10th November 2021 > > Scam alert.

tl;dr

Be wary of airdropped NFTs into your MetaMask wallet.

Market Snap

Market Wrap

A small pull-back from yesterday’s enthusiasm comes as no great surprise.

Perpetual futures funding rates have been building since we were at $60k. Forced liquidation of leveraged longs probably would not be seen in size until a drop to around $57k or perhaps lower.

So, despite elevated rates, we have some headroom before we need to worry about a forced sell-off.

Occasional Series – The Green Party & how to excel at hypocrisy

Honestly, some people make it too easy to poke fun.

Councillor Phelim Mac Cafferty is both leader of Brighton and Hove City Council’s Green Group, and leader of Brighton Council.

Whilst in Glasgow for Cop26 he made a speech on cutting carbon emissions and appeared at a rally with perpetually annoyed Greta.

Cafferty failed to mention that he travelled from Gatwick to Glasgow on ** AN AEROPLANE **.

It is rumoured that to get to Gatwick from his non-insulated 10-bedroom mansion on the south coast (staffed by illegal immigrants on less than the minimum wage who do not care about pronouns) he travelled in his one-seater, souped up 16-cylinder diesel drag car with the exhaust shorn down so that he might get noticed.

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On reflection that last bit may not be entirely reliable information.

He would insist that his staff are well-versed in pronoun etiquette.

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I have no problem if someone decides to fly from Gatwick to Glasgow.

But in common with all right-minded people it is the hypocrisy that disgusts me.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Scam and Fraud warning

The CCC is a little old school – I keep 80% or so of my cryptos on a Ledger Nano.

If used properly, Ledger Nano is to all intents and purposes impregnable. This miraculous feat is achieved by signing transactions with the private key off-line. The importance of this point will become clear.

There are issues around forgetting the PIN, or losing the private keys, but anyone who is reasonably well-organised can quickly develop their own strategies to mitigate these risks. I cannot tell you the techniques I employ to keep my private keys safe in case that information leaks. Think gold vaults, desert caves, and so on.

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I keep most of the remaining 20% of my crypto holdings on Coinbase and Binance for trading purposes, and on MetaMask.

MetaMask is undoubtedly a great product. It is easy to use (though a bit fiddly to set up for the BSC chain and others at first) and meshes very well with all the Decentralised Finance (DeFi) platforms.

It is now my preferred method of interacting with DeFi, and NFTs.

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But Metamask is an online wallet, and there are always security risks with online wallets. Though these can be mitigated easily enough - see Module 1.12 of our free online training course).

Now I hear of probably the least unsurprising crypto scam of all time.

Users of OpenSea have been airdropped free NFTs into their MetaMask wallet.

And who doesn’t want a free NFT, just in case it turns out to be valuable? CryptoPunks were free originally, and we all mightily regret missing out on those.

Some – not necessarily all – of these airdropped NFTs contain malicious code that means on accepting the NFT, a signature is provided for transactions that drain the MetaMask wallet of crypto funds. Signing on-line (not off-line) is the security risk here with MetaMask.

Ouch.

I think I would cry if all my crypto holdings and NFTs on MetaMask were stolen just like that.