Opinion

Your weekly dose of crypto news & opinion.

Opinion Featured

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

Opinion Featured

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

Opinion Featured

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

Opinion Featured

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

Opinion Featured

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

Opinion Featured

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

Opinion Featured

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

Opinion Featured

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

Opinion Featured

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. In the 11 years since, I’ve spent a lot of time reading, writing and thinking about cryptocurrency. So, trust me when I say that the rapid-fire implosion of the LUNA-UST ecosystem

Opinion Featured

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

Opinion Featured

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

Opinion Featured

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. While the approval process

Opinion Featured

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

Opinion Featured

Onchain: Apple rumours, crypto’s biggest hack, the UK’s NFT play

Story One More rumours about Apple’s entry into the crypto space In what’s becoming the Groundhog Day of crypto rumours, we’re once again seeing chatter that Apple is going to announce something crypto-related in the near future – and perhaps even this week. The proximate cause for the

Opinion Featured

Wide-eyed Terra

Terra is buying billions in Bitcoin and the price is surging. Is it just a Ponzi primed to collapse? In case you hadn’t noticed, the price of Bitcoin has started going up again. As with most of these moves, looking back on the last three months of brutal chop,

Opinion Featured

Onchain: Going $APE, Australia takes charge, Luna’s $10bn Bitcoin bet

Story One Billionaire Ape Yacht Club While the NFT market itself may be in the midst of a mini-bear, the energy and money pouring into the space shows little sign of slowing down. See, for instance, Yuga Labs, the company that created the ludicrously successful Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs

Opinion Featured

What to do when the crypto is bad

With the crypto market in stasis, here are some ways to use your time in limbo productively. In late 2018, the crypto market died. For literally months the price did nothing except bracket up and down, seemingly without reason, and at one point traded in a US$100 range for

Opinion Featured

Onchain: Biden’s executive order, crypto war and DeFi loses a legend

Story One Biden signs executive order on crypto Joe Biden has just signed a long-awaited executive order on cryptocurrency. A wide-ranging document, the order discusses the creation of a digital dollar, regulation of crypto exchanges and the role of crypto in money laundering, ransomware and, yes, evading sanctions. However, Treasury

Opinion Featured

Crypto at War

A horrendous conflict offers us insights into the best and worst parts of cryptocurrency. Let’s not mince words here: what’s happening in Ukraine is absolutely awful. A completely unnecessary war that’s killing thousands, wounding tens of thousands and displacing millions. All at the whim of a paranoid,

Opinion Featured

The Crypto Bowl

The Super Bowl was crypto’s intro to prime time. But is crypto ready for the big stage? I don’t know exactly when it happened, but somewhere along the line advertising ate the Super Bowl. These days it’s less a sporting event than it is a 3-and-a-half hour

Opinion Featured

Crypto Culture Wars

From tech legends to furries to the editors of Wikipedia, everyone’s lining up to dunk on crypto. Are we the bad guys? Of all the digital communities one might expect to come out against crypto, the furries were not high on my list. Yet their grievances about web3 and

Opinion Featured

The 5 Biggest Stories of 2021

2021 may have served up its fair share of crap, but for crypto it was the year we finally came of age.

Opinion Featured

Human After All

Omicron is here, inflation is spiking and markets all over the world are struggling. Shouldn’t this be crypto’s moment? When the WHO decided to name the latest coronavirus variant of concern, ‘Omicron’ (skipping ‘xi’, the actual next letter in the Greek alphabet), I wonder if they were like,

Opinion Featured

Ethereum Under Fire

For the first time, people are saying the unsayable: Ethereum may be beyond saving. Is it actually true? The fact that Ethereum is painfully slow and cripplingly expensive to use is no great secret. Spending more in gas fees than you did on an actual transaction has become a shared

Opinion Featured

Australia Embraces Crypto

Australia’s largest bank is about to start selling crypto. Did you ever think you’d see the day? Perhaps I underestimate Australia. Don’t get me wrong: it’s a pretty great country, all things considered. But you couldn’t accuse us of brimming with vision, especially when it