Devon Bernard

CTO | 3x Founder (1 acquired) | Prev @FTX_Official @wallet_tg | 1st on-chain real-estate

[Devon Bernard @DevonWBernard]

Cancelling Whoop: Pages 5-8.

[Devon Bernard @DevonWBernard]

Just canceled my @WHOOP subscription.

You can't cancel within their app, you have to find a link (https://t.co/1dQMYkqgfp).

Also, it's not one click, they require an 8 page survey to cancel (screenshots below).

[Grey @greynguyen]

@WHOOP just filed a lawsuit against us.

A $10B company with 800+ employees is scared of us, a 20-person team making health tracking accessible to all.

Rather than focusing on product and innovation, Whoop has decided to use its newly raised capital on lawfare.

In this video, I share our side of the story, explain why their claims are baseless, and why we believe fighting back is the right thing to do.

[Devon Bernard @DevonWBernard]

Cancelling Whoop: Pages 1-4

[Armani Ferrante @armaniferrante]

Story time.

Over two years ago we attempted Backpack's first fundraise for the exchange.

We had lost most of our money on FTX, and we had to re-invent ourself. With a couple small checks and our personal savings, we bootstrapped the initial exchange team to focus on all the hard things regulated companies have to do--not just engineering, but finance, accounting, compliance, customer support, and importantly, the entire licensing process for our first anchor license in Dubai.

From the beginning, it was never just about building a matching engine, it was never just about building an app, it was about being able to re-imagine every layer of the stack of modern finance, where the legal code is just as important as the computer code--a thesis at odds with basically every crypto investor in the world. We had our sites set not just on the UAE but on the entire world, and one place in particular, the European Union.

From the perspective of many international exchanges, to put it in their own words, a "bloodbath" was coming. The world's largest derivatives platforms were leaving the EU, and it was getting harder and harder to enter the market. At the time, there was a total of zero exchanges offering a regulated perpetual futures product.

So we went out to fundraise. Our goal was simple: get enough money to buy FTX EU, do all the hard work to return customer assets, hire up a world class compliance team, solve all the problems that caused FTX in the first place, and re-activate the license. Turns out fundraising wasn't that simple.

The world was in a very different place back then. Most people looked at us like we were crazy. A lot of people questioned me and our team for FTX ties. Who wants to invest in ex FTX and Alameda employees trying to buy back the EU arm of FTX, returning customer funds, and gunning to be the first regulated perpetual futures product in Europe. To many it was the most contrarian of bets and a far fetched dream. Why couldn't Coinbase or any of the other giants just beat you and do this first? A fair question. And honestly, I didn't have an answer to that. All I can say is that I genuinely think our team is the best. No one works harder. Works more hours. Has more experience, more ore battle scars, and a more comprehensive of an understanding of crypto exchanges than us. Others might have more resources. Others might have better brands. Others might have been around for longer than us. They deserve all the respect in the world for pioneering much our industry. However, it's my job to think I can do better. It's my job to compete. It's my job to win. I naively thought I could. Investors did not. We failed.

So we didn't buy FTX EU. It ended up being purchased by the previous founders. We missed the opportunity. But we didn't stop. Tunnel visioned. Laser focused. We built our product. We went to market. And, turns out, we were pretty successful. In 2024, we made more money than our entire fundraise. We built our spot product, and with the capital on hand, we were ready to re-invest to climb our next mountain.

I don't know if it was luck, divine intervention, or just the universe just doing its thing, but we discovered that FTX EU was for sale--again. This time, we didn't have to fundraise to make an offer. We had the cash ready to deploy. And so we did.

But the interesting thing about buying regulated companies is that it's not simply a matter of having cash. There's many more people with much more money than us. It's not just about showing up to someone's door with a bag of cash, and you're off to the races. There's diligence. There's compliance tech. There's reporting requirements. There's the ability to steward the return of FTX EU customer assets. There's custody requirements. There's controls. There's bespoke integrations. There's product changes. There's a million little details that go into getting a regulated company off the ground. Details that very few startups at our stage ever have to think about.

Some people think we're making our lives harder than they have to be by doing all of this. But it's precisely the hard things that no one wants to do that are worth doing.

And I'm proud to say that we did it, joining the ranks of only a handful of crypto companies in the world that have met the highest standards of compliance to offer a regulated product in one of the largest, most important, and most rigorous regions in the world. And for perpetual futures, specifically, one of the first.

It turns out you can just do things, and we're not stopping there.

This year, we set our sites not just on Europe, but later to Japan, and ultimately our home, the USA. We've come a long way, but we have an even longer way to go. Every day. Little by little. Brick by brick.

🧱

[Devon Bernard @DevonWBernard]

@Dexlab_official Yes, that is a scam. I do not host a crypto podcast.

[Devon Bernard @DevonWBernard]

If you received a DM from my account inviting you to a podcast/interview/call, ignore it.

Some bot had unauthorized access to my account (even with 2FA), and spammed DMs, likely trying to spread malware or steal crypto.

I requested detailed access logs from X, will audit.

[Devon Bernard @DevonWBernard]

Yes, the impersonator is a scammer.

I've heard Zoom is most popular exploit. The default Zoom setting allows guests to perform remote-control attack while host does screenshare.

Maybe they chose Microsoft Teams because fewer people have it, so they can get someone to download fake version with malware.

Anyways, safer to use web-only options with fewer system permissions, like GHangout.

[Devon Bernard @DevonWBernard]

$SOL is now available in @wallet_tg ❤️

Now @telegram’s 1B monthly active users can buy, sell, and hold @solana!

All trades have zero fees until March 31st

[Wallet in Telegram @wallet_tg]

⚡️ New cryptocurrencies in @wallet_tg: Trade top assets like @ethereum, @solana & @dogecoin with zero fees until March 31st. Buy with USDT or TON, track prices, and build your ideal portfolio — all within @telegram.

Exchange €50+ worth of crypto in one transaction to enter the 10,000 USDT giveaway! 💵

[Devon Bernard @DevonWBernard]

ChatGPT is missing input field in temporary mode

This feature has been completely unusable for the whole day

I thought a company worth $300B would fix faster

[Devon Bernard @DevonWBernard]

Every time I install a new iOS app...

[Devon Bernard @DevonWBernard]

This probably wouldn't meaningfully impact H-1B (work) or O-1 (extraordinary ability) visas

There are very few employees that companies are willing to spend $5M upfront to have work in US vs remote

[Devon Bernard @DevonWBernard]

Trump will sell a "Gold Card" visa for ~$5M in two weeks

> replaces EB-5 program which grants visas for people who invest $800k in us businesses
> historically only ~10k visas/year are approved
> 80%+ from Chinese citizens

Now what people won't say 👇

[Devon Bernard @DevonWBernard]

Most of these people just want easy travel to US and won't actually become citizens

US is the only major nation that taxes citizens on their WORLDWIDE INCOME

These people are rich and don't want their current income getting double taxed by US rates

[Devon Bernard @DevonWBernard]

Calling all AI Agent wizards 🧙‍♂️

Here is an opportunity to do something useful

Build bots that follow transactions, aggregate destinations, and submit reports

[Ben Zhou @benbybit]

Join us on war against Lazarus - https://t.co/EEkj05V2xZ
Industry first bounty site that shows aggregated full transparency on the sanctioned Lazarus money laundering activities. V1 includes:
- Becoming a bounty hunter by connecting your wallet and help tracing the fund, when your submitted bounty leads to freeze, bounty is paid upfront upon instantly at freezing.
-All freezer gets 5% of the bounty, exchange, mixers and all.
- live ranking of good and bad actor and their response time to deal with the sanctioned Lazarus group transactions. You don't want to end up on the bad actor list , it's a record of you helping to facilitate sanctioned transactions.
- Live API wallet address update for exchange, Chainanalysis, @arkham @elliptic @trmlabs

We have assigned a team to dedicate to maintain and update this website, we will not stop until Lazarus or bad actors in the industry is eliminated. In the future we will open it up to other victims of Lazarus as well.

V2 coming up:
-Live update on latest wallet with latest balance, this will serve as open bounty, bounty hunter can claim a wallet and own that part of the journey for x amount of time when the wallet is moving.
-Regulator Tools
-
**More idea, feedback welcomed, please leave at comment, a lot more improvement needed**

LET THE HUNTING SEASON BEGIN!

[Devon Bernard @DevonWBernard]

@benbybit Trying to submit report. Submit button stuck. See submit console log but not network request.

[Devon Bernard @DevonWBernard]

The amount of people genuinely proud about generating AI slop content is sad

Please stop ruining the internet

[Devon Bernard @DevonWBernard]

The good news about AI Agents is that they have an answer for every question.

The bad news about AI Agents is that they have an answer for every question.
🙃

[Devon Bernard @DevonWBernard]

There are more fake Polymarket charts on X than real charts 🙄