Good Morning! It is Monday! New week, new possibilities. Let us use them well and grow together. People in: - Web3 - AI - Tech Let's #connect!

Good Morning! Sunday is a day to touch grass. A day to focus on something outside of work. If you are still here, let us grow together. I am looking to #connect with people in: - Web3 - AI - Tech

Good Morning! Saturday is a quieter day. A day for reflection. A day to catch up. So let us use it to grow together. I am looking to connect with people in: - Web3 - AI - Tech Let's #connect!

Uptober did not work out very well this year.

A protocol had a seven-day window to stop a malicious vote. A malicious vote removed the window. Then it took $8.5m. Term Finance, August. Nobody broke in. The vaults held depositors’ ETH and USDC. Whoever held the governance token decided what the vaults did with it. Almost nobody held it, so control was cheap. The attacker spent $951. That bought complete control of four vaults and about 90% of a fifth. Then, in order: 👉 17 and 18 August: two wallets funded with 2 ETH through a mixer 👉 21 August: seven governance proposals submitted, in public 👉 23 August: execution ✅ 06:25 UTC: the first proposal passes. It reduces the governance delay to zero ✅ 06:47 UTC: the vaults are emptied 22 minutes between removing the delay and removing the money. 2,843 ETH and 1.68m USDC — about 68% of everything the vaults held. Every vote was valid. Every rule was followed. The contracts did exactly what they were written to do. The seven-day delay existed so that depositors could see a dangerous proposal and object before it executed. A safety mechanism that can be switched off by the same vote it’s meant to restrain isn’t a safety mechanism. It’s a default. $951 was enough. Everyone who put money in had a vote. Almost nobody used it. The price of control collapses to whatever one determined person will pay, and apathy sets that price, not the value of what’s being protected. The seven days were there so someone could object. Nobody got the chance, because the seven days were voted away first. Total cost: $951.

Bitcoin is the only major asset still mostly owned by individuals, not institutions. Nearly everything being built in Web3 now is designed to end that. The share held directly by individuals, according to River’s figures: 👉 Bonds: 11.8% 👉 Stocks: 41.6% 👉 Gold: 47.4% 👉 Bitcoin: 79.6% That order is not random. It’s roughly the order in which each of these assets was "institutionalised". Bonds have been managed on other people’s behalf for centuries, and almost nobody holds one directly now. Equities followed. Gold spent most of a century in vaults belonging to central banks and funds. They all arrived at the same place by the same route. An asset becomes valuable. Then it becomes worth insuring, auditing, lending against, reporting on and regulating. Each of those is a service; each service needs a provider, and every provider ends up holding the asset while providing it. The interesting question isn’t whether Bitcoin becomes like the others. It is how long it will take. Over the last two years, the trend has been that individuals are selling and institutions are buying. Bitcoin is still mostly held by individuals. That is precisely what everyone is working to change.

Do you find growing on X addictive? I do, and I am a bit surprised by that.

The X algo is killing small accounts. Agree?

A listed company was paid $150m in Bitcoin. It tried to withdraw it but couldn't. Yesterday, the share fell 50% in a day. Datavault AI, a Bitcoin treasury company, disclosed this week that it cannot retrieve its Bitcoin. How it got there: 👉 September 2025: an investor agrees to buy $150m of Datavault shares, paying in Bitcoin 👉 The coins are credited inside an exchange account. The balance changes. Nothing moves on the blockchain 👉 Datavault records the Bitcoin as an asset, and tells investors it is a source of cash to fund operations 👉 June 2026: it requests a withdrawal to an outside wallet 👉 The transfer never completes. Four months later, it still hasn’t The company has now reclassified the original transaction to "money owed for shares", which reduces equity rather than adding assets. Conclusion: The Bitcoin was never the company’s asset in the first place, because it never received it and never held it. The company is now reassessing whether it can continue at all. This is an "ordinary failure" in a new form. Nobody was hacked. No key was lost. No contract was exploited. A company accepted a number displayed in an account, put it in its accounts, had it audited, reported it to the market for four quarters, and never once tried to move it. The test was a single withdrawal. A balance someone shows you is not something you hold. That was true of warehouse receipts, and it is true of this. A listed company was paid $150m in Bitcoin. It still hasn’t seen the coins. Everything else followed from that.

Only in Crypto: Someone created $2m that didn’t exist. Seven minutes later, he had real money on another blockchain. Then the chain switched itself off, and its token INIT closed up 14%. This was Friday, on a blockchain called Initia. A flaw let an attacker mint 2 million units of a dollar stablecoin with no backing. In plain terms, a counterfeit. Then, the clever part. He destroyed them. Tokens move between blockchains by being destroyed on one side so the equivalent can be released on the other. The system on the receiving end checks that the tokens were burned. It does not check whether they were ever supposed to exist. So, if you prove that you shredded a cheque, you get paid out in cash. No one is asking whether the cheque was good. Elapsed time from the fake money appearing to the real money landing: 7 minutes, 21 seconds Initia halted its blockchain and every rollup running on it 42 minutes after the mint. Everything was already gone. The company behind the stablecoin froze the attacker’s address about 89 minutes after he’d sold. The token fell to $0.115 on the news, then finished the day up roughly 14%. A piece of financial infrastructure stopped working, with no cause published and no date for resuming, and the market’s response was to send the token upwards. Money that didn’t exist bought money that did. The chain stopped. The token went up.