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Crypto fans, in the words of early Stones, we love you !!
Busy day today in Financial Times crypto prop, let's roll! Hmm, Boris finally out, sterling will have a dead cat bounce, entrenched inflation over & over like crimson & clover... Here we go! Hiding under a Tech label ( not so subtle bias there FT) is an all about crypto story fun with NFTs, Kasriel, and Meta!!
despite the crash"!! Meta does NFTs. Tiktok is eating Meta's lunch, but Meta sees billions of NFT fans doing 3 trillion in ten years!! Numbers go down, crypto layoffs. Meta agrees crypto is in the classic "pit of despair" cycle but NFT testing rocks on. Facebook "" crypto when US regs "scuppered" Diem. Kasriel thinks transparent, immutable blockchain will help restore user trust after FB screwed the people over & over about privacy and competition etc. Meta is gonna take NFTs across platforms.
The real story: Dear readers remember the FT/BIS lying about "client trust" sinking Zuckbucks.Here is a cheezy correction, it WAS the US gummint (like we done told ya.) It's funny, but good news, that Meta is looking to blockchain to uplift Meta's image.Kasriel's plan to beat down NFT costs and figure out scalable biz plans is the right way, he agrees it will take time. Crypto bash at beginning, middle & dig at blockchain scalability at the end, and effin of course Meta will not change plans, but overall judges say 0.25 FU's rounding down to zero out of five FU's, good job Hanna!!!
, under the beauteous blue Crypto header this time, we got UK lobbyists fighting to put mutual funds out as coins!
TLDR: The "Investment Association" lobbying over UK's 10 trillion asset industry is pressing the FCA to approve blockchain traded funds by 2023. The IA sees massive efficiency gains over current "laborious processes." Franklin Templeton in Cali last year already did a blockchain mutual fund for transactions and share ownership records. Brian from FundAdminChain says alpha (beating the market) can be found in transparency, settlement, data & analytics of blockchain. The IA is also pushing for the FCA to allow mutual funds to own some crypto, but that will take forever.
The City, in London, with English, a head start, & light regulation, was long big number one in finance. Some say it still is, but New York passed it a while back. All can agree now London is hurting bad under Brexit, helping Paris, Zurich and Frankfort eat London's lunch. Plus Singapore, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai and many other Asian cities are breathing down the CIty's neck. Here we see the UK sinking under the EU's punishment, looking desperately to steal at least a small march off the crazy slow, anti-crypto, EU regulators. HOLY CHIT Batman, we have the FIRST EVER Crypto story in the FT without any negativity!! No bash rehashes, snide headlines, it's allll good! Thank you Chris, ZERO FU's no wait one TU!!! THANK YOU!! This is a red letter day in history for the FT!!
Next !! Voyager formally bites the radish, Chapter 11 time at the hacienda.
: Rehash Voyager lost $650MM on Three Arrow's madness. Bankruptcy a week after locking. Crypto off 70%. Sammy Fried loan only allowed $75MM per 30 days, Sammy now the largest unsecured creditor. Voyager in Toronto had $5.7 billion in liabilities in March. They filed saying $1bn to $10bn in liabilities, with 1MM to google ( Google ads? lol) the rest to clients. Versus $110mm in cash & 1.3 billion in assets. Voyager will try to repay after three arrows recovery, also with company shares, plus "Voyager Tokens." They also oddly have $350 million in customer's cash in a NYC bank, with $250,000 FDIC coverage per investor. CEO Steve says they believe in the future of crypto, but hey. Celsius has also locked withdrawals, and BlockFi is hurting from a Three Arrows loan.
Well, we guess this is the FT's half-assed correction about actually stopping redemptions, sort of, dumped on Josh. Might be all we get. Not much news, but not too much more crypto bashing than appropriate.Just die, Voyager, pay what cash you have. Nobody wants your shares nor anymore than they wanted Luna 2.0, tho maybe SBF can prove us wrong. Overall 0 out of Five FU's, thanks Josh!!
Finally ( following a four of five star review for Rammstein, lol, 
big crypto smear job for today in the Big Read.
Cosmos, down 80%, says some get out some double down! Alchemy says folks are still building. The FT says they could be wrong, could all be over, Web3 is the dot.com bust. Meta says blockchain will be useful for a very long time. Crash rehash, plus the FT says crypto so far is all speculation, criminals, unregulated DeFI and NFTS. Martha from Forrester says the dot.com bust had some utility, but "Web3 has none of that." She says it's too early to tell if " anything lasting or useful will survive." 26 people wrote Congress to say blockchain is "risky, flawed and unproven." One, Bruce, says anything built on blockchain would be better on some other tech. The crypto boom is over. Phil says the boom was "zero percent technology."
Crypto lovers say blockchain gives new services where people, not governments nor corporations, are in control. But the FT says Eth can only handle 30 transactions per second, and Solana et al are unproven, there are questions, tech is hard for non experts. ( Really? 106 million worldwide hold crypto.) Supports say tech is still maturing. Juan from Filecoin says cloud services were hot in the 1990's but took 20 years to dominate the market, crypto the same. The FT says decentralization is being diluted to the point of being the same as older tech. ( !!??!! WHAT?) A primer on defi, eth, and proof of stake replacing proof of work causing concentration of powers. Martha says Web3 will allow big tech gatekeepers just like now. The internet "promised. but failed to deliver a more democratic online world." ( JEEZ we thought the interweb conclusively freed us from the tyranny of "experts." ) Web3 is supposed to be an existential threat to Big Tech, but look here comes Meta. Critics say crypto has little practical use, if decentralization is "illusory, there is nothing left to recommend. " But Electric Capital says " If 100 million people do it, pay attention."
The FT says some think Bitcoin has "some of the characteristics of money" ( !!??!!??!!) and may "" support defi, which has "propelled the boom," including "the first consumer servicesplay to earn." Critics say "financialization" will destroy gaming. Blockchain gamers Polygon say only a few payers will support all. Believers say it took ten years after the dotcom bust to produce Facebook, Iphone services, and Amazon, and a multi-trillion company on blockchain in ten years is just fine.
- zoom out, we see the repetition of the FT's arguments against crypto. The crash killed Web3, which was nothing anyway. Centralization has or will kill crypto, crypto is nothing but criminal speculation. Sounding very old , weak & hollow. Yes DeFI is unregulated, that's the POINT. The FT doesn't mind preferred (voting) stocks, but thinks governance coins will kill crypto, spare us. The central / decentral dead end logical hairsplitting is getting ridiculous. Have they read anything about ETH 2.0's approach to PoS, it looks pretty freaking clean & smarter people than us have thought a LOT about it.
We know who leads at Meta, Filechain, and Polygon, even Cosmos and Alchemy. Meta is building a 3 trillion dollar industry. On the other side? The FT is grubbing hard, scraping the barrel for anti-crypto voices.
Phil Libin ran evernote, which replaces post-it notes, now he retired to make demo videos for mmhmm, which is a zoom addon. So yes, Phil should know all about 0% technology companies, he's projecting.
All the smart people we knew at Forrester jumped to good paying jobs, i.e.n research lol. Martha has been going the other way for decades. Martha can get bent If she thinks a trillion dollars a year in DeFi volume and a trillion in crypto market cap is nothing. If she thinks will survive from smart contracts, NFTs, DAOs, trustless networks, and blockchain gaming, she is CLUELESS. And don't trust her gaming recommendations, dear readers know she's going against the very top biggest gamer winners - Tetris, GTA, Minecraft, Call of Duty, etc etc etc let alone Axie.
Bruce is an old data security hack who got laid off, then made his bones writing books, including "Protect your Mac" in 1994, then worked for IBM for decades. Bruce says " cryptocurrencies are useless" (tell that to the truckers lol) and states Bitcoin is not distributed, rather exposed. Yeah? So hack it, smarty, or just STFU. While hacking BTC, please also describe how Bitcoin could have been created "" without trustless blockchain. Remind us, what ARE your famous white hat hacks?? We will ALL listen after you casually crack BTC, believe us.
Funny how the FT ignores the article a couple pages back stating that the blockchain has alpha for UK mutual funds to help save the City. They KNOW crypto will evolve, speed up and solve governance, but it kills them to come close to admitting it. Here the FT are just SO happy to find someone to say of web3 will survive. Decentralization is an illusion, leaving to recommend about crypto. Bitcoin only has "some" of the properties of money. Defi "may one day" be supported, c'mon, say that again with a straight face, that's a comedy act like Baghdad Bob claiming victory with his pants on fire 1,000,000,000x. Lord they're still CRYING to say "IT COULD ALL JUST GO TO ZERO / YOU KNOW." Overall, judges give two and a half FU's for the ft trad scary / negative graphic, & the laughable pretense of balanced opponents whilst recycling the same desperate arguments/ proclaimed death of crypto & defi & blockchain.
Last, Lex gloats - "Not Now, Voyager. " Lex is referencing a pro-travel novel, which itself is referencing a Walt Whitman poem. Yeah, us neither, and we thought we loved the Brooklyn Bard and travel. 
