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5 days ago | 
mail.blockworks.com | Jeffrey Albus |Casey Wagner |Ben Strack |Kate Irwin
Byron’s away, but Katherine Ross from the Empire newsletter will be here all week to keep you entertained. Today, the Queen of Scoops returns to regale us with part 2 of the drama involving the layer-2 incubated by Bitget and the spicy leadership changes underway at Morph. (You can find part 1 here). If you like this edition, you’re in luck. You’ll get a lot more like it when you give the Empire newsletter a subscribe.
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1 week ago | 
mail.blockworks.com | Byron Gilliam |Jack Kubinec |Ben Strack |Kate Irwin
In her eviscerating review of Thomas Piketty’s Capital, Deirdre McCloskey laments that “for reasons I have never understood, people like to hear that the world is going to hell, and become huffy and scornful when some idiotic optimist intrudes on their pleasure.” “Pessimism sells,” she observes.
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1 week ago | 
mail.blockworks.com | Byron Gilliam |Jack Kubinec |Felix Jauvin |Kate Irwin
The investment case for bitcoin treasury companies can be confusing, so VanEck has done us a service by writing the definitive explainer on the various ways to invest in Strategy (MSTR, STRF, converts). The main vehicle, MSTR, is generally viewed as a leveraged bet on bitcoin, but VanEck details why thatâs not exactly correct.
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1 week ago | 
mail.blockworks.com | Byron Gilliam |Jack Kubinec |Casey Wagner |Kate Irwin
In Michael Lewisâ Wall Street classic Liarâs Poker, the phrase âequities in Dallasâ is wielded as an epithet â a catch-all term for the least competent people at Salomon Brothers doing the firmâs least desirable jobs. The young investment bankers in Lewisâ class of Salomon trainees lived in fear of being assigned to the equities division in Dallas â a fate considered only marginally better than being fired.
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1 week ago | 
mail.blockworks.com | Byron Gilliam |Kate Irwin |David Canellis |Jack Kubinec
Turns out that Congress, maybe, just maybe, will do something big on crypto this year. Admittedly, I had my doubts. Considering the circular boxing match playing out among Republicans on their tax and spending megabill, one wondered whether the political will was there to advance the GENIUS Act, which puts in place comprehensive rules around stablecoins.
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2 weeks ago | 
mail.blockworks.com | Byron Gilliam |Jack Kubinec |Felix Jauvin |Kate Irwin
Q: Do we need a new internet? The business model that populated the world wide web with information was straightforward: create content, attract traffic, sell ads. Now, however, you can often get better, aggregated information from a large language model, which sends a bot to visit those same websites on your behalf. Soon, most traffic on the web will be bots and therefore impervious to ads (and tragically uninterested in subscribing to newsletters).
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2 weeks ago | 
mail.blockworks.com | Byron Gilliam |Jeffrey Albus |Casey Wagner |Kate Irwin
Breaking the law can be productive (for everyone)Here are two things I believe: Tipping in cash so your server doesn’t owe taxes is good — but officially making income earned from tips tax-free is bad. Let me explain. Paying tips in cash is good because it helps low-margin businesses like restaurants hire staff they might not otherwise be able to afford.
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3 weeks ago | 
mail.blockworks.com | Byron Gilliam |Jeffrey Albus |Ben Strack |Kate Irwin
I’m old enough to remember when people thought recessions might not be a thing anymore. By the early 2000s, economists like Robert Lucas and Alan Greenspan argued that traditional recessions, in which a cyclical decline in demand led to a shrinking economy, were becoming an endangered species: less frequently seen and less dangerous when they were.
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3 weeks ago | 
mail.blockworks.com | Byron Gilliam |Jack Kubinec |Felix Jauvin |Kate Irwin
Q: What did dinner with the president cost? The final TRUMP holder to qualify for dinner with the president held 4,196 tokens, which were worth about $60,000 at the cut-off. But thatâs not the cost of the invite, because holders were free to sell as soon as the period or record ended. If they did, they would have taken about a 10% loss, making the real cost of dinner with the president (and 219 others) about $6,000.
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3 weeks ago | 
mail.blockworks.com | Byron Gilliam |Jeffrey Albus |Casey Wagner |Kate Irwin
When I started writing this newsletter nearly four years ago, I kept the subject matter high-level — mostly because I didn’t understand the low level. That’s not what I expected it to be.
