space ape 🌿

[Lyn Alden @LynAldenContact]

@unusual_whales It’s so effective that they have to do it again every year.

[Watcher.Guru @WatcherGuru]

JUST IN: Jim Cramer says the market is preparing to "give up some gains."

[Cobie @cobie]

@mert He’s just tradfi Adam Cochran

[space ape 🌿 @sirspaceape]

he’s like a clumsy angel

[Jim Cramer @jimcramer]

Not enough time to rally... too much fear that Monday will open lower

[space ape 🌿 @sirspaceape]

@TheBlock__ @loopify Thank you 🙏

[space ape 🌿 @sirspaceape]

ethereum lost its regulatory moat, anything is possible now

[space ape 🌿 @sirspaceape]

@jackmallers 🤣🤣🤣

[space ape 🌿 @sirspaceape]

@DeansEpoch It’s ok Dean, 4 more family members to go

[space ape 🌿 @sirspaceape]

@HuntingStops 4 more family members then up only ☠️

[Root 🥕 @therationalroot]

Market Cap Growth per Presidential Term. #Bitcoin

[Erik Voorhees @ErikVoorhees]

Don't fret, brother.

Crypto is, and has always been, 99% nonsense grifty garbage/scams/jokes, and 1% fundamental global financial system revolution.

But this 99/1 is based just on quantity of projects.

Considered by market cap, it's more like 75% quality, 25% nonsense. Bitcoin is good. Ethereum is good. Stablecoins are good. Several dozen defi projects are good. Wildly cool technology permeates through all of it, and sound economics underpins its long term growth, though the short term feels often like an appallingly irrational market.

How to cope with this dichotomy?

Embrace the degen frontier and have fun, and recognize that amidst it all, a decentralized financial system is real, is important, and is working. None of it is forced on anyone, after all.

We are building and we are attracting the world toward us... and much of the world simply wants to gamble and have fun. This is okay, and actually provides capital for the important work happening behind the casino.

It is, actually, working.

We are realizing the wildest dreams of those who are into it for all the right reasons, despite the accompanying fantasies of those who aren't.

Just keep building, and build well.

[space ape 🌿 @sirspaceape]

@GaryGensler @SECGov 🤣🤣🤣🤣 leave already, 2 more hours

[Dave @invalid_eutxo]

@cardano_whale @bobasfk Bro had SBF meeting with GG every Wednesday and still couldn’t win.

Game over

[space ape 🌿 @sirspaceape]

@cardano_whale Surprisingly strong 🤣

that’s actually a bullish backhanded compliment

[Peter Schiff @PeterSchiff]

@Rhythmtrader Keep dreaming. Bitcoin is never going to hit $100,000!

[space ape 🌿 @sirspaceape]

@cardano_whale 🤝

[space ape 🌿 @sirspaceape]

@GooseOfCrypto

[David Marcus @davidmarcus]

How Libra Was Killed.

I never shared this publicly before, but since @pmarca opened the floodgates on @joerogan’s pod, it feels appropriate to shed more light on this.

As a reminder, Libra (then Diem) was an advanced, high-performance, payments-centric blockchain paired with a stablecoin that we built with my team at @Meta. It would’ve solved global payments at scale. Prior to announcing the project, we spent months briefing key regulators in DC and abroad. We then announced the project in June 2019 alongside 28 companies. Two weeks later, I was called to testify in front of both the Senate Banking Committee and the House Financial Services Committee, which was the starting point of two years of nonstop work and changes to appease lawmakers and regulators.

By spring of 2021 (yes they slow played us at every step), we had addressed every last possible regulatory concern across financial crime, money laundering, consumer protection, reserve management, buffers, and so much more, and we were ready to launch.

We had worked on a slow rollout of a limited pilot that some members of the Fed’s Board of Governors were supportive of. At last, Chair Jay Powell was ready to let us move forward in a limited way. The story, as I heard it, is that Jay Powell was told by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen at one of their biweekly meetings that allowing this project to move forward was “political suicide,” and she would not have his back if he let it happen. I wasn’t in the room when this conversation happened, so take these words with a grain of salt, but effectively this was the moment Libra was killed.

Shortly thereafter, the Fed organized calls with all the participating banks, and the Fed’s general counsel read a prepared statement to each of them, saying: “We can’t stop you from moving forward and launching, but we are not comfortable with you doing so.” And just like that, it was over.

One essential point is worth making here. There was no legal or regulatory angle left for the government or regulators to kill the project. It was 100% a political kill—one that was executed through intimidation of captive banking institutions. That was the hardest part of this story for me personally. Not that we had failed, but that America, this country I immigrated to and became a proud citizen of because of its rule of law and value system, behaved in such a way for political reasons. It was a very tough pill to swallow.

The bright side of the story, though, was the many learnings from this wild ride. By the end of the project, we had made so many concessions to get a thumbs-up that the whole design of the network became a Frankenstein of our initial ambitions.

We also learned the biggest lesson of all, which is that if you’re trying to build an open money grid for the world—eventually moving trillions of dollars a day, designed to be here 100 years from now—you have to build it on the most neutral, decentralized, unassailable network and asset, which, hands down, is Bitcoin.

And now this is what many of us who went through this scarring journey are building together at @Lightspark. And this time, we won’t stop until we get it done!