Crypto platforms are racing to tokenize stocks like it’s the next obvious win. Unpopular opinion: what if they all ship the same product and drag users in right before the equity crash? History is full of rushes that look like progress until they land at a top. Tokenization moves custody. It doesn’t cancel drawdowns. The rush is the risk. Our live book simulation recently removed GOOGL from the mix.

This is the classic result of “technical chart” brainrot. “If ETH falls below $1700 it’s going to $900” type of shit. Someone managed to short $85 million of ETH right around there and hold the position for over two months while it climbed. I’m less shocked by the $9.8M unrealized loss and more impressed that a person this bad at reading the market, or anything at all, was able to command that much capital in the 1st place. That’s a miracle by itself. But in this “trading is glorious” world, especially the one turbo-charged by recent crypto culture, this kind of thing is actually pretty common. @arkham

Infantino took a big page out of a scammy crypto project playbook: 1⃣Maximize insider profit by low-balling the valuation to preferred early investors 2⃣Buy support/votes through massive “airdrop” incentives to member associations 3⃣Structure everything for maximum self-reward and value extraction He also pushed expanding the World Cup to 64 teams and a two-year cycle with almost zero regard for the actual core contributors — the players and the clubs who make the product. Add the backroom commercial deals and match-scheduling decisions designed for maximum revenue (including the cozy arrangements with certain associations like Argentina’s), and you get the full picture. In this world, ambition and greed big enough to risk breaking the game itself are treated as virtues, not red flags. The failed plan to sell a slice of FIFA’s commercial rights was pure crypto-bro energy: create a new entity, hand out big development checks to secure the votes, bring in connected capital, and keep the real upside for the people at the top. When the pushback got too loud, he just pulled the deal. Classic.

This isn’t unique to BitMEX. The “traditional finance” model is built on an adversarial relationship between the platforms and their own customers. Too many financial products still earn from churn, fees, liquidation, counterparties, or an information advantage over the people using them. Exchanges that can see your liquidation price, your hidden orders, and then trade against you aren’t some rare exception. They’re just the most obvious version of a structure that has existed for a long time. The only real difference is that in crypto, the extraction is more transparent and the lawsuits arrive faster.

Too many financial products still earn from churn, fees, liquidation, counterparties, or an information advantage over the people using them.

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Zack is touching on something real here. @saylor must have figured out what every good Ponzi operator eventually learns: people are greedy, and greed makes them forgetful. When things are going up, they’ll cheer almost anything — even highly leveraged structures with terrible incentives. Max Tegmark once pointed out that the universe itself kind of runs on Ponzi-like mechanics. It keeps creating more structure, more complexity, and more “growth” out of what looks like nothing, through constant expansion and leverage. In that sense, Saylor, Madoff, and even nature discovered the same hack: exponential growth looks sustainable… until it isn’t. We’re seeing that play out again right now. Bitcoin is correcting hard, and suddenly the same people who were celebrating “Bitcoin treasury companies” are quiet or in pain. The question is whether Saylor’s loudest admirers will finally see what was obvious from the beginning, or if they’ll just wait for the next leg up to forget again. I warned about this months ago when everyone was cheering these structures. https://t.co/A8TbWpbWN3 @zackvoell @tegmark

I warned about this months ago when people were loudly cheering for “Bitcoin treasury companies.” Don’t celebrate these things. They’re highly leveraged structures that will eventually break, and when they do, the pain will be much worse because so many people treated it like smart, safe money. We’re watching that play out right now. It was completely predictable. https://t.co/A8TbWpbWN3

This is one of the few posts that actually gets it. We spent years building crypto to escape the traditional financial system, only to now celebrate corporations and institutions piling in like it’s some kind of victory. The liquidity feels good in the short term, but it comes with strings attached. I warned about this exact risk months ago when people were cheering “Bitcoin treasury companies.” Once they get deep enough, they don’t just participate — they start influencing and eventually reshaping the rules to suit themselves. As @NickSzabo4 has pointed out, liquidity is nice, but that’s not what crypto was built for. We didn’t create this to get absorbed by the same system we wanted to replace. https://t.co/A8TbWpbWN3 @MastrXYZ

This was entirely predictable. We’ve been saying for a long time that Saylor’s “strategy” was never really designed with long-term success in mind for shareholders. It was always an all-in bet where he personally wins big if it works, and has already extracted hundreds of millions either way. The incentives were misaligned from the start. This kind of outcome was just a matter of time. @VinnyLingham