Opinion

Your weekly dose of crypto news & opinion.

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Offchain: Account abstraction or making crypto user-friendly

How the latest hyped concept could make crypto accessible to everyone and their mum Once again, an acronym is all the rage in the crypto world. Don't be misled. AA does not stand for anonymous alcoholics, even though crypto has a solid anon culture. It's short

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Onchain: Exploiting the exploiter, new L2 in town, and token-gating on Spotify

Story One Exploiting the exploiter Remember last year when Solana DeFi flourished despite the chain being down sometimes? Back then, a savvy hacker exploited Wormhole, a bridge between Ethereum and Solana, getting away with $120,000 ETH worth $325 million at the time. Despite being offered a $10 million bounty,

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Offchain: ZK-this, ZK-that, ZK-everything

Zero-knowledge, zero problem: all you need to know about this crypto narrative. It's been a tough week for anyone following crypto regulations closely. But instead of focusing on the attempts of the SEC's Gary Gensler trying to explain to us that staking has nothing to do

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Onchain: SEC Krak-down, 3AC founders back at it, and NFT Super Bowl ad confusion

Story One SEC is forcing Kraken to shut down its staking service The SEC's new year resolution must have been going down hard on crypto. The latest company being called out is the cryptocurrency exchange Kraken. This time it's all about their staking service. Staking, the

Opinion

Offchain: Bitcoin's never-anticipated utility is JPEGs - the maxis are not amused

The Ordinals protocol brought good old community fights back to Bitcoin. Are you on team meme? If you've been on crypto Twitter recently, chances are that you have come across some angry Bitcoin maxi not condoning JPEGs while others are having fun exploring what Bitcoin can do outside

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Onchain: Highly profitable trading strategy, Tezos cars, and Aptos' insane valuation

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

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Offchain: Ethereum's LSD trip

Liquid staking derivatives are all the rage on Crypto Twitter, but how high can they really go? The dominant narrative going into 2023 in the world of crypto has been LSDs. And you're forgiven if your first association are those colourful tabs party animals probably pop in Berlin

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Onchain: OMFGTX, Fed's Poker face, and a found fortune?

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

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Offchain: Crypto's Biggest Moments of 2022

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

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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

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Onchain: Binance backs Musk, Twitter & Insta’s NFT push, Arbitrum takes over

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

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Offchain: In web3 We Trust

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

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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

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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

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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$