TL;DR Crypto lender ‘Ledn’ processed more than $690M in loans to institutional clients in Q1, while retail is yet to arrive (which means the best is yet to come for crypto). Full Story Alright, time for some ‘canary in the coal mine’ data. If you don’t know what that is, it’s because we just made it up…kinda. (If nothing else, we gave it a name). Here’s what it means: Say you want to predict whether house prices are going to stay steady, go up, or go down. You could look at how many homes have been sold recently — but past/present performance doesn’t necessarily indicate future results. So ..read more

TL;DR The technology for stablecoins to exist on the BTC blockchain is being built which will enable anyone to spend crypto in the same way they would use a debit card today; just with less fees. Full Story If it wasn’t already abundantly clear, we (Seb & Chevy) love innovation. Which is why we got all kinds of giddy when we heard Elizabeth Stark, the CEO of Lightning Labs, discuss how far they’ve gotten with development towards hosting stablecoins on the Bitcoin blockchain. Here’s three reasons why this would be cool: Errbody loves to save money on fees - Visa and Mastercard typical ..read more

TL;DR Banks want to start using/relying on crypto rails to process their payments (the more entrenched crypto is within our legacy systems, the harder it is to kill). Full Story It’s ok. You can say it. We’re fully aware of it: We get weirdly excited about crypto integrations within legacy payments systems. Why? Because right now (for the most part) crypto is building outside of the existing system. That is to say, it doesn’t play nice with established infrastructure. It’s hard to buy with a credit card, banks don’t like you moving money to exchanges, and you need to learn a whole bunch of ..read more

TL;DR Avalanche is developing a system that will allow web3 apps to be “programmed in a natural language,” meaning you could code using voice-to-text. Full Story Not sure if you know this, but… Coding is hard. If you’re like us, you’ve tried your hand at coding with ChatGPT (to mild success). Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t — and unless you actually know how to code, you won’t really know until it’s out in the world being tested. Which is fine when you’re making a web3 focused AI chatbot… But when it comes to coding smart contracts (aka pieces of code that will automatically send ..read more

TL;DR FTX claims that 98% of its creditors should receive at least 118% of allowed claims in cash within 60 days of their proposed payout plan coming into effect. Full Story If you lost money in FTX, we have some good news, and some bad news. The good news is: The estate claims that 98% of creditors should receive at least 118% of allowed claims in cash within 60 days of their payout plan coming into effect. Translation: you should be getting your money back, plus a little extra on top. In fact, the FTX estate currently estimates that once all of the property that has been collected has be ..read more

TL;DR Grayscale just withdrew their Ethereum futures ETF application, meaning there will be no court case against the SEC (which was the thing that previously unlocked the BTC spot ETFs to be approved). Full Story We all know the classic story of the Trojan horse. The one where the Greeks gifted a huge wooden horse to the city of Troy filled with soldiers who jumped out of it once they were in Troy’s walls and overtook the city. Well, that same sort of tactic was used by Grayscale to get the BTC spot ETFs approved. Back in August last year, Grayscale took the SEC to court saying that it wa ..read more

TL;DR Right now there’s heightened BTC options interest predicting Bitcoin will be anywhere between $75k and $100k by September.  Full Story You know those insufferable YouTube thumbnails where the host will be pulling a cartoonish shocked face? (Á la, Edvard Munch's 'The Scream' ☝️). They annoy us as much as the next person — but if there were ever a time to use one, it’d be with this prediction… “Bitcoin will be above $100,000 by September.” That’s a bold statement. Especially after Bitcoin spent this past Monday and Tuesday sliding from $65.5k, to $63k… But that’s the bet Bitcoin o ..read more

TL;DR Colombia’s largest bank, Bancolombia, has entered the crypto business by launching a crypto exchange and a stablecoin, which got us thinking about the value of stablecoins. Full Story Colombia’s largest bank, Bancolombia, has entered the crypto business by launching a crypto exchange called Wenia. At the same time, they’ve launched a stablecoin called ‘COPW,’ which is pegged to the Colombian peso. That news is cool and all, but the important topic it got us thinking about is this: Lots of people (on both sides of the fence!) seem to think that there’s only room for either crypto or t ..read more

TL;DR The SECs latest series of Wells notices show that this is no longer an attack on certain crypto protocols, but on the industry as whole (via its infrastructure). Full Story The SEC has “gone full Oprah” with these Wells notices (aka: “we plan to sue you” notices). ICYMI — in the past few weeks, the SEC has handed out Wells notices to: Uniswap (the world’s largest decentralized exchange). Consesnys (the creators of the world’s most popular hot wallet, MetaMask). And just yesterday, Robinhood (you know — the app you used to buy your $GME stock with a few years back). It’s uncle ..read more

TL;DR It is rumored that soon qualified investors in the Shenzhen Stock Exchange could invest in BTC ETFs though the Hong Kong Stock Exchange through ‘Stock Connect.’ Full Story While the US slowly figures things out in the courtroom (see previous article), there’ve been some interesting murmurings about China letting its citizens invest in Hong Kong’s BTC ETFs. In order to understand how they plan to do that, we first need to understand how a little thing called ‘Stock Connect’ works. Stock Connect lets qualified investors from one market (China in this case) to access eligible shares in ..read more