Last year, a bunch of people got together and raised $40+ million to buy the Constitution.

The effort was outbid in part because the amount wasn't private.

There's another Constitution for sale, and we've fixed the privacy problem with @aztecnetwork.

ConstitutionDAO 2 is live: There are only two privately-owned copies of the Constitution of the United States.

One was lost to Ken Griffin last November.

The other is being offered at auction one week from now on December 13th.

sothebys.com/en/articles/so…

Yesterday, Orthogonal Trading defaulted on $36 million of loans borrowed from under-collateralized lending protocol Maple Finance.

It's a good reminder that collateral is actually one of DeFi's superpowers.

A thread on why the goal should be more on-chain collateral, not less: Collateralized lending involves putting up something of value (a house, a car, inventory) in exchange for the right to borrow.

In case the borrower can't repay, the lender liquidates the collateral.

Former Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison was spotted in SoHo over the weekend.

The rumor is she's retained white shoe law firm WilmerHale.

If true, there's a good chance she's represented by Preet Bharara, the most successful financial crimes prosecutor of all time: So: who's Preet Bharara?

He's a partner at WilmerHale, but he's really known for his last job, an 8 year stint as US Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

SDNY is the elite financial crimes unit of the Department of Justice.

The New York Times was soft in its coverage of FTX's collapse.

Thankfully, Andrew Ross Sorkin was not.

He put Sam Bankman-Fried to the sword at the NYT Dealbook Summit:

"Sounds like a bunch of kids who were on Adderall having a sleepover."

Here are the other highlights: On fraud:

“I made a lot of mistakes and would give anything to do over again. I did not ever try to commit fraud on anyone.”

One of the hardest things about web3 UX is aggregating your to-do's:

- claiming drops
- voting
- migrating positions

Sometimes it feels like the only way to keep track is staying glued to Twitter and Discord 24/7.

Not anymore.

Introducing @daylight: Missing important to-do's from your wallet has huge implications.

It could mean missing:

- Dollar returns for financial actions (forgetting to unstake, migrate, or claim airdrop funds).

- The ability to cast votes in DAO governance

- A key NFT or @poapxyz mint

Buried in yesterday's news:

While criminals who steal billions walk free, smart contract developer Alexey Pertsev remains in Dutch prison on money laundering charges.

His "crime"?

Writing open-source, autonomous code.

This is a chilling day for technology: Pertsev, a core dev for Tornado Cash, was first detained 3 months ago without charges.

He will remain in prison for at least 3 more awaiting trial.

Let's address the question everyone will be asking you this Thanksgiving:

"How will investors ever look at crypto again after FTX?"

Here's the answer without invoking any nonsense.

How to defend crypto with integrity this week:

↓ First off, I think it’s very hard for the general public to separate "crypto," as in:

"Distributed ledger technology" and other terms that are complete gibberish to normal folk

from the massive edifice of grift that was built on top of it, as in:

"FTX and all the other scams."

Something that might seem obvious:

Institutions and organizations don't actually want all their financial records out in the open on unencrypted blockchains.

👇 Let's think about what organizations--decentralized or not--might need to do:

- manage payroll
- negotiate deals
- raise money
- buy services
- invest their treasury

And in the current paradigm we're asking them to do all of that with complete transparency.

I just read FTX's Chapter 11 First Day Affidavit.

In it, the appointed restructuring CEO John Jay Ray III, who oversaw Enron's bankruptcy proceedings, calls FTX's case the worst of his career.

Its contents are shocking.

Here are the highlights:

👇 First off, some context.

In a bankruptcy the first day affidavit is a comprehensive summary of how the entity got to this point and why it's requesting relief via corporate restructuring.

Just paid my first week of Elon taxes.

Quick thoughts on being a newly minted member of the meaningless checkmark club: 1. It's already anti-signal

Used to be if someone was a blue check, I'd click on their profile and it'd be someone credible, typically a journalist.

Now it's meaningless noise since there's no actual verification.

I still click out of habit, but that's not going to last long.

For those wondering how FTX printed money out of thin air:

You have to understand what "low float, high FDV" means and why playing a market manipulation game with $FTT was key to this whole mess.

👇 SBF tweeted today that FTX has more assets than liabilities: that they're simply illiquid, not insolvent.

That’s the sound of a snake hissing.

Using "total market value of assets/collateral" to mean "realizable value" was the source of this whole fugazi to begin with.

Days like today I go back to the One True Coin.

Forget the battle-lines of maxi-ism for a second.

Bitcoin just works.

There are no ponzinomics, recursive token dynamics, locked this staked that.

It has no "utility" except being uncensorable money.

It's why we're here. of course as soon as i post this bitcoin bots promoting grifters instantly slam my replies

just can't win this week ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

FTX was the world's 3rd largest crypto exchange.

Today it's said to be insolvent and in the midst of an acquisition by Binance.

Here's everything you need to know about Alameda Research and the collapse of FTX:

👇 Troubled crypto exchange @FTX_Official has faced severe liquidity issues in the past few days and has now agreed to terms its primary competitor and investor, @binance.

It's hard to understate how big a deal this is.

https://twitter.com/SBF_FTX/status/1590012124864348160

A lot of people are noticing their Twitter experience getting better all of a sudden after sucking for months.

Here's why reversing "TikTok-ification" will save Twitter: First, a quick history of algorithmic social feeds:

Facebook first introduced linear newsfeeds in 2006.

And in 2009, they implemented an algorithm to rank posts based on likes.

But Google was WAY earlier to the game, and arguably the first to introduce algorithmic ranking.

If you've spent time in business, you've probably heard someone mention MECE, a problem-solving framework developed by McKinsey.

If you consistently deal with complex decisions, adopting it can help dramatically reduce the amount of brain damage you do to yourself: MECE stands for:

Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive

Meaning to make decisions effectively, you need a list of options that:

1) Doesn't overlap
2) And together represent the full set of constituent components

Sam Bankman-Fried just published his thoughts on the future of regulation in crypto.

It's structured as a set of self-governing community norms, but it also serves as a suggested framework for regulators to adopt.

Here's what it recommends: 1) On-chain blocklists maintained by US Treasury and updated in real time.

Transitive property applies, so funds must be frozen upon receipt, but receipt of sanctioned funds can be cured by sending to a "burn" address.

A lot has been written about the Ethereum merge but no one has really explained it the way your neighbor would.

So here's the merge as explained by a Brooklyn mechanic: Eyyyyyy Jonny how yuse doin?

Siddown, siddown, have a bite o da sfogliatel'.

So I hear yuse is wantin to know about da Ethereum merge?

Look kid, da merge is like swappin' a big-💪-fuckin' V8 for a pansy Elon Musk fuckin' electric motor.

Are you going to jail for interacting with Tornado Cash?

Well, today we find out!

I read US Treasury's OFAC office Tornado Cash FAQ's so you don't have to:

(Note: I'm not a lawyer 🤠) On getting money out of Tornado Cash:

You can do it!

...if you apply for an individual withdrawal license which includes furnishing provenance for your funds:

home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/…

The Starbucks x Polygon loyalty announcement is so boring it's revolutionary.

A non-speculative, 1:1 drop-in replacement for typical loyalty programs.

That's exactly why it's a huge deal: One of the biggest knocks against crypto is that nothing so speculative and ponzi-like could ever be a replacement for existing digital rails.

But that conflates activity with infrastructure.

The infrastructure enables many things--casino games among them.

Today we launched Aztec Connect, the VPN for Ethereum.

I just used it to get some $stETH on mainnet Curve for $1.50 in fees, with complete privacy.

Fully private DeFi, with huge cost savings.

Why I think our private rollup is ridiculously bullish for Ethereum: First, how does it work?

When you deposit to Aztec, you're transferring funds to an Aztec smart contract on Ethereum, which issues you an encrypted note within our system.

Think of this like a receipt for your deposit.

The EVM has won.

It's the dominant smart contract execution architecture, and Solidity is the dominant smart contracting language.

But how will Solidity devs choose between the 20+ major EVM implementations that are out there? First, let's list them all out.

Ethereum ecosystem:

- Ethereum Mainnet
- Polygon Hermez
- Polygon Zero
- Polygon PoS
- Optimism
- Arbitrum
- Loopring
- zkSync
- Metis
- Scroll
- Boba