Slow Ventures principal @jillruthcarlson says blockchains can democratize finance — if people run their own nodes.

Have you ever tried to sync a Bitcoin node or another blockchain node, essentially dow...nloading the entire history of the network to your computer? Not with your super-high-speed internet, but out in the wild, where most people live?

Jill Carlson, a VC and advisor to blockchain projects such as Algorand and Tezos, has—and she doesn’t think it’s a great advertisement for blockchain technology.

“I once had the experience, the joy of syncing a full Monero node from my parents’ condo, where the internet was really spotty and it took, like, two weeks to do, and they were all, like, ‘Isn’t this supposed to be the future of finance?” Carlson, who this week joined the Mina Foundation board, told host Matthew Aaron of The Decrypt Daily podcast.

In Carlson’s view, if you’re not syncing a node, you’re not fully participating in the future of finance. It’s the main reason why she’s excited to be a part of Mina, which has attracted investments from Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam and crypto angel investor Naval Ravikant.

Mina (formerly Coda) advertises itself as a “tweet-sized blockchain” that can be downloaded to a mobile phone even without much bandwidth. A node is just 22 KB. That’s a major contrast to more recognizable blockchains, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. Those networks create lots of demand for their tokens but face logistical challenges to attract actual users that will secure and decentralize the network.

“There’s this whole notion, which is really a misconception when it’s applied to most projects, that, ‘Oh, we’re bringing decentralization to the world, we’re democratizing finance this way,’” she said. “But unless you are really getting your hands dirty, if you will, with the blockchain itself, and running a node and syncing the whole thing, then that’s kind of a problematic statement.”

As a board member of the just-created nonprofit Mina Foundation (which also welcomed crypto industry vets Josh Cincinnati, Tess Rinearson, Sean Inggs, and Evan Shapiro), Carlson will help create an ecosystem around the blockchain, primarily via grants.

She’s ready to get started helping the tiny blockchain project grow big: “This is what’s really exciting to me about the Mina Protocol, is making good on that promise that blockchain technology has had all along.”Show more >

The penalty is further proof that crypto companies must play by the rules set by regulators.

Bitcoin payments processor BitPay today agreed to pay a $507,375 fine to the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign... Assets Control (“OFAC”) for 2,102 apparent violations of international sanctions.

According to OFAC’s notice, the agency found that BitPay, an Atlanta, Georgia-based crypto payments portal for online merchants founded in 2011, facilitated payments in nation-states subject to US sanctions, among them Cuba, North Korea, Iran and Syria, between 2013 and 2018.

The settlement is yet another reminder that although Bitcoin’s decentralized network is above the law, centralized crypto companies are still very much subject to it.

BitPay handles payments for merchants that want to sell goods and services for crypto. When customers buy things in crypto, BitPay handles the paperwork and facilitates the transaction, then converts that money into fiat currencies and hands it over to the merchants.

The firm allowed people in sanctioned regions to place transactions worth, cumulatively, $129,000, found OFAC.

“We cooperated fully with the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and are pleased to have resolved this matter,” Jan Jahosky, a spokesperson for BitPay, told Decrypt. He said that the case “involved a very small number of transactions.”

The treasury agency said that BitPay knew it was processing payments in sanctioned countries because it recorded information about the location of customers buying things from BitPay merchants, such as their IP addresses.

“BitPay failed to exercise due caution or care for its sanctions compliance obligations when it allowed persons in sanctioned jurisdictions to transact with BitPay’s merchants using digital currency for approximately five years, even though BitPay had sufficient information to screen those customers,” said OFAC in its statement.

The penalty could have been as high as $620 million, but BitPay settled by cooperating with regulations, had trained its employees to screen customers and had taken preventative steps.

Crypto companies are frequently in the firing line of US regulators. Paxful in September 2020 dropped out of Venezuela, citing US sanctions. And the US Securities and Exchange Commission has slammed dozens of companies for running unregistered ICOs (token sales) ahead of their launch to US investors.

Of great concern to crypto companies is the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network’s proposal to force crypto companies to regulate transactions from private crypto wallets.

Although US President Joe Biden froze federal rulemaking upon assuming office, it’s clear that the US government is closing the loopholes as quickly as possible. Show more >

The long-awaited Purpose Bitcoin ETF in Canada is proving to be very popular.

North America’s first ever Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) launched today. It traded $165 million-worth of shares in its... first day, including $80 million in its first hour, according to Bloomberg data.

The Purpose Bitcoin ETF was approved in Canada earlier this month and runs on the Toronto Stock Exchange. The physical Bitcoin that the ETF trades is stored by crypto exchange, Gemini.

According to Bloomberg ETF analyst, Eric Balchunas, it was an “epic full first day” for Purpose.

Exchange traded funds allow investors to buy and sell shares continually throughout the day.

The Bitcoin ETF allows investors to buy shares that represent the digital asset without having to actually own the cryptocurrency themselves.

The world’s first Bitcoin ETF got approval in Bermuda last year.

Purpose’s Bitcoin ETF allows “easy and efficient access” to Bitcoin “without the associated risk of self-custody within a digital wallet,” according to Purpose, the asset management company running the ETF.

“We believe Bitcoin, as the first and largest asset in the emerging cryptocurrency ecosystem, is poised to continue its growth trajectory and adoption as an alternative asset, further cementing the investment opportunity it presents,” Purpose CEO Som Seif said in a statement.

Purpose’s Bitcoin ETF is the first such ETF in North America. In the US, regulators have yet to approve one. The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has rejected applications from companies that want to launch an ETF, including Bitwise and Wilshire Phoenix. The SEC claims that a "real" Bitcoin market doesn’t exist in the US, and that the currency’s price is prone to manipulation by those with significant holdings.

But Canada has had some luck, it seems: the Purpose Bitcoin ETF got the green light on February 11. And a second ETF, by Evolve Funds Group, also got approval this month—but it isn’t up and running yet.

After today’s success, perhaps a Bitcoin ETF in the US may be one step closer to a reality. Though that might not be a good thing.

Quantum Economics analyst Charles Bovaird told Decrypt: “Since a Bitcoin ETF has launched in Canada, this development might ‘steal the thunder’ surrounding the launch of any such fund in the US."

Bovaird added: “More specifically, the existence of this Canadian ETF could make the approval of any US ETF less of a milestone, since it would not be the first fund of this kind to be approved by regulators.”

The existence of one or more Canadian ETFs, said the analyst, could reduce the trading volume that a US Bitcoin ETF draws if and when it finally obtains approval from the SEC.Show more >

Multiple venture capital funds are contributing $2.7 million to Nexus Mutual’s Foundation treasury.

Nexus Mutual, an alternative risk sharing platform, has raised $2.7 million in a strategic contributi...on to its Foundation treasury.

The effort was led by Collider Ventures with participation of 1Confirmation, Blockchain Capital, Version One, Dialectic and other leading institutional and individual investors in crypto space.

Nexus Mutual is a community-based insurance alternative offering protection against risk and potential vulnerabilities in smart contract code in decentralized finance (DeFi) products. Only members can participate in the network, buy cover and hold NXM tokens.

According to Nexus Mutual, the fresh capital will enable it to extend its offering beyond the existing product and cover users of the already established cryptocurrency exchanges and custodians, including Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, and Gemini.

The idea is that, through participation in the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) on the Ethereum blockchain, users cover themselves, rather than relying on an exchange’s insurance policy.

“We see Nexus Mutual as an indispensable pillar of DeFi strategic opportunity and decided to take a proactive approach to support the development of the platform, as well as participate in governance and continue funding projects building on top of Nexus Mutual as the underwriter,” said Adam Benayoun, founding partner at Collider Ventures.

He added that recently Collider had led another strategic investment in Armor Finance, a decentralized brokerage for cover underwritten by Nexus Mutual. Other projects in Collider’s portfolio include The Graph, ZenGo, Efficient Frontier, IDEX, and Hummingbot among others.

Nexus Mutual’s ambitious roadmap
Last December, Nexus Mutual CEO Hugh Karp fell victim to a sophisticated social engineering hack which resulted in him being tricked into sending the attacker $8 million in the project’s native NXM tokens from his personal wallet.

Despite this setback, within the final 5 months of 2020 the London-based company managed to increase the total value of crypto locked in its protocol from $4 million to $100 million.

Nexus Mutual also says they have designed “a very aggressive roadmap for 2021,” which includes an ambitious plan to sell over $1 billion worth of cover for at least 30 protocols.Show more >

The Filecoin network continues to grow—now its storage capacity equals thousands of copies of Wikipedia and tens of copies of the Internet Archive.

The Filecoin network has reached a total capacity of ...2.5 exbibytes, according to an announcement today. In more familiar terms, that's 2.5 billion gigabytes of data.

According to the release, this capacity is enough to store 725 million 1080p movies, 11,250 copies of Wikipedia, and 47 copies of the Internet Archive. So, a fair bit then.

Filecoin is a decentralized storage network that enables thousands of computers around the world to get paid to store data. Because the network is decentralized, it means the data isn't held in one single place, reducing the risk of it being lost or corrupted.

"The importance of an open, decentralized Internet has never been greater. Reaching 2.5 EiB storage capacity is a pivotal moment for Filecoin and the wider Web 3.0 movement," said Colin Evran, ecosystem lead at Filecoin.

"The Web 3.0 pursuit to create a more efficient and secure web, free from corporate control, is coming into fruition," he added.

Filecoin also provides a way of incentivizing the storage of data on IPFS, a protocol designed for accessing the Internet from anywhere in the world. IPFS users can store data directly from the IPFS network itself. It has been natively integrated into the Brave browser, or users can run their own IPFS nodes.

Decrypt has integrated with the IPFS network—so if you click the IPFS link at the bottom of this article, you can read it via the IPFS network.Show more >

Not long after Elon Musk’s Tesla invested $1.5 billion into Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency has notched up yet another record price.


Bitcoin’s price has broken the $50,000 barrier, reaching as high as... $50,560, on the news that MicroStrategy will sell $600 million of convertible senior notes to buy more Bitcoin.

The business intelligence firm said today that it intends to sell these notes to institutional investors. The firm intends to use the net proceeds from the sale to acquire more Bitcoin. That would be in addition to the 71,079 BTC it already owns—at a current value of $3.5 billion.

The firm added that it will allow investors the option to purchase an additional $90 million of notes, which the firm will also use to buy more Bitcoin.

Since reaching $42,000 in early January, Bitcoin hovered between $30,000 and $40,000 for weeks, prompting commentators to ponder whether Bitcoin had the momentum to climb any higher. But on February 8, 2021, Tesla announced that it invested $1.5 billion into Bitcoin, providing momentum to the cryptocurrency, which is breaking records once again.

"The latest price rally was largely initiated by Tesla getting into Bitcoin. Many industry insiders saw that expansion coming: over the past few months, Elon Musk started to talk about Bitcoin more often on his social media, and in a more positive light,” BitRiver CEO and founder Igor Runets told Decrypt.

Since Tesla’s $1.5 billion investment in Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency’s price has increased from $38,900 to $50,000, representing a 30% increase.

“The recent rally is proof that the corporate and institutional world are confident enough to make significant capital allocations towards Bitcoin, positioning it as a new vertical of investable assets,” Miha Grčar, head of business development at crypto exchange Kraken, told Decrypt.

But Musk’s influence on Bitcoin’s price didn’t start when Tesla announced its purchase. In fact, Musk has been pumping the price of Bitcoin since last month.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk says that if the distribution of Dogecoin does not become more even, he may stop endorsing it.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said today that he would support the top holders of Dogecoin selli...ng a big portion of their DOGE stash to ease out the altcoin’s distribution, as per a tweet this morning.

Whether that is a joke or not, Dogecoin’s wealth concentration issue is real. Reports suggest a single entity holds over 27% of the altcoin’s entire market cap, valued at over $7 billion at press time. That puts the entity’s holdings at over $1.8 billion, or about the GDP of a mid-sized island nation as of today.

In addition, the top twenty DOGE addresses hold more than 50% of the altcoin’s current circulating supply (over $3.5 billion). While these could likely be crypto exchanges holding Dogecoin as a reserve in their cold wallets, they have not been acknowledged by any exchange so far.

Musk insists that this must change for the better. “If major Dogecoin holders sell most of their coins, it will get my full support. Too much concentration is the only real issue IMO,” he tweeted this morning.

Musk’s advocacy of the token may also not continue forever, his reply to a relevant tweet today suggested. A Twitter account said that if “whales” (a term for the large holders of Dogecoin) did not sell their tokens and continued to hold on, Dogecoin could lose Musk’s endorsement—a tweet to which the eccentric billionaire replied, “Yup.”

Dogecoin’s concentrated holdings mean a problem for the long-term fundamentals of DOGE (as with any other altcoin). The lack of supply means prices can be artificially and disproportionately driven up for the benefit of the few large wallets. And when such wallets finally choose to sell, the price of DOGE would, inevitably, crash.

Founded in 2013 as a joke cryptocurrency, Dogecoin’s meme value, the usage of a Shiba Inu dog as a mascot, and a cutesy narrative has pumped its market cap to billions of dollars over the years.

In recent weeks, celebrities, rappers, adult entertainment stars, and notably Musk himself (as the self-styled “CEO of Dogecoin”) have tweeted about the joke currency to their millions of followers —with such coverage pushing DOGE from under $0.004 to over $0.07 in the past two months alone.

But can whales selling their holdings save the so-called “people’s crypto”? Musk seems to think so.Show more >

Tesla CEO Elon Musk says that if the distribution of Dogecoin does not become more even, he may stop endorsing it.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said today that he would support the top holders of Dogecoin selli...ng a big portion of their DOGE stash to ease out the altcoin’s distribution, as per a tweet this morning.

Whether that is a joke or not, Dogecoin’s wealth concentration issue is real. Reports suggest a single entity holds over 27% of the altcoin’s entire market cap, valued at over $7 billion at press time. That puts the entity’s holdings at over $1.8 billion, or about the GDP of a mid-sized island nation as of today.

In addition, the top twenty DOGE addresses hold more than 50% of the altcoin’s current circulating supply (over $3.5 billion). While these could likely be crypto exchanges holding Dogecoin as a reserve in their cold wallets, they have not been acknowledged by any exchange so far.

Musk insists that this must change for the better. “If major Dogecoin holders sell most of their coins, it will get my full support. Too much concentration is the only real issue IMO,” he tweeted this morning.

Musk’s advocacy of the token may also not continue forever, his reply to a relevant tweet today suggested. A Twitter account said that if “whales” (a term for the large holders of Dogecoin) did not sell their tokens and continued to hold on, Dogecoin could lose Musk’s endorsement—a tweet to which the eccentric billionaire replied, “Yup.”

Dogecoin’s concentrated holdings mean a problem for the long-term fundamentals of DOGE (as with any other altcoin). The lack of supply means prices can be artificially and disproportionately driven up for the benefit of the few large wallets. And when such wallets finally choose to sell, the price of DOGE would, inevitably, crash.

Founded in 2013 as a joke cryptocurrency, Dogecoin’s meme value, the usage of a Shiba Inu dog as a mascot, and a cutesy narrative has pumped its market cap to billions of dollars over the years.

In recent weeks, celebrities, rappers, adult entertainment stars, and notably Musk himself (as the self-styled “CEO of Dogecoin”) have tweeted about the joke currency to their millions of followers —with such coverage pushing DOGE from under $0.004 to over $0.07 in the past two months alone.

But can whales selling their holdings save the so-called “people’s crypto”? Musk seems to think so.Show more >

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A member of Tesla’s board audit committee—that approved its $1.5 billion Bitcoin purchase—is a director at two crypto companies.

A member of the audit committee that permitted Tesla to invest $1.5 bill...ion of its capital into Bitcoin is also a big crypto investor, as revealed by The Telegraph.

Antonio Gracias, the Tesla board member who was on the committee, is also a director at BitGo, a digital asset security and custody company, and at crypto trading platform ErisX. It is unknown whether he excused himself from the vote.

Gracias, who is leaving Tesla later this year, has been on the company’s board since 2007. He is also a board member at Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX.

The Chicago-based entrepreneur is also the founder of investment firm Valor Equity Partners. Earlier, Gracias invested in Harbor, a security token platform, which was acquired by BitGo last year.

While it is not clear whether Gracias took part in a vote to approve Tesla’s investment policy change, experts suggest there could be a potential conflict of interest because of the entrepreneur’s shared roles.

“If there’s any direct conflict or appearance of that, you better stay arm’s length away from it,” Bill Klepper, a professor of management at Columbia Business School, told The Telegraph. “We have to find out whether or not he is acting in good faith. It’s in the lack of transparency, that you find people begin to question your ethics.”

Tesla's latest SEC filing revealed that the company had adopted a new investment policy in January with a new focus on investing in digital assets and gold. According to the document, Tesla had bought $1.5 billion of Bitcoin.

When the news broke last week, it catapulted the price of Bitcoin to record levels.

However, some investors are not happy with the move. One of them is Gary Black, a private investor and former Goldman Sachs executive, who has exited his Tesla positions citing “risky capital allocation.”Show more >

Transaction fees on the Bitcoin blockchain have exceeded $20 on average. but that’s a good thing, experts argued.

Bitcoin (BTC) miners earn 0.97 BTC (currently worth around $48,000) in transaction fees... alone per block, according to metrics platform Clark Moody Bitcoin. This is an average taken over the last 2,000 blocks, meaning many of these blocks will have risen above the 1 Bitcoin mark.

When Bitcoin miners mine a block, they are rewarded with a fixed fee of 6.25 Bitcoin (although this halves every four years) and receive the transaction fees for all transactions included in that block.

But transaction fees have been on the rise recently (around $20), and are making up a greater percentage of the overall reward. Bitcoin miners are now making around $40 million per day in total. So, fees alone make up 13.47% of Bitcoin miners’ total revenue.

This suggests that, as Bitcoin mining rewards decline over time, fees might continue to increase and replace them—providing ongoing, economic incentive for miners to keep the network running and secure.

As average fees on the Bitcoin blockchain rise, does that mean that BTC may become too expensive to use for “normal” people at some point? Well, kind of, but that’s arguably a good thing, according to Quantum Economics analyst Pedro Febrero.

“In our opinion, this is an excellent sign. High fees mean adoption since fees usually grow once the competition to add a transaction into a block increases,” Febrero told Decrypt.

He noted that high fees may indeed scare away a few potential buyers, especially those with less cash. However, data shows that fees tend to spike as adoption increases—and that’s the normal way of things. But that doesn’t mean no one is working on a solution.

“To conclude, we argue that there are developments in place that aim at accommodating more transactions per block, such as SegWit and the Lightning Network,” Febrero summarized.Show more >

The upcoming stablecoin contender reached the milestone a little over a month after it was renamed.


The testnet for Diem, the Facebook-backed stablecoin project, reached over 50 million transactio...ns yesterday, data from blockchain explorer inDiem shows. The development comes a little over a month after Diem was rebranded from the erstwhile “Libra” project.

Diem is a stablecoin—a type of cryptocurrency pegged on a 1:1 basis with fiat currencies, the US dollar in this case—aiming to disrupt the traditional payments market with its low-fee, scalable, and fast settlement features. It is run by the Diem Association and a consortium of other members, such as crypto exchange Coinbase and ride-sharing giant Uber.

Currently running in the testing phase—or the “testnet” in crypto industry lingo—Diem reached over 50 million transactions in the late hours yesterday. Such testing allows developers to mitigate faults within the network, if any, before a public release.

Data shows the Diem testnet operates at an average throughput of over 3 transactions per second (tps). While sounding fast, this is much slower than transactions on both Bitcoin (4.6 tps) and Ethereum (15 tps), and much slower to the speeds on upcoming networks like Solana (65,000 tps). However, Diem may not be operating anywhere near capacity.

In terms of testnet users, over 221,000 individual addresses have interacted with Diem in some capacity. Of those, a single address holds over 100 million LBR (the tokens that run on Diem), while over 53 of those hold exactly 820 LBR.

In all, 57 of the top 100 wallets hold upwards of 29 LBR, while the others hold a single LBR each—likely for testing the network in various ways at various times of the day.

With testing in full flow, a public launch (albeit a so-termed “limited launch) for Diem is expected later in 2021, as per earlier reports. Meanwhile, the stablecoin has already found its takers, with music app Spotify said to already be beefing up its payments division in anticipation.

Show more >

After getting “GameStopped,” Dogecoin (DOGE) has caught up with some national fiat currencies across the world today.


It looks like WallStreetBets (WSB), the group of redditors that recently flipp...ed off Wall Street by pumping GameStop’s stock, have now got “meme crypto” Dogecoin in its sights. In just one day, DOGE has already surged by up to 80%, according to crypto metrics platform CoinGecko.

“Has Doge ever been to a dollar?” tweeted “WSB Chairman” earlier today.

Around the time the message was posted, DOGE’s price surged from $0.0075 to as high as $0.0136 today. At press time, the coin is trading at around $0.0125, up 58% on the day.

Subsequently, the “meme coin’s” price has caught up with some national fiat currencies across the world. For example, DOGE is now trading at a nearly 1:1 exchange rate against the Russian ruble on various trading platforms. On Binance, for instance, one Dogecoin is currently worth roughly 1.025 rubles.

While there is no clear ideological reasoning behind DOGE’s pump today—unlike in GameStop’s case—today’s shenanigans are still spreading like wildfire as users seem to be having fun just for the sake of it.


“in #dogecoin we trust ... and our chief elonmusk. Let's make it worth something . doge is us, we are doge,” one user tweeted.

As Decrypt reported, the WSB’s pump of GameStop’s stock resulted in huge losses for some Wall Street firms who were shorting the asset and struggled to get out of the trade. The same may have happened to Dogecoin traders—if any of them were shorting it.Show more >

DeFi “rug pulls” and exit scams made up 99% of all crypto fraud schemes in the second half of 2020, according to new data from blockchain analytics company CipherTrace.

It’s part of CipherTrace’s year...-end report examining cryptocurrency’s role in criminal activity over the course of 2020, similar to what Chainalysis released earlier this month.

According to CipherTrace’s data, criminals “netted” $1.9 billion in 2020. That’s down from $4.5 billion in 2019, and up from $1.7 billion in 2018.

The majority of that crypto-linked criminal activity falls under the general rubric of “fraud and misappropriation.” The second-most-popular category, per CipherTrace, was “hacks and thefts.”

A massive fraud scheme surrounding a coin called WoToken was responsible for $1.1 billion of last year’s figure. It was the single most expensive crypto crime of 2020, according to the report. Criminal activity surrounding the KuCoin hack and Fcoin came in second and third place.

DeFi was also particularly vulnerable to thefts last year, according to CipherTrace. And “rug pulls”—a kind of exit scam where attackers drain liquidity from a protocol, leaving investors unable to trade—reigned supreme.

“Half of all 2020 crypto hacks were of DeFi protocols—a pattern that was virtually negligible in all prior years—and nearly 99% of major fraud volume in the second half of 2020 stemmed from DeFi protocols performing ‘rug pulls’ and other exit scams in a pattern eerily reminiscent of the 2017 ICO craze,” says CipherTrace.

As the amount of money locked up in DeFi has grown—according to data from DeFi Pulse, it’s nearly $25 billion, up from around $10 billion at the beginning of November—so too have the risks.

“FOMO is fueling growth and an urgency associated with participating in DeFi, but the DeFi space overall lacks adequate due diligence, exposing individual investors to significant risks,” CipherTrace CEO Dave Jevans told Decrypt. “When protocols launch quickly to take advantage of the hype cycle, they put users at risk who could fall victim to loopholes or bugs in the code that would have been discovered in an in-depth security audit.”

CipherTrace’s list of targeted DeFi protocols and trading mechanisms included Pickle Finance, Uniswap, Harvest Finance, Bisq, and more.

“With the influx of billions of dollars into DeFi,” said Jevans, “expect more DeFi related hacks, frauds and a variety of exit scams in 2021.”Show more >

Crypto derivatives exchange FTX has just listed GameStop’s “meme stock” for tokenized futures and spot trading.

Cryptocurrency derivatives exchange FTX has listed tokenized GameStop (GME) stocks for fu...tures and spot trading, the platform’s CEO Sam Bankman-Fried announced on Twitter today.

In his tweet, Bankman-Fried posted a link to “GME-0326”—the ticker under which GameStop futures are already being traded. Since the launch, the total trading volume of tokenized GME futures has already amounted to over $1.6 million.

Speaking to Decrypt, Bankman-Fried explained that GameStop’s shares—which became a “meme stock” recently—were in high demand.

“It's probably the single product we've ever gotten the most requests to list, and all in the last day. Plus, the ability to list both spot and futures means that we're able to give a bunch of flexibility to our users,” he told Decrypt.

Recently, the price of GME surged to as high as $365—compared to $18.84 at the end of 2020—thanks to a coordinated “attack” that redditors mounted against Wall Street traders. The latter were shorting the company’s stock amid the overall decline caused by the coronavirus pandemic—until that backfired.

“Shorting” means that traders expect to profit off an asset when its price declines. For example, this could be done by borrowing some stocks and immediately selling them. Then, after their price decreases, a trader can re-buy the assets for less, return them to the lender, and pocket the difference.

But if the asset’s price suddenly surges, then traders have a bit of a problem on their hands since, in the worst-case scenario, they will have to repurchase it at a much higher price than they initially sold it for to fulfill their obligation. And this is exactly what redditors are trying to orchestrate.

As Decrypt reported, massive hedge fund Melvin Capital was one of the players shorting GameStop. However, when it finally exited its short position recently, the company took a “huge loss.”

“I’ve just got off the telephone with who runs that firm, they have taken a rather huge loss, I do not have the full number on what that loss looks like,” said Andrew Sorkin of CNBC’s Squawk Box.

With FTX adding tokenized GME futures and spot trading, it looks like redditors just got even more ammo to fire at Wall Street’s institutional investors.
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