Luke at CoinJar

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Offchain: A Half of the Whole

Want a chance to win 1,000,000 sats? All you need to do is tell us whether you think the Bitcoin price will be higher or lower one week after the Halving. Must have an ID-verified CoinJar account to enter. Entries close Friday 19 April at 5 pm (AEST)

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Offchain: An Exchange of Value

SBF has been sentenced, bringing to an end one of crypto’s most shameful story arcs. What can we take from it for the future? The end, when it came, felt like an anticlimax. 25 years for Sam Bankman-Fried, the mastermind/bona fide imbecile behind one of the largest financial

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Offchain: You Say Meme, I Say Community

Crypto is having its memecoin moment. Is it a tribute to crypto’s fundamental emptiness or a celebration of its enduring community? Yo brah, don’t know if you’ve noticed but memecoins are going fkn off chops right now. PEPE is up 800% in a month. In the same

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Offchain: Can We Get Much Higher?

A new Bitcoin ATH has arrived, way ahead of schedule. So, what’s going on? Normally, in these newsletters, when I’m admonishing you to remember that “history doesn’t repeat” it’s to remind you all to rein in your expectations because there’s no guarantee that just because

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Offchain: Four Big Trends For 2024

A quick tour through four areas that could really give this bull run something to holler about. Last issue I was writing about the arch-cynic’s take on the coming bull run. The basic argument was that crypto tech and culture hasn’t sufficiently advanced since the last cycle, leaving

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Offchain: The No Expectations Bull Run

The next bull run is taking shape. All it’s missing is a reason to actually happen. Last week crypto fund manager Travis Kling kicked off a furious conversation with his provocatively titled thesis for the coming bull market: A Lack of Pretense That Any of This Shit Does Anything

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Offchain: 4 Things I Want Less Of Next Bull Market

The ETF has arrived and we’re working out what comes next. While we wait, I’m gonna yell at the clouds for a bit. Alright, the ETF dropped, price went up, price went down. It’s never nice when you cede ground, but at a mere 20% this could

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Offchain: In The Big Leagues

The Bitcoin ETF is a watershed moment – and one that brings with it a whole host of new opportunities and risks. For the last few weeks, the question of whether the SEC is going to approve this god damn Bitcoin ETF has become a black hole for the industry’s

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Offchain: 5 Big Crypto Themes For 2024

I think it’s safe to say that 2023 was not as bad as expected. Will 2024 continue crypto’s winning form? I don’t want to blow your mind, but on January 3 Bitcoin – and by extension cryptocurrency in general – will turn 15. Not yet old enough to drive,

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Offchain: It’s Ecosystem Season!

The idea of an ETH killer has always been faintly ridiculous. But as SOL and AVAX surge and surge, this could be the cycle where the balance finally shifts. When SBF’s criminal empire came crumbling down last year, it seemed to put a bullet in the prospects of Solana,

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Offchain: The Last Domino

CZ is gone and with him the last remnants of crypto’s gluttonous age. Now we can finally build again. I’m not going to pretend I wasn’t surprised by the sudden fall of CZ, the once-untouchable overlord of crypto, but it did have an air of inevitability to

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Offchain: Half a Chance

The Halving is less than six months away. It’s all uphill from here, right? Alright, cards on the table. I legitimately thought there was a 50/50 chance that we would never see a crypto-wide upswing again. That the damage wrought by the endless scandals, macroeconomic headwinds, confidence-sapping hacks

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Offchain: Return of the king

Crypto is surging and Bitcoin is leading the charge. It’s a reminder not to forget who the boss really is. Do you hear that, friends? That faint popping noise, echoing over the hills, sounding ever so much like someone opening a bottle of Veuve while riding a mighty stallion?

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Offchain: The King Is Dead

The Sam Bankman-Fried trial sounds the long overdue death rattle of crypto 1.0 Perception is a magical thing. Little more than a year ago, Sam Bankman-Fried was crypto’s wonder kid, the clarion voice of where the industry went next. The cargo shorts and shambolic hair and WGAF attitude

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Offchain: Meta? I Hardly Knew Her!

Meta’s photorealistic avatars reminded the world that the metaverse still exists. But will it ever actually come to fruition? One thing crypto could never be accused of lacking is hubris. Founders never simply launched a protocol or coin: they launched an entirely new way of understanding money. They launched

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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