Ledger’s own lab spent this year finding holes in Trezor and Tangem. Then Ledger got hit through its own reseller. 2026 so far: > Coldcard: Seed phrases came out guessable. ~$116m gone in august. > Trezor: Ledger’s lab got into the chip with a laser in june. Keys weren’t stored there so the money held. > Tangem: Same lab, july. A laser resets the card password. (both of these need $250k of gear & hours btw) > BitBox02: Two bad firmware flaws in august. Caught before anyone used them. > Ledger: CryptoBilis implants. Plus a customer data leak back in january. Trust in cold wallets dropped hard this year.

Quantum ready. People got drained this month by a chip taped to a battery. Whoever picked this week for a product launch, respect lol.

You can’t even buy a real rolex from just anywhere. But a cold wallet with your whole savings in it, you can get from some third party seller. Products like this should only be sold by the brand itself imo. Own store & website.

Picture buying a brand new car from an authorized dealer in europe. BMW, peugeot, doesn’t matter. And there’s a bomb mechanism sitting underneath. If it didn’t leave the factory that way, the violation is in the dealer network the brand built. And that hits trust in cars sold in europe generally, not just that brand. The Ledger case is exactly this. CryptoBilis was selling Trezor and OneKey too, so the risk stops being brand-specific. Hard to see trust in cold wallets getting rebuilt quickly after something like this.

What got marketed as "GameFi" was one of the biggest scams in crypto. 93% of 3,200+ web3 games now effectively dead. -96% funding rounds. 141 in 2024, 5 in H1 2026 -94% capital into the sector. $758.6m down to $44.8m -95% average token price from ATHs -90% token value in roughly four months, which is how long the average title lasts before daily users drop under 100 Games and the NFTs attached to them were exit liquidity for the teams for years. There was never a proper game in any of it, and if you think there was, none of those needed a blockchain underneath. That was just the marketing, and then they died.

I deposited into the USD.infra vault. I think @dawninternet does an airdrop eventually, and extension points alone probably won’t be the whole criteria. If Bytes ends up being a req (and I think this is highly likely) I’d rather already be in. 14M+ points on the extension over two years. That’s the only reason I’m willing to put money in at all. If your take is that you don’t put money into a project that went quiet for ages and came back with another points program, I think you’re right. I’m just taking a risk.

I’ve read a lot of campaign briefs over the years. Not one of them asked us to sell security Because nobody’s buying it. A project could put everything into being the safest venue out there and the only thing it pulls in is institutional interest. High spend, small audience So protocols sell what moves. Yield, points, airdrops, a TGE date Which tracks, because most of this market treats crypto as a place to gamble and leave fast. The volume is in memes and most of it knows exactly what it’s buying And it’s the one market with no undo. Nobody to call when it goes. You’d think that part would sell itself..

We’ve been telling people the same three things for years. buy direct, check the seal, run the genuine check. All three passed here. Karpeles opened his up and found a second board sitting under the screen, reading the seed as it came up on display. Box was sealed. Genuine check came back fine, because the actual security chip was still in there doing its job. $93M suspected so far per bitquery. And I don’t have a better answer to give anyone. Nobody is taking a spudger to their device before setup.

Pretty sure Vitalik never said this. Anyway, pumpfun did change things and it absolutely cranked the gambling part up by 100000%. But standing against something people want and enjoy gets silly at some point. It's like telling people coke is bad for you. Everyone already knows. They drink it anyway This is all hype though. NFTs were the same thing for a while. When you're in it you assume it runs forever. It doesn't. Things with no product behind them always end What actually matters is what you took out while it lasted. Being in the right place at the right time, and leaving at the right time. That's the whole game here

L2s got what they asked for and it killed them Blast is winding down because operating costs exceed revenue. - $755k in annualized fees against $23k in revenue. - $2b in deposits at peak, $32m now EIP-4844 landed in march 2024 and cut data posting costs 80-90%. That was supposed to be the unlock, cheaper for everyone Except the business was always the spread between what users pay you and what you pay ethereum. Make the floor cheap and the spread goes with it. You need volume to survive on thin margins and most of these chains never had volume, they had incentive programs. Wrote about L2 tokens having no real utility back in december. Now the chains are going too.

Two years into the extension points program, guess what @dawninternet just announced: Another points program 😵 It's called Bytes, and it's season 1.. - You mint USD.infra 1:1 with USDC - deposit it into the vault and start collecting again. Points accrue on your balance, what you do with it, and how early you got in. infinite farming loop.