Wall St/TradFi Refuge. Crypto Realist. Maxi ideology rarely survives contact with economic pragmatism but blockchain can change finance.
Joined April 2023
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Tether, Thorchain and Tron. The Three Ts - every bad actors favorite trio.
🚨UPDATE: Tether temporarily FREEZES $1.45 MILLION in USDT across four THORChain vaults on TRON, forcing the protocol to suspend affected swaps, per The Defiant.
Tether reversed the blacklist after just THREE HOURS, restoring access to the funds and allowing services to resume.
THORChain says it received NO prior warning. Another 19 addresses remain BLACKLISTED. Tether has not explained the freeze.
OneKey just launched a new crypto hardware wallet called the Pro 2.
One feature they may not have thought through....a finger print power button to unlock the wallet and grant access.
Any bad actors planning wrench attacks on crypto owners will certainly hope they use the new OneKey Pro 2. No need to torture anybody, just use their finger (and they can leave it attached) to unlock the wallet.
Convenient, but for who?
Meet OneKey Pro 2.
The iPhone moment for hardware wallets.
Crypto security, finally simple, quantum-ready.
Available now: onekey.so/products/onekey-pr…
🍿🍿
$OUSD is live.
Build with OUSD via @Coinbase @Mastercard @Stripe and @Visa. Each integration path supports 1:1 USD conversion at no cost.
Read the announcement: joinopenstandard.com/blog/ou….
Here's the Senate report on Tether. Summary findings:
- Tether has become a primary illicit payment system for Iran
- Tether serves as a central payment mechanism that interlinks Iran and its terrorist proxy organizations...
- Tether's repeated failure to freeze illicit wallets and prevent abuse created the permissive environment under which Iranian shadow banking has flourished.
When I last checked, Trump is no fan of Iran........
hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/…
Howie Lutnick has run interference for Tether in DC.
But now the Trump administration wants to apply maximum economic pressure on the Iranians.
And how do the Iranians evade USD sanctions? Tether (see WSJ story below).
And squeezing the Iranians is a bipartisan issue. So nobody in DC will want to protect Tether other than Howie Lutnick.
But Trump will be much less interested in protecting Howie's/Cantor's stake in Tether that squeezing the Iranians as hard as he can and find an exit from this war.
🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿
wsj.com/finance/currencies/s…
Tom Wolfe famously said “a conservative is a liberal who got mugged.”
In crypto, it’s amusing that so many decentralized maxis become full supporters of centralization when it’s their money gets stolen by the DPRK.
Ideology never survives first contact with economic reality
We are devasted to hear about the recent exploit and can imagine how difficult this must be for everyone involved.
THORChain is decentralized and permissionless like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and BNB Chain.
What responsibility should Bitcoin, Ethereum, and BNB Chain bear when handling known stolen funds?
@star_okx @GracyBitget
Say it ain't so Paolo.....(although nobody should be surprised)
"But a U.S. government seizure of bank accounts held in the name of an obscure company based in Sacramento, Calif., in recent weeks shows how Tether still relies on a web of sometimes unstable intermediaries to facilitate transactions, thanks to challenges it has faced opening accounts directly at major U.S. banks. And that has exposed Tether to problems at those intermediaries."
theinformation.com/articles/…
So far, OpenAi and Anthropic agents seem busy going after relatively benign (but not unimportant) targets like Hugging Face, a DSEWiki, the Aussie health care system and a number of unnamed targets.
But why not NORAD? ATC? Maybe a nuclear power station or a power grid?
Dumb luck, perhaps.......
Breaking news: Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has revealed that an OpenAI agent hacked an Australian government health service website in June, in the latest high-profile cyber incident involving AI ft.trib.al/gloVAyn
I never understand why Tether has to keep spinning such bull shit. Tether didn't apply for a MiCA license because he could never get one. The more interesting question is why does it matter so much to Paolo?
The "ooh, we're taking so much risk with those pesky bank deposits" is vacuous spin.
In the first six months of '26, Tether lost $3.1Bn on its major risk positions (BTC, Au and Public Equities) and there's no backstop to those.
Total US bank deposit lossses YTD? ZERO.
If Tether really cared about risk and specifically bank deposit risk, they'd only hold money markets and TBills......
What they actually held was $47Bn of risk positions like bonds, BTC, gold, loans etc. - none of which have any backstop
LATEST: @Tether CEO @PaoloArdoino says the company refused to apply for a MiCA license because of the rule requiring 60% of reserves in bank deposits, the same rule the ECB is now proposing to scrap citing bank stability risks.
Novacula Occami retweeted
The dead cat continues to bounce.
What is Bitcoin, 17 years later?
It’s not great for transactions or smart contracts; the user experience is still intimidating for most, and it’s no longer capturing the public’s imagination.
If it comes up at the dinner party, it's followed by a hearty “remember that!”
It’s a boring store of value, trusted as that—which is its biggest value.
It's boring.
Folks expect bitcoin to be stable and that it’s no longer a way to get rich quick.
Institutions embracing and accumulating it took $btc from punk rock to Muzak.
Advocates went from pirates to suits in orange ties, awkwardly sharing cringe memes — just like the cool kids do!
If Bitcoin were going to reach mass adoption and an important use case, it does better than anyone else, it would have by now.
Bitcoin feels like the CD in the age of Spotify, the DVD in the age of Netflix — a bridge technology that folks who invested in “their collection” keep saying is the better experience.
Perhaps bitcoin is vinyl, cool memories and fun to drag out and put on display, but a technology that served us to get to where we are now.
Crypto is so predictable. Circle launches Arc mainnet, but the Arc token is not yet publicly tradeable as Circle has stated.
But of course there's a shitty little token called Arc with a $1.8M market cap that rallied 66% on a 1,600% increase in volume today.
Hasn't seemed to have fully corrected yet....
Predictably stupid.
This is the interesting difference between Tether and Circle. Recently Tether has earned plaudits from many in crypto for freezing USDT purportedly stolen in exploits
Circle has often been criticized for being slow, but their stance has always been they'll respond only to legal orders/warrants.
As much as Tether is often the favorite of the crypto bros, just freezing USDT in the absence of a legal order opens them up to litigation risk, and gives them a lot of arbitrary power that's not very cypherpunk.
Circle's mainstream approach to freezing can be slow, but it insulates them from this sort of risk that Tether faces.
I suspect this won't be the last of this "debate" that we'll see.
Tether has just been sued over a $42.4 million USDT freeze by Two Thai businessmen in the SDNY.
Nutthawat Rukthammachalern and Natthawat Kasamvilas say Tether blacklisted their wallets on October 30, 2025 (42,417,785.62 USDT) after an informal request from an HSI agent.
No warrant. No court order. No notice to them.
A seizure warrant came later, in February 2026, out of the Eastern District of North Carolina. They say that warrant still doesn’t give Tether the right to freeze, burn, or reissue their tokens.
The pitch of the complaint: Tether can freeze or destroy USDT anywhere with a smart-contract function, doesn’t advertise that power, isn’t a custodian of these tokens (they were bought on the secondary market), and keeps earning yield on the Treasuries backing the frozen coins while the owners can’t move a dollar.
Here’s the main claims:
- Declaratory judgment that the freeze/burn isn’t authorized
- Conversion
- Trespass to chattels
- Unjust enrichment (the reserve yield)
- Injunction to un-blacklist the wallets and block any burn
They want the freeze lifted, damages if the tokens are destroyed, disgorgement of the interest Tether earned during the freeze, and punitive damages.
Again this is a complaint, not a ruling.
The live fight is whether a stablecoin issuer can lock $42 million on an informal government ask and keep the carry while the owners sit in court.
Arthur Hayes nails @Strategy’s fundamental weakness perfectly.
Ever since its equity mNAV broke below 1x last year it’s been an under-performer that has loaded up on dividend obligations and financed them by diluting the common holder.
Their playbook is inane AI videos from @saylor and lots of stupid new BTC metrics.
If you love BTC. Own it. If you want a cult that favors bull shit over performance, buy @Strategy
Arthur Hayes says MicroStrategy is irrelevant now, just buy $IBIT or another bitcoin:native ETF
"MicroStrategy was relevant for a hot second, whenever it was freaked out that Bitcoin might go to like 20,000 or whatever. But if we're in this period of money printing and soft yield curve control, MicroStrategy is irrelevant. What he does doesn't matter"
"At the end of the day, if I'm an investor getting back into Bitcoin and I have to invest through a stock market, just buy IBIT or one of these other Bitcoin ETFs. Don't buy MicroStrategy, it makes absolutely no sense"
"If you want to gamble, cool, that's a thing. But the institutional bid for crypto exposure through a stock market will not go through MicroStrategy"
"And if that stock does not trade at a premium to mNAV, the whole thing breaks down. Then what's the point?"
True operating companies focus on execution and performance of their business. They do not lobby publicly for index inclusion (or lobby against index exclusion)
If @MicroStrategy 's model is dependent on MSCI indexes, then it doesn't have a business model.
No amount of @saylor AI posts can solve the fact that MSTR isn’t a true operating business.
Unfortunately some bad news.
MSCI appear intent on removing $MSTR from their indexes.
Strategy is specifically named in their own consultation document.
The August consultation proposes screening out non-operating companies from the Global Investable Market Indexes.
First a core screen on operating assets, then five financial ratios where failing four out of five means ineligible.
The five, at the softer thresholds applied to existing constituents:
1) Operating asset intensity below 10% of total assets.
2) Operating expenses below 5% of total assets.
3) Operating cash flow below zero.
4) Non-operating fair value changes above 5% of total assets.
5) Financing cash flow above 30% of total assets, combined with filings showing capital raised for asset accumulation.
MSCI ran the simulation as of May 2026.
Three deletions from ACWI IMI:
-Strategy, USA
-Yellow Cake, UK
-Metaplanet, Japan
Constituents are only deleted after failing two consecutive annual filings. Strategy is in the deletion column, which means MSCI have already concluded they fail on both.
Timeline:
-Feedback closes 30 September.
-Results by 16 October.
-Implementation at the November 2026 Index Review.
The difficult part is that the ATM model itself triggers the capital dependence flag. Raising equity to accumulate Bitcoin is the strategy and that is what the screen is designed to catch.
Buybacks, USD reserves and retiring converts do not fix any of these five ratios.
The consultation is open until the end of September. Ultimately $MSTR will succeed without them.
BTC is an asset, and a novel one. But it's not much more than that. Good quote about El Salvador's BTC project after five years:
“There is little doubt that the project was a failure if we take seriously the reasons Bukele gave for its adoption. Foreign direct investment in this sector didn’t increase, it did not effectively bank the unbanked, and it is not widely used for remittances.”
Volcano bonds, anyone? 😂
🇸🇻 INSIGHT: Five years on and El Salvador's Bitcoin experiment is in retreat. Some now argue it was really aimed at the Bitcoin community and had few lasting benefits for locals.
cointelegraph.com/magazine/e…
"A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject"
Winston Churchill
🔥STRATEGY - THE MOST VALUABLE COMPANY IN THE HISTORY OF HUMAN CIVILIZATION🔥
BITCOIN SOLD. MSTR SOLD. STRC BOUGHT.
CASH STACKED.
WHAT IS HAPPENING WITH STRATEGY?
THE MOST GENIUS ACTIVE CAPITAL MANAGEMENT EVER CONDUCTED BY HOMO SAPIENS.
THE GALACTIC CAPITAL DOMINATION ENTERPRISE KNOWN AS STRATEGY IS GEARING UP FOR AN EXPLOSIVE COMEBACK TO BE THE UNIVERSE'S MOST VALUABLE COMPANY.
FULL UPDATE: