Most people misunderstand Crypto because they think of Cryptoassets as Businesses, instead of thinking of them as Communities. A Community’s upside is much bigger than that of a Business, and it's the one thing that will not be replaced by AI anytime soon. 💹🧲

🚨 Elliptic has worked with @SecretService to freeze wallets holding $52.8 million in cryptoassets linked to Xinbi Guarantee, the second largest illicit online marketplace of all time. Merchants on Xinbi sell victim personal data, communications infrastructure and money laundering services to scam operations worldwide. Since 2022 the marketplace has processed at least $24 billion. Guarantee marketplaces run entirely on trust. Merchants post deposits with the platform because criminals have no legal recourse against each other, and the escrow model substitutes for it. That only works while everyone believes their funds are out of reach. But that trust is misplaced. Every dollar that has moved through Xinbi left a permanent record on a public blockchain. We have been investigating that record for years, and this week our work brought those funds within reach of law enforcement. Read how Elliptic's work enabled today's freeze:

The System (both inside and outside of Crypto) thrives on Division, Distraction and Gambling. The cryptoassets & communities that inspire Unity, Focus and Diamondhanding at an insane level will be the only ones that win huge on a global scale.

☠️ Address poisoning is a crypto scam built around how wallet addresses are displayed. When sending cryptoassets, people often copy a recent address from their transaction history and check the first and last few characters rather than the full string. Attackers place a lookalike address in that transaction history, one that matches those visible characters but differs in the middle. Because wallets shorten addresses in their display, the lookalike can be copied by mistake, sending funds to the attacker. No private key is exposed and no system is breached. Our new explainer covers how address poisoning works and how you can detect it:

Bad money creates opportunity for new money. Bitcoin would not exist in a world where USD was sound and there wasn’t financial repression With context, the weaknesses of Bitcoin (Quantum, Privacy, Security Budget) creates opportunity for new crypto-moneys. Your base case should be that new moneys like Zcash and Pearl don’t flip Bitcoin and the best they can hope for is to compliment it BUT, we’re still on the frontier of money. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to believe that the current uncertainty in Bitcoin means the optionality value of this new crop of moneylike cryptoassets is underpriced. Study them and put on some hedges or revalidate your singular conviction in Bitcoin And to clarify, Bitcoin is still my largest holding. I think it’s still really underowned within the crypto twitter crowd of active traders. Especially since the US Treasury Secretary is currently staring down a bond crisis straight to the face My positions in Zcash and Pearl are truly zero or hero. If they hit (zec $1t, Pearl $20b?), I will be paid fantastically. If they don’t zero, I’ll be totally fine

There was a bigger story behind the battle over stablecoin rewards in the CLARITY Act: a fight over who will control the underlying infrastructure of digital finance as tokenization moves rapidly from experiment to broad adoption. Tokenization is forcing a battle over whether this new financial system will be built primarily on private networks controlled by financial institutions, with central banks and regulators at the center, or on public networks, similar to the internet, that no financial institution owns and that anyone can build on. Many people don’t realize how systematic this battle between old and new has been, or how long it has been underway. As far back as 2021, the @baselcommittee effectively required banks to hold capital equal to 100% of their exposure to cryptoassets like BTC. That rule wasn’t designed to benefit banks - banks and their regulators frequently have competing interests - but its effect was to create a regulatory wall between the banking system and assets operating on open networks. Then, in 2024, the @BIS_org joined with seven central banks and dozens of the world’s largest banks and other financial institutions in Project Agorá to build an alternative tokenized payments system around commercial bank deposits and central bank money - essentially recreating the existing banking architecture on new technology rather than moving payments onto open networks. The common thread isn’t that banks and their regulators always agree. They don’t. And banks themselves increasingly experiment with public networks. But the core economics of banking - and the regulatory perimeter within which those economics operate - remain rooted in an institutionally controlled system. Banks and their regulators may have different interests within that system, but both have powerful reasons to resist financial activity migrating outside it to public networks that no institution controls. The stablecoin rewards fight was another chapter in this larger battle. Big banks sought restrictions on rewards that would make stablecoins less attractive as an alternative payments infrastructure. They activated community banks with warnings that rewards would cause massive deposit flight, despite never producing evidence for that claim. But the banking campaign was much bigger than rewards. The banks worked to peel away support for CLARITY among lawmakers in both parties, contributing to delays and ultimately the death of legislation that would have provided statutory protection for developers and decentralized financial applications operating outside bank-controlled payment rails. The Trump administration has embraced a very different approach to tokenization, competition and disruptive technologies. From its first days, the Trump Administration made it explicit U.S. policy to protect Americans’ ability to use open public blockchain networks, develop and deploy software, transact peer-to-peer and maintain self-custody - and to support innovation on permissionless blockchains. The President’s Digital Assets Working Group went further, calling on policymakers to embrace DeFi and describing the movement behind crypto as one dedicated to building a more open and efficient financial system. The administration has been putting that commitment into practice, using regulatory authority to enable more financial activity to move onchain and reducing regulatory barriers to the development of decentralized financial infrastructure. These regulatory steps don’t replace legislation. But the Trump administration deserves enormous credit for understanding what is ultimately at stake: not simply whether finance becomes tokenized, but what kind of financial architecture America will build. Finance will be tokenized. The question is what we tokenize onto: open infrastructure that anyone can build on, or a digital version of today’s system controlled by the institutions that dominate it. That is the fight.

🇺🇸 The GENIUS Act went from executive order to signed law in six months, without a crisis forcing it. That's almost unheard of in Washington. Elliptic's VP of Strategic Advisory Peter Phelan spent years at the Treasury and ran risk and controls at Citi. In his new piece, he argues that digital assets are changing how the US regulates. Specifically, rules are giving way to outcomes, periodic validation is giving way to continuous monitoring and agencies that used to work in silos are starting to coordinate. Companies handling cryptoassets in any capacity can stay ahead by building #compliance# programs for that new way of regulating.

I'm not a buyer yet, but if I were to be a buyer, imo the areas to watch for $BTC are: ~$80K: Nov '25 low, local low of this "bear" ~$74K: April '25 low, Tariff Tantrum low, just below $MSTR's cost basis (~$76K) ~$70K: Top of $50-70K range, near '21 high ~$58K: 200W SMA & on-chain cost basis (RV = ~$56K) ~$50K & below: bottom of the weekly range below, psychological, below this number you would see "death of BTC" calls once again Importantly, I don't care what happens. If we rally from here, I'll ride what I have and diversify my portfolio, if we fall apart I'll buy more $BTC & select cryptoassets.