Opinion

A collection of 117 posts

Opinion Featured

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

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Offchain: Lessons from the GFC

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

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Onchain: CeFi meltdown, Grayscale rejected, Bored Ape lawsuit

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

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Offchain: Contagion

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

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Onchain: Celsius wobbles, 3AC in strife, the trillion dollar club no more

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

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Offchain: Goodbye to the Wild West

America has released its first comprehensive cryptocurrency legislation. Is this the beginning of the end for crypto’s Ludicrous Era? For most of Bitcoin’s history, the OG crypto followed a familiar pattern: China made it, America bought it. As a result, moves by either player always had an outsize

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Onchain: LUNA 2.0, Commonwealth Bank backdown, new VC funding record

Story One And in the third week, it rose again Remember LUNA-UST, the so-called stablecoin whose US$45 billion collapse brought the crypto industry to its knees? You do? Because it was only three weeks ago? Well, it’s back, baby, and it’s… basically the same but without the

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Offchain: This Time is Different

As the chill of a new crypto winter sets in, the past offers itself as a flawed guide. Last year, during the height of the mania, people started talking about cryptocurrency launching into a new “supercycle” –  basically a paradigm shift wherein the familiar boom-bust cycle would be replaced by one

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Onchain: Terra collapses, Tether withdrawals, terror reigns

Story One The death spiral we had to have I wrote my first story about Bitcoin in 2011 [https://www.crikey.com.au/2011/06/20/currency-for-thought-bitcoins-a-primer/]. In the 11 years since, I’ve spent a lot of time reading, writing and thinking about cryptocurrency. So, trust me when I

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Offchain: When The Frost Thaws

The much prophesied collapse of LUNA–UST has come to pass. Is this the beginning or the end of the crypto suffering? The biggest story in crypto right now is undoubtedly the bank run on UST. Far and away the largest of the algorithmic stablecoins (i.e. those governed by

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Onchain: Bitcoin tops $100, Mt Gox gets sued, the real Satoshi? (Yes, it's May 2013)

Story One Bitcoin breaks the magical US$100 mark Can you believe it? I barely can and it’s my job to be optimistic about Bitcoin. Remember being at Christmas last year and having to explain to your family that, no, your magic internet money hasn’t exploded in value

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Onchain: Australia gets an ETF, North Korea hacks, Merge delays

Story One ASX greenlights the first Australian Bitcoin ETF While all the focus is understandably on the prospects of a US Bitcoin ETF, Australia has gone and put itself in the history books by announcing that our first spot Bitcoin ETF will start trading next week [https://www.afr.com/

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Offchain: Green with Envy

After the Merge, Ethereum’s energy usage will drop by 99.95%. Is there any hope for Bitcoin? Of all the things to look forward to in Ethereum’s upgrade to a Proof-of-Stake network (AKA ETH 2.0, AKA The Merge) one of the most important is surely the colossal