Hello crypto maximalists, we love the bones of ye, we would marry you in the morning!! Thanks for settling in for the wild ride of the winds of change as the centralized mismanagement of the world fights it out against the decentralized beauty of money for the people, by the people, and of the people!
Dear Lord, it's been a rough weekend. We MADE THE COVER OF THE FT!!! but for all the wrong reasons. As a highbrow / lowbrow elitist overeducated friend once told us, as a meta comment referencing the band Bachman Turner Overdrive's song Taking Care of Business, " ya gotta remember the bad along with the good." Well, the FT had bad crypto news in spades, and Tuesday's crypto news takes that grist for the mill and punches down hard. OK, we deserve it this week, let's get to it dear readers - we all need every half penny of that sweet crypto to start rebuilding our liquidated positions.
It's a three shot professional hit. First up - the cover ! Yay! not. Only three paragraphs, but still TLDR. Note the groovy pun - "Chain block" oh hardy har har, tho TBF what passes for humour in the FT (or the WSJ) is always just, lame. The Story - Celsius locked up. BTC crashed. Binance locked up for three hours. Total crypto market cap, also including ether and ripple down from over three trillion to one trillion.
The REAL Story - that's about it, we got nuthin. Oh, OK, if we were not sick to our stomachs we could offer a jibe about wtf 1) would the Brits please call ETH ETH and not "ether," and 2) why mention poor old Ripple ( and call it "ripple"?) Who at the FT has a hardon against XRP? We admit we never liked Ripple, but it seems biased or ignorant to pick on XRP. Even if we can understand logically skipping over the stablecoins in the top eight by market cap, objective journalistic standards would demand beating on BNB and ADA before getting around to kicking XRP, that's just weird... at least it was a short article.
#2 - Lex piles on. 
The story - 1) Celsius can no longer brag about "lightning fast transactions." 2) 18.5% returns look fake compared to "fusty" tradfi that actually protects investments. 3) another quick kick at stablecoins/Terra, which only work when prices rise. 4) "Splashy" crypto websites will continue to rack up the body count of "victims." The REAL story? Again, we got - ahhh - nuthin. The truth walrus hurts. Well, OK, let's push back against YET AGAIN conflating all stablecoins with Terra. Actually, Lex, as you FREAKING know, fully backed non algo stablecoins dwarf the rest and ARE JUST FINE.
But here's the gem, the coup de grace 
The story - well two stories. The smaller one is just a primer on Celsius, Nexo et al, crypto lenders. Implies that nobody knows what the hell the unregulated lenders DO to provide such returns. Plus Defi is sometimes hacked. The large story - holy chit Alex is trying to challenge D'oh for the biggest loser in crypto 2022 title. LAST WEEKEND he stood up and said find "even one person who has a problem withdrawing." And you KNOW he knew the deal as Celsius dropped from 24 to 12 billion dollars in deposits. Anyway, Celsius locked, BInance stuttered, BTC crashed, "ether" crashed, CEL crashed, MicroStrategy and mikey sailor lost 25% in market cap, Coinbase 16%. Y'all know the deal, let us have a moment of silence.
The REAL Story - we got NUTHIN!! in fact, we actually got NEGATIVE NOTHINK!!! OK maybe the gang of FT authors could have mentioned Nexo's biz model of borrowing at 2-7% and loaning at 6-14% could real world work. Or, mention that Nexo offered to help out, or even buy out, Celsius, which would have been positive, interesting and relevant. But overall, arguably the FT went kinda easy here. They do say Celsius took a 400MM round of financing last year, even as the regulatory dawgs were a-sniffing. But they don't mention the rumours that Tether invested a billion smackeroonies in Celsius. They don't bring up the allegations that Celsius was investing in some deeply shady chit. Hell, they don't even bring up that Celsius had an employee fired, who was soon arrested for fraud and sexual harassment (at a previous gig. )
But the FT skips the REALLY fun/lurid parts !! - Understandingly, since it's hard to find in the media , so we can't list a reference source other than Reddit or Substack - Twitter took it down!! -apparently / allegedly Celsius had / has?? an ex porn star working as the head of institutional investments. Yes, a 24 year old woman somehow worked her way up to personally manage 300 MM in assets - 500MM by the time she was 25. Now we are all sure she was a super genius who had been working at crypto hedge funds - or something - since she was 14 and was totally legit. On the other hand, we have certainly hated working at companies where the C-suite was busy having affairs with each other and getting divorced, talk about distraction. Some of the less lurid pictures out there - we will not touch this one even with just our Preview annotator. 
Our wife used to joke that we could sleep with our boss if we had to to get ahead, but even skipping her temper, we never could/would. Nor did we ever have an affair with a colleague even while single, can you imagine having a lover's spat and then COMING TO WORK TO MEET THEM ON MONDAY!!?! And not much was worse than watching a co-worker getting a juicy promotion while she was sleeping with the boss. Depressing.
OK a lot of that was considered ' just wall street." Our one CEO had a button installed, hidden under his desk, to lock the door to his office remotely - our naive ass thought it was for comp discussions. That Fortune 50 CEO seemed like a nutcase to us. Once, when giving the CEO a demo with just us and our CTO, the CEO got up in the middle and started rooting around in the back of the Unix workstation - my CTO told us to let him do what he wanted ( he was looking for a VCR connection with a canned feed? we still dunno...)
We had thought the "me too" movement had come a long way, baby. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. Anyway, would seem there is nowhere to go but up from here crypto fans. Excelsior!
Love,
Dave
