Su Zhu Got Locked Up: News 10.9.23

And what's next at the SBF trial.

Hello and good morning. A bit of business before we get to news.

First, I want to re-up my summary yesterday of the first week of the Sam Bankman-Fried trial. A long dive for the real heads, it seems many missed this Sunday drop.

Second, I will be reading fiction in Brooklyn on Wednesday, October 11, at 7pm at Hart Bar. I’ll probably be reading from my novella, which can be had here.

Finally, I’m excited to offer some free premium upgrades to existing subscribers. I have as many as ten free one-year subscriptions to offer, and I’m asking for two things:

1. Write one or two sentences about the newsletter and post to any social media site or other platform.

2. Screenshot or link your post and send it to me in a Twitter message to @davidzmorris. Include the email address with which you’re subscribed here.

That’s all there is to it. These free slots are funded by an anonymous donation that came in after I whined about Ben Armstrong’s fundraising on Twitter. So, in a way, you can thank BitBoy.

But not actually, don’t do that, not even in your mind, silently, to yourself.

Crypto/Tech/Finance News October 9, 2023

• Su Zhu Arrested - One of the two co-founders of Three Arrows Capital, which seems to have lied to lenders on a massive scale, was arrested on September 29 in Singapore. The immediate cause of the arrest was that he has refused to cooperate with the liquidators of the fund he co-founded and then ran into the ground. The failure of Three Arrows was largely rooted in Zhu’s proselytizing of the “supercycle theory” that Bitcoin would be going up (from its then-price of ~$50,000+) indefinitely.

  In retrospect, that sounds like a great way to attract money to an investment fund. And Three Arrows, while it represented itself as essentially a family office managing its own money, is now understood to have taken large loans.