Meanwhile, investors, upon discovering the existence of “gold-backed cryptocurrencies,” collectively exclaimed, “Ah! A modern way to ignore Warren Buffett’s advice!” and started buying tokens with such vigor one wonders if alchemy was involved. Over the last month, more than $80 million worth of goldy tokens were minted, presumably without anyone actually swinging a pickaxe anywhere except perhaps in Minecraft.
The ADA price is up 13.3% over two weeks. Investors are giddy, Charles Hoskinson is tweeting in full cryptic-CEO mode, and meanwhile, everyone’s pretending they know what “Leios protocol” means. Here’s the pitch: Leios is Cardano’s answer to scalability and quantum resistance (whatever nightmares keep cryptographers up at night, that’s the fix).
Glover jawed with CryptoMoon—yes, that’s the real name—layin’ out all the perils and promises of holdin’ on to Bitcoin:
Behold! By early 2025, Ethereum’s dominion over startup founders had withered below half — a first, as unthinkable as tea without sugar. Meanwhile, Solana, bruised but unbowed by its FTX frolics, advanced with the optimism of a poet after three espressos. Wang — with the gravitas of someone who just dropped a plate of borscht and shrugged — declared that “momentum favors Solana.” Imagine Ethereum glancing nervously at its rearview mirror, only to see Solana weaving through traffic with the reckless abandon of a Lada at a police checkpoint.
As the ever-watchful @ai_9684xtpa whispered from within the blue void of X (formerly Twitter, now just existential crisis in app form), this ancient hodler entered in 2015, paying a princely ransom of $0.31 per ETH. After orchestrating a two-week selloff that would make even Behemoth the cat envious, the last grand piano dropped—a dainty 2,000 ETH flung at Kraken for $3.66 million, as if to say, “Take my bags, I’m off to Crimea!”
Right now, the ETH/BTC pair is floating around 0.019 BTC. But it’s eyeing the 0.016 BTC mark like a vulture circling its prey. In 2019, it hit that level before surging an eye-watering 450% over the course of a year. Let’s just say, if history repeats itself, people might need to start buying up more Ethereum than they can safely store under their mattress.
Melissa Song and Dustin Becker, those self-styled confessors of the enigmatic Gold DAO—an organization almost as chaotic and decentralized as my brother Dmitri—sat at their desks, weighed down by existential dread and the spectral presence of physical, serialized gold somewhere in a vault.
To the delight of frazzled crypto-enthusiasts everywhere (and the chagrin of anyone with more sense than fever), the Bitcoin blockchain, recently pronounced comatose by several severe men in ill-fitting suits, has staged a minor resurrection. Active addresses now frolic above 900,000—rather a lot of wallets for a funeral march, one thinks.
This means BANXA can now sprinkle Pi coins onto the wallets of eager folks in over 100 countries, just like fairy dust—only with slightly more paperwork and slightly less likelihood of spontaneous flight.
With $1.3 trillion in imaginary money traded in 2024 (enough, one might add, to finance several royal weddings or a couple of modest tsarist campaigns), Deribit’s leaders stared out their high-rise windows, sipping Turkish coffee, and considered what would happen should they bring their spectacle to the United States. Their CEO, Luuk Strijers, confessed to the Financial Times that the mood was changing — even the shadows had grown slightly less foreboding, provided one disregarded Wall Street’s eternal skepticism and the Congressmen’s tendency to legislate as if they were writing Tolstoyan novels: complex, everlasting, and confusing to all involved.
