Maya Zehavi
@mayazi
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16K
Following
90K
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Statuses
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No politician has disappointed me in my lifetime as much as @SenWarren has. I was that wonky fan girl who thought Prof. Warren was the real deal providing the right policy prescriptions to fix the systematic ills of the system. She really was the smart progressive intellectual.
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CZ didn’t buy FTX, Binance bought time for the crypto market to calm down & let FTX find a buyer to fill their hole.
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Sometimes it just hits you we don’t give Vitalik enough credit for being the kind of industry leader he is.
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Something tells me law enforcement really digs crypto traceability
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Seriously, nothing signals crypto is here to stay than Goldman getting in by buying one of the shadiest crypto lending platforms in the industry.
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I've never been more bullish about Ethereum & I was one of the loudest critics about DeFi escalating systematic risks. Yesterday was a real time stress test, one that traditional finance wouldn't have withstood. It's unreal how far DeFi protocols have come since last March.
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The irony is that alongside the crypto crash, DeFi held its ground, it’s the centralized intermediaries that broke the market with over leverage without proper regulation.
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But in the midst of a once in a generation opportunity to crack down on the dark money loopholes in the US financial system (which is what Prof. Warren would have done), she chooses to focus on crypto as though it’s the cardinal sin in global finance.
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@SenWarren @SECGov No, it shows that your approach; Senator has failed on multiple fronts:.- pushed more retail investors to off shore centralized exchanges with no legal protections .- client funds don’t have a legal obligation to be segregated & aren’t even considered client assets in bankruptcy/.
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The irony that crypto was lauded for years as a technology to rectify a lot of the credit mistakes that spiraled out of the GFC (subprime MBS), only to to replicate the same structures in crypt based lending & funds, was almost preordained.
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Crypto for however much is fraud/scam/illicit has built a real alternative infra for finance & the web that in some ways resolves a lot of the wonky issues Prof. Warren once had with TARP & consumer organizations. But for some expedient reason Sen. Warren refuses to see that.
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Turns out it was Gensler who eventually promoted an unregistered security
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She should be crafting consumer protection rules for token disclosures & DAOs w/ Prof. Warren’s flare. Instead she wants to stomp all over any chance of a market driven alternative to data driven monopolies (be it big tech or big banks) & the prospect for US dominated Web3 stack.
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I will never NOT find it surreal that US senate is about to pass a multi trillion dollar infrastructure bill that’s been in world since the Obama admin, but instead of debating the economic merit of provisions & earmarks, they’re negotiating how to define consensus mechanisms.
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The SEC now claiming ETH is a security is a shining proof about how dishonest the SEC has been in their guidance. 1. POS has been around long before the merge, yet the SEC hasn’t come around to making any determination on that matter till now.
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I 💜 crypto VCs who are basically just retail investors who got lucky 4 years ago & still have the same fianncial knowledge base as teenage Robinhood investors.
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I don’t think i can be shocked by crypto anymore, but realizing SBF was running the same liars poker on leverage while lobbying for regulation to stop that practice is flabbergasting. I’m now convinced all CeFi is a Celsius playbook & more confident in DeFi than ever.
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Cringy corporate NFTs seem to be marketed like happy meal toys for what a boomer marketer thinks a degen would like.
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Imagine if crypto auditing firms were liable for the hacks they signed off on, or rated as “audited”.
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Square is literally about to build DeFi on Bitcoin.
Square is creating a new business (joining Seller, Cash App, & Tidal) focused on building an open developer platform with the sole goal of making it easy to create non-custodial, permissionless, and decentralized financial services. Our primary focus is #Bitcoin. Its name is TBD.
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To be clear I’m convinced Sen. Warren plans to essentially blacklist/greylist any wallet that received tokens from pools, unknown sources (airdrops/yield) (essentially any on chain transaction) or tokens that were on or interactive with unhosted wallet.
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I don’t think the US regulators are going to let a Chinese firm buy FTX, there’s too much on the line. It’s much more likely we’ll see a Wall Street incumbent step in the void & leverage the opportunity.
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The OFAC/Tornado slippery slope:.banning any on-chain private metadata cuz it could potentially harm blockchain forensic analysis. I.e. only wallets that can be hermetically survelied are kosher under OFAC crypto rules. It’s a government war on privacy, not money laundering.
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If the Tornado cash arrests are the opening shots in the war on privacy what should we expect next?.Will open source ZK circuits development deemed illegal? posting public encryption codes? where does the US plan to draw the line on code being free speech?.
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Sam’s biggest mistake was making a fool out of DC politicians & regulators. They’re not just going to forget about crypto, his advocacy is gonna come back as a boomerang against the victims if crypto doesn’t get their act together & explain the value prop of real DeFi.
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The original sin that birthed Stablecoins was that banks refused to bank crypto companies or projects & the industry needed to come up with its own solution. Second order outcomes are easier to deal with than the root cause - gatekeepers blocking innovation.
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@SenWarren @SECGov - opted out of questioning, investigating or enforcing existing laws on the biggest perpetrators, even when your political connection to their family is way too public for comfort.- chosen to block any real path for real innovators building solutions.
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Lots of big minds just spent the weekend with GPT & realized the data sitting behind big tech silos is a huge moat that’s going to make it difficult for startups to compete. The only alternative is for there to be an open market for data models where the metadata of that data /.
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The fact that the ETH pump is run by spot markets suggests this might be a big institutional buy FOMOing into DeFI yields, instead of BTC. Expect the blue chip DeFi tokens to pump along. .
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Equities crashing on expected interest rates was the most expected event in 22’, crypto crashing alongside with leverage is just another secondary effect. Crypto markets have continuously shown a high correlation on the way down, just like in March 20’. But going forward….
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Dissident tech is going to be a thing sooner than any of us realize & it fits right into crypto for the most part.
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I consider myself pretty up to speed on crypto & I've never heard of Poly network till an hour ago.
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The number one reason I’m against CBDC in the surveillance mode BIS is promoting - how my extended family managed to hide away money & gold to survive the ww2 in relative safety. The rising fascism across the world alongside brewing antisemitism means we need to support a web /.
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Elon Musk is a next level market troll. It’s all performance art.
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Gonna go out on a limb, but I think Mario’s continuous Twitter space is a real time prism as to how scams, shills & branding works in crypto. In comes an enthusiastic guy, well intentioned that from the outside seems like he knows what he’s taking about, despite being called out.
See you all in a few hours, special guest is Mick Mulvaney, ex- chief of staff to Donald Trump. Citizen Journalism at it's best 🫡❤️.
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It’s almost like rating agencies are reprimanding the Gensler approach. A country that lauds capitalism can’t afford to not have a crypto policy that isn’t “let’s shut the whole thing down”.
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Imagine a scenario where XRP was part of DeFI - vaults, synthetics, CDS.
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Imagine an alternative world where @GaryGensler had gone after a Mashinsky before the crash, or the real shilling as a biz entities, instead of shilling some Kardashian news that doesn’t matter in the grand scheme?.
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Regulators were obsessed with KYCing all crypto “unhosted wallets” when the iceberg was unsecured lending, false misrepresentation of assets & lack of aggregated/coordinated execution facilities. it’s time to realize disclosures from FI/funds & intermediaries are the real risk.
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WorldCoin is another specimen in the crypto generational divide. Web2 winners have a mentality gap in internalizing what Web3 models are trying to achieve. Hint: launching a blockchain just to centralize the storage of biometric data is peak “not getting it”.
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Really digging Vitalik’s focus on identity - social media, token access to forums, Ethereum login. The time has come to build decentralized identity on several crypto verticals.
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If this is economically feasible, why didn’t El Salvador just use geothermal energy for things other than mining? Say, being a LATAM renewable capital.
Our engineers just informed me that they dug a new well, that will provide approximately 95MW of 100% clean, 0 emissions geothermal energy from our volcanos 🌋. Starting to design a full #Bitcoin mining hub around it. What you see coming out of the well is pure water vapor 🇸🇻
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This is pretty good interview tbh, GS knows how to follow up on SBF’s attempts to exempt himself from the commingling. The only question is how did West Shite reinvest in FTX when all the assets Sam bought with the $1B loan were in his name alone?.
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funny how in the "trust machine" space, a company can falsely mislead the market about a @Microsoft partnership, resulting in a whale pump in market value w/out any consequence @IOTAcurrency
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The seminal question looking forward after we all take the weekend to chill lost Luna - are we looking at ‘18 bear market or ‘21 summer season?.Gut is that this time is different:.1. Crypto isn’t an unknown to Wall Street, institutional or normies. It’s not alien to them anymore.
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I don’t think ppl realize how much ETH the institutionals have been buying in the mini-bear run.
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The most disgusting thing just struck me - the paper of record aka @nytimes employs a man who calls himself a “crypto reporter” yet doesn’t know to how to ask a single crypto related question when faced with the highest crypto story ever. That puff piece should be career ending.
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The underrated Zuck move:.FB realized that the only sustainable biz model in the stack is one that requires them to own the the OS & hardware. The move to Meta is about to be followed by a shift to more FB owned devices other than the new watch & Occulus (VR headset).
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The CFTC choosing to frame FTX as a bank run rather than fraud is a big ace for SBF, they’re choosing his explanation over the facts to justify a severe crack down on crypto. To be clear of it was fraud, they fucked up enforcement, rather than existing laws aren’t enough.
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The DeFi mania was organic, the NFT drives seem coordinated across investors like a FOMO campaign.
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Read! .Vitalik’s expansion of the proof-of-reserve concept into ZKp schemes for:.- Proof of on-chain assets.- Proof of liabilities (collateral pledged).This still leaves 2 gaping ommisions:.- proof of fiat assets .- proof of dual pledged collateral .
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Weird how every weekend its the bear/bull market instead of recognizing:.1. We’re in a super cycle that’s impacted by both COVID macro & the billions of new money on the sidelines in crypto funds .2. comparison to 18’ is what Kahenman calls “availability bias” distorting views.
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Apple’s overreach of trying to tax crypto transactions is uncovering how broad their definition of OS jurisdiction they think they have. According to Apple any financial tx down through an OS is a Apple taxable event. Now imagine they try to apply that to Zelle or Venmo….
You might have noticed you can't send NFTs on Coinbase Wallet iOS anymore. This is because Apple blocked our last app release until we disabled the feature. 🧵.
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Crypto ppl being so pumped for Elon owned Twitter seems so disconnected with the decentralization narrative that it makes u wonder if it’s all really about the cult of personality across culture.
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I just realized Janet Yellen is 75 years old…I honestly worry that a generational divide is blinding policy makers from seeing the big picture of what’s happening in markets & tech.
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👇 the US senate is trying to shove IRS crypto tax reporting for non custodial crypto entities as a way to pay for the infrastructure bill. Not only is it almost unenforceable, the US might be loosing more tax revenues by cracking down on the entire US crypto industry.
1/ 🚨 Here's the deal with the US infrastructure bill:. A new provision has been added that expands the Tax Code's definition of "broker" to capture nearly everyone in crypto, including non-custodial actors like miners, forcing them all to KYC users. This is not a drill 👇.
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Crypto pitches now resemble Hollywood pitches “from the founders of X & Y, the academic labs of Z, a co production sponsored by SV fund A - a new crypto project. It’s payments but scalable on chain, a Monero mixed with lightning”. FOMOing a fund near you with a 9 fig valuation.
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The more everyone declares crypto over & moves on to AI, the more I’m convinced my main thesis on crypto remains strong - it’s the marketplace infra for markets. As AI enters the picture we’ll see new marketplaces emerge for AI agents, computing, data verification etc. /.
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The first public signal (outside of crypto gossip) that something was rotten in the state of the SBF empire was in the Celsius bankruptcy in June. A Celsius’s creditors was an entity called “Pharos USD fund” associated with a British “Lantern Ventures”.
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The mere fact Gensler can't answer the question & expects crypto entrepreneurs to understand what that implies between the lines is the exact definition of regulatory ambiguity trying to have it both ways.
Gary Gensler getting grilled on whether he thinks ETH is a security or commodity. Enjoy
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I have my own opinions about the Palestinian conflict, I have no solutions. None of that is relevant. If you see the barbaric acts of raiding towns, butchering civilians, kidnapping toddlers & girls as anything but horrendous, I’m not sure you have a moral fiber to stand on.
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Imagine how the crypto crash would have played out had DeFi figured out unsecured lending.
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🧵Let’s imagine how this week would have unfolded if @SenStabenow DCCPA proposal had been the law of the land in order to judge if this is the best path forward:.1. FTX would have started the week as an off shore crypto exchange trading shitcoin & perps ./.
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We thought COVID was the crypto moment, but it was just the opening bell. The new macro of canceling a nation put the spotlight on the dark money legal vortex, big tech reliance & compliance.
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Love how bitcoiners just became experts on Geothermal energy, much like they were epidemiological experts a day after the lockdown.
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So it’s official, any crypto in the custody of a centralized crypto platform could be deemed as owned by the platform, rather than client money. Crypto depositors are just junior creditors.
JUST IN: Judge grants Celsius Network ownership rights to $4.2 billion in customer #crypto deposits.
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Not enough credit is given to the 17’ ICO projects that actually put their head down & delivered. I was the a loud critic of the ICO bubble, but the 3% who proved it was about protocols & not scams should be commended.
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Working on privacy is now illegal in Europe. There’s something bizarre about prosecuting technology instead of the users or violators of existing laws that render innovation as a threat.
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The GBTC arb is the crypto slayer trade. It birthed unicorns who built entire businesses that sold the premium to retail (BlockFi, Celsius). It wrecked the entire industry in crashes when crumbling giants went all in gambling everything to close it. The SEC kept it alive for that.
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“Whats fintech? It’s subprime lending on an app” - My fave Jim Chanos quote from last week’s Odd Lotts.
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The Web3 Fomo going on in venture & corporate America kind of proves it was never about the tech. It’s the fear of loosing the narrative & pure greed.
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Prediction: Uniswap's non-fungible liquidity tokens might be the biggest NFT market by end of year.
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OMG @NickSzabo4 following me, just made my day. Been following his work for years, one of the giant intellectual powerminds this industry is built on.
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Coinbase going to the mat on Greyscale asset, shouldn’t be dismissed with the usuals “don’t trust, verify”. It’s just not the same situation. It’s a public company with a board that would be indicted if any of this is false.
Coinbase affirms all the Grayscale assets are secure …should help sentiment a bit
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DeFi truism:.1. DeFi is a rerun of the 2008 asset backed finance bubble on speed. Predictable with self-gobbling mechanisms multiplying systematic risk via leverage in the system & composability.2. The bubble will be bigger than 17’, due to leverage & shorts .3. People will scam.
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While we were all obsessing with Corona:.✳️ a humanitarian crisis on the Turkish-Greek border .✳️ Lebanon is about to default .✳️ Saudi is undergoing another prince arrest party led by MBS.✳️ India nationalized the third largest bank .✳️ the OPEC alliance is about to collapse.
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FWIW I’ve always been pro-regulation in crypto, I just think we’ve been indoctrinated to think in KYC/aml terms, when the real regulation is disclosures for projects & centralized intermediaries.
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Contrarian take: in some dark twisted way, markets should be grateful crypto managed to both contain & unravel SBF. The man knew how to work the system, media, politicians, establishment so well, he was months from getting approval to trade commodities & stocks on FTX.
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SDNY saying what mainstream media weren’t able to figure out for a month :.FTX is one of the biggest financial frauds in US history.
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Despite all the cascading liquidations, the infra held up. Investors had tools to handle their margin calls on DeFi & we didn't see any protocol go under. We did see exchange outages not only at the usual suspects (yeah Coinbase).
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@LayahHeilpern Most don’t, but you did! otherwise why did u name your book “undressing Bitcoin” ?.Best not to infer your own choices to an entire gender.
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Things I find confounding: the SEC refuses to even acknowledge the need for clarity regarding crypto, tokens, DeFi, but the banks get a timeline for:.- crypto asset custody.- issuing crypto backed loans.- facilitating stablecoin. tell me it's not rigged.
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seeing some Eth maxi takes about how Ethereum is all about privacy. well, no. Ethereum has actually been an example of the law of unintended consequences when everything is a transparency machine waiting for a privacy layer.
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Other than Sedona masterpiece tweets I think @aeyakovenko deserves some weekly crypto Twitter award for handling Solana’s crisis communication like a pro with humor & humility.
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Trudeau managed to convince even Crypto’s biggest critics we all need a default freedom rail, even in democracies. The impact of the Canadian care bear rushing to declare marshal law was a real pivot point for a lot of skeptics imo.
"I still can't believe that this is the protest that would prove every Bitcoin crank a prophet. And for me to have to slice a piece of humble pie, and admit that I was wrong on crypto's fundamental necessity in Western democracies."
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🤚📢stop!.If you are about to tweet about crypto or fintech or identity. 🔥take a look at what's happening in Hong Kong, how protestors are being identified (facial recognition), censored, and where money plays into it. These are people asking for a chance at a fair trial.
There is usually never a line at the train ticketing machines. Judging from an overheard convo, it appears that people are reluctant to use their rechargeable Octopus cards for fear of leaving a paper trail of them having been present at the protest.
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Forget the crypto macro pseudo analysis. The mere fact that Bloomberg knows there’s drama between Alchemix & Curve is a big signal crypto has crossed the chasm. The short term price action is just the tic toc side show.
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Pretty huge win for DeFi here. A judge claiming an AMM is "sufficiently decentralized" & isn't a securities exchange nor a B/D. Gensler insisted the courts will be the final arbiter on crypto & they've been clamping down. on the SEC.
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so a blockchain wallet screener backed by Visa, Amex, Paypal & Citi is literally permissioning access to crypto. Don't know if this is funny or tragically inevitable.
It appears following Uniswap, has started sending all your data to TRM Labs. This is what happens when you connect with an address they don't like. No way to close positions from the UI, no explanation or anything.
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Coinbase’s IPO might go down as a tangible pivot point for crypto markets & market infrastructure:.- the final inning of institutionalizing crypto into legacy finance .- spur a wave of consolidations in crypto infra.- emerge as the beginning of traditional fintech built on crypto.
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Some thoughts on the new Atom whitepaper:.1. It's pretty clear the IBC/Atom ecosystem has been one of the more progressice chain communities since the get go, despite the original tokenomic not leading to direct Atom appreciation.
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