Backstage pass: The yoink heard round the world
Vitalik manifests // Morgan Stanley // Michael and me // Truthonometry // Razzlehearts beat as one
11 years ago this week, bitcoin was $264.20.
The 11th largest coin was counterparty.
The 111th was diode.
Vitalik said a thing
Back in 2017, when I first joined CoinDesk, we would put out a story any time Vitalik wrote a blog post or had a good tweet. We called these Vitalik-said-a-thing stories. The readership always pounced.
Vitalik has hit roughly Boutros Boutros-Ghali tier now, but in those days he was more like Geek Jim Morrison with a side of Jim Jones.
But people still care when Vitalik says a thing, just in a different way, and this week he said a thing.
He said: It’s easy for a large institution to gradually drift away from its ideals. Like how the USA was founded on the notions of “don’t tread on me” and “no taxation without representation” yet we’ve somehow become mired in a 100-year-long fight over just what exactly the Department of Agriculture should be telling kids to eat.
Is it 7s? Is it 4s? Is it a pyramid? Is it even real?
For Ethereum: Vitalik wrote a manifesto to remind the community that trustlessness has always been an ideal on the chain, so he’s urging its users to stand with him, to never adopt changes that prevent some few using it on exactly their own terms.
No proctored gates on Ethereum!
It’s the kind of thing that makes someone who’s been around this space, and the tech-o-sphere, for a while get a bit sniffly. Principles are normally the cost of doing business on the web. Not having principles but selling them off in lean times.
Sell ‘em like stepchildren on the edge of a border war.
Longtime Ethereum critic, Multicoin Capital’s Kyle Samani, retweeted Vitalik and wrote, “What Vitalik is explicitly telling is, the EF is not building for what users want. They are building for what Vitalik wants.”
Look, man, they don’t all need to be go-fast-zoom-zoom chains. And that isn’t entirely what everyone wants.
Ethereum’s a chain that gives its denizens a reason to sail across the cybersea and drop anchor there. Yet, cultures drift! Part of the job of a leader is to remind his flock about what binds them.
“Ethereum is not the world. Ethereum is an opinionated take on properties that we think should be available in the world,” he wrote in a tweet further down in the thread.
Decentralized online technologies have proven that convictions about the future can be expressed programmatically. When someone decides one digital place isn’t working for them, other chains are just a bridge hop away.
And the ones that wanted go-fast-zoom-zoom have hopped that bridge. God bless!
But the point here is for each coin community to plant a flag in cyberspace!
So.
🥁🥁🥁
That’s why I’m ready to announce my own blockchain, coming soon. The devs are hard at work.
It’s a trustless, permissionless, privacy enhancing kind of money with just one revolutionary new property: It won’t spend at all at bars and clubs that host karaoke.
Someone’s gotta do something. Society’s foundation is cracking up.
Thanks, Vitalik, for lighting the way. I’ll take it from here.
Morgan stans ETH
Let’s do a little thought experiment, OK?
What’s a really big financial brand that we don’t discuss interminably, with a name that rhymes with Hippie Rogaine Face? How about we say Vanguard?
Now we all know Vanguard has typically been averse to blockchain financial assets, but let’s just set that aside for the moment.
So let’s imagine that it’s like, say, 2017 again, and bitcoin is ripping there in the late part of the year, and the team at Vanguard put out a press release announcing “Vanguard Bitcoin.”
Vanguard Bitcoin is just like Bitcoin proper, it’s just that Vanguard tweaked the code enough such that it would stand on its own like all the many Bitcoin forks through the early part of that decade and they put their seal of approval on it.
One big unlock: you could buy Vanguard Bitcoin right in your Vanguard account!
What would you have thought?
Do I need to play this out any further?
OK. With that sneer/smirk/chuckle in mind: There is the aforementioned Ethereum, the second biggest chain. Not so long ago the SEC finally gave the greenlight to Ethereum spot ETFs. These are instruments that take the crypto asset you know and love and put a legal wrapper on them and take a fee.
Fine.
There are nine of them. All good options. All with a bit of a track record. All, let’s be fair, pretty much exactly the same thing.
So.
Why, why, why does anyone expect me to care that Morgan Stanley has filed for an ether ETF?
Yes. Big famous name. Yes. Network of wealth advisors. But, in the end: Same damn thing. Different labels. Ethereum.
If you would have smirked at Vanguard Bitcoin you should at least side eye the Morgan Stanley ETH ETF. You definitely should not triumphally bullpoast about it.
At least not if you want me to take you seriously. Remember your Vanguard smirk? Yeah. That smirk is coming at you now. Were you ready for that?
See also: the bitcoin one. Also the solana one. The creation of this product category was a big deal. The marginal importance of any particular new wrapper, however, is 🥱
I know crypto is a little boring right now, but don’t force it. This is why God gave us video games. You can play them.
Morgan Stanley Capital International
I don’t know about you, but I wake up every day and I say to myself: I hope Michael Saylor is getting his way.
Because Mr. Saylor got religion about Bitcoin while all of us were stuck at home, started buying bitcoin with his company’s money and well it got surreal.
Like... we’ve had Bitcoin Jesus. He’s Bitcoin Apostle Paul. Out there on those mean streets (CNBC) telling us all about how we should feel our way to the future orange coin panacea.
The apostle sent Epistles. Saylor runs PowerPoint presentations. Same, same.
So every day I wake up like: “My interests are Michael Saylor’s interests.”
I need a strident billionaire with a high raspy voice out there slinging memes and gold halo bedecked Twitter avatars in order to validate my life choices. You, too!?
Which brings us back to Morgan Stanley, kind of, but actually a company it spun off that still bears its name, MSCI, which has been kicking around the idea of pushing DATs out of its indices.
MSCI doesn’t like to list companies that are just investment holding companies. So MSCI did not appear to be in love with the DAT trend, companies that just buy random cryptocurrencies and try to HODL for good. So the index generator floated the idea of booting all the DATs from their products.
But, deus ex machina, this week, they decided not to do that.
But it wasn’t all good news for Strategy. MSCI did decide that it’s going to ignore new share issuance. If Strategy wants to make up a bigger piece of the index, it’s going to actually need to grow its relative value in the market.
It’s like if Tinder came out with a system to crowd-source height verification. Dudes who were 5’ 8” IRL would also be 5’ 8” in their matches’ dreams.
But the important thing, what the market cares about today: Strategy remains in the club.
So, for at least one more night I can sleep easy knowing that Big Mike is going to be okay.
Truth trig
Sometimes something big happens. And that very big thing could potentially have all kinds of wild implications. That word “could” is doing a lot of work there, but it could. There are known-unknowns and unknown-unknowns that multiply like e-girls wen number go up.
It gets even hairier when one of the known-knowns is that there are no more no-no’s. Under conditions like that, speculation spins wildly, freely and everywhere.
Normally, our job in the reporting class is to keep our speculation about known-unknowns to the things we can reasonably put a source to, but the precise trigonometry of this can be impossible to make sense of.
I’m only using “trigonometry” semi-metaphorically, because, you see, the bigger the thing that happened was, the more loose-goosey truth pursuants might get about articulating potential implications.
“Could” goes from mild mannered intern or affable hourly worker to the news feed CEO at times like that.
And if the speculation can somehow lead to “Trump is corrupt” then permitted speculation extends further and into greater volume. We’re talking about going into dimensions where you’ve gotta leave Microsoft Paint and start firing up AutoDesk.
Which is all a roundabout way of saying that Venezuela (you might have heard that Delta Force visited) might have a few metric tons of bitcoin and Trump might seize it.
Bitcoin Treasuries estimates about $20 million. Unnamed sources say $60 billion. Who wants to make a big deal out of a few orders of magnitude though?
No one actually knows anything about any of this! There’s no sources named. The last time I heard anything about Venezuela and crypto was the petro.
Just spitballing here, but seems to me like Delta Force yoinking the leader of the 53rd most populous country on Earth is a big enough story till we actually get reports of actual coins and see them move on chain.
The Versace Bedouin nomadic no longer
Razzlekhan got her man back.
Ilya Lichtenstein, who took all the heat for a hack on Bitfinex in 2016, is set to be released on January 25, according to the Bureau of Prisons inmate database. But he’s writing tweet threads, so I think he’s out already?
“I was offline for 4 years,” he writes at the top of his latest thread. Obviously, dude. No one’s been a threadoooooor for at least that long.
Lichtenstein is the husband of Heather Morgan, aka Razzlekhan. In 2022, the two were arrested for the hack in which $72 million worth of bitcoin was stolen from the exchange Bitfinex in 2016.
This led to a series of bizarre inventions of new tokens that somehow showed that crypto could be used to create after-the-fact insurance policies, through internet money magic.
As details of the arrest came out, Crypto Twitter melted down as we learned more and more about Morgan, the Crocodile of Wall Street (it’s all been said before).
But you know the real treasure these two found?
Love. True love.
And isn’t that the greatest treasure of all?
But, seriously, what the heck is going on with all that bitcoin? Will Bitfinex get it back and burn LEOas promised?
Did we just decide to keep it? Are the Razzle-bitcoins the entire Strategic Bitcoin Reserve?
You know, I heard Maduro got his hands on it!
Is that why we yoinked him?
What does Anthony Scaramucci know???