Who cut the onions! 🥲 Very happy to see Kimi crowned champion, and what a blockbuster podium to celebrate on! 🇮🇹 #KimiAntonelli
Iain Toft retweeted
the choice of secp256k1 over r1 (P-256) in bitcoin (and ethereum) was heavily influenced by the fear of an NSA backdoor. this has been very annoying for wallet developers because the secure enclave chips found in most consumer devices only support r1. passkeys use r1 as well.
turns out there is no backdoor after all... amazing work by anthropic.
anthropic.com/research/ecdsa…
After 6 yrs of the trenches at Coinbase I'm hanging it up. I'm not going to work in AI, or another crypto company :) simply taking a break after ~10yrs in crypto.
Working on some of the sharpest pieces of the retail and spot exchange trade execution stack was exciting and gruelling in equal measure, I wouldn't change a thing 💪
I'll miss all of the folks at Coinbase, I still believe the company has it all to play for and I'm cheering for you all💙
Iain Toft retweeted
Ledger is investigating reports of loss of funds from users in South East Asia who purchased products from a reseller named CryptoBillis. As a precaution, and pending the results of our investigation, we have asked CryptoBilis to pause all sales and shipments of Ledger devices. We recommend Ledger users who purchased from this reseller in the last 90 days to not initiate set up if you have not done so yet. If you have set up your Ledger device, consider moving assets to a new Ledger signer (with new seed). We will continue to inform customers of updates as the investigation progresses.
Reach out to Ledger customer support through official channels with any questions: support.ledger.com/
Iain Toft retweeted
The CFTC has approved the launch of Coinbase Clearing LLC, our own USDC-native clearinghouse.
Built for 24/7 settlement with USDC collateral, Coinbase Clearing completes our full stack of regulated derivatives infrastructure.
Iain Toft retweeted
University debate, "Were humans built to eat meat?", same two chairs, same clock.
Vegan: "Anatomically we're closer to the gorilla than the lion. Flat molars, long gut. A gentle plant-eater with delusions."
Paleoanthropologist: "Then explain the acid."
Vegan: "Which acid?"
Paleoanthropologist: "Your stomach runs at a pH of about 1.5. A lion's sits nearer 3.6. Yours is stronger than the animal you've just been contrasted with, by a factor of about a hundred."
Vegan: "Stomach acid digests food."
Paleoanthropologist: "A cow's rumen sits at about 6.5. That's a compost heap with a pulse. Yours strips the zinc off a coin. Why would a gentle plant-eater carry that?"
Vegan: "Protection."
Paleoanthropologist: "From what? Lettuce doesn't fight back."
Vegan: "Bacteria."
Paleoanthropologist: "Which bacteria live in a leaf at a level that needs a pH of 1.5? Name the salad."
Vegan: "..."
Paleoanthropologist: "The animals that run acid as low as ours are the scavengers. Vultures. Things that arrive at a carcass on the second day and need to kill what's already living in it. We're not built like the lion. We're built like the bird that waits for the lion to finish."
Vegan: "Flattering."
Paleoanthropologist: "It's a picture of a species with a rock, a sharp flake and no claws. You don't get the fresh kill. You get the femur nobody could open, forty hours late, and you'd better have the acid for it."
Vegan: "Acid that strong is dangerous. Look how many people are on tablets for it."
Paleoanthropologist: "The only animal on earth that pays to switch its stomach off. You've spent sixty years pouring cereal onto a carcass digester and now you're medicating the digester for doing its job."
Vegan: "So your argument is that we're vultures."
Paleoanthropologist: "My argument is a number. Yours is a feeling about gorillas. The gorilla eats for most of the day and its gut is a fermentation tank. Yours is done in a few hours and runs on acid. One of you is designed for leaves."
Moderator: "Thirty seconds."
Paleoanthropologist: "She can keep them. I'm still waiting on the salad."
Iain Toft retweeted
pretty curious that @DefinitiveFi has the same 30D revenue as Virtuals according to DefiLlama.
• one is $400M+ MC while the other is <$20M MC
• one does buybacks and distributes token holder value while the other does not
base:0x0b3e328455c4059eeb9e3f84b5543f74e24e7e1b ethereum:0xb0076de78dc50581770bba1d211ddc0ad4f2a241
fun to think about :D
Iain Toft retweeted
Today’s message from @POTUS was clear: This Administration is committed to passing the Clarity Act — answering voters’ call for consistent rules for crypto.
Regulators @SECPaulatkins and @chairmanselig are aligned, Congress has set a date, and the entire industry is ready to get this across the finish line.
67M Americans own crypto, and they want this legislation. I’m confident the Senate will listen. Contact your lawmakers today — let’s get this done!
Iain Toft retweeted
This bill literally requires President Trump to divest his digital asset holdings or put them in a blind trust.
It's becoming painfully clear some of my Democrat colleagues would rather let consumers lose everything if a crypto exchange fails and posture for the midterms than pass market structure legislation with unprecedented ethics standards covering the President, VP, Congress, and the Federal Judiciary.
Iain Toft retweeted
The SEC deleted a full year of Gary Gensler's communications at the peak of his campaign against crypto.
The FDIC tried to secretly cut off an entire lawful industry from the banking system and buried the evidence.
The US government doesn't get to operate like this. Unless the American people allow them to.
So @Coinbase sued, won, and exposed the details, resulting in one of the largest FOIA awards in each agency's history. More details below.
Iain Toft retweeted
In a few weeks, @Mamo will launch Boosted USDC Accounts. ⚡
With the same simple experience, you'll be able to earn a high 2-digit APY, powered by a new Mamo Intelligent Rebalancer, a @sherwoodagent vault, @MoonwellDeFi lending, and @aeroxyz's impressive revenue.
Economics dashboard updates are live ✈️
Key metrics including volume, exchange revenue, TVL, lock rates and more, now trackable over time 👇
aero.xyz/economics/
Iain Toft retweeted
Nah that's Rach, she's been calling out the double standard for a while. She's hilarious and I highly recommend following her if you have TikTok (I don't see her on X,if I'm wrong someone please tag her!) Here's one of her recent videos, she's like og white girl calling it out
🇺🇸🎉
This is because the anti-capitalist left is not actually against people being crazy rich. They're against certain types of people being crazy rich.
Artists and athletes make sense to them because they've played music and sports and because their success can be explained by "luck" and "talent". Messi's wealth is not offensive to them because they understand Messi is much better at football than they are.
But when it comes to business, the anti-capitalist leftist has no framework for understanding why Jeff Bezos might be super rich since 99% of them have never ever created a product, business or service that was of value to other people. They've never taken entrepreneurial risk. They've never employed people and felt the burden of responsibility that comes with that. They've never pick up a business and given it a play in the way they've picked up a ball or a guitar.
They *literally* don't understand wealth creation. They think there is a fixed amount of money and the only thing a business does is split it unfairly.
It's why they rage at Elon and other successful business leaders. Because they genuinely don't understand why they're wealthy.
Also, and this is just as important, athletes and artists are disproportionately young, attractive, "diverse", left wing etc. Business leaders are "evil" middle aged white men whose success offends the average anti-capitalist leftist because they don't understand a) what it is they do and b) that Elon Musk has the same talent advantage on them as Messi does, it's just harder to measure.
Iain Toft retweeted
Imagine your family worked for a generation to save enough money to buy a brownstone occupied with rent stabilized tenants on the Upper West Side. The family financed the purchase with a mortgage from a bank based on the premise that rents and cash flow would at least keep pace with inflation so you could pay interest and principal on the mortgage and hopefully have some cash flow left as a return on your investment.
While you had rent stabilized tenants, you were led to believe that the NYC Rent Guidelines Board would be required to adjudicate rental increases each year by taking a measure of the inflation of costs to own and operate a building and setting rental increases appropriately.
You believed the RGB would do its job as the board is comprised of two representatives each for landlords and tenants and five independent representatives that represent the general public.
Now, a new mayor @NYCMayor Mamdani is elected on the promise of freezing rents. There are about two million rent stabilized renters that benefit if rents are frozen so by promising frozen rents the new candidate for mayor buys votes and wins the election.
The new mayor achieves his objective by stacking the RGB with directors who do not follow their obligations and simply vote for a rent freeze as a preordained conclusion as evidenced by the statements of an RGB director who resigned in protest for this very reason.
Meanwhile, inflation in NYC is rampant in utilities, real estate taxes, insurance, repairs and maintenance, etc. and now your rents are frozen. Real estate is a high operating leverage business which means that frozen rents and inflating expenses will cause property cash flows to plummet and your after debt service cash flow to go negative.
I expect therefore there will be hundreds if not thousands of small NYC property owners who are now or will shortly be underwater on their mortgages, and without any cash flow to maintain their assets.
If you remember the images of the South Bronx burning in the mid 1970s, you can viscerally understand what is happening to small NYC real estate owners.
While the rent freeze appears to be short-term good news (long term it will lead to poorly maintained apartments) for 2 million NYC renters, it is bad news for the 2 million or more renters in the 1 million market rate apartments in the City because a landlord-hostile market is not likely to add meaningfully more supply and market rents will likely continue to escalate at a high rate.
All of this seems quite unfair and wrong unless I missing something?
Why am I wrong?
For disclosure: I do not own any NYC rental apartments.
There's no freeze on property tax.
There's no freeze on the wages paid to landscapers, plumbers, electricians, drywallers, flooring installers.
There's no freeze on the cost of lumber, copper, baseboard, quarter rounds, flashing, siding, window treatments.
There's no freeze on the wages paid to janitors or porters.
There's no freeze on utilities -- on electric, gas, water, sewer (building-paid utilities in hallways, lobbies, maintenance corridors; most buildings pay water and sewer for tenants).
There are currently 57,421 units sitting vacant in NYC because it's more cost-effective to leave them empty than it is to rent them out.
If you're wondering: "How that could be possible? Wouldn't making anything be better than making nothing?" -- the answer is no, because of the 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act.
The HSTPA mandated a certain level of renovation for a vacant unit, but did not allow landlords to raise the rent enough to be able to recoup those costs.
If a long-term tenant moves out after decades, the apartment often requires $50,000 to $100,000 in lead abatement, new wiring, plumbing, and structural renovations.
Because the law heavily restricts how much of that cost can be passed to the next tenant.
The HSPTA eliminated the "vacancy bonus" (which allowed automatic 20% rent increases when a tenant left) and heavily capped Individual Apartment Improvements (IAIs).
This means landlords who want a renovation loan would be rejected by a bank, because the landlord would not be able to show that they could repay that loan.
Landlords who pay out-of-pocket would end up losing money, underperforming even what they could get by putting their money in a U.S. Treasury or gov't bond.
Therefore, it's more cost-effective to just leave the unit vacant.
That's why we have 57,421 vacant units across New York right now.
That number is about to get much worse.
brother 🙏
History's first trillionaire is a guy who catches rockets out of the sky with chopsticks and beams internet to every dead zone on the planet.
Same guy ships cars that drive themselves, humanoid robots for the factory floor, brain chips that let paralyzed people move a cursor with pure thought, and an AI running on a supercomputer his team stood up in months instead of years.
And the people crashing out about his net worth are doing it on the app he owns. The same app governments spent years trying to censor.
You cannot legislate a rocket into orbit.