zcash had an infinite mint bug in its orchard shielded pool for 4 years. anthropic's claude found it. no human auditor caught it. trail of bits, NCC group, ABDK all missed it because the bug lived in zk circuit constraints, not application logic. zcash disclosed transparently, ironwood upgrade with mandatory formal verification targeting Q3 2026. here's the part worth watching. anthropic's project glasswing just added monero to the audit queue. if bulletproofs or RingCT have a similar flaw, monero has no electric coin company to coordinate an emergency upgrade. decentralized governance is a feature until you need to patch an infinite mint in 72 hours
The bmnr story is different than the mstr one
They’re buying the most eth they have this year
And they haven’t issued a strc like product (although they filed for it)
There’s billions in strc, if they can capture the same and buy eth it would be huge
Also unlike mstr, their staked eth earns yield which can be used to pay the dividend without “selling” (optically ofc)
The best bitcoin is ethereum
"either a decade of infrastructure development added zero value relative to bitcoin or this is the most asymmetric long setup ETH has printed since its existence"
ETH/BTC at 0.026 for the first time since march 2016. ratio is pricing ethereum the same relative to bitcoin as when it had zero DeFi, zero NFTs, zero L2s, and a $1.2b market cap. meanwhile 32.4% of ETH supply is staked at all-time highs with 1,261x more ETH waiting to enter staking than exit. BitMine holds 5.42m ETH (4.5% of supply) at a $3,476 cost basis, down roughly $9b, and just filed to raise $300m in 9.5% preferred stock to buy more. on the same day BitMine bought 26,497 ETH, BlackRock deposited 17,511 ETH to coinbase. the sellable float is compressing into a smaller and smaller window while $2.4b in ETF money walks out the door over 5 months. daily RSI lower than COVID, lower than FTX collapse, lower than the tariff crash. either a decade of infrastructure development added zero value relative to bitcoin or this is the most asymmetric long setup ETH has printed since its existence. stop trading the ratio. start deciding which side of the BitMine bet you're on.
cryptopunks floor held at 50 ETH through a 25% ETH price collapse. one wallet accumulated 14 punks for 447 ETH during the drawdown, removing roughly 4-5% of total listed supply in a single event. floor hit 52 ETH during 3AC, 46 ETH during FTX, recovered 50-65% in ETH terms within 6 months both times. current floor sits at 50 ETH in the same compression zone. the mechanic most miss: you're buying an ETH-denominated asset at cycle-low ETH prices. if ETH recovers and the floor expands on top of that, the returns stack multiplicatively. NFTfi and Gondi now accept punks as tier 1 collateral at 30-40% LTV so you can lever the position further. 10,000 fixed supply, no roadmap to disappoint you, no token to dilute. just provably scarce digital property priced in the most oversold ETH reading ever recorded
Surprisingly bad take. Blackrock isn’t building on ETH rails because they’re cheap.
They’re building on ETH because it’s the most secure network on the planet. Full stop.
Affordability is a distant second factor.
ethereum shipped glamsterdam, cut fees 78-80%, and dropped to 19th by protocol revenue. USDT generates $493m in monthly revenue and briefly flipped ETH to #2 by market cap. ETH literally optimized the economic model that justified "ultrasound money" out of existence. the new pitch is settlement layer for tokenized securities but settlement layers don't command speculative premiums. they command utility pricing. blackrock and DTCC are building on ethereum rails because rails are cheap. that's the point. that's also the problem
Woke up extremely bullish on DeFi and Ethereum today
Uniswap launched in the 2018 bear, when Ethereum sentiment was at all time lows
Uniswap and other defi projects relentlessly built through that bear market and proved how powerful Ethereum can be, catalyzing defi summer and everything since
Now vibes are down bad again and Uniswap intends to build our way out of it. Last time it was by proving defi is possible. This time it will be by proving defi is inevitable.
The internet brought two disruptive changes: existing businesses moving onto the internet, and the formation of new internet-native businesses
The same duality will exist for defi: the tokenization of all existing assets, and a growing vibrant economy of crypto native assets. And it’s all happening right now, with more and more assets being brought onchain, increasing the value and productivity of crypto native assets.
As this digital economy grows, Defi is being integrated everywhere - payment processors, brokerage accounts, asset issuers. It won't stop until we eat the entire global economy
Uniswap the liquidity layer + Ethereum the settlement layer. The perfect combination of low counterparty risk, permissionless, programmable infrastructure
And all this will result in huge growth in protocol volumes and fee generation. Which reminds me:
UNI burn hit all time highs today, after several new sources of protocol fees came online.
And there are many more to come: v4, uniswap x, aggregator hooks, more chains, etc
Now add in all the new assets coming onchain
We're still at the beginning 🦄
Every bear market bottom has been marked by some outlier event that none of us expected. FTX, etc
If a Zcash bug that was discovered but never exploited is as bad as it gets, then we’re fortunate. My concern is the dead bodies we haven’t discovered yet due to how sharp this move was. Like more short term pain coming.
Licking my wounds with everyone else, but also trying to keep a level head on the "big picture"
A few thoughts:
- BTC has now dipped below the 200 WMA -- historically a fantastic zone to buy on a long-time horizon.
- We've also hit *extreme oversold* levels on the 14-day RSI (nearing levels we saw Feb. 5th) as well as the long-term 12 Month RSI (in line with past cycle lows)
- More than half the supply of BTC is now underwater, including just about every ETF holder
- ETF flows are ugly. 15 straight outflow days (over $5b)
- In the futures market, funding rates have just flipped negative (in aggregate) and open interest is down 22% over the last few weeks.
- Meanwhile, BTC still trades above its Realized Price of $54k (proxy for the cost basis of all coins in circulation). This is a level we fell below in each of the last two bear markets.
----
This is historically the "time to buy."
Personally, I'm underwater on some recent purchases, but also looking to accumulate the fear.
What I'm looking for moving forward:
1. Signs that traders are getting aggressively short.
2. Signs of seller exhaustion.
3. Clarity on Strategy's next move.
4. Apathy to set in/time-based capitulation.
We're in the "fog of war" right now, but we will have a full breakdown for readers next week.
If you'd like to sign up and get this type of analysis weekly + access to our portfolio and price targets (18 assets are currently in our "fair value" or "deep value" ranges, see the link below (one month free) 👇
There's a lot of confusion about the recently patched Zcash bug. Here's how to actually understand it.
If the bug had been exploited before the patch (very unlikely it was), it would have looked like the shielded pool getting drained. Whoever minted the counterfeit shielded ZEC would want to sell fast, before anyone else found the same bug. And remember, the market for ZEC is almost entirely transparent ZEC, not shielded. You can't dump freshly minted shielded ZEC on Binance or Coinbase without unshielding it first.
The losers in that scenario are shielded holders who sit still. The transparent portion of Zcash is fully visible, so it's trivial to enforce that transparent ZEC never exceeds max supply. If you try to unshield more than the cap, you'll get stopped at the door.
So if you hold transparent ZEC (anyone trading, on an exchange, or doing price discovery on ZEC) there's no marginal effect on you. The loss falls entirely on shielded holders.
The team's next step is a new turnstile and a fresh shielded pool in the coming upgrade, which will confirm the shielded pool was not inflated. Think of it as taking headcount at the end of the field trip--that will make sure no extra kids snuck onto the bus.
But while AI found this bug, AI will also deliver the fix for the whole category: formal verification. I'm very bullish on this as the path to harden all software across the industry. Formally verified cryptography can't have implementation bugs by construction.
Right now AI is surfacing vulnerabilities across all our software--browsers, OSes, and blockchains are no exception. We're in the awkward adolescence where every wart is getting magnified and put on full display. But formally verified software is the only path forward for mission-critical software, and Zcash has put it front and center on their roadmap to deliver.
Privacy is too important not to.
(Dragonfly holds $ZEC and continues to. I'm personally an investor in ZODL.)
This is by definition the most painful part of every cycle. If you’ve made it this far, do not capitulate. Prob more short term pain to come, but it’s the price we pay for the vertical green line on the other side. HODL
LATEST: More than half of all $BTC in circulation is now held at an unrealized loss, a signal that has coincided with every major bear market bottom in history.
Here is what this means for @fundstrat and $BMNR @BitMNR in simple words:
1. $BMNR sells shares for $100 a piece 3M shares (6X current market value) and raises $300M
2. @fundstrat promises to pay 9.5% dividend annually. So roughly $30M
3. Bitmine‘s annual staking rewards are roughly $300M.
Here is why it’s really smart and different than $BTC $MSTR $STRC
We spend only 10% cash of the annual stacking reward to buy $300M worth of $ETH now probably closer to the lows.
We don’t need to sell $ETH to cover the dividend because staking covers it 10X, we could potentially raise $3B and be staking rewards neutral forever and never be in the pressure to sell $ETH like @saylor did recently with Bitcoin.
As @fundstrat always said: no debt.
I think of a dividend 10% of the profits paid to investors (same like a normal dividend stock) but instead of just paying that to investors you get 10X more back in cash one time to built your business.
Smart move. Well a few more things…
This all will trade under the ticker symbol $BMNP at $100 with a FIXED dividend of $9.50.
Now the $100 isn’t fixed so it can go lower, but let’s say it drops to $50 ($BMNR no problem as they already collected the $300M) the buyer still gets an annual dividend of $9.50 on $50 which would be 19% dividend per year paid weekly to the investor. So the price will regulate itself.
This is a really smart way for $BMNR to raise more funds. I am curious if it will be fast sold out and we could raise even more money this way.
This all looks stupid now, I know, I was investing in $TSLA at $23 and it dropped to $11.
But this will look completely different when $ETH is back at $5,000 and then much higher.
The AI capex spend is so insane that Google is raising equity from Berkshire Hathaway through a private placement to fund spend on infrastructure
Berkshire is receiving $10B split across Class A and C shares at a roughly 6% discount to share price
Good math, but not all quite there:
First, SpaceX pays fairly average, but for more than a decade they have offered regular (~bi-annual) liquidity to employees. To live comfortably (especially to have a family) in LA County, most employees would have sold a little bit here and there, if not a lot (e.g., if they were the sole earner in a household).
Second, critically, because there is no double trigger (in order to facilitate the liquidity), most people default to "sell-to-cover" — i.e., ~40-50% of their holdings are immediately sold to cover the taxes on vest. Remember these vests are W-2 events. In order to not do this, the employee would need to come up with significant cash (because the taxes are paid against the price at vest, not the price at grant) — especially later on.
However, two things make SpaceX particularly awesome IMO:
1. They gave employees the option to choose stock or options along the way. Someone who took options and paid the taxes with cash would have done very well.
2. They gave stock to everyone. There are a bunch of highly skilled workers that we on X never think of, like Tube Benders, Orbital Tube Welders, Cleanroom Technicians, etc. that are going to make significant fortunes.
Maybe it's overly quixotic, but this last point is underrated part of @elonmusk attacking physical problems, not just software ones, with 100x thinking: a bunch of people in the types of jobs America needs and romanticizes (for good reason) will be rewarded with the kind of wealth that really would not be possible at any other company they would have chosen.
An incredibly positive story that, if you can't see it in that light, you should look inward.
Virgin Galactic stock is currently +165% over the past month because Redditors on WallStreetBets are confusing the ticker $SPCE with Space X ticker $SPCX
Thats how dumb the market is right now
@moseskagan I think this is one of the major upsides of having investors. It’s not just your capital, and while you can “justify” almost anything, feeling compelled to multiply capital for others is powerful.