Luke at CoinJar

Opinion Featured

Offchain: Dance Dance Binance

Despite a horror year, Binance remains the undisputed champ of the crypto space. But how long can they defy gravity? Looking back, it’s still hard to believe exactly how fast Binance’s rise to the top actually was. The exchange traded its first Bitcoin in June 2017 and by

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Offchain: East v West

As regulators around the world scramble to work crypto out, some familiar divides are re-emerging. CoinJar UK customers this week received an email informing them that something called the Travel Rule now applied to all crypto transactions in the UK. In a nutshell, this means that all crypto transactions must

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Offchain: With Friends Like These

Crypto’s latest hype train lets you buy and sell shares in, well, people. Here’s a few ways of thinking about Friend.tech. So, it’s come to this. Some enterprising crypto enthusiasts have designed a platform that lets you render yourself as a tradeable commodity. Welcome to Friend.

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Offchain: Show Me The Money

Crypto is doing its best to bore the true believers into bailing out. The equation is simple: we need more cash. Nothing like taking a month away from newsletter duties to realise that absolutely zero is happening in crypto-land right now. Have you seen the Bitcoin chart for the last

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Offchain: NFTs All The Way Down

The much-derided NFT market has taken yet another nosedive. Is the end of the suffering in sight? It’s been almost two years since someone paid US$1.3 million (400 ETH at the time) for this picture of a rock. Looking back now, it’s a true sign of

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Offchain: Attack of the Titans

While crypto smoulders, some of the world’s biggest asset managers make their move. You have to hand it to the bear market: it has a perverse sense of humour. Here we are, deep in crypto’s most existential of winters, a time of bankruptcies, protocol collapse and 99% drawdowns,

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Offchain: The Tower Trembles

The SEC has launched definitive action against Binance and Coinbase. Welcome to the endgame of Crypto 1.0. You’d be hard-pressed to find a crypto watcher who was necessarily surprised by the decision of Gary Gensler’s SEC to sue both Binance and Coinbase last week. If anything, the

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A Laughing Matter

Memecoins reign and in-jokes are the currency of the realm. Is crypto fundamentally dumb? Is that the whole point? I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the past 12 months have been a Bad Time for crypto. It’s as if the Book of Revelation turned out to

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Onchain: FTX collapse mega-edition

Story One How Sam Bankman-Fried killed the world’s greatest money printer Hands up if you had “amphetamine addicted sex nerd rug pulls the international crypto market” on your 2022 bingo card. Anyone? Anyone? Hell, where do you even start? Over the past week the Twitter hive mind has done

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Offchain: Welcome to Hades

I regret to inform you that crypto has been cancelled. There are savage falls from grace. And then there is whatever the %#&@ just happened to FTX founder and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried. My god. I mean, my GOD. A few months ago SBF was being hailed as the saviour of crypto

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Onchain: Binance backs Musk, Twitter & Insta’s NFT push, Arbitrum takes over

Story One Elon buys Twitter, Binance tosses in half-a-billion Unless you’ve been clinically dead for the past week, you’re probably aware that Elon Musk now owns Twitter. An interesting footnote to the whole saga is that Binance, indisputably the world’s biggest crypto exchange, contributed US$500 million

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Offchain: In web3 We Trust

The decentralised web is crypto’s latest and greatest crusade. Could a web 2.0 giant show us the way forward? When web3 roared into the crypto vernacular last year it felt like a direct response to Facebook’s hamfisted attempts to co-opt and privatise the metaverse. A technology that

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Onchain: Institutional free-for-all, Ethereum censors, more like Craptos

Story One Mastercard, Google and BNY Mellon make the crypto leap Classify this news package under “If it happened during a bull market we’d all be drinking martinis in gold-plated Lambos but it’s happened now so back to packet noodles and regret for us”. America’s oldest bank,

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Offchain: Make Mine a Macro

The world is in a right state. Is financial catastrophe inevitable? And what might it mean for crypto? If you’ve spent any time listening to the financial punditry of late, you’ll probably have picked up that the broader financial system is in Bad Shape. As far as anyone

Opinion

Onchain: The SEC v Kim K, Celsius endgame, Credit Suisse teeters

Story One The SEC goes after big Kimmy Of all the on-the-nose celebrity crypto endorsements of the 2020/21 bull cycle, surely the most grotesque was Kim Kardashian putting the 300 million-strong heft of her Instagram account behind a straight-up scam called EthereumMax. I know zero standard, money-grabbing trash is

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Offchain: Ready and Stable

As the US dollar pulverises the world’s fiat currencies, could stablecoins give crypto the utility it’s been seeking? It’s been a hell of a week for the world’s forex traders. Liz Truss, newly appointed UK Prime Minister, announced that her first priority in government would be

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Onchain: Do Kwon on the run, US crypto regs, the Merge wash-up

Story One Catch me if you Kwon I will not apologise for that headline. Anyway, Terra founder Do Kwon’s very bad year continues with South Korean prosecutors issuing a warrant for his arrest, quickly followed by a request for Interpol to slap a red notice on him, which obligates

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Offchain: After the Merge

The Merge is done and dusted. Now what are we going to talk about? By the time you read this, the Ethereum Merge will be complete. If it went well then basically nothing will have changed. If it went badly, well, may as well delete those crypto apps and pick

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Onchain: Binance v Tether, Saylor gets sued, ETH counts down

Story One Stable Wars: Binance comes for the king The world’s largest exchange kicked up no small amount of ruckus this week when it announced that it was removing all stablecoin trading pairs except for Binance USD (BUSD) and Tether. BUSD is the third largest stablecoin in the world,

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Offchain: Urge to Merge

So, here we are.  More than three years behind schedule and with approximately one thousand deadlines left burning in the rearview mirror: the Merge has finally arrived. (The Merge refers to the merging of the current ETH chain with the so-called Beacon test chain set up in December 2020.) Currently

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Onchain: Tornado Cash sanctions, BlackRock x Coinbase, ETH’s hardfork chaos

Story One The Feds put Tornado Cash on their international sanctions list If you haven’t heard of it before, Tornado Cash is DeFi’s version of a Bitcoin tumbling service. If you want to break a transaction chain, simply send your ETH or ERC-20 token to the relevant Tornado

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Offchain: Bridge to Nowhere

A major hack shows us how far crypto still has to go – and that the first step might have to be backwards. On Tuesday, the Nomad bridge was hacked for US$190 million, making it the fourth largest hack in crypto history. In this case, a simple code error allowed

Opinion

Onchain: Tesla sells, Coinbase v SEC, Vitalik’s 5-step vision

Story One Elon got out while the getting was… OK The US quarterly earnings season is upon us (like Christmas coming four times a year!) and Tesla’s wrap-up revealed the company sold 75% of their Bitcoin holdings during May, when the price was around US$29k. Given they purchased

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Offchain: A Matter of Speculation

The savage nature of the crypto crash offers a stark warning about the dangers of rampant speculation. But is it a necessary evil? The details of the 3 Arrows Capital collapse has made for riveting reading. A recently released 1,100-page auditor’s report revealed a world of mansions, US$

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Onchain: Miner capitulation, stablecoin tango, CeFi contagion continues

Story One Bitcoin miners are the latest forced dumpers of the crypto crash First they came for the shitcoins and NFTs. Then the CeFi lenders. Now it’s the Bitcoin miners who are feeling the heat from crypto’s version of armageddon. Miner capitulation is a well known phenomenon in