Backstage pass: Nobody told you so
Zcash wins '25 // LIT token // Flow pain // Wrench attacks // WOJAK! // Prediction
Happy new year! WAGMI, frens!
Eleven years ago, the price of bitcoin was $317.
The 11th largest cryptocurrency was counterparty.
The 111th largest was unobtanium.
A WINNER IS ZOO(ko)!
A lot of people are going to make predictions for next year about the crypto world. Most of them will be pretty anodyne. The only good one is the set I made.
We do the prediction lists because they are engagement bait start conversations. We do them because we hope to point back and say “We were right.”
We do them because they are fun, mainly. (or I think they are)
But keep in mind that the world is messy and developments develop out of nowhere. For example, I went looking for any mainstream crypto thinkfluencers who wrote end of 2024 predictions that called for zcash (ZEC) popping in 2025. I found zilch.
I found a couple obscure tweets calling 2025 ZEC’s year, but knowing how Crypto Twitter works these were bagholders who were going to say that anyway. I bet if I went and looked I’d find people saying 2025 would be hot for DOT and ADA too.
But here we are at the end of the year and it turns out that zcash topped the boards..
What. On. Earth. We have a POTUS whose sons love Bitcoin now and it still couldn’t catch a bid? But zcash, the O.G. privacy coin, comes out of nowhere and rides off into the sunset?
When I saw zcash was popping mid-year I assumed it was some kind of whale pumping that would come and go, but it has persisted. It’s catching a new wave as the year closes.
God bless.
The Cypherpunk Mailing List may be closed, but its legacy is still printing.
New tokuhn, who dis?
Lighter, the latest perp DEX to challenge Hyperliquid, announced its token and token airdrop on X this week. Free money from the blockchain gods is always news.
As I have said here before: I do not understand perps in a real way. Like, funding rate? I don’t know her.
I have looked this up 773 times. I might as well be reading Dostoevsky in Russian. I might as well be designing a teleporter.
I also don’t get the new token, LIT. In the new announcement they wrote: “The future of finance lies at the nexus of the traditional financial system and DeFi, and infrastructure that is efficient, secure, and verifiable will be important in both directions.”
Cool, but I like turtles.
Lighter’s CEO was on The Chopping Block recently and I came away from that thinking that this is that deep financialization plumbing normal people should not approach unless they are willing to undertake the equivalent of a martial arts movie montage worth of training and study before really wading into.
Probably most people just work it out as they go though. Some of them will buy in strong to a coin based on a frog who likes to take a leak and then, two years later, lose $30 million over a couple days. Are you ready for this?
After the LIT airdrop, $250 million exited the platform. I just hope this turns out to be the last we hear about “points seasons.”
The web and FLOW
I’m not saying I’m psychic or anything, you guys, but I am saying that you should keep reading this newsletter closely because there is a chance that I am psychic a little.
So a few weeks ago I was futzing around on X and started thinking about once-ascendant blockchains that we don’t hear anything about any longer, and my mind turned to that one from Dapper Labs, the NFT company, the video basketball card and Crypto Kitty conglomerate. It made a blockchain of its own in 2019.
So I posted this tweet, where I just joked about how hard the FLOW blockchain’s coin has tanked since the end of the 2021 cycle. That was Dec. 17. It just hit me. 🔮
10 days later, Flow got hacked. Trading on FLOW halted all over. The token that was already worth close enough to nothing went even lower. The foundation put out a statement yesterday.
But it didn’t answer the burning question for me: Why, seriously, would anyone still be holding FLOW in 2025?
What I feel badly about when I hear about an event like this is the fact that there must be some engineers and other staff who are still working at this company somehow. Like if you’re an NFT guy, if you want to make blockchain cartoons and stuff, if that’s your jam. Cool? Get your Dapper on.
But if you actually dig crypto technology, why? This has to be an epically low morale moment for everyone technical that remains. What’s gotta be the reaction when you show up at a Consensus side-party and tell people you are working on Flow?
A lot of VC-backed blockchains debatably need an orderly unwinding and I would argue that the silver lining of this $5 million exploit is that it’s like the blockchain gods gave Dapper Labs an excuse. Just stop running the chain, move your IP to Solana or Base or Polygon or something.
It’s time to pour one out for Flow.
STFUsec
I grew up in the middle of nowhere. After college, I moved to DC and after a series of unfortunate events I ended up in New York City, where I lived for 11 years.
In all these big coastal places, it was normal to tell people what you paid in rent. I found this a bit weird, because talking about money always seemed impolite to me, a little gauche.
But it’s rational when you think about it. Rent, especially for young people in urban areas who aren’t choosing high paying jobs (I was not) is the biggest source of financial stress. We all had an interest in sharing information about it in a continuous way to make sure we weren’t being screwed.
But the place where people were really, really open about rent was NYC. In NYC it’s basically like, you meet someone at a party and you introduce yourself by saying, “Hi I’m Brady. I’m a freelance writer who moved to Brooklyn about a year ago. My girlfriend and I are paying $1300 for two-bedroom in Prospect Heights.”
(I wrote it that way because any New Yorker reading this will have to pick their jaw up off the floor — that’s a real number but it’s a 2014 number, relax).
This kind of openness is crazy because you’re basically telling people what your household income is. And, it seems to me, more broadly, a culture of talking more openly about income, wealth and budgets has taken hold among the Millennial and Gen Z class of American urbanites and professionals.
Which is maybe fine broadly but: Crypto people. Stop it.
There was basically one wrench attack every week all of 2025 (that is, a physical attack where someone tried to steal someone else’s crypto assets — which are all bearer assets), according to data compiled by Bitcoin developer and all around detail man, Jameson Lopp.
The lesson here is that the hot new OpSec is discretion. If you have fat bags, keep that quiet. You risk getting shoved in the trunk of a car until you give up your Ledger.
Fact: There may or may not ever be a quantum crack in Bitcoin, but there is for sure a tattoo-covered Russian who can kick your ass.
WOJAK v WOJAK
Wojak is a meme character that’s become somewhat universal on the internet. He’s just a guy. A guy with feelings.
You may know him from the “Money Printer Go Brr” meme or the related Wifejak meme, the dispenser of simple aphorisms. Wojak has taken many forms.
So of course one form he has taken is that of a memecoin. Glancing at CoinGecko yesterday I noticed that WOJAK had been a big mover. I opened the coin page. It’s on Solana. Tokenomics: Hugs.
You probably noticed that it’s up 854% since launch. That’s not what I noticed. I noticed it only launched in November.
No way that this is the first WOJAK coin, I thought. So I looked. There was already a WOJAK on Ethereum, it turns out. That one dates back to 2023! And it’s down. So don’t confuse WOJAK on Solana with Ethereum WOJAK. They are completely distinct pointless memecoins.
But while you’re at it, don’t confuse WOJAK on Solana with — umm, ermm — WOJAK on Soalana. That one dates back to August (also down).
Did we just get a new slurp juice?
Rain protocol
Returning to the topic of predictions here as we close up: one of my favorite vagueposty calls for next year was this one: “Prediction markets have a bit of a craze and some set of markets will have an unfortunate consequence that causes soul searching in policy circles.”
Basically, I think some market will spin up that will not only wager on events but also influence some sort of crucial event that, once it comes to pass, will leave people skeeved out about this category of product.
Like maybe people bet that someone gets fired from a job and then they try to drum up controversy around that person and they really do get fired. Or someone has dirt on someone so they bet that he or she will get canceled and then they release their dirt. Things along those lines.
Well, you might be thinking, how could that happen? Companies like Polymarket and Kalshi just wouldn’t allow that kind of bet to run on their platforms! Probably they won’t, but I’ve already stumbled onto one purportedly decentralized prediction market, Rain Protocol.
I haven’t dug into Rain. Perhaps it has controls on it such that shady markets can’t be open.
But you know the day will come that there will be a truly permissionless platform where someone can spin up any sort of market that they want, and hijinks, as the old folks say, will ensue.
My bet? Pearl clutching at the New York Times. Breathless tweets by Elizabeth Warren.
Everything works itself out, but not without someone making a late night visit to the Crypto Uncle that they won’t soon forget.