Opinion

Your weekly dose of crypto news & opinion.

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Onchain: Is this accelerationism?

I ask myself, being in crypto these days - where presidential candidates advertise tokens with ludicrous claims, a bot gets rich shilling memes, and blockchains launch phones.  Story One World Liberty Financial not going great  Remember the days when everyone was outraged at Nancy Pelosi's insider trading? Well,

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Onchain: Crypto Realism

In his essay Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher establishes that we've canceled the future and are just recycling the old instead. And what's old in crypto? Discussing who Satoshi is, viewing memecoins as community coins and incompetent projects with million-dollar backing... Crypto is having its recycling moment

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Onchain: Back to Basics

In 2006, I, a teenage girl, was really into Christina Aguilera. So much so, I listened to her latest album on repeat, to the detriment of my family's sanity.  Anyway, it was called Back to Basics.  A fitting title for the stories this week, which highlight those who

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Onchain: Delulu

Even outside of crypto, Gen Z has adopted being delusional as a coping mechanism, delulu denoting someone who, despite evidence to the contrary, holds on to idealistic beliefs.  Well, if that doesn't sound like someone still reading crypto newsletters believing some good has to come out of this

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Onchain: All PR is not good

Another whistleblower wrote a book about how corrupted crypto is, and Pavel Durov, the CEO of everyone's darling messaging app Telegram, got arrested in France—where he went to donate sperm hang out with a female influencer.  But that's not even all...  Story One McDonald Experiment

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Onchain: Power and Progress

Also the title of a great book I took the liberty to borrow. It tries to answer the question of why tech often benefits the elites and what can be done about that. More people in crypto and AI should read it and ask themselves, are we navigating ourselves into

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Onchain: Penguins, Politics, and Pickups

Warning: this may contain traces of sarcasm and cynicism. Story One Penguins There's a clear hierarchy in NFTs. The squiggles are for edgy art appreciators, while Bored Ape holders are the same crop of people who will buy a Ferrari and a Rolex believing that'll increase

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Onchain: Blinking Red

Red has always been used as a warning sign, as we're wired to pay attention to it. The colour is also a theme for what's happened in crypto in the past few days. Story One Red Candles  In January of this year, the German criminal police

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Onchain: Another Moon Landing, Unethical Auditors, and Blinks

Dive into our latest newsletter covering groundbreaking space ventures, blockchain security scandals, and Solana's innovative tech strides. Plus, discover a fascinating moon-related fact inspired by Japanese folklore!

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Onchain: ZK Airdrop, Tap-to-Earn, and Crypto's first Emmy?

Story One ZK Airdrop  Is this the start of ZK summer or just a Midsummer Night's Dream where we're all manipulated by the magic airdrop fairy? It remains to be seen, but with ZK Sync, the first real zkEVM protocol (their words), it is distributing its

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Onchain: Just another normal week in crypto

Dare I say, such a thing does not exist. While another exploit and another outage aren't big news to us anymore, the first story at least led to some hated arguments. And what are we here for if not drama? Story One Frontrunning the frontrunners  One of the

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Onchain: Requiem for a Dream

These past few days, the crypto news suggests it might be time to play a requiem and lay our long-held dream of life-changing airdrop wealth to rest. Story One Kyrie (Lord have mercy)  First case in point: Eigenlayer, the hottest re-staking protocol. When the team initially announced its plan for

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Offchain: Follow the Users

Crypto has always claimed it’s about more than just speculation. Could this be the cycle where we find out what crypto is actually for? A look back at crypto’s history can sometimes feel like a cringe-inducing survey of the less fashionable trends of the 1990s. Pogs? What the

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Onchain: The Future of France

Whenever prices go up, we're seeing a renaissance of everything that makes crypto such an aspirational, deeply respected industry. From new token standards no one asked for (akin to the castles built by the monarchs while the peasants starved) to the metaphorical cake 🍰 (airdrop tokens) we're

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Offchain: A Half of the Whole

So, here we are again. The Bitcoin block reward is about to halve, reducing the amount of new BTC entering the system each block from 6.25 to 3.125. Let me say upfront that the Halving is simultaneously the most important day in the crypto calendar and its most

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Onchain: Solana eclipse, another fee switch, and PTSD

Story One Solana Eclipse Millions gathered across the US, Mexico, and Canada to watch the Solar eclipse. Meanwhile, all the manlets transacting on Solana experienced their own eclipse in the form of dramatic transaction failure. On April 4th, 75% of all non-vote transactions on Solana failed, and the chain continues

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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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Onchain: Things are going just great

That's if all you care about are numbers and cheap engagement. Story One EU banning anonymous wallets?! At least, that was the tenor from Crypto Twitter over the weekend after seeing that the EU was about to introduce further regulation. As so often, rumors spread far and wide,

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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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Onchain: A W, an L, and something in between

But as they say, one should always deliver the bad news first, so here we go. Story One Wormhole's W airdrop more of an L? If there were an Oscar for giving free money to the wrong people, Wormhole would be a top nominee.  As a protocol in

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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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Onchain: It's giving Bull

This week, it's all about number go up, which hints at a bigger trend: the bull market making a comeback. Story One MetaMask nears record users  While Bitcoin has already passed it's all-time high in countless countries with weak national currencies, such as Japan, MetaMask is

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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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Onchain: Laser eyes, Sysiphus, and Pandora's box

Story One Laser eyes Laser eye's making a comeback wasn't exactly on my 2024 bingo card. Life is full of surprises, and so is Joe Biden. On February 11th, he posted a picture of himself featuring laser eyes referencing a conspiracy theory that stated the Super

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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