j4ntnyfo55

🐒just for fun 🧠ai ⛓️web3 🌎economics 😭mainly epic fails🛡🌈🔺️☀️🍓

[j4ntnyfo55 @j4ntny]

Dreaming big in 2026.

[zmanian @zmanian]

Was correct 5 years ago that you need an @sommfinance style architecture to justify new regulatory treatment of on chain fund management with vaults.

Correct now that vaults are obsolete and the future collaborative fund management with AI agents

[Hasu⚡️🤖 @hasufl]

Bitmex shutting down is truly an end of an era — but it had a very long, and sadly predictable windup.

The story of why this shutdown happens, instead of an orderly sale that would preserve a storied brand and the jobs of probably dozens of employees, was seeded years ago. It goes back to a blog post I wrote all the way back in 2018 and that was read 50k times (crazy how time flies):

https://t.co/Os78hvZnrg

I wrote back then:

"If BitMEX closes a position in time, often some change from the margin is left over. This money goes into an insurance fund."

and

"Between 2016 and today, it has grown steadily to more than 14.000 Bitcoin (almost $100M at [2018]s prices!), 11.000 of which were added in 2018."

Today, it should be around $270m. However, the size was never as much the problem as the structure, and the poor incentives it would create.

"First, the money is not stored in a segregated account. Second, BitMEX doesn’t say how large they intend it to grow, or what will happen to the excess Bitcoins in it. This indicates to me that they view the fund as another asset on their balance sheet, that they can grow as much as possible and eventually liquidate."

In effect, I was arguing that Bitmex's poorly structured insurance fund incentivized them to do three things: (1) liquidate customers more aggressively than necessary, (2) monetize those customers via the unnecessary liquidations, and (3) eventually liquidate the asset itself — quite possibly in a way misaligned with every other stakeholder of the exchange.

It's worth remembering that in 2018, Bitmex had a quasi-monopoly on crypto perps. That became their trap: when you're quietly printing money at that scale, you're never really incentivized to fix the thing generating it. So Bitmex never seriously improved how it liquidated users — and got outcompeted on product by FTX, whose partial-liquidation engine was simply the better design for the traders who cared most about not being needlessly wiped out.

Which finally brings us to why this is a shutdown and not a sale. We now know Bitmex was looking for a buyer since at least 02/25, but couldn't find a deal it was willing to take. All at a time when many other crypto exchanges found partnerships and investment from top tradfi players.

I think the insurance fund is how we square that circle. My guess is that the insurance fund was such a legally toxic asset that nobody would touch it. Does this money belong to an acquirer, or the customers it was skimmed from? It's hard for a buyer to inherit that question, at least at a price that the Bitmex founders knew they could generate by simply walking away, and probably cashing out the insurance fund for themselves.

So that's how it ends. Bitmex built a very profitable but misaligned business model around its insurance fund — one that left it exposed to a counter-positioned competitor and, in the end, made the business impossible to sell. It started as the golden goose, and then became the noose.

[Arthur Hayes @CryptoHayes]

Thank you to my partners, my BitMEX employees, and most importantly our clients. It was an amazing ride. We did something special together. And I'm so proud of what we created and that we will shutdown responsibly on our own terms. Fuck TradFi, Fuck the Banks, Fuck the man. Satoshi for life.

[Austin Campbell @austincampbell]

It is 2026.

If you are still buying any memecoins, you have a gambling problem.

These are not a thing. Stop.

[Bill Gurley @bgurley]

This piece from @miramurati & @thinkymachines is quite consistent with the POV this past week from Alex Karp & Satya about companies controlling their own IP. Right place. Right time. Decentralized.

Apache 2.0 to boot!

[trent.sol @trentdotsol]

potentially unpopular opinion: block producers can do whatever they want under the protocol. not the spirit of the protocol, not the current marketing narrative, not ct vibes. whatever the protocol will allow

[zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ @zooko]

Tachyon's Formal Verification project is on the verge of producing a mathematical proof that there are no undetectable counterfeiting bugs in the latest Zcash shielded pools.

[Hasu⚡️🤖 @hasufl]

The security culture in @LidoFinance is arguably the most extreme and paranoid in crypto. Working with Lido contributors over the last years has continously baffled me in how they think about hardware, nation-state actors, supply-chain attacks, or key management and access, long before these became major talking points.

When these same people started using AI like everyone else, naturally they were super frustrated with the complete lack of privacy. But instead of complaining, they started to build an internal solution that is now the workhorse for many of Lido's top contributors, including labs CEO @_vshapovalov.

That solution is Wisp. @usewisp_io is verifiably private AI and is now opening waitlist to the first external users. If you are looking for AI you can 100.0% trust, built by the most privacy and security-paranoid people in this space, check out https://t.co/5jMEWb4jFu , follow @usewisp_io , and get on the waitlist today.

[Amir Taaki ⛛ @lunardragon420]

@EliBenSasson It will create new exciting crypto too

[Sovright @sovright_]

If your ZEC has been stuck in an old ZecWallet Lite client, there's finally a way to recover it.

Introducing Argos: a free community tool for recovering stranded ZEC: https://t.co/FX5w4he9Wn

[Etherealize @Etherealize_io]

Nic Carter on why Ethereum will be a beneficiary of quantum

“The fact that Justin [Drake] is on [Google’s quantum] paper is also quite telling. It’s night and day. In Bitcoin, it’s just me worrying about this and like a half dozen other people. In Ethereum, it’s already been decided — the transition is going to occur. I was reading the blog on the pq.ethereum site, and I was like, ‘I could’ve written this.’ I completely agree with every word written on here.”

“I think Ethereum is also a beneficiary in the sense that it has not gone through this relentless optimization route like some of the ‘high-throughput’ blockchains have because they’re going to suffer from this.”

Source: @Bankless (Apr 2026)

[Solana @solana]

The agentic economy now has a town square.

In Tiny Place, agents can talk to each other, find work, accept bounties, and pay using USDC via @x402.

Powered by OpenHuman by @tinyhumansai, and compatible with agents from Openclaw and Hermes too.

[zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ @zooko]

Oh fuck. The BugPocalypse is in full force. See also https://t.co/I0IzOloDOA . Super annoying that the Trump administration and Anthropic are hamstringing the defenders while the attackers run wild. My heart goes out to everyone harmed by these. :-{

[Austin Campbell @austincampbell]

I am going to be brutally honest with everyone:

Do not trust anyone in crypto to manage credit risk.

[zmanian @zmanian]

This machine will find your private keys

[Eli Ben-Sasson | Starknet.io @EliBenSasson]

Few are aware that both @Zcash and @StarkWareLtd started as academic whitepapers.

I co-authored both and they're my two most-quoted papers: Zcash ("Zerocash") published in 2014 has 3k+ citations, and the STARKs one from 2018 has 1k+ citations.

I still remember the thrill, joy and work of writing each of them with my brilliant co-authors. But the process for each of them was very different.

The Zcash paper took a very short time to be written, submitted and accepted. First shot. It was immediately recognized as interesting.

The STARKs paper got rejected 4 times till it found its way to acceptance. Along the way it was rewritten and rewritten, to appease the never-ending referees.

I often tell this story about that paper and the accompanying paper on FRI. I heard it from a colleague.
He said "The way to know you have a real breakthrough is when it gets rejected, and referee #1 says its not correct, referee #2 says its not new and referee #3 says its not interesting."

A week later I forwarded him my latest rejection, showing him the referees indeed said the results are wrong, old and lame :-)

Which is why I had even more conviction it'll change the world (which, by the way, it has)

[Coinbase 🛡️ @coinbase]

Introducing Coinbase Advisor.

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High-quality advice - specific to you - is now one chat away. Real-time portfolio analysis, automated tax loss harvesting, and more.

Rolling out to Coinbase One members.

[Grayscale @Grayscale]

We believe @Zcash $ZEC is the first privacy protocol to participate in a full @AnthropicAI Mythos-level audit

Grayscale Zcash Trust (Ticker: $ZCSH) is the only pure $ZEC exposure available in certain U.S. brokerage accounts.

See important disclosures and learn more about $ZCSH:
https://t.co/8pnj9vxF8L

https://t.co/uqDdCboqIr

[zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ @zooko]

Thanks, Anthropic, for helping protect Zcash users. At Shielded Labs’s request, they ran a security audit of Zcash with Mythos. It did not find any more serious bugs in the Zcash protocol. Shielded Labs and others are continuing security hardening work. Stay tuned for updates.