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The Protocol: Solana’s Allure for Devs; Avalanche’s Big Upgrade

Also: ENS picks tech for its L2; Bitcoin’s Runes Get an AMM

Welcome to The Protocol, CoinDesk’s weekly wrap-up of the most important stories in cryptocurrency tech development. I’m Marc Hochstein, CoinDesk’s deputy editor-in-chief for features, opinion and standards.

In this issue:

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  • Solana was the biggest draw for new crypto developers in 2024
  • No wonder: Solana’s transaction volume is off the charts
  • Coinbase alums take next step toward no-code blockchain development
  • Kraken’s ‘Ink’ layer-2 goes live
  • Avalanche activates biggest-ever upgrade
  • Ethereum’s ENS picks Consensys’ tech for its L2
  • Bitcoin’s Stacks L2 gets an automated market maker for Runes
  • Most Influential 2024: EigenLayer’s Sreeram Kannan

This article is featured in the latest issue of The Protocol, our weekly newsletter exploring the tech behind crypto, one block at a time. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Wednesday.

Network News

NEW DEVS ❤️SOLANA: The Solana ecosystem, ground zero for the memecoin craze, was the most popular blockchain among new developers this year, according to a report released last week by Electric Capital. In July, this community became the first since 2016 to bring on board more devs than Ethereum. Solana attracted 7,625 new developers in 2024, the most of any chain and a little over 1,000 more than Ethereum. The results underscore the challenge Ethereum faces as rival smart contract platform Solana’s low fees and fast transactions attract investment and talent. Read more.

SPEAKING OF SOLANA: Solana’s network activity has lit up as the Pudgy Penguins NFT project debuted its native token, PENGU, on the programmable blockchain. Solana registered a total transaction tally of 66.9 million Tuesday, the highest daily volume since its inception in 2020, according to data source Artemis. To highlight how busy it was, Solana’s transaction count eclipsed the total of all other major chains combined. Read more

THE INK IS DRY: Kraken, the seventh-largest crypto exchange, said its layer-2 rollup network, built on top of the Ethereum blockchain, has gone live. The network, called Ink, is Kraken’s answer to Base, the highly successful blockchain launched by rival exchange Coinbase. Like Base, Ink is based on the OP Stack, a customizable framework that lets developers build their own rollups using Optimism’s technology. The team had originally planned for Ink to go live in early 2025, so the launch of its main network is ahead of schedule. Read more

AVALANCHE UPGRADE: Avalanche, a layer-1 blockchain launched in 2020 that’s now the tenth-largest by total value locked (TVL), activated its highly anticipated Avalanche9000 upgrade Monday, marking the ecosystem’s biggest technical changes to date. The network has been prepping for these changes for months, with new features that will cut the costs for sending transactions, operating validators and building applications on the network. Leaders at Avalanche previously said that part of the goal with the upgrade is to attract developers to Avalanche and encourage them to create customized blockchains using its technology, known as subnets, or “L1s.” Read more.

A BOON FOR RUNES: Crypto degens have a new – and, if all goes according to plan, faster, cheaper and safer – way to trade Runes, the Bitcoin ecosystem’s answer to memecoins. An automated-market maker (AMM) for the Runes protocol went live on Wednesday on Stacks, following the unveiling of the layer-2 network’s native BTC-backed asset sBTC on Tuesday. It’s the first AMM for such tokens on Stacks. The teams behind decentralized exchange (DEX) Bitflow Finance and Bitcoin bridge Pontis developed the AMM. Runes launched in April and spurred a flurry of activity, paying 78.6 BTC ($8.18 million) in fees in the first 90 minutes. However, less than a month later, this excitement waned considerably, with fees dropping more than 50%. Bitflow’s aim is for its AMM to help Runes scale and address some of the shortcomings holding it back. Read more.

ENS PICKS L2 TECH: ENS Labs, the company behind the Ethereum Name Service, has picked Linea’s technology to build its upcoming layer-2 network, Namechain. Linea is a zero-knowledge rollup that came out in July 2023 and was built by Ethereum infrastructure giant Consensys. It is the seventh-largest rollup network, according to L2Beat, with $1 billion locked in its ecosystem. Rollups are a special type of blockchain where one can transact faster and at a lower cost. There are two kinds of rollups: optimistic and zero-knowledge. Optimistic rollups use optimistic proofs, which have a seven-day window to dispute transactions before they are finalized. Zero-knowledge rollups, by contrast, finalize proofs within minutes. ENS has been described as “the phone book for Web3,” but a more precise analogy is the web’s domain name service (DNS). The domain name “CoinDesk.com” is easier to remember and type than a numerical IP address. Similarly, ENS handles like parishilton.eth, which the namesake heiress acquired in 2021, are more relatable than the strings of letters and numbers that make up Ethereum wallet addresses. For this service, “we need fast finality,” said Nick Johnson, the founder and lead developer of ENS. That’s because “you want to be able to update your ENS name and have the chain reflect it in the smallest interval possible. And to do that and have it remain decentralized and secure, we need fast finality, and optimistic roll-ups can’t deliver that.” Read more.

NO CODE, NO PROBLEM? Patchwork, a startup focused on simplifying blockchain and smart-contract development founded by former Coinbase employees, has released the next version of its low-to-no-code tools for building decentralized applications (dapps). Currently linked to Coinbase’s Base and backed by Coinbase Ventures, the “Create-Patchwork” picks-and-shovels approach lowers the barriers to building blockchain applications and attaching data to them. Following the trend toward easily generated content, the complex world of blockchains and smart-contract design is on a path to no-code applications, or a “text-to-app” experience. Create-Patchwork is the first of several features the team plans to roll out in early 2025 and a foundational step to enable creators to generate contracts and applications in seconds using natural language inputs. “Patchwork is an Ethereum protocol that makes it really easy to build dynamic on-chain applications,” co-founder Kevin Day said in an interview. “It lets on-chain things own other on-chain things, and it allows anyone to attach programmable data to on-chain things.” Read more

EIGENLAYER’S SREERAM KANNAN: KING OF THE PROFESSOR COINS

EigenLayer founder Sreeram Kannan at ETH Denver 2024 (Danny Nelson/CoinDesk)

For a crypto founder who’s attracted so much controversy, Sreeram Kannan is surprisingly sanguine.

In a wide-ranging interview after his selection as one of CoinDesk’s “Most Influential” figures in crypto for 2024, the EigenLayer founder was generous with his time, chatting more than an hour beyond our scheduled slot. I was surprised at his openness because the last time we spoke, a colleague and I had just published an investigation into potential conflicts of interest at his company, Eigen Labs, and in the interim Kannan had disavowed our reporting point-by-point on a Blockworks podcast.

This time, Kannan emerged in a different light. Whatever his misgivings about CoinDesk’s past coverage, they didn’t seem top-of-mind.

What emerged wasn’t the portrait of a defensive tech founder, but rather that of a driven, thoughtful academic-turned-entrepreneur still adjusting to a spotlight few in this industry ever enjoy. Instead of bitterness or evasion, I found ambition, reflection and a quiet kind of excitement.

Kannan seemed as astonished as anyone by how swiftly EigenLayer had transformed from a concept into one of crypto’s most talked-about experiments, telling CoinDesk that he continued to view EigenLayer as a “scrappy startup.”

Over the past 12 months, EigenLayer — which allows emerging blockchain applications to borrow Ethereum’s robust security — went from a relative unknown to an industry heavyweight. The platform raised more than $100 million from venture firms including Andreessen Horowitz and, before even fully launching, drew hundreds of millions of dollars in deposits from crypto users seeking extra yield. Many were incentivized by a viral points program that investors hoped would translate into a lucrative future token airdrop.

EigenLayer’s success during the bear market was striking, and Kannan may have played a larger role than any other entrepreneur in revitalizing decentralized finance on Ethereum. But not everything went according to plan. Industry critics took issue with the EIGEN token distribution plan — which locked up tokens for months and barred claimants from certain geographies — as well as the platform’s slower-than-expected feature rollout and concerns about “rehypothecation,” or the reuse of collateral for multiple purposes. In August, the CoinDesk investigation (that Kannan disputed in the podcast) raised questions about EigenLayer’s conflict-of-interest policies, which may have allowed employees preferential access to tokens powered by its platform.

None of this seemed to derail Kannan’s intellectual ascent. Beyond running Eigen Labs, he still holds a position as an affiliate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Washington, and his theory of “restaking” — letting people reuse staked Ethereum assets to secure other networks — has sparked a wave of innovation and copycats. He’s become a familiar face on the conference circuit, where he unpacks his vision of blockchains as tools for solving humanity’s endless “coordination problems.”

Blockchains, Kannan says, “are the biggest upgrade to human civilization since the U.S. Constitution.”

CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL PROFILE BY COINDESK’S SAM KESSLER:

Money Center

‘Wrapped’ in intrigue

  • Coinbase Says It Nixed wBTC Because Justin Sun Posed ‘Unacceptable Risk’
  • WBTC Episode ‘Reopened Old Wounds’ of Centralized Failures: Bitcoin Builders Association

Deals and grants

  • Stablecoin Payments Platform BVNK Raises $50M to Fuel U.S. Expansion
  • RWA-Focused Plume Raises $20M from Brevan Howard, Others Ahead of Mainnet Launch
  • Custody Firm Taurus Partners With Temenos Bringing Crypto Wallets to Thousands of Banks

Regulatory and policy

  • Next U.S. Senate Banking Chair Calls Crypto ‘Next Wonder’ of World

Calendar

  • Jan 9-12, 2025: CES, Las Vegas
  • Jan. 15-19: World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland
  • January 21-25: WAGMI conference, Miami.
  • Jan. 24-25: Adopting Bitcoin, Cape Town, South Africa.
  • Jan. 30-31: PLAN B Forum, San Salvador, El Salvador.
  • Feb. 1-6: Satoshi Roundtable, Dubai
  • Feb. 19-20, 2025: ConsensusHK, Hong Kong.
  • Feb. 23-24: NFT Paris
  • Feb 23-March 2: ETHDenver
  • March 18-19: Digital Asset Summit, London
  • May 14-16: Consensus, Toronto.
  • May 27-29: Bitcoin 2025, Las Vegas.

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Razzlekhan’s Husband, the Bitfinex Hacker, Makes First Public Statement Since Arrest

In a video posted to X, Ilya Lichtenstein reiterates he acted alone in stealing 120,000 bitcoin, denying a Netflix documentary’s speculation.

Ilya Lichtenstein, who pled guilty last year to charges related to the 2016 theft of 120,000 bitcoin from Bitfinex, has made his first public statement since his 2022 arrest.

In a five-minute video posted to X (formerly Twitter) on Thursday, Lichtenstein reiterated that he was the hacker and that he acted alone, denying speculation in a Netflix documentary that his father (or, perhaps, some spy agency, maybe Russia’s) might have been involved in the theft.

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“My dad is no hacker, he doesn’t even know how to use Instagram,” said Lichtenstein, who was sentenced to five years in prison for conspiracy to commit money laundering, including the time he was incarcerated after the arrest while the case was pending.

“I offer my sincerest apologies to Bitfinex for all the stress that I have caused them,” he said in the video, recorded from prison during a remote visit with his wife. “I knew what I was doing was wrong and I did it anyway because I didn’t care … I look back at the person I was then, and I hate myself. I hate myself.”

In the video, Lichtenstein also provided an update on restitution for the funds he stole from Bitfinex.

“For the past three years, I have worked hard to account for and return all assets down to the last satoshi, as required by my plea agreement, and I will continue to do so,” Lichtenstein said, showing bags under his eyes.
A restitution hearing is set for February to determine whether they should be distributed to Bitfinex or to its customers who were affected by the hack.

Razzlekhan speaks

Lichtenstein’s wife, Heather “Razzlekhan” Morgan, pled guilty to one count of money laundering conspiracy and one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States.

Prosecutors said she became aware of the hack only years after the fact and was enlisted by her husband to launder the stolen bitcoin.

“In many ways, my wife … is just another victim of my bad decisions,” Lichtenstein said in the video.

Last month, Morgan was sentenced to 18 months in prison for her supporting role in Lichtenstein’s crimes.

“It’s nice to begin to have the public record surrounding our case set straight,” Morgan told CoinDesk, referring to the video her husband released. “You would think that would have happened after our sentencing memos got filed, but that really hasn’t been the case. There are so many myths that I look forward to debunking when we tell the real story.”

Best known for her goofy rap videos, Morgan recently began selling custom videos for $125 a pop on Cameo, a sort of non-pornographic version of Onlyfans. Her prison sentence could begin as soon as next month.

“Despite everything you’ve read, my Razzlekhan persona never had anything to do with this case, besides the government mentioning it in their charging documents. I created Razzlekhan years before I ever knew my husband had hacked Bitfinex,” Morgan told CoinDesk.

“While our criminal case was open, I was unable to speak publicly or tell my story,” she said. “This also meant I could not publish any articles or release any new artworks or songs the last three years. Now that the case is over, I look forward to freely expressing myself creatively again. … I am eager to tell the story of what really happened.”

Takes one to catch one

Atoning for his misdeeds in court, Lichtenstein said that after he serves his time he plans to pursue a career fighting cybercrime.

In Tuesday’s video, Lichtenstein reiterated that pledge.

“When I am released from prison … I plan to dedicate myself to working in the cybersecurity industry,” Lichtenstein said. “I know the cyber threats that we face and I know how to stop them.”

The bitcoin stolen in the 2016 hack was worth $70 million at the time and around $12 billion today.

The Netflix documentary leaves viewers with the impression that a substantial portion of the stolen funds remain missing, but according to Lichtenstein’s lawyer, this is not the case.

“With significant help from Mr. Lichtenstein, the government has recovered nearly all of the assets stolen during the 2016 Bitfinex hack,” the lawyer, Samson Enzer of Cahill Gordon & Reindel LLP, told CoinDesk. “In total, approximately 114,601 BTC (representing 96% of the approximately 119,754 BTC taken in the hack) were recovered, as well as 29 additional assets with substantial value.”

The U.S. Department of Justice did not respond by press time to CoinDesk’s inquiry about the percentage of stolen funds that were recovered.

Merhaba arkadaşlar, bugün sizlere Prizmabet adlı bir bahis sitesinden bahsedeceğim. Prizmabet, Betconstruct altyapısı ile üyelerine kaliteli hizmetler veren ve ülkemizin önde gelen bahis sitelerinden bir tanesidir. 2009 yılında kurulan Prizmabet, lisanslı, güvenilir ve avantajlı bir site olarak dikkat çekmektedir. Prizmabet’te spor bahisleri, canlı bahisler, casino, canlı casino, slot oyunları, sanal sporlar ve daha pek çok seçenek bulabilirsiniz. Prizmabet’te oyun oynamak için aradığınız ortamı fazlası ile bulacaksınız.

Prizmabet’in en önemli özelliklerinden biri de Prizmabet TV kanalıdır. Bu kanal sayesinde bahis sitesinde bulunan müsabakaları üyeler bir ücrete katlanmadan istedikleri zaman takip edebiliyor. Böylece hem heyecanlı hem de kazançlı bir bahis deneyimi yaşayabiliyorsunuz. Prizmabet TV kanalında futbol, basketbol, tenis, voleybol gibi popüler spor dallarının yanı sıra daha az bilinen sporlara da yer verilmektedir. Prizmabet TV kanalını kullanmak için sadece siteye üye olmanız ve yatırım yapmanız yeterlidir.

Prizmabet ayrıca üyelerine bol miktarda bonus ve promosyon da sunmaktadır. Prizmabet’te ilk üyelik bonusu olarak 100 TL deneme bonusu alabilirsiniz. Bunun yanında yatırım bonusları, kayıp bonusları, arkadaş davet bonusu, doğum günü bonusu gibi farklı bonuslar da mevcuttur. Prizmabet bonusları sayesinde daha fazla oyun oynayabilir ve kazancınızı artırabilirsiniz. Prizmabet bonuslarının çevrim şartları da oldukça makul seviyededir.

Prizmabet para yatırma ve çekme işlemleri konusunda da üyelerine kolaylık sağlamaktadır. Prizmabet’te banka havalesi, kredi kartı, papara, cepbank, QR kod, bitcoin gibi farklı yöntemlerle para yatırabilir ve çekebilirsiniz. Para yatırma ve çekme işlemleri 7/24 yapılabilmekte ve kısa sürede hesaplara yansımaktadır. Prizmabet para yatırma ve çekme işlemlerinde herhangi bir komisyon veya kesinti de yapmamaktadır.

Prizmabet müşteri hizmetleri de üyelerine 7/24 canlı destek hizmeti sağlamaktadır. Prizmabet canlı destek ekibi sayesinde site ile ilgili her türlü soru, sorun veya önerinizi iletebilir ve anında çözüm bulabilirsiniz. Prizmabet canlı destek ekibi profesyonel, güler yüzlü ve yardımseverdir.

Sonuç olarak, Prizmabet ülkemizin en iyi bahis sitelerinden biri olarak gösterilebilir. Prizmabet’te hem eğlenceli hem de kazançlı bir bahis deneyimi yaşayabilirsiniz. Prizmabet’e üye olmak için güncel giriş adresini web sitemizden bulabilirsiniz. Prizmabet’e girmek için tıklayınız! Prizmabet’e katıldığınıza pişman olmayacaksınız!

EigenLayer’s Sreeram Kannan: King of the Professor Coins

Kannan may have played a larger role than any other entrepreneur in revitalizing DeFi on Ethereum. But not everything went according to plan.

For a crypto founder who’s attracted so much controversy, Sreeram Kannan is surprisingly sanguine.

Story continues below

In a wide-ranging interview after his selection as one of CoinDesk’s “Most Influential” figures in crypto for 2024, the EigenLayer founder was generous with his time, chatting more than an hour beyond our scheduled slot. I was surprised at his openness because the last time we spoke, a colleague and I had just published an investigation into potential conflicts of interest at his company, Eigen Labs, and in the interim Kannan had disavowed our reporting point-by-point on a Blockworks podcast.

This time, Kannan emerged in a different light. Whatever his misgivings about CoinDesk’s past coverage, they didn’t seem top-of-mind.

What emerged wasn’t the portrait of a defensive tech founder, but rather that of a driven, thoughtful academic-turned-entrepreneur still adjusting to a spotlight few in this industry ever enjoy. Instead of bitterness or evasion, I found ambition, reflection and a quiet kind of excitement.

Kannan seemed as astonished as anyone by how swiftly EigenLayer had transformed from a concept into one of crypto’s most talked-about experiments, telling CoinDesk that he continued to view EigenLayer as a “scrappy startup.”

Over the past 12 months, EigenLayer — which allows emerging blockchain applications to borrow Ethereum’s robust security — went from a relative unknown to an industry heavyweight. The platform raised more than $100 million from venture firms including Andreessen Horowitz and, before even fully launching, drew hundreds of millions of dollars in deposits from crypto users seeking extra yield. Many were incentivized by a viral points program that investors hoped would translate into a lucrative future token airdrop.

EigenLayer’s success during the bear market was striking, and Kannan may have played a larger role than any other entrepreneur in revitalizing decentralized finance on Ethereum. But not everything went according to plan.

Industry critics took issue with the EIGEN token distribution plan — which locked up tokens for months and barred claimants from certain geographies — as well as the platform’s slower-than-expected feature rollout and concerns about “rehypothecation,” or the reuse of collateral for multiple purposes. In August, the CoinDesk investigation (that Kannan disputed in the podcast) raised questions about EigenLayer’s conflict-of-interest policies, which may have allowed employees preferential access to tokens powered by its platform.

None of this seemed to derail Kannan’s intellectual ascent. Beyond running Eigen Labs, he still holds a position as an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Washington, though he is currently on leave, and his theory of “restaking” — letting people reuse staked Ethereum assets to secure other networks — has sparked a wave of innovation and copycats. He’s become a familiar face on the conference circuit, where he unpacks his vision of blockchains as tools for solving humanity’s endless “coordination problems.”

Blockchains, Kannan says, “are the biggest upgrade to human civilization since the U.S. Constitution.”

Academia

Kannan grew up in Chennai, in southern India. At first, he was drawn to pure math, staying in India for his undergraduate and master’s degrees. He studied telecommunications, a discipline that would later prove relevant to crypto’s distributed systems.

In 2008, he moved to the United States to earn another master’s in mathematics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, followed by a Ph.D. in entrepreneurship. Then, postdoctoral stints at Berkeley and Stanford opened his eyes to new academic frontiers.

At Berkeley, a lecture on “Synthetic Genomics” lured Kannan into the intricate realm of reprogramming living systems. “I said, ‘Okay, that seems much more fun than trying to get people to download more and more data on their phones,’” Kannan remarked.

Computational biology became Kannan’s specialty. As an associate professor at the University of Washington, he worked with his students to develop complex mathematical models to study the structure of DNA. Then advances in artificial intelligence blindsided him. One of Kannan’s students proposed using AI for a particularly tricky DNA sequencing problem, and Kannan balked — surely a neural network couldn’t outperform his finely tuned equations. Yet, in just two weeks, the AI beat Kannan’s best benchmarks.

Kannan came to a disturbing realization: “In five or ten years, all the stuff I was doing — the mathematical algorithms — is all gone,” he said. “AI will do everything.”

Pathfinding

Confronted with AI’s relentless rise, Kannan saw two paths: go deeper into AI-driven computational biology or try something new. He chose the latter.

In 2017, a call from his Ph.D. advisor alerted him to Bitcoin’s meteoric rise. Kannan began dabbling in crypto, and a reading of Yuval Noah Harari’s “Sapiens” offered deeper inspiration. Kannan’s takeaway from the bestseller was that “the reason why humans are special is not that we are intelligent,” or “can innovate.” Instead, humanity’s strength comes from our ability to coordinate at scale.

“Coordination is communication plus commitments,” Kannan said, explaining that while the internet had solved global communication, there was still no digital-native way to ensure trust. To Kannan, the trustless architecture of blockchains could fill that void. “If you don’t trust somebody, you’re not going to be able to coordinate,” he said, framing blockchains as the next evolutionary leap in human cooperation.

He dove deeper into Bitcoin, noting its low throughput and inefficiencies. That felt oddly familiar. “This is what I had studied in my PhD: How do you optimize a peer-to-peer wireless network?” Crypto’s bottlenecks and scaling issues seemed like the perfect place to apply his telecommunications expertise.

By early 2018, Kannan had found his purpose in crypto: not just to tinker, but to use his academic experience to address fundamental human coordination and scaling problems. He was ready, as he put it, “to go all in.”

Founding EigenLayer

Kannan’s early path through crypto founderdom included a few less-than-successful pit stops, among them building a short-lived NFT marketplace. “I realized I can only really build things for which I, or some core team members, are also the consumers,“ Kannan said. He shuttered the project in under a year.

He then began shopping around ideas for new blockchain security models, including one that he proposed to Cardano, the blockchain project helmed by Ethereum co-founder Charles Hoskinson. Kannan’s work in this area eventually culminated in an idea that stuck: “restaking” — the technology that would eventually underpin EigenLayer.

Ultimately, Kannan focused on Ethereum, the most widely used smart-contract blockchain, and he formed Eigen Labs, the company behind EigenLayer. The new platform’s goal was straightforward: let emerging blockchain projects “borrow” Ethereum’s security through restaking.

Ethereum is secured by a system in which users “stake” ether (ETH) as collateral, effectively earning interest in return for helping validate the network. Misbehavior – such as misreporting transactions or going offline – risks having collateral slashed.

EigenLayer builds on that structure, allowing stakers to earn additional returns by “restaking” their ETH pledged on the main chain to secure other networks, known as “actively validated services” or AVSs.

It’s unlikely most stakers (or restakers) really understand how this all works under the hood. Most investors stake ETH because they want to earn interest. EigenLayer promised to boost yields with its restaking.

For AVS developers, EigenLayer provides an easy way to tap into Ethereum’s collateral reserves without building a new security framework from scratch. This concept of “shared security” resonated widely and helped propel EigenLayer’s sudden rise.

“It’s a crazy, 100-year project, and it upgrades the human species,” Kannan told CoinDesk.

Growing pains

As EigenLayer soared, the bright lights brought scrutiny. “There was a lot of uncomfortable attention,” recalls Kannan. The attention was “positive, initially,” but it eventually began to sour in some corners.

“I think the first time the negativity hit was after the token launch,” reflected Kannan.

Before announcing the EIGEN token, EigenLayer gave “points” to depositors, a common tactic in crypto to spark early interest. Officially, the points are just an informal tally meant to gamify the system. But people mainly racked up points because they assumed they’d eventually be able to cash them in for EIGEN crypto tokens — speculation that EigenLayer did little to quell.

Entire markets emerged around these points, even though they were not meant to hold intrinsic value and EigenLayer never directly confirmed that it would release a token.

Early enthusiasm surrounding EigenLayer points turned into disappointment once the EIGEN token details finally emerged in April. People who expected easy liquidity chafed at EigenLayer’s plan to lock tokens for several months. Some felt excluded by geography-based restrictions, which Eigen Labs imposed to avoid violating U.S. securities laws. Others criticized EigenLayer’s slow feature rollout and fretted over conflict-of-interest issues, including (but not limited to) those raised by CoinDesk’s investigation.

“We had these features which were coming up. We had more decentralization coming up,” said Kannan. In the EigenLayer founder’s mind, he was “trying to protect the rights of all the people holding tokens” with his conservative regulatory approach, and by blocking transfers until after the platform was ready to release its main features. But, Kannan admits, ”it just blew up in the most negative possible manner.”

Kannan attributes some of the turbulence to his academic roots. He’d stepped into a world rife with hype cycles, tribal spheres, and financialization, and he was still learning its rhythms.

Early on, he realized that building a crypto startup required a more diverse team and skill set than any academic project. In one of his earlier failed crypto ventures, “everybody was similar,” with PhDs from “Stanford, MIT, and the University of Washington.” With EigenLayer, Kannan knew he needed not just brilliant engineers but also clear communicators, community advocates, and savvy business operators.

But Kannan still had to learn how to turn intellectual rigor into practical progress — and how to communicate that progress to a restless audience. The token fiasco exposed a disconnect between Eigen Labs and its community.

Users and developers wanted more transparency, collaboration, and communication. To Kannan, those demands felt extreme even by crypto’s warped, highly financialized standards. But he eventually understood that his perception of EigenLayer, as a scrappy startup, didn’t match how others saw it, as an industry juggernaut.

Kannan recalls being at a crypto conference and having a stranger ask him how the crypto community should address a concerning trend of over-leverage in crypto markets. Kannan was confused. “That doesn’t have anything to do with EigenLayer,” he recalled thinking. “I asked him, ‘Why are you telling me this?’” The answer: “Because you’re an industry leader.”

It was a turning point. Kannan, who once saw himself as “just some startup guy,” began accepting this new reality. Influence comes with responsibility and complexity.

One EigenLayer investor reminded Kannan that as he charted new territory, he would continue facing unexpected hurdles. In founding a startup, Kannan would be forced to reckon with something he was used to from his research days: trial and error. “You will learn,” the investor told him, “So I’m going to let you make your mistakes.”

Merhaba arkadaşlar, bugün sizlere Prizmabet adlı bir bahis sitesinden bahsedeceğim. Prizmabet, Betconstruct altyapısı ile üyelerine kaliteli hizmetler veren ve ülkemizin önde gelen bahis sitelerinden bir tanesidir. 2009 yılında kurulan Prizmabet, lisanslı, güvenilir ve avantajlı bir site olarak dikkat çekmektedir. Prizmabet’te spor bahisleri, canlı bahisler, casino, canlı casino, slot oyunları, sanal sporlar ve daha pek çok seçenek bulabilirsiniz. Prizmabet’te oyun oynamak için aradığınız ortamı fazlası ile bulacaksınız.

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Prizmabet ayrıca üyelerine bol miktarda bonus ve promosyon da sunmaktadır. Prizmabet’te ilk üyelik bonusu olarak 100 TL deneme bonusu alabilirsiniz. Bunun yanında yatırım bonusları, kayıp bonusları, arkadaş davet bonusu, doğum günü bonusu gibi farklı bonuslar da mevcuttur. Prizmabet bonusları sayesinde daha fazla oyun oynayabilir ve kazancınızı artırabilirsiniz. Prizmabet bonuslarının çevrim şartları da oldukça makul seviyededir.

Prizmabet para yatırma ve çekme işlemleri konusunda da üyelerine kolaylık sağlamaktadır. Prizmabet’te banka havalesi, kredi kartı, papara, cepbank, QR kod, bitcoin gibi farklı yöntemlerle para yatırabilir ve çekebilirsiniz. Para yatırma ve çekme işlemleri 7/24 yapılabilmekte ve kısa sürede hesaplara yansımaktadır. Prizmabet para yatırma ve çekme işlemlerinde herhangi bir komisyon veya kesinti de yapmamaktadır.

Prizmabet müşteri hizmetleri de üyelerine 7/24 canlı destek hizmeti sağlamaktadır. Prizmabet canlı destek ekibi sayesinde site ile ilgili her türlü soru, sorun veya önerinizi iletebilir ve anında çözüm bulabilirsiniz. Prizmabet canlı destek ekibi profesyonel, güler yüzlü ve yardımseverdir.

Sonuç olarak, Prizmabet ülkemizin en iyi bahis sitelerinden biri olarak gösterilebilir. Prizmabet’te hem eğlenceli hem de kazançlı bir bahis deneyimi yaşayabilirsiniz. Prizmabet’e üye olmak için güncel giriş adresini web sitemizden bulabilirsiniz. Prizmabet’e girmek için tıklayınız! Prizmabet’e katıldığınıza pişman olmayacaksınız!

Donald Trump: The Crypto President

His July speech at the Bitcoin Conference, in Nashville, was a turning point for crypto, promising an easier path for the industry heading into 2025.

The morning after Bitcoin hit $100,000 for the first time, Donald Trump took a victory lap.

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“CONGRATULATIONS BITCOINERS!!! $100,000!!!” he posted on his platform Truth Social. “YOU’RE WELCOME!!!”

The price of Bitcoin has been on a tear over the last month, rising over $30,000 — some 45% — since Trump won election to a second term as president of the United States. While some price action after the election was was predicted whoever won the election, the speed at which bitcoin hit triple-digits was widely seen as a direct result of Trump’s win. The industry hopes that, with Trump in the White House next year, it will finally get regulatory clarity clearing a way for further growth and expansion of the digital assets sector.

This profile is part of CoinDesk’s Most Influential 2024 package. For all of this year’s nominees, click here.

The first time he was president, Trump did not do a whole lot for the cryptocurrency industry. While some of his regulators were ostensibly pro-crypto, by and large his administration proposed rules and took on enforcement actions seeking to limit the size of the industry.

That has all changed that all changed as Trump took the stage at the Bitcoin Conference in Nashville on July 27, promising to make the U.S. the “crypto capital of the planet,” free Ross Ulbricht, fire SEC Chair Gary Gensler and take a dramatically different approach to crypto than the Biden Administration.

“They don’t understand it,” he said of Democrats at the time. “They are blocking your path. They’re blocking your way. But I’ve made it a lot easier for you because the SEC has been very, very tough on you.”.

In doing so, Trump elevated an already-emboldened crypto industry to a new level in the political discourse. While the industry — largely funded by the executives of the now-defunct FTX empire — threw a fair bit of money around in 2022, that campaign war chest was not deployed as strategically or as effectively as it was in 2024. And it shows signs of only becoming more overt. And the industry at large has celebrated what it views as a potentially friendlier four years of policymaking than outgoing President Joe Biden’s administration provided.

For these reasons, Donald Trump, alongside executives who encouraged his pivot to crypto this electoral cycle, including Amanda Fabiano, David Bailey and Ryan Selkis, is among CoinDesk’s Most Influential figures in 2024.

Popular discourse

2024 was the year that crypto has really broken out as an election issue. Candidates at multiple levels mentioned crypto as they ran for office, ranging from the presidential contest to candidates for the House of Representatives and Senate.

Trump actively solicited support from the crypto industry for months. Before Nashville, he issued several non-fungible token launches, stretching back to 2022. He’s involved in World Liberty Financial, a crypto project heavily supported by his sons which recently received a $30 million infusion from Tron and HTX’s Justin Sun, allowing Trump himself to directly profit off the venture.

One lawmaker, who did not wish to be identified, pointed to the amount of crypto money donated to his campaign,and the possibility of even just a few more votes, as reason enough for Trump to appeal to the crypto industry earlier this year.

“If crypto is going to define the future, I want [it] to be mined, minted and made in the USA. It’s going to be,” Trump said in his Nashville appearance. “It’s not going to be made anywhere else. And if Bitcoin is going to the moon, as we say, it’s going to the moon, I want America to be the nation that leads the way and that’s what’s going to happen.”

Since the election, crypto has enjoyed a surge in popularity. Mainstream news organizations are writing about the sector’s quirks again, while companies trying to tie digital assets to the more traditional financial markets have filed a flurry of applications to list exchange-traded products for Solana and XRP.

Some of Trump’s initial picks seem poised to support the crypto industry. Scott Bessent, Trump’s pick for Treasury Secretary, said he was “excited” by Trump’s “embrace of crypto.”

“Crypto is about freedom. The crypto economy is here to stay,” Bessent said during a Fox News appearance earlier this year. “To me, one of the most exciting things about Bitcoin is a generation of investors who maybe post the Great Financial Crisis had been looking for investment opportunities, maybe they soured on markets, crypto is bringing in young people, it’s bringing in people who haven’t participated in markets.”

Paul Atkins, Trump’s pick to chair the Securities and Exchange Commission, is an adviser to crypto projects including Securitize and Reserve, and joined The Digital Chamber’s board in 2018.

And just Thursday night, Trump named venture capitalist David Sacks as his “AI and crypto czar.” It’s unclear as of press time just what responsibilities this position will have, but Sacks is a longtime crypto booster. His company, Craft Ventures, has invested in a plethora of crypto companies, ranging from Bitwise to Lightning Labs.

2025

When Trump takes office next month, he’ll do so having eked out a narrow popular vote win and with a Republican trifecta — the Grand Old Party will hold the majority in the House and Senate. This means there is a real chance Republicans can enact a comprehensive crypto-friendly legislative regime. Ahead of November’s election, some Republicans used that as a talking point.

“We have a real opportunity to do big things,” Congressman Andy Barr (R-Ky.), one of several lawmakers vying to run the powerful House Financial Services Committee, told me. “The digital asset agenda, both stablecoins and market structure, needs to be a prominent feature of the House Financial Services Committee’s legislative agenda.”

Senator Tim Scott (R-S.C.), who will take charge of the Senate Banking Committee next year, said Trump “has been very clear on his position of being pro-crypto” at an event in August.

“That position puts the entire Republican apparatus on the table, leaning in, looking for a solution,” he said.

The Republican party platform said it would pursue policies that support crypto innovation and “end Democrats’ unlawful … crackdown” while supporting self-custody. Senator Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) said at the same event in August that “the Republican platform was written by basically Donald Trump.”

“He’s supportive of digital assets,” she said. “He has spoken positively about digital assets. He wants to move the needle in this area.”

Merhaba arkadaşlar, bugün sizlere Prizmabet adlı bir bahis sitesinden bahsedeceğim. Prizmabet, Betconstruct altyapısı ile üyelerine kaliteli hizmetler veren ve ülkemizin önde gelen bahis sitelerinden bir tanesidir. 2009 yılında kurulan Prizmabet, lisanslı, güvenilir ve avantajlı bir site olarak dikkat çekmektedir. Prizmabet’te spor bahisleri, canlı bahisler, casino, canlı casino, slot oyunları, sanal sporlar ve daha pek çok seçenek bulabilirsiniz. Prizmabet’te oyun oynamak için aradığınız ortamı fazlası ile bulacaksınız.

Prizmabet’in en önemli özelliklerinden biri de Prizmabet TV kanalıdır. Bu kanal sayesinde bahis sitesinde bulunan müsabakaları üyeler bir ücrete katlanmadan istedikleri zaman takip edebiliyor. Böylece hem heyecanlı hem de kazançlı bir bahis deneyimi yaşayabiliyorsunuz. Prizmabet TV kanalında futbol, basketbol, tenis, voleybol gibi popüler spor dallarının yanı sıra daha az bilinen sporlara da yer verilmektedir. Prizmabet TV kanalını kullanmak için sadece siteye üye olmanız ve yatırım yapmanız yeterlidir.

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Prizmabet para yatırma ve çekme işlemleri konusunda da üyelerine kolaylık sağlamaktadır. Prizmabet’te banka havalesi, kredi kartı, papara, cepbank, QR kod, bitcoin gibi farklı yöntemlerle para yatırabilir ve çekebilirsiniz. Para yatırma ve çekme işlemleri 7/24 yapılabilmekte ve kısa sürede hesaplara yansımaktadır. Prizmabet para yatırma ve çekme işlemlerinde herhangi bir komisyon veya kesinti de yapmamaktadır.

Prizmabet müşteri hizmetleri de üyelerine 7/24 canlı destek hizmeti sağlamaktadır. Prizmabet canlı destek ekibi sayesinde site ile ilgili her türlü soru, sorun veya önerinizi iletebilir ve anında çözüm bulabilirsiniz. Prizmabet canlı destek ekibi profesyonel, güler yüzlü ve yardımseverdir.

Sonuç olarak, Prizmabet ülkemizin en iyi bahis sitelerinden biri olarak gösterilebilir. Prizmabet’te hem eğlenceli hem de kazançlı bir bahis deneyimi yaşayabilirsiniz. Prizmabet’e üye olmak için güncel giriş adresini web sitemizden bulabilirsiniz. Prizmabet’e girmek için tıklayınız! Prizmabet’e katıldığınıza pişman olmayacaksınız!

Tigran Gambaryan: The Star Crypto Investigator Kidnapped by Nigeria

The star IRS investigator-turned-executive was unlawfully detained by Nigeria and charged with tax evasion for Binance. His case shocked the crypto industry.

After eight long, harrowing months locked up in a Nigerian prison, Tigran Gambaryan is finally back home in Atlanta, recovering from his ordeal.

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The Nigerian government finally agreed to release Gambaryan on humanitarian grounds in October to allow him to return to the U.S. to receive medical care for a host of conditions he developed while in Kuje prison including malaria, double pneumonia, and a herniated disc in his back that left him in excruciating pain and struggling to walk.

In addition to releasing Gambaryan, Nigerian officials dropped the money laundering charges they’d been prosecuting him for since March, as a stand-in for his employer, Binance. The Nigerian government accused Binance of tanking the value of the naira by facilitating the movement of some $23 billion in untraceable funds in 2023. Equally unjust tax evasion charges against Gambaryan had previously been dropped in June. Binance, however, still faces both charges; the Nigerian government is seeking $10 billion in penalties.

Gambaryan’s detention sparked outrage across the crypto industry and beyond. As Binance’s Head of Financial Crime Compliance, Gambaryan had nothing to do with his employer’s actions, criminal or not, in Nigeria. And, as an American citizen, it was unthinkable for many, including several members of Congress, that he could be snatched by a foreign country – especially one that is an ally of the U.S. – and left to languish in a cell for nearly a year.

And, perhaps most perplexingly, Gambaryan wasn’t just any American executive getting held for ransom – he’s a former federal agent, a one-time Internal Revenue Service (IRS) investigator that was part of an elite group of early crypto tracers in the federal government. During his tenure at the IRS, Gambaryan had a central role in some of the biggest crypto crime busts in the industry’s history, including the takedown of child sex abuse video network Welcome to Video and darknet marketplace Alpha Bay, the seizure of nearly 70,000 bitcoins stolen from the Silk Road, and the recovery of 650,000 bitcoins stolen from Mt Gox.

That Nigeria would detain any American executive to use as a scapegoat for their employer was bad enough. But that Nigeria detained Tigran Gambaryan, a former U.S. government employee, was an outrage.

Star investigator

Gambaryan’s detention came as a shock to many of his former government colleagues, including Lili Infante, CEO of CAT Labs. During her tenure as a special agent at the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), Infante frequently crossed paths with Gambaryan, working with him on investigations and sharing investigative techniques.

“Tigran is a very rare breed of elite investigator,” Infante said. “It’s very difficult to find his personality type in the government. If IRS-CI had the equivalent of a special forces, he would probably be front and center leading them.”

Infante, along with Gambaryan, was part of an elite cadre of early crypto tracers working across several government agencies who figured out how to track transactions that were, at the time, largely thought to be anonymous. And, of all the federal agencies developing cutting-edge crypto tracing techniques, the IRS was the best.

“They were accountants. They were really good at following the money, and this was just following the money on blockchains,” said Ari Redbord, global head of policy at blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs. “And Tigran really became the star amongst that group of agents in those early days… In large part, he invented what it means to be a cryptocurrency investigator.”

Infante said that Gambaryan was “instrumental” in catapulting IRS-CI into being the leading federal agency in crypto investigations.

“Not only did he work on some of the most impactful, high profile crypto cases, which resulted in multi-billion dollars of digital asset seizures, he also mentored other agents and laid the groundwork for IRS-CI to continue dominating in the area of crypto investigations even after he left [for Binance],” Infante said. “He left a legacy.”

Infante attributes part of Gambaryan’s success at the IRS to his personality, which she and other former colleagues of his described as driven, ambitious and innovative.

“He’s like a dog with a bone. No challenge is too difficult,” Infante recalled. “The government was lucky to have him. It’s very, very difficult to innovate in the government because of the level of bureaucracy…Innovation requires a certain level of risk tolerance which Tigran had, and still does. Sometimes it pays off, and sometimes it bites you.”

Pioneer at Binance

When Gambaryan left the IRS and took a position at Binance in 2021, Infante said she wasn’t surprised. By the time he left the government, the crypto investigative space had matured significantly, and Gambaryan was ready for a new challenge.

And Binance presented a significant challenge, even for the OG crypto investigator. When Gambaryan joined the company, it was still willingly violating the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) by failing to set up a proper know-your-customer/anti-money laundering regime, which allowed money launderers and international criminals to use the platform freely. Last year, the company agreed to pay $4.3 billion in fines to settle criminal charges against it, and then-CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao was sentenced to four months in federal prison — half the time that Gambaryan ended up serving in Nigeria.

Though Gambaryan was well aware of Binance’s troubles, he took the job anyway.

“He said, ‘Well, it’s the largest exchange. They have the most impact on the industry right now, and I want to help them get their shit together,’” Infante recalled Gambaryan saying before he left the IRS. “And he wasn’t kidding.”

Redbord pointed out that, though it is now common for government officials to take jobs in the crypto industry, it was “pretty extraordinary” when Gambaryan joined Binance.

“He’s a man of firsts,” Redbord said. “This was a very unique thing at the time. Not only did he go to a cryptocurrency business, he went to the largest by a magnitude of 15, and one that was really having to rethink the way it did anti-money laundering and compliance. And he came in and really became the face of that in many respects.”

Infante pointed to the exchange’s response process to law enforcement inquiries as an example of how Gambaryan had positively changed Binance.

“It’s night and day. Before Tigran came in, you’d send a request or a subpoena and you’d wait a month or two or six or forever — the compliance program was nonexistent,” Infante said. “After Tigran came in, you’d get an answer within 24 hours.”

“Imagine taking a borderline criminal organization and turning it into a force for good to help law enforcement with their cases, be extremely compliant with subpoena requests, helping return assets to victims of cybercrime and pig butchering – it’s an impact. It’s a massive impact,” Infante added.

A spokesperson for Binance said Gambaryan brought “unparalleled expertise” to the exchange when he joined in 2021.

“His contributions have solidified Binance’s position as a leader in compliance and innovation within the cryptocurrency ecosystem,” the spokesperson added.

Colleagues, Congressmen push back

For many in the crypto industry, especially for compliance officers and former government officials, Gambaryan’s stellar track record made his detention in Nigeria — and the U.S. government’s disturbingly lackluster response — even more incomprehensible.

“Nobody should go through what he went through, but the fact that he’s literally a national treasure…and it took us eight months to get him out of a hostage situation in another country is insane,” said Infante.

Infante and Redbord joined a group of former federal agents and prosecutors that worked, behind the scenes and in public, to secure Gambaryan’s freedom. They both signed a letter, spearheaded by investor and former federal prosecutor Katie Haun to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, asking the State Department to “step up” its efforts to get Gambaryan home. Some of Gambaryan’s former government colleagues also protested outside the UN in September and regularly posted on social media demanding his freedom.

Read more: Former Government Employees, Compliance Officers Rally for Detained Binance Executive

Their efforts to free Gambaryan also attracted people who didn’t know him before his detention.

Gary Weinstein, founder of Infinity Consulting, told CoinDesk he worked pro bono for four hours a day for months to help free Gambaryan.

“I felt a personal responsibility to act. I think Tigran’s dedication to compliance and integrity resonated with my values,” Weinstein said. “I couldn’t just sit by hoping for a good result.”

Members of Congress also took steps to advocate for his release. Sixteen members of Congress signed a June 2024 letter to President Joe Biden, Blinken, and Roger Carstens, the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs, urging them to take “immediate action” to get Gambaryan released.

Rep. French Hill (R-Ark.), who signed the letter, and Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-Penn.) traveled to Nigeria to visit Gambaryan in prison in June.

Poorly handled

Though Gambaryan was ultimately released, many of those involved in advocating for his freedom remain frustrated by the way that his situation was handled by the Biden Administration.

Infante credited Hill and Rep. Rich McCormick (R-Georgia), Gambaryan’s congressman, with advocating for his release on Capitol Hill, but stressed that their degree of involvement should not have been necessary.

“Something like that happens to me, God forbid, I hope I have a representative like Rich McCormick to fight for me,” Infante said. “But they can only do so much. Because, really, it should have been a phone call from the President. It could have been resolved very early on, in my opinion, and it wasn’t. It wasn’t prioritized, and it should have been. That’s where the frustration lies – with the White House.”

Though a spokesperson for Binance said the company doesn’t believe Gambaryan’s situation was “unique to the crypto industry,” others, including Amanda Wick, a former money laundering process who now works as a crypto consultant, believe Gambaryan’s employment in the crypto industry was part of the reason the White House dragged its feet freeing him.

“Just look at all the things about him: he was a former IRS agent that had served his country as a law enforcement agent, he was a compliance officer and he was an American. And all of that was getting subsumed and ignored because he was in crypto.”

While the government ultimately secured Gambaryan’s release, the lack of transparency throughout the negotiation process left many people closely watching the situation — including Rep. Hill — frustrated.

“Tigran is back where he belongs – home with his family in America. I remain deeply disappointed that an American business executive was held under horrible conditions on unsubstantiated charges by Nigeria, a nation that the United States considers a friend,” Hill told CoinDesk.

On November 19, Hill introduced a bill, the American Detainee Transparency and Recovery Act, aimed at increasing the transparency in the recovery process.

“Tigran should have never been wrongfully detained by the Nigerian government in the first place and his case should be an example to the incoming Trump administration of how not to treat Americans who are taken by our friends and allies,” Hill said.

Chilling effect

Wick and others said that Gambaryan’s situation is likely to create a chilling effect across the industry, and perhaps beyond, when it comes to sending American employees to foreign countries on business.

At the September protest at the UN, Wick said one of the attendees was a man who did not know Gambaryan personally, but worked in compliance at a traditional finance firm.

“Most of us were former prosecutors and agents – crypto people who either knew Tigran or were in that community. But there was a guy who came [to the protest] who used to be at Wells Fargo, and he came because it could have been him,” Wick said.

“People forget that, at the end of the day, he was just a compliance employee who was kidnapped in a foreign country for the compliance failures of his financial institution,” Wick added. “And the only reason why people were so comfortable with it was because Binance was a crypto company…but if it had been TD Bank? If it had been Wells Fargo, and an American had just been kidnapped because of the company he worked for not having a sufficient AML program and then held in a prison with terrorists? If you say it out loud, it’s ridiculous.”

Weinstein said Gambaryan’s situation raises a “huge issue” — that foreign governments, including those allied with the U.S., might feel emboldened to target and detain compliance officers without just cause to hold them as bargaining chips.

“It sets a dangerous precedent that could deter talented professionals from entering the field, engaging and frankly, is a setback for the industry’s growth and its efforts to build trust with regulators,” Weinstein said.

“Tigran’s wrongful detention was a wake up call for the entire crypto industry, and it highlighted vulnerabilities that compliance officers and professionals face when engaging with international regulators.”

Moving forward

Gambaryan is now at home and focusing on his recovery. A spokesperson for his family declined CoinDesk’s request for an interview for this story, citing his ongoing recovery.

“There is an overwhelming sense of relief and gratitude among the Binance team. Tigran’s safe return is not just a moment of personal joy but also a collective victory for those who supported him throughout this ordeal,” a Binance spokesperson said.

“That said, we remain deeply concerned about his health and are focusing right now on providing support to help him and his family during this time of healing.”

This profile is part of CoinDesk’s Most Influential 2024 package. For all of this year’s nominees, click here.

Merhaba arkadaşlar, bugün sizlere Prizmabet adlı bir bahis sitesinden bahsedeceğim. Prizmabet, Betconstruct altyapısı ile üyelerine kaliteli hizmetler veren ve ülkemizin önde gelen bahis sitelerinden bir tanesidir. 2009 yılında kurulan Prizmabet, lisanslı, güvenilir ve avantajlı bir site olarak dikkat çekmektedir. Prizmabet’te spor bahisleri, canlı bahisler, casino, canlı casino, slot oyunları, sanal sporlar ve daha pek çok seçenek bulabilirsiniz. Prizmabet’te oyun oynamak için aradığınız ortamı fazlası ile bulacaksınız.

Prizmabet’in en önemli özelliklerinden biri de Prizmabet TV kanalıdır. Bu kanal sayesinde bahis sitesinde bulunan müsabakaları üyeler bir ücrete katlanmadan istedikleri zaman takip edebiliyor. Böylece hem heyecanlı hem de kazançlı bir bahis deneyimi yaşayabiliyorsunuz. Prizmabet TV kanalında futbol, basketbol, tenis, voleybol gibi popüler spor dallarının yanı sıra daha az bilinen sporlara da yer verilmektedir. Prizmabet TV kanalını kullanmak için sadece siteye üye olmanız ve yatırım yapmanız yeterlidir.

Prizmabet ayrıca üyelerine bol miktarda bonus ve promosyon da sunmaktadır. Prizmabet’te ilk üyelik bonusu olarak 100 TL deneme bonusu alabilirsiniz. Bunun yanında yatırım bonusları, kayıp bonusları, arkadaş davet bonusu, doğum günü bonusu gibi farklı bonuslar da mevcuttur. Prizmabet bonusları sayesinde daha fazla oyun oynayabilir ve kazancınızı artırabilirsiniz. Prizmabet bonuslarının çevrim şartları da oldukça makul seviyededir.

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Fairshake: Crypto Titans Use Old-School Dollars to Turn Tide in Congress

The industry went from pariah in Washington to being a top political player in less than two years, thanks in part to unlimited spending and hard-nosed tactics.

Here’s the new political calculus for a U.S. congressional candidate: You nod to crypto and say you’re on the pro-innovation side, and chances are, a million dollars (or more) could drop from the sky to pay for TV spots that highlight your strengths or pillory your opponent.

In any of hundreds of lesser known districts of the House of Representatives, a few hundred thousand dollars tends to make or break a candidate. When the leading crypto-driven political action committee notices you, a massive influx of cash can pave your way straight to Congress. The Fairshake super PAC isn’t subtle. It’s nuclear. For a relatively small industry, Fairshake is the biggest corporate money player in U.S. politics. And it’s not close to hanging up its hat as the Nov. 5 elections recede into the past.

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The main PAC and its two affiliate cousins spent some $139 million on the 2024 elections. Just Congress, mind you, not the presidential showdown. What the crypto sector wants is legislation, and Fairshake is all about securing the most expedient path toward the right number of supporters on Capitol Hill.

It’s got about $30 million left from this cycle. And its top industry benefactors have committed to another $73 million. Before the 2026 cycle even begins, this super PAC is already dominating the field with $103 million.

Thanks to current U.S. election rules, corporate interests can spend unlimited amounts to support or oppose campaigns, as long as they do so through “independent expenditures” that purchase advertising without coordinating with the campaigns they’re helping. Fairshake aimed to take full advantage of that with a simple goal. According to its primary spokesman, Josh Vlasto, the goal was to “support candidates who supported this industry and wanted to work across the aisle to advance responsible regulation,” he told CoinDesk in an interview.

They set out to show Washington that crypto was now “really focused on building a professional political operation that was going to be very well resourced and effective.”


Into 2026

So what can we still expect from what may be the most influential, issue-driven political force in the U.S.? A close look at 2024 probably tells you all you need to know about what’s still to come.

Coinbase, Ripple Labs and crypto investment firm a16z raised Fairshake from the ashes of the industry’s most recent campaign machinery, tapping at least two people involved in running a previous version. But, in contrast to the customary radical-transparency vibe the industry is proud of, Fairshake’s origin story is a no-go for the involved companies. They won’t talk about how Fairshake was formed and who hired whom. They won’t discuss the ongoing relationship between the heavy donors and the PAC management.

“We have consultants and advisors on both sides of the aisle,” said Vlasto, the person who most often does the talking for Fairshake. “We also take input from our supporters, you know, which represent real industry leaders from the crypto and blockchain sector.”While the activity of the organization is publicly disclosed, as the rules require, and the broad strategy of Fairshake is clear, the nuts and bolts are off-limits.

“I’m not getting into the sort of day-to-day,” Vlasto said. “All I can speak to is sort of the outcome of it. And the outcome is a very successful election cycle.”The industry had a profoundly tarnished reputation to build on, because disgraced FTX frontman Sam Bankman-Fried was the leading driver of crypto’s campaign contributions in the last congressional election. One in three members of Congress were funded by he and other FTX executives under his watch, though the dollar amounts paled in comparison to what the industry spent this time. Still, all those members were forced to figure out how to deal with the tainted contributions after the company imploded in a cloud of fraud.

That’s nothing Vlasto can speak to, he insists, because Fairshake is an entirely new effort with “really the crème de la crème and the blue chip companies across crypto and blockchain.”

And, while they were erecting their political siege engine, Coinbase also propped up an advocacy organization called Stand With Crypto meant to rally the troops. It was billed as “crypto’s first true grassroots movement,” despite its origin as a corporate-funded project in which Coinbase initially handled its public relations and staffed its events.

It features Fairshake’s company-led effort on its website, but it also raises money for its own activities, such as running events and maintaining a database evaluating politicians’ crypto support. The organization says it’s so far taken in $2.8 million, though its supporter list indicates $2.3 million of that is from companies Exodus and Moonpay.

Stand With Crypto signed up almost 2 million online supporters. That large number of digital assets enthusiasts is often touted as evidence of a groundswell in public support.

From political pariah to belle-of-the-ball in less than two years, the crypto industry learned in 2024 that aggressive tactics and a whole lot of money were the answer to overcoming reputational damage.

Influencing the agenda

This current congressional session provided Fairshake a live-fire exercise in influence. Instead of a theoretical idea of what crypto legislation future members of Congress may be willing to support, Fairshake got to make a more urgent case with its outsized war chest.

Two highly significant crypto test cases made a splash in Congress earlier this year.

First — and most notably — the Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act (FIT21) was Representative Patrick McHenry’s effort to move a wide-reaching set of standards to regulate the U.S. crypto markets from top to bottom.

The other was a campaign to permanently erase a Securities and Exchange Commission crypto accounting policy in which the agency sought to make public companies hold their customers’ digital assets on their own balance sheets. It effectively forced banks to maintain capital against those assets — a cost-prohibitive demand that contributed to U.S. bankers shying away from crypto.

Both matters came up for votes. FIT21 was shepherded personally by McHenry, the Republican chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, who hoped the bill could be his swan song as he leaves the Hill at the end of the year. The Republican legislation became the first significant crypto measure to clear the committee and win passage by the House, pulling in a massive 71-vote block of Democrats and demonstrating that there’s a wide bipartisan cooperation available on digital assets legislation.

And it provided the simplest litmus test possible for the industry to know which House lawmakers were worthy of crypto cash. At the time the bill was on the House floor, the existence of Fairshake’s campaign muscle had already been noisily demonstrated when it spent about $10 million to throttle the Senate hopes of Representative Katie Porter, a crypto skeptic in California. The lawmakers who voted on FIT21 were well aware that the new player in campaign finance was watching and stood very willing to spend millions to bolster friends and defeat enemies.

Even before it spent millions to ensure more allies in the 2025 session of Congress, Fairshake was already influencing policy. 

The SEC’s controversial accounting rule — known as Staff Accounting Bulletin No. 121, or SAB 121 — came up for a vote in the Senate as lobbyists sought to reverse the SEC’s position. That vote was made possible after the Government Accountability Office said the regulator mishandled the policy by trying to tuck it into staff guidance rather than treating it as a full-blown rule. Lawmakers sought to toss it out under the Congressional Review Act, and both the House and Senate passed the effort. Most notably, the 60-38 Senate vote showed a significant number of Democrats bucking their leadership to join. It forced President Joe Biden to make good on a veto threat, meaning the policy remained intact at the SEC despite Congress’ wishes.

Still, it gave Fairshake and the crypto industry a list of which sitting senators were on the side of this financial technology.

“The broad strategy was to pick races where ultimately someone who was pro-crypto, pro-blockchain, pro-innovation would come out on top and win the scene,” Vlasto said.

During the primaries, the PAC often deployed money in big bursts, sometimes dumping more than $1 million into a relatively obscure campaign where that kind of money could drown out opposition. On social media, high-profile Democrat Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez characterized the spending as “insane sums.” At first, much of it was based on relatively flimsy evidence of crypto support on candidate websites, but with incumbent lawmakers, their recent voting record made for harder targets.

In the Democrat-dominated congressional district that covers Westchester County and part of the Bronx in New York, incumbent Representative Jamaal Bowman has opposed both of the big crypto efforts. Fairshake dropped more than $2 million in negative ads against him in that race, and Bowman was easily defeated in the primary.

When it came to lining up the congressional races it would support, the group was also very careful to balance its choices between the two major parties, often angering both. In the end, it backed about the same from each, though its two marquee efforts devoted tens of millions to derailing Democrats the industry disliked: Porter in California and Senator Sherrod Brown (Ohio), chairman of the Senate Banking Committee.

Where its practical thinking was obvious, though, could be seen in Massachusetts, where Fairshake didn’t devote money to crypto lawyer John Deaton’s race against Senator Elizabeth Warren, the well-known Democrat who is arguably the industry’s most powerful critic on Capitol Hill. The odds were always very long against beating Warren in her state, and money spent there was ultimately wasted.

A point of pride for Fairshake staff is that any time a candidate started objecting that corporate money from crypto was underwriting their opponent, the argument was unsuccessful. The PAC organizers interpret that record as demonstrating that voters aren’t moved by efforts to use digital assets as a political scare tactic. 

“When we supported a candidate aggressively who was pro-crypto, their opponent attempted to make an issue out of the spending and say that voters should not support our preferred candidate because they were receiving support from crypto,” Vlasto recalled, and that opponent tended to lose.

“Every time.”

Going into 2025 and a new congressional session, more than four dozen members of Congress were backed by Fairshake — almost half of them new arrivals in their elected office. At this point, the PAC estimates that about 300 of the 535 members of the House and Senate are on crypto’s side. 

But Fairshake has $103 million in its pockets before most other super PACs have even started, meaning sitting lawmakers in the next session will be aware that a huge stockpile of cash will be ready to help them in 2026 if they cooperate with crypto legislation.

And those hoping to join Congress in the 2027 session will know that a simple nod toward crypto could help them raise fast support.

This profile is part of CoinDesk’s Most Influential 2024 package. For all of this year’s nominees, click here.

Fairshake’s approach will not only influence the U.S. legislative branch. The crypto industry has now demonstrated that large amounts of money concentrated into a single purpose can have an outsized electoral impact.

“We were on the right side of the arguments,” Faryar Shirzad, chief policy officer of Coinbase in a CoinDesk interview, when asked whether another group could repeat the results.

Beyond the campaign money, there was a wider upswell of crypto support. “I don’t know if other industries can replicate the grassroots and the merits of the arguments in the way we can. But I doubt it.”

Merhaba arkadaşlar, bugün sizlere Prizmabet adlı bir bahis sitesinden bahsedeceğim. Prizmabet, Betconstruct altyapısı ile üyelerine kaliteli hizmetler veren ve ülkemizin önde gelen bahis sitelerinden bir tanesidir. 2009 yılında kurulan Prizmabet, lisanslı, güvenilir ve avantajlı bir site olarak dikkat çekmektedir. Prizmabet’te spor bahisleri, canlı bahisler, casino, canlı casino, slot oyunları, sanal sporlar ve daha pek çok seçenek bulabilirsiniz. Prizmabet’te oyun oynamak için aradığınız ortamı fazlası ile bulacaksınız.

Prizmabet’in en önemli özelliklerinden biri de Prizmabet TV kanalıdır. Bu kanal sayesinde bahis sitesinde bulunan müsabakaları üyeler bir ücrete katlanmadan istedikleri zaman takip edebiliyor. Böylece hem heyecanlı hem de kazançlı bir bahis deneyimi yaşayabiliyorsunuz. Prizmabet TV kanalında futbol, basketbol, tenis, voleybol gibi popüler spor dallarının yanı sıra daha az bilinen sporlara da yer verilmektedir. Prizmabet TV kanalını kullanmak için sadece siteye üye olmanız ve yatırım yapmanız yeterlidir.

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Prizmabet müşteri hizmetleri de üyelerine 7/24 canlı destek hizmeti sağlamaktadır. Prizmabet canlı destek ekibi sayesinde site ile ilgili her türlü soru, sorun veya önerinizi iletebilir ve anında çözüm bulabilirsiniz. Prizmabet canlı destek ekibi profesyonel, güler yüzlü ve yardımseverdir.

Sonuç olarak, Prizmabet ülkemizin en iyi bahis sitelerinden biri olarak gösterilebilir. Prizmabet’te hem eğlenceli hem de kazançlı bir bahis deneyimi yaşayabilirsiniz. Prizmabet’e üye olmak için güncel giriş adresini web sitemizden bulabilirsiniz. Prizmabet’e girmek için tıklayınız! Prizmabet’e katıldığınıza pişman olmayacaksınız!

Shayne Coplan: He Took Prediction Markets Mainstream

In so doing, Polymarket’s founder demonstrated a real-world consumer use case for crypto, earning him a spot on CoinDesk’s Most Influential 2024 list.

For decades, prediction markets were a backwater, a science experiment.

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In 2024, Shayne Coplan, founder of Polymarket, turned them into a multibillion-dollar business and a popular barometer of the political winds, cited by everyone from Donald Trump to CNN.

In so doing, he demonstrated a real-world consumer use case for cryptocurrency – and, some argue, a new model for news media at a time when the public has lost trust in traditional sources of information.

“Most people I know were checking Polymarket for odds during the election,” said Meltem Demirors, a crypto O.G. and early investor in the company. “You’re creating so much signal that you’re getting people who don’t care about crypto, and would never care about crypto” to look at the site.

Like many crypto founders – and even some successful tech founders – the 26-year-old Coplan also took what looks like a calculated risk in pushing the regulatory envelope. In mid-November, the FBI raided his New York home and confiscated his devices, reportedly as part of a Department of Justice investigation into whether Polymarket was operating illegally in the U.S. Coplan has laid low since then, and would not comment for this article.

However that investigation shakes out, Coplan has brought unprecedented attention to an idea long advanced by academics: That the wisdom of the crowd, backed by skin in the game, can produce more accurate forecasts – or at least, more accurate gauges of sentiment – than traditional experts or polls.

“This man made prediction markets mainstream. Simple as that,” said Hart Lambur, co-founder of UMA, the decentralized oracle service that Polymarket uses to resolve contracts. “He’s just been the guy that’s grinded through the pain and been dedicated to the Polymarket concept for years.”

A stubborn wunderkind

Demirors recalls meeting Coplan in 2018, when the college dropout was about 18 years old, on the recommendation of a crypto colleague.

“Shayne came to my office, and we basically just argued with each other for two hours,” Demirors said. “I was like, ‘wow, this kid is sharp.'”

Pratik Chougule, executive director of the Coalition for Political Forecasting, got a similar impression interviewing Coplan for the Star Spangled Gamblers podcast early in Polymarket’s history.

“He’s a very unique figure in the sense that he’s this creative artist type, but he’s also delved deeply into academic literature, and he really understands technicalities of building something on the blockchain,” said Chougule.

Demirors said that in addition to investing in an early Polymarket round during the pandemic, she has been “a little bit of a big sis” to Coplan, acting as a sounding board as he built the business.

“He’s just an opinionated, stubborn little f*ck, and I love him,” she said, adding that Coplan’s headstrong personality served him well as a founder.

Early on, “people tried to pressure him to launch a token, and he was like, ‘we’re not doing that.’ People tried to pressure him to open up markets before the infrastructure was ready. He was like, ‘we’re not doing that.'”

Volume and vindication

Flip Pidot, a veteran prediction market trader and analyst, estimated that Polymarket racked up $3.6 billion in trading volume just from this year’s U.S. presidential election, giving it a dominant, 74% market share. In previous election cycles, the entire prediction market industry never cracked $1 billion, he said.

Many saw the election as a moment of vindication for Polymarket. In the weeks leading up to the event, Polymarket odds signaled a sizable lead for Trump while the polls showed a toss-up between the former president and his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. Trump won handily.

Yet a clearer validation of Polymarket’s informational value arguably came in July, when President Joe Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed Harris.

For months, cable news’ talking heads dismissed any talk of replacing Biden on the Democratic ticket, despite the 82-year-old’s frequent public stumbles.

https://twitter.com/0rf/status/1807620571934478683

Polymarket told a different story: Even after Biden won enough votes to clinch the Democratic nomination in mid-March, traders gave him only an 80% chance of being the nominee. A separate contract asking point blank if he would drop out gave low but nontrivial odds in the teens and 20s throughout the first half of the year.

“People were like, ‘Oh, these [traders] are right-wing crypto bros, they’re just conspiracy theorists. They don’t know what’s going on,'” said a Polymarket user who goes by the handle CSPTrading. “And they were completely vindicated.”

Following Biden’s disastrous, doddering performance in the June 27 debate with Trump, the narrative quickly changed, with Democratic leaders and donors calling for the incumbent to step aside, as he did a month later.

More so than with the election, the pundits (who had nothing to lose from being wrong) got it wrong by claiming epistemic certainty. Polymarket’s traders (who had money on the line) got it right by telegraphing a modicum of doubt.

Spectrum of decentralization

In prediction markets, traders bet on verifiable outcomes of events in specified timeframes. (Which movie will gross the biggest box office of 2024? Will this be the hottest year on record?) Questions are usually framed as yes-or-no propositions, for which traders can purchase “yes” or “no” shares. Each share pays $1 (or, in Polymarket’s case, the equivalent in crypto) if the prediction comes true, bupkis if not.

Bettors can buy and sell shares any time, and prices fluctuate like on stock markets. Expressed as cents on the dollar, these prices signal the market’s assessment of an outcome’s probability. On Dec. 4, for example, “yes” shares for the Detroit Lions winning the next Super Bowl traded at 18 cents on Polymarket, meaning bettors gave the team an 18% chance of victory. The corresponding “no” shares were priced at 82 cents.

Prediction markets date back to the late 19th Century, when Wall Street traders would bet millions (tens of millions in today’s dollars) on city, state and national elections. “There was more money bet in presidential betting markets than in the stock markets at the time,” said Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University.

Since the late-1980s, Hanson has championed prediction markets as a way to aggregate information and thereby improve decision making by corporations and even governments.

“One of the obstacles, of course, was that betting markets had many legal barriers, and cultural barriers [because] many people disapproved of them and thought they had little social value,” Hanson told CoinDesk.

This is one reason why blockchains, decentralized financial systems with no central authority that a government can shut down, have long been seen as a natural home for prediction markets. They are one of the use cases Ethereum architect Vitalik Buterin described in his 2014 white paper for what would become the second-largest blockchain. (As a teenager, Coplan bought into the Ethereum crowdsale; a decade later, Buterin invested in Polymarket.)

The modern-day prediction markets Hanson inspired can be viewed on a spectrum. On one end there’s the model used by Augur, one of the first projects built on Ethereum.

“One of the advantages is that it’s 100% decentralized,” said Joey Krug, who co-founded Augur in 2015. “If you’re building it, you’re effectively writing code. It’s effectively free speech, assuming you’re not taking a fee for yourself, and it’s also pretty flexible in the sense that anyone can kind of create a market on anything.”

But as crypto veterans know all too well, decentralization requires trade-offs.

Best of both worlds?

“It’s really hard to market if you’re building something decentralized,” said Krug, who is now a partner at Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and led its investment in Polymarket’s $45 million Series B round.

(For whatever it’s worth: Thiel was an early investor in Bullish, two years before that company acquired CoinDesk. Bullish has not disclosed a cap table since 2021, and CoinDesk journalists do not know the current roster of investors in its parent.)

“The whole point is that you don’t want to take on the regulatory version of being this central operator that does everything,” Krug said. “And so you don’t really market it. … You don’t do all this stuff that you need to do to actually get usage.”

Consequently, Augur had very little. (In fairness, Polymarket benefits from Ethereum infrastructure that wasn’t around when Augur debuted).

On the “very centralized” end of the continuum, there’s Kalshi. Founded in 2018, the startup boasts about its status as the first (and, until recently, only) regulated prediction market platform in the U.S.

This route has its own disadvantages. In 2023, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission denied Kalshi’s application to list election-related contracts, and the company spent most of this year fighting the regulator in court for the right to do so – while watching Polymarket enjoy the volume and publicity from political betting fever. Only after an appeals court upheld a ruling in its favor in early October, a month before the election, was Kalshi cleared to list political contracts.

Polymarket is in the middle of the spectrum. In some ways, it’s decentralized. It uses smart contracts on a blockchain (Polygon, a layer-two, or auxiliary network, to Ethereum) and doesn’t custody users’ funds. Bets are denominated in USDC, a stablecoin that trades 1:1 for dollars. Early on, an internal market integrity committee resolved Polymarket’s contracts, before Coplan’s team delegated this job to the decentralized UMA protocol.

“If you are sufficiently sophisticated, you can interact entirely with Polymarket without ever touching the website,” said Haseeb Qureshi, a managing partner at Dragonfly, another VC investor in Polymarket. “The trades settle all on-chain. You can interact with everything through APIs.”

But you don’t have to. Unlike Augur (which co-founder Krug admitted “kind of sucks to use”) or for that matter many crypto exchanges (decentralized or otherwise), traders have found Polymarket easy to use and reliable.

“The platform’s really smooth, it runs really well,” said CSPTrading. “On election night, it was basically up the entire time, which is crazy because… all the other sites were crashing.”

‘Decentralized enough’

One way Polymarket is centralized is that it curates markets. Community members can suggest ideas in the Discord server, but the team decides which ones get posted. With little fanfare, the platform recently debuted a “creators” page where big names like polling analyst Nate Silver (a Polymarket advisor) and the financial blogger Zerohedge have their own branded markets.

“I think Polymarket is moving its way towards more decentralization,” said Qureshi. “They’re also right to be doing this in a gradual, thoughtful way, rather than just turning everything on and saying, ‘let the dogs of hell run loose.'”

In Demirors’ view, Polymarket is “decentralized enough.” The key to winning this game, she said, is amassing “a large enough global pool of market participants,” because traders want to be where the liquidity is. By building on crypto rails at the right time, that’s what Polymarket has become.

“That’s the beauty of crypto. It’s global. Anyone with a wallet address can join,” Demirors said.

However, Polymarket wasn’t decentralized enough for U.S. regulators to consider it untouchable. In January 2022, the company paid a $1.4 million civil penalty and entered into a settlement with the CFTC, which said the company had been operating an unlicensed derivatives exchange because its services were available to U.S. citizens and residents.

Since then, the company has blocked U.S. IP addresses, but wily Americans have been using virtual private networks, or VPNs, to get around the geofencing. Apparently, the government thinks the company should have done more to keep Americans out, perhaps by requiring customer identification. (which Polymarket has requested only from a subset of users).

“Polymarket is required to adhere to the terms of the settlement they reached with the CFTC. Full stop,” a CFTC spokesperson told CoinDesk in late October, two weeks before law enforcement officials raided Coplan’s home. “That means they cannot accept any business from people living in the United States.”

In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Coplan called the raid a “last-ditch effort” by the lame-duck Biden administration “to go after companies they deem to be associated with political opponents,” though he reiterated that Polymarket is nonpartisan.

Challenges ahead

Polymarket’s investors and supporters are hopeful the incoming Trump administration will end the probe as part of a broad pro-crypto agenda.

Even if Polymarket receives clemency, Coplan faces other challenges, not least of all maintaining volumes without a galvanizing tent-pole event like a presidential election.

The company, which currently doesn’t charge trading fees, also must figure out a long-term revenue model. And a handful of outcome disputes, including for a market on whether Trump’s son Barron was “involved” in a memecoin, suggest Polymarket needs to improve its resolution criteria.

Yet, by at least one measure, Coplan has already succeeded.

“Shayne’s vision has always been that this is a product that can disrupt traditional media and political discourse … and he achieved that” said Chougule, at the Coalition for Political Forecasting. “This was always the dream, that you would have major talk shows, cable news, places like Politico and Bloomberg citing prediction markets as a source of information, as something that can enlighten even people who know nothing or don’t care about prediction markets.”

Merhaba arkadaşlar, bugün sizlere Prizmabet adlı bir bahis sitesinden bahsedeceğim. Prizmabet, Betconstruct altyapısı ile üyelerine kaliteli hizmetler veren ve ülkemizin önde gelen bahis sitelerinden bir tanesidir. 2009 yılında kurulan Prizmabet, lisanslı, güvenilir ve avantajlı bir site olarak dikkat çekmektedir. Prizmabet’te spor bahisleri, canlı bahisler, casino, canlı casino, slot oyunları, sanal sporlar ve daha pek çok seçenek bulabilirsiniz. Prizmabet’te oyun oynamak için aradığınız ortamı fazlası ile bulacaksınız.

Prizmabet’in en önemli özelliklerinden biri de Prizmabet TV kanalıdır. Bu kanal sayesinde bahis sitesinde bulunan müsabakaları üyeler bir ücrete katlanmadan istedikleri zaman takip edebiliyor. Böylece hem heyecanlı hem de kazançlı bir bahis deneyimi yaşayabiliyorsunuz. Prizmabet TV kanalında futbol, basketbol, tenis, voleybol gibi popüler spor dallarının yanı sıra daha az bilinen sporlara da yer verilmektedir. Prizmabet TV kanalını kullanmak için sadece siteye üye olmanız ve yatırım yapmanız yeterlidir.

Prizmabet ayrıca üyelerine bol miktarda bonus ve promosyon da sunmaktadır. Prizmabet’te ilk üyelik bonusu olarak 100 TL deneme bonusu alabilirsiniz. Bunun yanında yatırım bonusları, kayıp bonusları, arkadaş davet bonusu, doğum günü bonusu gibi farklı bonuslar da mevcuttur. Prizmabet bonusları sayesinde daha fazla oyun oynayabilir ve kazancınızı artırabilirsiniz. Prizmabet bonuslarının çevrim şartları da oldukça makul seviyededir.

Prizmabet para yatırma ve çekme işlemleri konusunda da üyelerine kolaylık sağlamaktadır. Prizmabet’te banka havalesi, kredi kartı, papara, cepbank, QR kod, bitcoin gibi farklı yöntemlerle para yatırabilir ve çekebilirsiniz. Para yatırma ve çekme işlemleri 7/24 yapılabilmekte ve kısa sürede hesaplara yansımaktadır. Prizmabet para yatırma ve çekme işlemlerinde herhangi bir komisyon veya kesinti de yapmamaktadır.

Prizmabet müşteri hizmetleri de üyelerine 7/24 canlı destek hizmeti sağlamaktadır. Prizmabet canlı destek ekibi sayesinde site ile ilgili her türlü soru, sorun veya önerinizi iletebilir ve anında çözüm bulabilirsiniz. Prizmabet canlı destek ekibi profesyonel, güler yüzlü ve yardımseverdir.

Sonuç olarak, Prizmabet ülkemizin en iyi bahis sitelerinden biri olarak gösterilebilir. Prizmabet’te hem eğlenceli hem de kazançlı bir bahis deneyimi yaşayabilirsiniz. Prizmabet’e üye olmak için güncel giriş adresini web sitemizden bulabilirsiniz. Prizmabet’e girmek için tıklayınız! Prizmabet’e katıldığınıza pişman olmayacaksınız!

As BitMEX Turns 10, the Market Is Still Thankful for the Perpetual Swap

BitMEX’s CEO says he’s OK with everyone copying the exchange’s most important invention.

“Good artists copy, great artists steal,” was a favorite saying of Apple’s Steve Jobs to explain his company’s blatant copying of technology from Xerox.

Fast forward to the Web3 era, and BitMEX CEO Stephan Lutz, who was appointed to the role in late 2022, says he’s fine with competitors copying the crypto exchange’s invention of the perpetual swap, the financial instrument that underpins the crypto derivatives market. The more traders access the tool, the healthier the market, the logic goes.

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“It was copied by everyone, because that’s just open-source know-how,” Lutz said in an interview with CoinDesk. The whole world works on it, which is like the best form of flattery we can wish for in the end.”

Unlike futures — which are contracts to buy or sell an asset at a specific price on a specific date — the perpetual swap eliminates expiration and mirrors the feel of margin trading. Perpetuals act as a rolling series of short-term futures contracts using a funding rate, or payment exchanged between long and short positions, to maintain price alignment with the underlying asset.

Lutz argues that the perpetual swap was a cornerstone innovation in crypto trading because it addressed a fundamental challenge in building derivatives in the early crypto market structure.

“You faced counterparty credit risk, and there was no real structure for bringing longs and shorts together,” he said. “The perpetual swap with the funding mechanism and the insurance fund in the background sparked the whole [futures] trading industry.”

It also allows traders to react with the hyperdrive speed required in crypto.

“If you say it’s a seven-year cycle [some investors believe the market functions in this pattern] in TradFi, this cycle is six months in crypto,” Lutz, a veteran of Deutsche Börse, which operates the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, said. “You need to react to new developments very quickly.”

While BitMEX is nowhere near the largest derivatives exchange by volume anymore – that’s what happens when larger centralized exchanges, like Binance, adopt the perp and get into the derivatives business – it still has a loyal cadre of traders.

One reason for that is because BitMEX does not have its own market-making desk. It doesn’t trade against its own customers, Lutz said.

“Our funding rates can sometimes differ because we ensure completely independent price discovery, which is important for maintaining fairness,” he said. “It’s a matter of neutrality.”

During periods of high volatility, particularly market downturns, BitMEX often sees its market share spike — sometimes double — Lutz explains because of the exchange’s loyal cadre of derivatives traders.

Another 10 years

Sometimes it’s tough to imagine where a crypto company will be in 10 years, given the speed at which the industry operates.

Compare the liquidation and winding up of Lehman Brothers, to the relatively rapid resolution of FTX’s bankruptcy.

As for BitMEX, Lutz foresees the exchange maintaining its niche in bitcoin-based derivatives while selectively expanding its offerings.

And maybe sometime during this next decade, BitMEX will invent something new — and be flattered when the entire industry copies it.

Merhaba arkadaşlar, bugün sizlere Prizmabet adlı bir bahis sitesinden bahsedeceğim. Prizmabet, Betconstruct altyapısı ile üyelerine kaliteli hizmetler veren ve ülkemizin önde gelen bahis sitelerinden bir tanesidir. 2009 yılında kurulan Prizmabet, lisanslı, güvenilir ve avantajlı bir site olarak dikkat çekmektedir. Prizmabet’te spor bahisleri, canlı bahisler, casino, canlı casino, slot oyunları, sanal sporlar ve daha pek çok seçenek bulabilirsiniz. Prizmabet’te oyun oynamak için aradığınız ortamı fazlası ile bulacaksınız.

Prizmabet’in en önemli özelliklerinden biri de Prizmabet TV kanalıdır. Bu kanal sayesinde bahis sitesinde bulunan müsabakaları üyeler bir ücrete katlanmadan istedikleri zaman takip edebiliyor. Böylece hem heyecanlı hem de kazançlı bir bahis deneyimi yaşayabiliyorsunuz. Prizmabet TV kanalında futbol, basketbol, tenis, voleybol gibi popüler spor dallarının yanı sıra daha az bilinen sporlara da yer verilmektedir. Prizmabet TV kanalını kullanmak için sadece siteye üye olmanız ve yatırım yapmanız yeterlidir.

Prizmabet ayrıca üyelerine bol miktarda bonus ve promosyon da sunmaktadır. Prizmabet’te ilk üyelik bonusu olarak 100 TL deneme bonusu alabilirsiniz. Bunun yanında yatırım bonusları, kayıp bonusları, arkadaş davet bonusu, doğum günü bonusu gibi farklı bonuslar da mevcuttur. Prizmabet bonusları sayesinde daha fazla oyun oynayabilir ve kazancınızı artırabilirsiniz. Prizmabet bonuslarının çevrim şartları da oldukça makul seviyededir.

Prizmabet para yatırma ve çekme işlemleri konusunda da üyelerine kolaylık sağlamaktadır. Prizmabet’te banka havalesi, kredi kartı, papara, cepbank, QR kod, bitcoin gibi farklı yöntemlerle para yatırabilir ve çekebilirsiniz. Para yatırma ve çekme işlemleri 7/24 yapılabilmekte ve kısa sürede hesaplara yansımaktadır. Prizmabet para yatırma ve çekme işlemlerinde herhangi bir komisyon veya kesinti de yapmamaktadır.

Prizmabet müşteri hizmetleri de üyelerine 7/24 canlı destek hizmeti sağlamaktadır. Prizmabet canlı destek ekibi sayesinde site ile ilgili her türlü soru, sorun veya önerinizi iletebilir ve anında çözüm bulabilirsiniz. Prizmabet canlı destek ekibi profesyonel, güler yüzlü ve yardımseverdir.

Sonuç olarak, Prizmabet ülkemizin en iyi bahis sitelerinden biri olarak gösterilebilir. Prizmabet’te hem eğlenceli hem de kazançlı bir bahis deneyimi yaşayabilirsiniz. Prizmabet’e üye olmak için güncel giriş adresini web sitemizden bulabilirsiniz. Prizmabet’e girmek için tıklayınız! Prizmabet’e katıldığınıza pişman olmayacaksınız!

The Protocol: A Quantum Threat to Bitcoin?

Also: An Ethereum dev’s defection to Solana; Polygon’s big proving-system flex; crypto’s most influential

Welcome to The Protocol, CoinDesk’s weekly wrap-up of the most important stories in cryptocurrency tech development. I’m Marc Hochstein, CoinDesk’s deputy editor-in-chief for features, opinion and standards.

In this issue:

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  • What does Google’s quantum computing chip mean for Bitcoin?
  • Dev’s defection highlights Ethereum’s growing Solana problem
  • OrdinalsBot inscribes largest-ever file on Bitcoin blockchain
  • Polygon touts speed of Plonky3 proving system
  • Crypto’s most influential techies of 2024

Network News

NEED FOR SPEED: Polygon Labs claims its newest proving system, Plonky3, is the fastest on the market. (Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s creator, apparently agrees.) A proving system is at the core of zero-knowledge rollups, and a crucial component for transactions that rely on cryptographic security. It is the main piece of technology that creates proofs that summarize off-chain transactions, which are then sent back to a base blockchain (in this case, Ethereum). “If a zkVM is a car, you could look at the proving system as being the engine, so Plonky3 is kind of what makes everything work,” Brendan Farmer, a co-founder at Polygon, tells CoinDesk’s Margaux Nijkerk. The quicker a proof is generated, the less computing time that must be paid for. “If we improve speed, then we’re improving costs,” Farmer said. “And so what this does is it makes ZK rollup really competitive in terms of costs.” In January 2022, Polygon released its previous proving system, called Plonky2, claiming then that it was the fastest one on the market. Plonky3, the new and improved version that has more flexibility, was released in July.

IN AWE OF THE SIZE OF THIS LAD: Bitcoin inscriptions project OrdinalsBot minted what it says is the largest file ever on the oldest and most valuable blockchain: the last in a collection of 1,500 “Pizza Ninjas.” It’s part of a phenomenon in the Bitcoin development community known as “four meggers,” which are files that take up an entire block on the network. They are called four meggers because they are almost 4 megabytes (MB) big (the maximum size of each block of transactions on Bitcoin). Ordinal collectors consider them valuable due to their visibility on the blockchain. “There’s more than just bragging rights behind wanting to have the largest file on Bitcoin,” said Toby Lewis, co-founder of OrdinalsBot. “Four meggers will be on the Bitcoin blockchain forever and they already hold significant market value.” Bitcoin inscriptions, similar to non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on Ethereum, were made possible by the Ordinals protocol. It allows data to be “inscribed” onto individual satoshis, or “sats” (the smallest unit of BTC at 1/100,000,000 of a full bitcoin), making each one unique and potentially valuable. Read more.

JUMPING SHIP: Ethereum’s place near the top of the crypto market is unquestioned from the perspective of market cap. Beneath the surface – at the product, developer and decision-making levels – the original smart contracts platform continues to take a beating from Solana, one of its closest competitors. Ethereum and its many closely-linked networks are still the most important, influential, and largest platforms for decentralized finance. That lead is beginning to erode, however, with many newcomers to crypto choosing Solana’s speed and low fees. The dynamic was further punctuated Monday with news that longtime Ethereum ecosystem developer Max Resnick was moving into Solana’s orbit, abandoning his job at the developer studio Consensys. “There’s just so much more possibility and potential energy in Solana,” Resnick said in an interview with CoinDesk. He framed the decision as rooted in his own career path, but noted “frustration” with Ethereum’s inability to adapt contributed to the move. Ethereum lacks a streamlined process for making quick changes. Some see that as a point of strength for a decentralized network, while others, like Resnick, see it as a hindrance for long-term success. Read more

MOST INFLUENTIAL: This week, for the tenth time, CoinDesk has selected the people who defined the year in crypto: Our Most Influential list. (Here was the first edition in 2015.) Most Influential highlights personal achievements in the last calendar year. People are chosen for their projects, ideas, leadership, personality, or notoriety. There is a top 10 of the most Most Influential – people we feel had outsize influence or led the most important projects. Then, we profile another 40 people who were only a little less influential. (Certain prominent people in crypto – Vitalik Buterin, say – would naturally be Most Influential every year. But we choose not to feature the same names each time.) Among the tech luminaries we highlighted in this year’s series were Solana’s Lilly Liu, Optimism’s Jin Yang, EigenLayer’s Sreeram Kannan, BitVM’s Robin Linus, Rootstock’s Sergio Lerner, TON’s Steve Yun, NEAR’s IIlia Polosukhin, Akash Network’s Greg Osuri; Bitcoin’s Taproot Wizards founders … and of course, Satoshi Nakamoto, whose secret identity remains a parlor-game topic after all these years. (Writing that last piece was downright cathartic for me.) Find all the profiles here.

WHAT DOES GOOGLE’S QUANTUM COMPUTING CHIP MEAN FOR BITCOIN?

Google’s new quantum computing chip could mean bitcoin (BTC) is finished.

That was the sentiment for some on Monday as the internet giant unveiled Willow, a quantum supercomputer that can perform certain computational tasks in just five minutes that would take classical supercomputers an astronomical amount of time—specifically, 10 septillion years (or one followed by 24 zeroes; a trillion trillion).

10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Such an amount of time is greater than the existence of the entire universe at 13.8 billion years.

In superficial theory, such a powerful computer could mean no passwords are safe, encrypted messages are intercepted, nuclear weapons codes are found out, and almost anything can be unlocked by brute-forcing combinations of numbers and letters.

But it isn’t all doom and gloom yet.

While quantum computing does indeed pose significant threats to current security systems, it’s not a master key to the universe, at least not right now. And there is no looming threat to Bitcoin, either.

Quantum computing leverages the principles of quantum mechanics, using quantum bits or qubits instead of traditional bits. Unlike bits which represent either a 0 or 1, qubits can represent both 0 and 1 simultaneously due to quantum phenomena like superposition and entanglement. This allows quantum computers to perform multiple calculations at once, potentially solving problems that are currently intractable for classical computers. Willow uses 105 qubits and demonstrates an exponential error reduction as the number of qubits increases. This is a critical step towards building a practical, large-scale quantum computer, said Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

Bitcoin uses algorithms like SHA-256 for mining and ECDSA for signatures, which might be vulnerable to quantum decryption. And the short answer is that quantum computers, even advanced ones like Google’s Willow, do not possess the scale or error correction capabilities needed to immediately decrypt widely used encryption methods like RSA, ECC (used in Bitcoin transactions), or AES (used in securing data).

If quantum computers like Willow reach a scale where they can easily factor in large numbers, they could potentially break these encryption schemes, compromising wallet security and transaction integrity. That would require quantum computers with millions or even billions of “qubits” with extremely low error rates, far beyond the current technology.

“Google claims to have demonstrated ‘below threshold’ error correcting capabilities with their latest quantum chip,” said Chris Osborn, founder at Solana ecosystem project Dialect, in a post on X (formerly Twitter). “‘Below threshold’ is industry jargon for turning physical qubits, which are noisy, s*itty quantum bits that are basically useless, into logical qubits, which are multi-qubit abstractions that correct for errors & let you actually perform real computation.” he added.

It takes roughly 5,000 logical qubits “to run Shor’s algorithm to break encryption. In other words, millions of physical qubits are needed to break encryption. Google’s chip today: 105 physical qubits,” Osborn noted.

Until then, cryptocurrencies (and other sectors) have time to develop quantum-resistant algorithms.

CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL ARTICLE BY COINDESK’S SHAURYA MALWA

Money Center

Hole in the wallet

  • Magic Eden’s $5B Token Airdrop Raises Crypto Wallet Security Questions

Deals and grants

  • Binance Partners With Circle to Push USDC Stablecoin Adoption Across the Globe
  • Stablecoin Trading Startup Perena Tries Its Luck on Solana

Happy perp-day

  • As BitMEX Turns 10, the Market Is Still Thankful for the Perpetual Swap

Regulatory and policy

  • El Salvador and Argentina Regulators Sign Agreement to Help Develop Crypto Industry

Calendar

  • Dec. 4-5: India Blockchain Week, Bangalore
  • Dec. 5-6: Emergence, Prague
  • Dec. 9-12: Abu Dhabi Finance Week
  • Dec. 11-12: AI Summit NYC
  • Dec. 11-14: Taipei Blockchain Week
  • Jan 9-12, 2025: CES, Las Vegas
  • Jan. 15-19: World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland
  • January 21-25: WAGMI conference, Miami.
  • Jan. 24-25: Adopting Bitcoin, Cape Town, South Africa.
  • Jan. 30-31: PLAN B Forum, San Salvador, El Salvador.
  • Feb. 1-6: Satoshi Roundtable, Dubai
  • Feb. 19-20, 2025: ConsensusHK, Hong Kong.
  • Feb. 23-24: NFT Paris
  • Feb 23-March 2: ETHDenver
  • May 14-16: Consensus, Toronto.
  • March 18-19: Digital Asset Summit, London
  • May 27-29: Bitcoin 2025, Las Vegas.

Merhaba arkadaşlar, bugün sizlere Prizmabet adlı bir bahis sitesinden bahsedeceğim. Prizmabet, Betconstruct altyapısı ile üyelerine kaliteli hizmetler veren ve ülkemizin önde gelen bahis sitelerinden bir tanesidir. 2009 yılında kurulan Prizmabet, lisanslı, güvenilir ve avantajlı bir site olarak dikkat çekmektedir. Prizmabet’te spor bahisleri, canlı bahisler, casino, canlı casino, slot oyunları, sanal sporlar ve daha pek çok seçenek bulabilirsiniz. Prizmabet’te oyun oynamak için aradığınız ortamı fazlası ile bulacaksınız.

Prizmabet’in en önemli özelliklerinden biri de Prizmabet TV kanalıdır. Bu kanal sayesinde bahis sitesinde bulunan müsabakaları üyeler bir ücrete katlanmadan istedikleri zaman takip edebiliyor. Böylece hem heyecanlı hem de kazançlı bir bahis deneyimi yaşayabiliyorsunuz. Prizmabet TV kanalında futbol, basketbol, tenis, voleybol gibi popüler spor dallarının yanı sıra daha az bilinen sporlara da yer verilmektedir. Prizmabet TV kanalını kullanmak için sadece siteye üye olmanız ve yatırım yapmanız yeterlidir.

Prizmabet ayrıca üyelerine bol miktarda bonus ve promosyon da sunmaktadır. Prizmabet’te ilk üyelik bonusu olarak 100 TL deneme bonusu alabilirsiniz. Bunun yanında yatırım bonusları, kayıp bonusları, arkadaş davet bonusu, doğum günü bonusu gibi farklı bonuslar da mevcuttur. Prizmabet bonusları sayesinde daha fazla oyun oynayabilir ve kazancınızı artırabilirsiniz. Prizmabet bonuslarının çevrim şartları da oldukça makul seviyededir.

Prizmabet para yatırma ve çekme işlemleri konusunda da üyelerine kolaylık sağlamaktadır. Prizmabet’te banka havalesi, kredi kartı, papara, cepbank, QR kod, bitcoin gibi farklı yöntemlerle para yatırabilir ve çekebilirsiniz. Para yatırma ve çekme işlemleri 7/24 yapılabilmekte ve kısa sürede hesaplara yansımaktadır. Prizmabet para yatırma ve çekme işlemlerinde herhangi bir komisyon veya kesinti de yapmamaktadır.

Prizmabet müşteri hizmetleri de üyelerine 7/24 canlı destek hizmeti sağlamaktadır. Prizmabet canlı destek ekibi sayesinde site ile ilgili her türlü soru, sorun veya önerinizi iletebilir ve anında çözüm bulabilirsiniz. Prizmabet canlı destek ekibi profesyonel, güler yüzlü ve yardımseverdir.

Sonuç olarak, Prizmabet ülkemizin en iyi bahis sitelerinden biri olarak gösterilebilir. Prizmabet’te hem eğlenceli hem de kazançlı bir bahis deneyimi yaşayabilirsiniz. Prizmabet’e üye olmak için güncel giriş adresini web sitemizden bulabilirsiniz. Prizmabet’e girmek için tıklayınız! Prizmabet’e katıldığınıza pişman olmayacaksınız!

Bitcoin Going to $140K Says Trio of AIs Managing $30M Investment Fund

Intelligent Alpha’s investment committee is composed of three AIs and the fund’s CEO tries to stay out of their way.

There’s a $30 million fund that, for all intents and purposes, leaves all investment decisions to be made by artificial intelligence (AI).

The firm’s name: Intelligent Alpha. Its staff includes founder and CEO Doug Clinton, a few programmers and contractors, and a trio of AIs — OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude.

The AI triumvirate makes up the firm’s investment committee and so far, it’s doing a stellar job.

“Some of the AI’s best calls have been shorts,” Clinton told CoinDesk in an interview. “It was short on Boeing earlier this year, before that door blew off the 737 MAX [in January]. And AI was actually short on the stock for that reason — because it thought there would be quality issues with the plane.”

While the firm has focused on traditional finance so far and mostly kept away from crypto, Clinton said he started experimenting with bitcoin (BTC) specifically in the last five months. The objective: for AI to set useful targets to trade the world’s top cryptocurrency.

“In the bull case — which was a Trump win and a more favorable regulatory environment — AI saw that bitcoin could maybe go to $140,000,” Clinton said. “Maybe that’s the scenario we’re working toward right now.”

How it works

A lot of firms now use AI to enhance human processes, to help analysts process data and think in different ways. But Clinton’s method is to give responsibility to the AI trio, and stay out of its way as much as possible when it comes to investment decisions.

The process is relatively simple. If, for example, Intelligent Alpha is looking to build a large cap U.S. equity portfolio, the fund will curate a bunch of data about U.S. companies with large market capitalizations, like historical revenue and earning projections, and feed it to the AIs.

The next step is to give a philosophical framework for the AIs to use. Clinton asks the AIs to step into the shoes of some of the most famous investors in the world — Warren Buffett, Stanley Druckenmiller, Cathie Wood — and apply their way of thinking to the portfolio at hand.

The triumvirate then produces a portfolio, which a human must double-check to make sure there aren’t any “hallucinations,” in Clinton’s words. For example, the AI may accidentally include a stock that was recently acquired, or the stock of a company with a small market cap.

“Other than that, we try not to really mess with the portfolios,” Clinton told CoinDesk. “As a human, I’ll sometimes look at the portfolios and think ‘Oh, this pick seems like a terrible idea.’ Other times I’ll see something really interesting and try to understand the logic. It’s kind of fun.”

The process involves the three AIs explaining their reasoning to Clinton. Not only does it help him ascertain that the investments are aligned with the portfolio’s goals, but he says that models provide better portfolios when they’re forced to explain why they like specific stocks.

It often happens for the AIs to disagree. And their way of thinking changes as updates get rolled out. “It used to be the case that Claude was the most contrarian model in terms of the outputs, when we first started testing,” Clinton said. “Now I would say it’s ChatGPT.” And while Clinton has tested other AIs such as Grok or Lama AI, keeping the investment committee down to three AIs has proved to be the most efficient set-up.

Predicting the future

Investors can gain exposure to Intelligent Alpha’s strategy through an exchange-traded fund, the Intelligent Livermore ETF, which launched in September and uses AI to build a global equity portfolio. More such funds are on the way, Clinton said.

For the Livermore ETF, every financial quarter the models review world events and try to make predictions for the next three to six months. Five or six areas of opportunities are then identified (following the investment philosophies of the greats like Druckenmiller) and the portfolio gets built around these sectors.

Having competing philosophies means the portfolio usually ends up being quite balanced. “In many cases they’re looking at idiosyncratic opportunities,” Clinton said. “We haven’t seen big issues where [the investment philosophies] are at odds, but even then, it would be like hedging.” The AIs themselves make the decisions on how to weigh the various philosophies found in the portfolio, depending on the areas they’re the most confident in.

“AI has been, at least so far, really good at seeing forward,” Clinton said. “Right before we launched, it made a big bet on Asian stocks, specifically Chinese stocks, and that was right before [billionaire hedge fund manager] David Tepper went on CNBC in September and said that China was his biggest bet, that they were bringing out the bazooka for stimulus. And you know, Chinese stocks went crazy.”

Another memorable trade: chipmaker giant Nvidia has been AI’s top pick since the experiment began in summer of 2023. “Back then, I was like, ‘Oh, my God.’ Nvidia had run so much at that point,” Clinton said. “But it’s up now like 400% from the moment the AI picked it.” The lesson in there, he says, is humans will react to charts emotionally, whereas AI “just doesn’t care. It says ‘No, this is going to go higher.’”

Not that every bet has been a slam dunk, but so far, the mistakes have been on the margin, according to Clinton. The AI is building a good track record on macro events especially, he said. For one thing, it predicted that former President Donald Trump would be re-elected.

And crypto?

One of the reasons Intelligent Alpha doesn’t focus too much on crypto is simply lack of data. Their trades may have happened on-chain, but there’s no easy way to go back and find the kind of trading setups and investment philosophies used by famous crypto investors like Cobie or GCR. Most of the time, all you can do is go off of their posts on X — and it’s hard to know whether the posts reflect reality.

That being said, the crypto community’s reliance on X means that Grok could end up playing a role in Intelligent Alpha’s triumvirate someday for crypto purposes, Clinton mused, since that model is trained and fine-tuned with data from the social media platform.

“The question that we’re exploring here is, what can we do with AI that would maybe be unique and different and stand out a little bit,” Clinton said. “To find a unique way to use AI to identify breakout crypto projects, that would be a really cool way to use the tech.”