simon morgan

@dotkrueger It’s closed

Bitcoin 110K. MSTR -7% Brutal. Happy Memorial Day guys.

Cantor Fitzgerald and Copper partner for secure Bitcoin financing. @Official_Cantor has chosen Copper as collateral manager and custodian for its new #Bitcoin financing business, designed to provide institutional investors with secure and efficient access to Bitcoin-backed financing. Learn more: bit.ly/4ilbBpj

Ethena and Exchange Risk: Bybit Case Study As the dust settles on the events of last weekend, we wanted to provide an in-depth breakdown of how the protocol handled what many thought would be a “worst case scenario” event for USDe Link in post below:

Update: All settlement cycles continue to be met by @Bybit_Official every 2 hours. We would like to emphasize that Copper also holds a collateral buffer from Bybit to meet PnL settlements as an additional layer of protection. This information is visible in a dashboard in real-time to all our clients. All underlying collateral is protected under a bankruptcy-remote trust structure, the first line of defence.

Rough last 24hrs for everyone involved. Firstly want to call out the response from @benbybit and the team. Don't think I've ever seen a team handle crisis communications as well as they did. Stood up to face the music immediately to provide transparent answers to the community. An example for us all to look up to. Ethena handled the largest single day of redemptions and unwound all unrealised exposure to Bybit within an hour of the news breaking. In any event, the unrealised exposure at its peak was always a fraction of the excess reserves behind USDe. At no point was USDe undercollateralised despite Bybit representing >20% of the hedging exposure as the second largest derivative exchange in the world. Even if the unrealised exposure to Bybit had not been reduced to zero within the hour, this exposure could have been lost entirely and USDe would have still been overcollateralised. We hope this event validates some of the design decisions that were made to reduce risk for our users using OES custody solutions. The easy design route was to avoid the costs and the added engineering complexity of custodians within our offchain hedging systems. But we don't make decisions because they are easy, we make decisions we think are right for our users in the long run. It is not good enough to listen to me speak about how we mitigate for these risks in theory, often you need to see it play out in real time with your own eyes to have confidence it actually works at scale. While in the short term this has been painful for many parties involved, I hope we have continued to build confidence and trust from our users on the go forward resilience of the model even in the face of extreme pressure. An event like this was often cited as the single biggest risk to USDe, and we have experienced zero loss to the backing or issues with regards to redemption requests. We are in the process of providing a full write-up on the event to help answer any open questions which we will share via the @ethena account shortly.

ByBit will take a haircat, most likely covered by their revenue. I would expect ByBit to survive this incident without issues. Ethena stood up like a champ. Aave stood up like a champ. Big winner is Copper's ClearLoop, PMF secured. Biggest winner is self custody. Onwards.

We are aware of the @Bybit_Official incident and want to reassure our clients that their collateral is whole and protected. Our ClearLoop network ensures all collateral is fully protected in a secure off-exchange environment with MPC-enabled security. ByBit has indeed settled client PnL in accordance with the latest settlement cycle. We’re liaising closely with ByBit and receiving regular updates. We will share relevant updates here.

@worldbest_17 It's Gareth bale

Guess the player who scored this goal. $25 for 5 random winners👍

First two months officially in the books (it's felt like six) and the ten bitcoin ETFs now have over $55b in assets with exactly double that in volume at $110b. If these were the numbers at the end of year I'd call them a success. To do it in eight weeks is simply absurd.

BREAKING: Total #Bitcoin ETF trading volume hits a record $7.5 billion today, 2.5 TIMES its $3 billion previous record. Breakdown of Volume by ETF: 1. BlackRock: $3.3 billion 2. Grayscale: $1.8 billion 3. Fidelity: $1.4 billion 4. ARK Invest: $425 million 5. Bitwise: $252 million 6. Invesco: $162 million 7. WisdomTree: $59 million 8. VanEck: $52 million 9. Franklin: $32 million 10. Valkyrie: $15 million To put this in perspective, Microsoft, the largest company in the world, has an average daily volume of ~$10 billion. Bitcoin is currently up 290% from its low and 15% away from a new all time high. Today was historic for Bitcoin.

Over the last year, crypto markets have seen: 1. Collapse of FTX, largest fraud in recent history 2. Collapse of regional banking system 3. $2 trillion bear market, its largest in history 4. Over 500 lawsuits and regulation cases 5. Multiple crypto lender bankruptcies 6. Binance fined a record $4.3 billion by US regulators 7. Increased calls for regulation around the globe Yet, #Bitcoin is up 160% this year and just hit $43,000. This market is incredibly resilient.

Crypto custody firm @CopperHQ plans to open a digital securities brokerage – Copper Securities – early next year in Abu Dhabi. @IanAllison123 reports. trib.al/anc9O3f

JUST IN: Crypto safekeeping firms @BitGo and @CopperHQ are combining their in-custody settlement networks. By @IanAllison123 trib.al/DfgQQ7Z

Today, the SEC appears to have continued their ongoing crusade to protect terrorist funding and large bank monopolies at the expense of the American consumer, innocent civilians in warzones, and technology that was created after the year 1940. I want to be clear that I'm not anti-regulator in saying this. Quite the reverse, actually! I have a lot of respect for the work of the Federal Reserve, the NYDFS, the JFSA, the CFTC, and others. Are they perfect? No, nobody is. Are they more of a positive force than most people who complain about regulators want to admit? With almost 100% certainty. I've had my differences with the OCC and FDIC on crypto regulations in particular, but I think in their case it's driven by a lack of understanding and the natural paranoia they have for the stability of the US banking system. Thus, even when I disagree, I'm usually not of the belief that their actions are motivated by malice, but rather lack of information and understanding that will be remedied over time as they get up to speed on things. I've also written several times about what an unenviable job most US financial regulators have and how we should appreciate them more. Then there is the SEC. To recap briefly on the history of the SEC, they have somehow managed to sue Ripple and Coinbase, then send Wells Notices to people like Paxos on products that are already regulated by a banking regulator. They've also destroyed LBRY, one of the few functioning crypto projects from the early boom which wasn't defrauding anyone, and they inexplicably shut down Stoner Cats. Do you notice what is not on that list? FTX. Celsius. Terraform Labs. Hex. SafeMoon. BlockFi. The list goes on. Basically, if you were an actual scam or criminal activity, you were 100% safe from the SEC and they were, in fact, going to go out of their way to assist you by attempting to cripple your legitimate competitors instead. There is a very strong argument that if the SEC simply did not exist and had been replaced with literally nothing, far less consumers would have been harmed in crypto. This brings me to today, where we find out the SEC, in response to all of the concerns being raised about terrorism financing, the still-ongoing issues Justin Sun-affiliated projects like TUSD, USDD, and Tron, and the increasing offshoring of all KYC/AML data due to projects leaving the United States, the SEC has decided to attempt to intimidate and investigate... PayPal? You can't make this shit up. PYUSD is transparently a stored value project under the NYDFS stablecoin guidance. Being incredibly blunt here, as someone with deep knowledge of the inner workings, if PYUSD is a security, so are Starbucks gift cards, prepaid debit cards, and airline reward points. This thing fails Howey so spectacularly it would be laughed out of court by a judge. It's also safer for consumers than standard PayPal e-money because it's bankruptcy remote. This is strictly better in all ways. And yet, in a target rich environment, the SEC continues to avoid going after anyone actually doing wrong and instead continue to target legitimate companies helping consumers in a way that is guaranteed to damage American security interests and push the space offshore in a way that makes it more viable for terrorists and criminals to use crypto because we slowly lose the tools to interdict them. Put differently: if Gary Gensler has been bribed by crypto scammers, organized crime, and Hamas, and was trying to help them while not tipping his hand, what would he be doing differently?

@Dougielarge Ha you’re going to need one now!

We’re in good company as @ethena launch their stablecoin backed by @LidoFinance stETH. Our partnership has seen Ethena integrate with ClearLoop, Copper’s off-exchange settlement network.

Excited to announce our end-to-end integration with @bitgetglobal @LidoFinance and @CopperHQ Ethena is happy to support Lido’s stETH collateral with institutional-grade custody solutions and one of the fastest growing derivative exchanges in the market More to come soon…

Excited to announce our first end-to-end integration with @Bybit_Official @LidoFinance and @CopperHQ For the first time in history, Lido’s stETH collateral is combined with institutional-grade custody solutions and a leading derivative exchange More to come soon…

"Given the state Welsh rugby is in and that they are playing a pair of props without a solitary cap to their name, a defeat for England would be embarrassing" ✍️ @SBarnesRugby thetimes.co.uk/article/wales-…