Story One Avi's highly profitable trading strategy might end him in jail Avraham Eisenberg's "highly profitable trading strategy" might come with some unexpected losses, namely his freedom. Avi had found a vulnerability in the DeFi lending protocol Mango market and exploited it to borrow $116 million in other currencies against

Story One After F comes G...TX What comes next after months of laying low in a country which offers no extradition to the US? You make a comeback. An investment deck outlining "cross-asset trading on a public marketplace" which was widely distributed earlier this week caused quite a stir.

Last year saw few positive cryptocurrency headlines. Was there even a glimmer of hope? The end of 2021 felt like a hangover after all time highs. We soberly asked ourselves back in January last year: everyone’s lining up to dunk on crypto. Are we the bad guys?  As early

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

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

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

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

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,

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

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

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

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

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,

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

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

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

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$

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

Crypto firms are collapsing under the weight of bad bets, excess leverage and poor risk management. What can the GFC tell us about what comes next? The implosion of the LUNA-UST ecosystem in May was the starter’s pistol on a rapid-fire and comprehensive bout of deleveraging that has left

Story One The horrible, no-good, very bad story of CeFi continues. Contagion was the theme of last week’s Offchain, but the news hasn’t gotten any better in the intervening seven days. The list of centralised yield providers to have halted withdrawals or otherwise signalled their deep financial distress

What DeFi giveth, DeFi taketh away AKA why unsustainable yield both started and killed the bull run. Do you remember DeFi summer? That magical period in mid-2020 where people were chasing 10,000% yields, mining liquidity and getting rug pulled by food-themed protocols on a daily basis? I mean, who

Story One It’s getting hot in here You may or may not have heard of Celsius, the much heralded crypto unicorn that offered people “up to 18.63% APY” on their crypto deposits. Well, much like LUNA before it, Celsius has been discovering that offering people unsustainable interest rates