Sam Fux

Following capital, not hype.
Crypto | Macro | Equities.
Breaking down narratives before they hit consensus — daily.

[Sam Fux @samfux0]

@ilar0x The bigger lesson is that high income doesn't guarantee financial control
Clear accountability, independent oversight, and automatic tax payments can prevent years of avoidable damage
The key is separating responsibility from blame without knowing all the facts

[Sam Fux @samfux0]

@Telronx The real lesson is negotiating for ownership, not just visibility
equity carries more risk than an endorsement fee, but when the business scales, the upside can be transformational.
Kobe helped build the value, not just promote the brand

[Sam Fux @samfux0]

@vglonix The key is to separate on-chain evidence from speculation
large transfers and Tornado Cash links warrant scrutiny, but they don’t prove a hack; official confirmation, wallet attribution, and the exchange’s response matter most

[Sam Fux @samfux0]

BINANCE WAS HACKED FOR $6.3 BILLION. TWO COMPANIES SWITCHED $2.3 BILLION OF IT OFF BEFORE MORNING. THE PART THAT CAME BACK TELLS YOU MORE THAN THE PART THAT DIDN'T

$2.3 billion of this was recovered by two companies pressing a button. That number tells you more about where crypto actually is in 2026 than the $6.3 billion does

Look at what the attacker held versus what survived.
Taken and unfreezable: ~$1.5B in BTC, ~$900M in ETH. Roughly $2.4 billion that no one on earth can claw back

Taken and switched off: ~$1.5B in USDT, ~$800M+ in USDC. Tether froze over $1.57B. Circle froze over $800M. Roughly $2.3 billion, neutralised in hours

The split is almost exact. Everything that embodied crypto’s founding promise is gone. Everything that embodied the thing crypto was built to replace was saved

That is the story. Not the headline number

And the uncomfortable half of it: a capability that can freeze $2.3 billion on a Thursday night exists permanently, and it does not check who it’s pointed at. Tonight it was used well - against a thief, at speed, probably recovering money for ordinary users. The switch doesn’t know that. It’s the same switch either way

If you hold stablecoins as your cash leg, you’ve accepted that. Most people holding them have never priced it

What actually failed here wasn’t crypto

Binance’s own account: a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop, access to a service container, unauthorised withdrawals submitted through legitimate rails. Explicitly no evidence of a private key leak

So the cryptography held. Perfectly. What broke was an endpoint and the permissions around it - a corporate IT failure that happened to have a $144 billion balance sheet attached

This is why proof of reserves was never going to help. PoR demonstrates that assets exist at a moment in time. It says nothing about who is authorised to move them. It is an accounting statement, not a security statement, and the industry has spent three years treating the two as interchangeable

The question that matters isn't "do the coins exist". It's "how many humans can move them, and what’s on their laptops"

The detail almost nobody will flag:

The attacker borrowed around 20,000 WETH, roughly $44 million, from Aave - posting stolen USDT as collateral

Read that again. They knowingly posted the freezable asset to obtain the unfreezable one. That looks less like opportunism and more like someone who understood the freeze was coming and was racing it

AAVE fell 11%, more than BTC, ETH or BNB. The market worked out what had happened faster than the commentary did

On scale, because panic is its own risk:

$6.3B is roughly 4% of the ~$144B Binance held beforehand. SAFU holds around $1B in BTC, with company funds behind it. Covering this looks feasible, and both Yi He and CZ have said it will be covered

Solvency and security are different questions. The first one probably has a fine answer. That is not a reason to be relaxed about the second - it's the reason the second gets ignored

What I'd take from this:

I wrote two days ago that Mt. Gox erased people who were completely right about Bitcoin and completely wrong about counterparty - right asset, wrong custodian, zero. I did not expect the point to be restated at this scale within the week

The custody question is not a footnote to the investment thesis. It is a second, separate thesis, and it carries its own risk that does not diversify away by being right about the asset

caveats, stated plainly: figures are live and still moving - binance says $6.3B, Chainalysis estimated ~$5.9B at the time of theft, earlier reporting said $5.7B. Part of the above comes from Binance’s own disclosure, and Binance is an interested party. Attribution to North Korean groups comes from TRM Labs and ZachXBT, not from Binance, and is not confirmed. Frozen does not yet mean recovered

So: if $2.3 billion can be switched off in a night, what else can be, and who decides? I don’t think the industry has an answer it would like saying out loud.
Not financial advice

Nothing here is a recommendation to move or hold funds anywhere.

[Binance @binance]

Binance's initial investigation suggests that the security incident may involve a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop, which allowed an attacker to gain access to a service container and submit unauthorized withdrawal transactions. We have found no evidence of any wallet private key leak. We will share a detailed technical post-mortem once the investigation is complete and the facts are fully verified.

The estimated total impact sits at around $6.3B. We have worked with blockchain partners to freeze affected assets, with ~$3 billion frozen on-chain so far.
Binance will cover all losses from the SAFU fund and the company’s funds. User funds are safe. We will also publish an updated Proof of Reserves once the remediation is complete.

As an immediate precaution, Binance has:

- temporarily suspended deposits and withdrawals while security checks are completed;
- revoked the affected address authorisation;
- engaged law enforcement and blockchain intelligence partners to trace and recover funds.

Our teams are working around the clock to resolve this issue safely and thoroughly. We are working closely with our law enforcement partners to confirm the identity of these criminals and bring them to justice.

Please rely only on official Binance channels for updates. Please feel free to contact Binance Customer Support if you have any further questions.

https://t.co/ywB2mKFy0p

[Sam Fux @samfux0]

@binance This highlights why exchange security must extend beyond private keys to endpoint security and transaction authorization
for investors, the key things to watch are independently verified losses, actual asset recoveries, and the updated Proof of Reserves

[Sam Fux @samfux0]

@0xlexlab Exactly. The real cost wasn’t the entry fee - it was surrendering decades of future upside
When the asset has asymmetric long-term potential, a cheap deal today can become an extraordinarily expensive decision in hindsight

[Sam Fux @samfux0]

MLS didn't lose a negotiation. They wrote a perpetual call option with a $25 million strike and collected zero premium for it

Strip the celebrity out and this is a clean derivatives story - and it's more useful read that way, because the structure shows up in deals you'll actually sign

Why nobody fought the clause in 2007

This is the part everyone gets backwards. Toronto had just paid under half of $25 million for its franchise. So on signing day, Beckham's strike was above the market price. The option was out of the money

He wasn't given a discount. On paper he'd agreed to overpay for a right he might never use. That's exactly why it sailed through - nobody argues about a strike that looks expensive today

Every catastrophic option grant in history looked free on the day it was written.

The actual value wasn't the price. It was the missing expiry date.

"Whenever he decided to use it"

That single phrase is the entire trade. A fixed strike with a deadline is a bet. A fixed strike with no deadline is a position you hold until the thesis proves itself - and only then do you pay.

He exercised around 2014–15, when the league was charging $150 million. He didn’t need to predict MLS would grow. He needed to not be forced to decide before it did.

I wrote yesterday that duration of capital is the hidden variable in every "genius call" story. This is the same variable in a different suit. The Winklevoss twins could wait because their capital had no redemption date

Beckham could wait because his option had no expiry. Both stories are one story: the party that can wait captures the value.

the genuinely unusual part

In a normal option, the holder has no influence over the underlying. Here, Beckham's participation was part of what made the league more valuable. He held a fixed-strike option on an asset he was personally helping to appreciate

There"s no clean textbook name for that. It's the structural reason this wasn't luck and wasn't charity

One correction worth making

The $1.35 billion is the club's valuation, not Beckham's personal proceeds. He's a co-owner alongside the Mas brothers, who put up the capital that actually built the franchise. The headline conflates enterprise value with one shareholder’s stake.

It doesn't weaken the story - a $25m strike against a $150m market price was already a 6x before a single match was played. But if you're going to cite a number, cite the one that's actually his.

And the case for MLS, which nobody makes

They got Beckham, legitimacy, and a decade of growth narrative. The $125 million of intrinsic value they handed over is small against what the league's collective valuation did in that window.

A deal can be correctly motivated and badly structured at the same time. MLS probably made the right trade. They just wrote the instrument badly - and those are separate failures.

Where you'll meet this structure yourself

Token warrants with fixed strikes and no expiry. SAFT allocations. Earnouts. Advisor equity. Anchor-investor side letters with fixed-price follow-on rights. Purchase options on land. Right of first refusal at a frozen number.

The pattern to recognise:

> Fixed price + no expiry + an asset you can influence is the best term in any document.
> It is never on the first page.
> The clause nobody argues about is the clause that's mispriced. If a term sails through without friction, that’s information, not relief

So neither answer in the original question. He didn"t out-negotiate anyone and he wasn't paid fairly after the fact. He was handed an unpriced perpetual option in 2007 because it looked expensive at the time, and he had the one thing almost nobody has: no obligation to decide
Which term in your own deals is the $25 million clause - the one that went through with no resistance? Mine is almost always the expiry date, or the absence of one. Tell me where you've seen it

[DimiX @0xdimix]

In 2007, everyone laughed at Beckham for burying his career to chase American parties for $6.5 million a year. They just missed one line in the contract that made him over $1.3 billion.

“When I signed my contract, my manager Simon Fuller actually got a clause in the contract that enabled me to have a franchise at the end of my playing career.”

That’s Beckham himself, explaining it years later. The clause gave him the right to buy a future MLS expansion team for a fixed $25 million, whenever he decided to use it, more than double what Toronto had paid for its own franchise that same year but still a rounding error compared to what was coming.

By the time Beckham pushed his Miami bid through in 2014 and 2015, MLS was charging new investor groups $150 million to join the league. Other owners openly complained that Beckham’s partners were getting a franchise at a sixth of the going rate, riding a clause signed nearly a decade earlier.

Inter Miami kicked off in 2020 and struggled near the bottom of the table for years, even drawing a league-record fine for breaking roster rules. Then Lionel Messi signed in 2023, and the valuation curve went vertical. By 2026, Forbes had the club priced at $1.35 billion, the most valuable franchise in MLS history.

A $25 million number frozen into a contract in 2007 was now worth over 50 times what everyone else in the league had to pay just to get in.

Did Beckham out-negotiate an entire league before anyone understood what the clause was worth, or did MLS just finally pay him fairly for turning it into a billion-dollar business?

[Sam Fux @samfux0]

@wadeledger I'd focus on the deal structure as much as the valuation

Founders need to understand how investor rights affect exit decisions before taking capital - control can be worth more than a higher headline price

[Sam Fux @samfux0]

@Syntzxbt I’d ban myself immediately
chasing losses turns a bad session into a potentially catastrophic one - discipline means knowing when to walk away, not trying to win it all back

[Sam Fux @samfux0]

@fomoliver The key was finding a structural edge, not predicting random outcomes
for investors, the same principle applies, look for favorable odds, control downside, and never confuse a repeatable advantage with a lucky streak

[Sam Fux @samfux0]

@Bitwise The range is striking, but the assumptions matter more than the headline targets

for a 10-year forecast, adoption, regulation, liquidity, and Bitcoin’s role in institutional portfolios will determine whether the base case is realistic

[Sam Fux @samfux0]

@Dunkan_1 Well put. Permanent capital buys time, not immunity from bad decisions
the real edge is combining staying power with thesis discipline and knowing when the evidence says you’re wrong

[Sam Fux @samfux0]

The question offers two answers. There's a third, and it's the only one you can actually copy

They weren't prophets and they weren't lucky. They were structurally unkillable - and that’s a thing you can build on purpose

Three parts to it, none of which involve predicting anything:

1. Both bets were made with money they didn't need.
The lawyers who said "take the $65 million in cash" were giving correct advice - to someone who needed the money. The twins weren't that person. Same advice, different balance sheet, opposite right answer.

The Bitcoin position was a low single-digit percentage of their Facebook stake, at most. That reads as conviction. The math reads as position sizing. A bet that can go to zero without changing your life isn"t courage - it's an allocation, and allocations are repeatable.

2. The hard part wasn't buying. It was the 14 months after

Nobody talks about this stretch. Mt. Gox collapsed in February 2014. Bitcoin went from roughly $1,150 in December 2013 to around $180 by January 2015 - about an 85% drawdown

Run their 120,000 coins through it: roughly $138M at the peak, roughly $22M at the bottom. They watched about $116 million evaporate and did not sell

Buying is one decision. Holding through that is the same decision re-made every morning for over a year, while every person you know tells you it’s over. That’s the actual achievement, and it’s the part the highlight reel skips

3. They treated custody as a separate bet from the asset.

This is the genuinely transferable insight. Mt. Gox erased people who were completely right about Bitcoin and completely wrong about counterparty. Right asset, wrong custodian, zero

The twins built their own cold storage and then built Gemini. They understood that owning the thesis and surviving the thesis are two different problems requiring two different solutions

The uncomfortable part:

They filed for a Bitcoin ETF in July 2013. The SEC rejected it in 2017. Spot ETFs arrived in January 2024 - more than a decade after the filing. Their $400B call on CNBC took the better part of a decade to come true
Being right ten years early is operationally identical to being wrong, unless your capital can wait that long. Theirs could. No LPs, no redemptions, no margin, no quarterly reporting, no risk committee.

A fund manager with the identical thesis and identical conviction gets fired in 2015. Not because he was wrong - because his capital had a duration and the trade didn’t

Duration of capital is the hidden variable in every "genius call" story, and it’s the one nobody puts in the thread

And the honest caveat: thousands of people made concentrated early bets with the same conviction and are anonymous today. Losers don’t get CNBC segments. What separates process from lottery ticket isn’t the call - it's windfall capital, small sizing, permanent duration, and custody discipline. Those four are repeatable. The call isn’t

Why this matters right now:

The current AI buildout is financed as the exact structural opposite. Leverage instead of windfall. Five-year loans against three-year contracts. Capital with covenants and redemption dates

The thesis might be just as correct as Bitcoin in 2012. It doesn't matter. Nobody in that trade has the duration to be early and survive it

So my answer: not luck, not prophecy. Structure.

Where do you land - is permanent capital the real edge here, or am I underweighting the simple fact that they were right? I think it’s structure, and I think that’s the less flattering answer, which is usually a sign it’s the true one

Drawdown figures are my arithmetic from the post’s own numbers and public price history - check them before quoting. Not financial advice

[onetouch @1onetouch1]

In 2008 the Winklevoss twins lost Facebook to Mark Zuckerberg and took $65 million to go away. In 2012 they put it into Bitcoin, buying about 1% of every coin in existence at under $10 each.

In the video below, 2013, they say Bitcoin should be worth a hundred times more than it is — and the host tells them Fed presidents are writing the whole thing off.

Their own lawyers told them to take the $65 million in cash.

They took Facebook stock instead.

"The lawyers thought we were crazy."

By Facebook's IPO in 2012 that stock was worth around $300 million.

Then they did it again.

In late 2012 they started buying Bitcoin, when a coin cost less than ten dollars. Over a few months they bought about 1% of every Bitcoin then in existence. Roughly 120,000 coins.

By April 2013 it was worth about $11 million.

For years they were the punchline. The guys who lost Facebook. The twins from the movie.

"We've turned that laughter and ridicule into oxygen and wind at our back."

On television in 2013 they said the bull case for Bitcoin was a market cap of $400 billion. At the time it was $4 billion.

Today it is about $1.3 trillion.

Did they see something nobody else did, or did they just get lucky twice?

[Sam Fux @samfux0]

@0x_Renjii Exactly. Having permanent capital lets you survive volatility without being forced to sell too early
being right matters, but having the time to prove it is what separates great investments from missed opportunities

[Sam Fux @samfux0]

@huginalpha That’s the compounding effect of a good decision: the Facebook stock preserved upside that cash couldn’t

sometimes the biggest investment advantage is having the conviction and patience to let an asset grow

[Sam Fux @samfux0]

@0xJeyx Exactly. The key is to look beyond headline leverage and track off-balance-sheet commitments,
lease obligations, and refinancing risk as AI infrastructure spending accelerates

[Sam Fux @samfux0]

The 3.5% debt figure is correct. It’s also measuring an entity that isn’t carrying the risk.

Raoul is right about the hyperscalers. They are the best cash-generating businesses ever built and they are barely levered.
Both true. Neither tells you where the leverage went.

It didn’t stay at the parent. It was pushed one layer down - into the neoclouds, the SPVs and the project financings. Those structures exist precisely so the capex doesn’t sit on a hyperscaler balance sheet.

Here’s what that layer is pricing right now:

- CoreWeave’s five-year CDS crossed 1,000bp - the level credit desks treat as distress. Its 2031 bonds yielded 15.78%. The stock fell 15.5% in a single session on Oct 14
- Oracle’s five-year CDS widened ~10% in a week to 282bp
- Volta is raising $5B for a Norwegian data centre at 11%+, arranged by JPMorgan and Goldman, anchored by Apollo. The coupon steps down if Anthropic earns an investment-grade rating - because Anthropic is the expected tenant. The lender is underwriting the borrower’s customer
- S&P’s head of digital infrastructure said in October there is likely more AI-linked debt than the agency can see - largely hyperscaler guarantees that are neither reported nor rated
that last one is the whole disagreement. A guarantee is leverage that never appears in a debt-to-market-cap ratio. If the obligation is real and unreported, 3.5% isn’t bad arithmetic - it’s the wrong perimeter
And the covenant nobody quotes: CoreWeave’s $2.6B facility prices at SOFR+5.5%, with customer payments redirected to a lender-controlled account if projected contract value falls below 2.4x the loan for three consecutive months. The contracts average three years. The loan runs five
that gap is the trade. It is not at Microsoft

On the railroads - that comparison is mine, not his.

The rails did get built. The cycle did run 35 years. And inside that window railroad finance detonated twice: Jay Cooke’s failure on Northern Pacific paper triggered the Panic of 1873, and the Reading’s collapse helped trigger 1893. By 1894 roughly a quarter of US rail mileage sat in receivership.

The track stayed. America used it for a century. The bondholders did not get paid.

“The buildout continues” and “creditors get wiped” have never been mutually exclusive - they are the historical base case for infrastructure supercycles. The analogy is correct, and it argues for credit caution, not against it.

The practical read hasn’t changed:

This is a credit story before it’s an equity story. Exposure is concentrated in the levered second tier, not spread evenly across the index. Shorting the index here pays a premium for a risk that isn’t uniformly distributed - and Raoul is right that the cash-flow engine at the top can run far longer than bears expect.

Watch the guarantee disclosure, not the balance-sheet ratio. Watch neocloud spreads, not the Nasdaq.

I published five signals to track three days ago. Two of them - second-tier spreads and circular vendor financing - moved from theory to observable inside a week.

So: where do you think the guarantees sit, and would you be able to see them break before the tape did? That’s the part I can’t resolve, and it’s the part that decides this.

Not financial advice

[Raoul Pal @RaoulGMI]

The hyperscalers are the biggest cash-generating businesses the world has ever seen. And they’re recycling all of that cash flow into the biggest capex build in history.

It’s a self-reinforcing loop. They use the technology they’re building themselves, productivity rises, cash flows rise, capex accelerates. People worry about the borrowing, but these companies carry roughly 3.5% of their market cap in debt. They’re barely in debt at all.

This is already the second largest capex event in history. The only bigger one was the railroads... and that cycle ran for 35 years.

If intelligence keeps rising, capex keeps rising with it. There is no end to the need for data centers, compute and energy.

[Sam Fux @samfux0]

@0x_Renjii The real risk is whether SPVs isolate the debt or just make the leverage less visible
CDS spreads can signal rising credit concerns before they show up in headline numbers, especially when AI infrastructure requires heavy borrowing

[Sam Fux @samfux0]

@0ddscent Exactly. Many people forget that investing is about having a system, not just plain luck

[Sam Fux @samfux0]

@Veltrixmoon Neville showed that loyalty to a club doesn’t have to mean loyalty to its owners

The Super League backlash proved that even the biggest clubs can’t ignore their supporters when sporting merit is at stake

[Sam Fux @samfux0]

@kaiwestro Turning it down was both brave and a smart long-term decision
She chose control over her own story, and the success of her book shows that honesty can create far more lasting value than a one-time payout

[Sam Fux @samfux0]

@rendeeex A delayed apology can’t undo the damage, but it can still matter
the bigger lesson is that accountability often comes only after the consequences become impossible to ignore