It should now be crystal clear whether or not Ethereum is a security. — According to The Securities Act of 1933, an investment contract needs to meet a three-part test in order to be considered a security. It must be an investment of money In a common enterprise With the expectation of earning a profit derived solely from the efforts of others It’s a…

Last week’s collapse of Silicone Valley Bank (SVB) and the subsequent de-peg of USDC (the second largest stablecoin by market cap) had everyone in crypto rightfully terrified. To the extent people were doing math on the night of Friday, March 10th (rather than just panic dumping their USDC), the thinking…

Shout out to all the midwits who sold their OP at a dollar. — Yesterday’s announcement that Coinbase built and deployed its own Layer2 blockchain came as a surprise to me and most people I know who work in the space. The new L2 will be called “Base” and while it’s not yet deployed on Ethereum mainnet, the team has been working on it…

Privacy tech is at war with authoritarian governments, the legacy tech industry, the legacy financial system… and now the AI industry? — An interesting piece surfaced in The New York Times recently. At first blush it kind of reads like one of those “searing takedowns” of our technology overlords. “We have a technologically driven shift of power to ideological individuals and organizations whose lack of appreciation for moral nuance and good governance…

But are the advantages worth the tradeoffs? — Search “account abstraction” on the bird app and you will find one of the hottest product discussions going on in crypto right now. The hopes for account abstraction (AA) range from simply improving the usability of blockchains to unlocking a whole new world of functionality that will finally bring about…

A design exploration to illuminate some of the magic behind the bitcoin seedphrase. — This design exploration was inspired by Gigi’s talk at the Baltic Honeybadger Conference in 2022 titled, Cryptography is not enough. Bitcoin finds its strength in cryptography. When you create a bitcoin wallet, a bunch of extremely large random numbers are generated. …

Oh god, not another one… — Is what I’m thinking as I scan the announcement of Sui. Sui is yet another L1 blockchain. This one created by MystenLabs, a team that previously lead Facebook’s now defunct blockchain projects, Novi and Deim, and that raised $36 million from a16z. I think it’s safe to say, alternative Layer…

1. Bitcoin Behind the Veil — For anyone who spends more than an hour or two honestly trying to understand bitcoin, it quickly becomes clear that this thing is interdisciplinary. To appreciate it fully, you need a bit of math, macroeconomics, cryptography, monetary policy, behavioral economics, programming, incentive structures, philosophy, environmental studies, law, privacy, security, and…

Traditional finance works on unfair handshake agreements, opaque business relationships, and selective enforcement. CeFi could level the playing field. — It can be painful to watch traditional finance professionals try to reason about crypto, however Bloomberg columnist and former investment banker Matt Levine pretty consistently provides analysis worth considering. In a recent column, he wrote that the fundamental difference between crypto and traditional finance comes down to the extension of…