"always looked like either window dressing or desperation"...
Recall "👁️ Jump Trading Colluded with Do Kwon: Whistleblower" from DZM on April 2nd:
"On that note, Hunsaker also testified that Bill DiSomma, not Kanav Kariya, was the 'real boss' of Jump Crypto. It always seemed odd that Kariya, who is very young and started at Jump as an intern, would be made head of the new Crypto arm. This suggests Jump itself was engaged in a long game that planned for the possibility of fraud, and need an insignificant fall guy to eat the heat."
Why would Hunsaker lie about this on stand? Further it makes perfect sense. The real "window dressing" is the crypto on all this TradFi nonsense happening with private, centralized institutions dealings where none of the important bits are on any distributed ledger for anyone to see.
"Jump was also in the blast zone of the $325m Wormhole Hack, which is particularly dumb because that was a clunky bridge mainly for the purpose of moving tokens affiliated with Axie Infinity, an incredibly low-brow project for a firm like Jump to get involved in."
I remember the Wormhole bailout. I didn't understand it at the time and I still think we haven't learned everything there is. No one had previously done such a huge, almost altruistic move. Jump was just an investor, why cover other people's losses? Now I don't believe in altruism from CeFi. SBF offering to bailout BlockFi and Celsius and others, I believe, was all to hide previous dealings. I believe it was related to the whole GBTC rehypothecation BS that all three of them were involved in, along with Genesis and 3AC, which blew up so spectacularly that it probably led to DZM no longer writing for CoinDesk. If I recall it all correctly. So I bet there is more going on with the wormhole bailout. Just like there was with Luna which was notably not publicized (as it absolutely should as it proved it only survives via ponzi).
And Axie Infinity? Of course they were in on that! Play to Earn is just as ponzi as sham algorithmic stablecoins that just use prior investors to pay the next. And Axie was as big in P2E as Luna was in algostable. It made /perfect/ sense.
"However, I think the most important take here is this: what Synapse was doing should have been on a private blockchain. There, I said it! Coordination between a small group of not-entirely-mutually-trusting players? That’s what this stuff is for!"
Disagree. I think this should have been on a ZK public blockchain where the information is encrypted from viewers, but the underlying chain is sufficiently secure, e.g. such as by using the security of a sufficiently decentralized chain like Bitcoin or Ethereum. A ZK rollup of Ethereum with the important bits encrypted might have been the best solution. A private blockchain still goes on the internet. Airgapped intranet... Maybe. But in this case, it would be internet. I'm not convinced that's much more secure than sufficiently encrypted public blockchain which is less mutable.
"Many, many crypto pros are incredibly pissed at CertiK over this. And maybe worse than pissed, they are confused, because none of this actually makes sense …
"Until, that is, you look at the cap table! "
That's a good point. But another is that a lot of audits are theater. Get their stamp and immediately "upgrade" it into meaningless. A niche type of audit company that I think we should have should also be keeping tabs on the (d)apps they certify and warning people loudly (not just the devs but users etc.) if they change their code after they have been certified without getting it recertified first. Would it make their work more expensive? Yeah. Would it make development slower? Much more so. Would it make the cert more meaningful? Absolutely.
Quite a bit going on in here.
"always looked like either window dressing or desperation"...
Recall "👁️ Jump Trading Colluded with Do Kwon: Whistleblower" from DZM on April 2nd:
"On that note, Hunsaker also testified that Bill DiSomma, not Kanav Kariya, was the 'real boss' of Jump Crypto. It always seemed odd that Kariya, who is very young and started at Jump as an intern, would be made head of the new Crypto arm. This suggests Jump itself was engaged in a long game that planned for the possibility of fraud, and need an insignificant fall guy to eat the heat."
Why would Hunsaker lie about this on stand? Further it makes perfect sense. The real "window dressing" is the crypto on all this TradFi nonsense happening with private, centralized institutions dealings where none of the important bits are on any distributed ledger for anyone to see.
"Jump was also in the blast zone of the $325m Wormhole Hack, which is particularly dumb because that was a clunky bridge mainly for the purpose of moving tokens affiliated with Axie Infinity, an incredibly low-brow project for a firm like Jump to get involved in."
I remember the Wormhole bailout. I didn't understand it at the time and I still think we haven't learned everything there is. No one had previously done such a huge, almost altruistic move. Jump was just an investor, why cover other people's losses? Now I don't believe in altruism from CeFi. SBF offering to bailout BlockFi and Celsius and others, I believe, was all to hide previous dealings. I believe it was related to the whole GBTC rehypothecation BS that all three of them were involved in, along with Genesis and 3AC, which blew up so spectacularly that it probably led to DZM no longer writing for CoinDesk. If I recall it all correctly. So I bet there is more going on with the wormhole bailout. Just like there was with Luna which was notably not publicized (as it absolutely should as it proved it only survives via ponzi).
And Axie Infinity? Of course they were in on that! Play to Earn is just as ponzi as sham algorithmic stablecoins that just use prior investors to pay the next. And Axie was as big in P2E as Luna was in algostable. It made /perfect/ sense.
"However, I think the most important take here is this: what Synapse was doing should have been on a private blockchain. There, I said it! Coordination between a small group of not-entirely-mutually-trusting players? That’s what this stuff is for!"
Disagree. I think this should have been on a ZK public blockchain where the information is encrypted from viewers, but the underlying chain is sufficiently secure, e.g. such as by using the security of a sufficiently decentralized chain like Bitcoin or Ethereum. A ZK rollup of Ethereum with the important bits encrypted might have been the best solution. A private blockchain still goes on the internet. Airgapped intranet... Maybe. But in this case, it would be internet. I'm not convinced that's much more secure than sufficiently encrypted public blockchain which is less mutable.
"Many, many crypto pros are incredibly pissed at CertiK over this. And maybe worse than pissed, they are confused, because none of this actually makes sense …
"Until, that is, you look at the cap table! "
That's a good point. But another is that a lot of audits are theater. Get their stamp and immediately "upgrade" it into meaningless. A niche type of audit company that I think we should have should also be keeping tabs on the (d)apps they certify and warning people loudly (not just the devs but users etc.) if they change their code after they have been certified without getting it recertified first. Would it make their work more expensive? Yeah. Would it make development slower? Much more so. Would it make the cert more meaningful? Absolutely.