Jail is not that bad

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Read time: 3 mins (time per day SBF doesn't spend gaming)

Should've seen them yesterday!

What a week. There's far too much to distil into a lighthearted, hilarious, and free newsletter but we're here to do just that so pucker up.

This is The Reveal, where the fun side of crypto is pumped and dumped into your inbox every Friday.

News Hits 🗞

If you thought 2022 couldn't get any crazier, what unfolded this week with FTX sets a new bar for how nutty the crypto world still is.

What happened?

Binance, the largest crypto exchange in the world, was an early investor in a different exchange called FTX, which became a competitor to the behemoth.

Binance sold its stake in FTX in return for $2B of its token, $FTT, but when former billionaire CEO Sam Bankman-Fried lobbied against Binance – all hell broke loose.

As a result of SBF's bitching to regulators, the petulant Binance executive Changpeng Zhao aka CZ tweeted that he was going to dump $FTT.

This crashed the $FTT price, people panicked and wanted to withdraw from FTX which left them in a liquidity crisis.

After re-assuring the world that things were safe, SBF deleted that tweet and FTX went silent and paused withdrawals, creating more panic. 

Binance claimed to have wanted to acquire FTX to save them but after due diligence have decided not to.

The TLDR is that SBF & Co had a major God complex and operated without any checks and balances such as the popular concept of...a board, and it verges on criminal behaviour over that which is just irresponsible, for which there was also a lot to show for.

What now?

It's a stark reminder for you degens to not leave your precious crypto in centralised exchanges run by nutters. It's better off in a non-custodial wallet like friendly old MetaMask, where it's also easier to buy NFTs like Art Gobblers that will tank in price while you sleep.

But – we do have to accept that centralised exchanges allowed for beginners who are unable to learn how to use MetaMask to get into crypto. They have been your exit liquidity which is an unfortunate paradox. 

From here, it's looking like a pretty dark winter for crypto with most coins down fairly hard, with Solana hitting a 60% decline. It's another in a series of high profile calamities for the space as a result of recklessness that regulators, especially in the UK, saw coming.

Fair play to the squares.

Crypto is facing an existential crisis, fatigued by the constant need to be on guard and assume the worst of not just NFT rug pullers but major leaders in the industry who are featured on the cover page of Fortune magazine.

But, the optimist in you is seeing discounts. Three figure ETH, Sub 10k BTC... the stuff of dreams right? 

Patience my friend. There's probably a lot yet to come. 

In the mean time, a market has emerged for withdrawals-as-a-service (WaaS):

How Twitter reacted

Big words from our favourite pundit:

Must be another nice looking app we can lose our life savings on?

Anything is possible now:

The eternally annoying BitBoy, who seems to have picked up a raging Coke habit, somehow made it all about him:

Gainzy getting quite neggy:

All the while, SBF has been de-stressing in the only way he knows how:

One of the weirder side quests this week involved Do Kwon turning up on Cobie's light-hearted weekly Twitch stream to chat about all things extradition, fraud, prison and to pass some comment on the SBF events.

If that wasn't enough, fan-favourite Martin Shkreli also joined, giving his two-cents on the events and of course, first-hand accounts of what prison is like.

Sadly Ben Shapiro and Edward Snowden were busy.

It's like one of those sea shanty Tik Tok videos but with more booze.

A Digestif 🍸

Sometimes you need to take a break from crypto and just settle into some Trombone Champ. Enjoy.

Thanks for reading, folks. See you next week!