Opinion

A collection of 144 posts

Opinion Featured

Onchain: Drama in Cosmos, an unhinged hacker, and a controversial L2

Story One Drama in Cosmos My theory is that some people are just in crypto because their friends would make fun of them if they watched the Kardashians or Selling Sunset for their dose of drama. Fortunately, crypto never fails to deliver reality TV-type cringe or entertainment. This time, things

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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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Onchain: Another highly profitable trading strategy, Plasma comeback, and Disney doing NFTs again

Story One Another highly profitable trading strategy Chances are you spent last weekend monitoring the situation around Sam Altman, the AI Sam who was fired as CEO of OpenAI and re-hired by Microsoft. If you did, you missed yet another highly profitable trading strategy, or as non-crypto people would call

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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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Onchain: SBF guilty, Aragon DAOn, and an L2 boom and bust

Story One SBF guilty Sam Bankman Fried, also known as the guy who ruined the reputation of Effective Altruism for the foreseeable future, has been found guilty on seven criminal counts, including wire fraud, commodities fraud, and money laundering. This verdict probably doesn't come as a surprise to anyone who's

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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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Onchain: Reddit Rug, Interface Rent, and a media-induced Pump and Dump

Story One Reddit Rug Bad times for the people who were bullish on Big web2 social platforms integrating web3 elements. After Meta shut down its NFTs on Instagram initiative a while back, the next one to kick the curb to web3 is Reddit. Reddit recently announced the wind-down of its

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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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Onchain: In the arena, Bitcoin Mining gone volcano, and Optimism Fraud Proofs

Story One In the arena When people on crypto Twitter are not thinking about the Roman Empire or tokenizing Uranium, they spend their time on SocialFi these days. The combination of finance and social has become popular ever since the launch of Friend.Tech. And as usual, when one thing

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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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Onchain: A DAO forking around, a new wallet, and yet another attack

Story One A DAO forking around Nouns is a DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization with a simple business model: make their IP great. Nouns IP is based around a set of red goggles called noggles. The more popular the IP, the higher the value of the NFTs that people buy

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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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Onchain: CFTC chooses violence, Visa lands on Solana and Vitalik gets hacked

Story One CFTC chooses violence Someone at the CFTC must have had a bad flight home from vacation. Why else would they end the holiday season by bringing enforcement against 3 DeFi companies? The Commission for Futures Trading figured it'd be a good idea to accuse Opyn, 0x (ZeroEx), and

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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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Onchain: Pepe members go rogue, Farcaster goes Optimism, and Balancer finds vulnerability

Story One Pepe members go rogue Pepecoin, a memecoin that surged to fame earlier this year when everything was trading flat, now faces allegations of being a rug. Or at least of founders enriching themselves, which, at this stage, is as common in crypto as drunk people in the trains

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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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Onchain: PayPal enters the stablecoin game, Base goes live and buy your friends

Story One PayPal enters the stablecoin game On August 6th, the payments giant PayPal announced the launch of its own stablecoin with the creative name PUSD. It's the first major US financial company to launch a US-backed stablecoin. PUSD will be backed 100% by US dollar deposits, short-term treasuries, and

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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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Onchain: The new Samcoin, $50 million for real stuff, and yet another exploit

Story One The new Samcoin On July 24th, Worldcoin, the iris-scanning startup, launched its token with the ticker $WLD. Sam Altman's side project has already faced a lot of criticism for operating their Orbs like an MLM scheme and privacy implications of scanning eyes. But with their launch, the team

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Offchain: RWAs, or how crypto is coming full circle

Real-World-Assets are the latest and greatest in crypto, as they promise to usher in the age of financial institutions adopting crypto for real. It's ironic to think back to the beginning of this entire industry when Satoshi wanted to create an alternative to the traditional financial system without ties to

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Onchain: XRP not a security, Rolex as collateral and Snitch-to-Earn

Story One XRP, not a security For a while, the most consistent thing in crypto wasn't the value of stablecoins nor the laser eyes on Bitcoin Maxis profile pics (both didn't perform well). It was Ripple's ongoing lawsuit with the SEC, which ran since 2020. After three years of little

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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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Onchain July: Still no Bitcoin ETF, Azuki enraging its holders, and Poly Network hacked again

Story One Still no Bitcoin ETF Even though major banks now offer digital asset solutions, what's missing so far in the US is a Bitcoin Spot ETF. Exchange Traded Funds are a vehicle that allows institutional investors, such as pension funds, to gain exposure to an asset's appreciation. When Blackrock,

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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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Onchain: 3AC's NFT collection sold, Tether de-peg, and Polygon 2.0

Story One 3AC's NFT collection sold Last year in March, the infamous crypto fund Three Arrows Capital, was still managing an estimated $10 billion. It didn't last. Within months, the fund collapsed, triggered by the Luna crash, and left behind $3.5 billion in unpaid claims and a collection of