Core banking and bitcoin at @galoymoney. Woodwork, music, permaculture 🐇🕳️
⚓️ The Ocean State
Joined July 2009
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Andrew Begin retweeted
1/ “A typical bank can’t survive a 10% bank run. Silvergate saw a 70% bank run & survived it.” —@MaxfieldOnBanks interviewing Alan Lane & Ben Reynolds about Silvergate, 4 yrs post the collapse of fraudulent FTX
Andrew Begin retweeted
The only way out is through.
They're calling it the Bugpocalypse. LLMs are being used to find long-hidden cracks in the software infrastructure, and it's happening at a furious rate. 3% of all compromises in computing history happened in the last week, claims one source? I believe it.
There are people saying public access to the frontier models ought to be locked out, or heavily guardrailed, over this. The problem with that idea can be summed up in one sentence: when lockpicks are outlawed, only outlaws will have lockpicks.
The lockpicks will be Chinese open-weight models, if nothing else. There's no way to stop those from becoming ubiquitous.
There are two futures in front of us. One in which only the bad guys have lockpicks, and security holes go undiscovered until they're exploited. Another in which everybody has lockpicks and is aggressively red-teaming their own software so it gets fixed before the holes are exploited.
The corpus of human code is huge but finite. The number of defects in it has to be finite too. We can fix those defects now; we have a million friendly robots to do it with.
The only way out is through.
Andrew Begin retweeted
I'm resharing this article from a year ago since many people seem to think "tokenized deposits" solve internal bank liquidity/reconciliation issues.
Andrew Begin retweeted
Many people respond to my critique of tokenized deposits by arguing "OK fine, not as good as stables, but at least you can transfer them instantly 24/7 on chain."
The implication here is banks couldn't offer the same thing internally. Alas, the 5 biggest US banks spent over $40b on tech last year alone (per Claude).
Do you really think they don't offer instant internal transfers "because they need new tech like a blockchain to do it"?
I assure you that's not the reason. Databases that don't shut down on nights and weekends actually do exist. The technical term for them is databases.
Now ponder the real reason why every single bank doesn't offer real-time payments and didn't roll this out a decade ago.
Lmao Lao Tzu reincarnated as a hockey goalie. So good. "The past is dead, there's nothing for you there"
Years after Silvergate's voluntary wind down, CEO Alan Lane shares his story.
It's overwhelming to hear, especially if you work in bitcoin, and even moreso if you know the Silvergate team. They built an incredible business, they were years ahead. They were growing and well run. They survived a run that would have crippled most banks, and after making depositors whole, focused on doing right by investors.
I get angry and sad to think about the nearsightedness of third parties that created an untenable environment for Silvergate Bank. But mostly I'm just thankful to the Silvergate team for showing what grit and dedication in the face of chaos looks like. 🙏
open.spotify.com/episode/3Op…
Made a substack to share thoughts on banking, bitcoin, decentralization and the transformation of money. No AI slop inside.
First article – From banks to bitcoin: A scale of decentralization
coiningmoney.substack.com/p/…
feat. @malekanoms @JohnArnoldTen31
Andrew Begin retweeted
Zaria is what made the $200B Ledn investment grade bitcoin collateralized bond offering possible
Everything in Fintech needs to speak bitcoin
Zaria $5.2M Seed Round⚡️
📑 About:
Loan servicing and collateral management infrastructure for digital asset lenders.
🤝 Investors:
@lightspeedvp (Lead), @epochvc_, and Refract Ventures
ALT Zaria $5.2M Seed Round
Andrew Begin retweeted
Kyle Shirkness (@KyleShirkness) says his kids don't even know what a check is. He's seen 10 grand parked in Venmo earning no interest.
To credit unions: don't wait for a law to pass. The cost of doing nothing is real.
Live at Midwest Bitcoin Summit:
youtu.be/wl0Ar4z6zbk
Andrew Begin retweeted
My issue has long been that those who believed the second iteration of Chokepoint didn't happen also believed it was deserved--*wink*--if it did happen. (They also supported v 1.0 as well.)
bombshell report from the OCC out today confirming what we all suspected:
between 2020 and 2025, based on a review of 100,000 complaints, America’s largest banks systematically denied banking to lawful businesses based on political and reputational considerations rather than objective financial risk, effectively appointing themselves arbiters of which industries deserved access to the financial system. digital assets was specifically named as one of the six most affected industries.
TLDR: we weren't imagining it. OCP2.0 was real.
Andrew Begin retweeted
we made a kiosk. we made it really smart. you can talk to it if you want. and it looks pretty good too.
squ.re/kiosk
Andrew Begin retweeted
Our Head of Marketing @DanHerseyRI has been tracking US policy changes on digital assets in banking, with 155 of them since January.
He went back through the whole list to work out what it all means for community banks and credit unions and where the bottleneck still exists:
galoy.io/blog/rules-came-fir…
Andrew Begin retweeted
Me, rushing to listen to this podcast with Silvergate's Alan Lane about #OperationChokePoint2.0 and all the things the Biden Administration did to bring down a bank it didn't like. @_DannyKnowles
