Leading the news this week is Sam Bankman-Fried giving a public appearance, Larry Fink like tokenization, BlockFi filed for bankruptcy and more
A casualty of FTX's "ripples" or another cog in a crypto's poorly regulated CeFi machine that is casting a shadow on the industry?
Although many Latin American companies claim they have little exposure to FTX's digital token, a widespread loss of conviction in crypto poses a significant risk.
We look at a recent report from Protos that traces the issuance of USDT to the institutional players in the centralized crypto capital markets. The data reveals the market share of players like Alameda, Cumberland, Jump, and others in powering trading in exchanges. We try to contextualize this market structure with what exists both in (1) investment banking and (2) decentralized finance. The analogies are helpful to de-sensationalize the information and calculate some rough economics.
Making news this week was FTX expanding into stock trading, Plaid getting into identity verification, Klarna raising money at a lower valuation, Nubank adds 5.7 million new customers in Q1, Robinhood launching self-custodial wallets and more.
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The FTX debacle continues- when you thought it was all over, things just get weirder.
FTX led the news all week with the fastest fall in crypto history. This story crowded out any other major news story.
Sometimes more is more, and sometimes less is more.
In that spirit, we strongly urge you to check out Messari’s Crypto Theses for 2021. It is a mammoth work of 134 pages, covering each and every development in the ecosystem.
If you don’t want to fuss around with the email gate, the direct link is here.
We are going to pick out five things that are interesting to us substantively and provide a view below. By pick out, we mean screenshot and respond.
This week, we cover these ideas:
The difference between building a Fintech company, and building an empire to transform the world
How Warren Buffett is the best in the world at getting leverage through third party capital to grow
How Elon Musk is the best in the world at re-investing capital into his own judgment and view of the future
The $1.2B BitGo acquisition by Galaxy Digital, and the growing footprint of Alameda Research
DAOs as a way for all of us to participate
Tuesday afternoon Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao announced on Twitter an agreement to buy FTX.com, the non-U.S. section of FTX.