One of the best articles from the spring argues that the Web3 buzz was just another hype bubble inflated by VCs. Another explains why forms of private money are politically problematic by nature. The way crypto has been is the way it will be.| The Crypto Syllabus
What everyone in the crypto industry must have been hearing, as they rang in the new year, were the reverberations from FTX’s collapse. Increased regulatory scrutiny and financial precarity are spreading through the ecosystem.| The Crypto Syllabus
As we await film adaptations of the FTX saga, this month’s reading list contains reports on the unethical blockchain trials taking place in refugee camps; accounts of how the creation and transference of digital money mediates economic relations; and much more.| The Crypto Syllabus
The big news, of course, is FTX. The writing was on the wall – or at least inside the Magic Money Box, an analogy Sam Bankman-Fried used to explain yield farming, which now applies to his businesses. After a bank run led to a liquidity crisis for FTX, trapping at| The Crypto Syllabus
Last month, Ethereum finally made the switch to a proof-of-stake protocol. The Merge slashed Ethereum’s future annual emissions down to a level close to Gibraltar’s, but it hasn’t yet ended the crypto winter. Nor has it dampened concerns about the emissions entailed by crypto| The Crypto Syllabus
Even as bitcoin prices continue to hover around $20,000, investors await developments they hope will right the crypto ship. This month, Ethereum and Cardano will adopt, or 'merge' with, proof-of-stake blockchains; next year, the SEC could approve the first spot exchange-traded fund for bitcoin. In the meantime,| The Crypto Syllabus
The crypto bubble has officially burst. For the first time since 2020, the end of the last crypto winter, Ethereum mining is no longer profitable for those drawing power from traditional grids, as energy prices skyrocket and token prices plummet. No wonder graphics cards are back in stock, after years| The Crypto Syllabus
After a generalised fall in the prices of virtual currencies, the crypto-sphere is experiencing a strange sort of interregnum: the standard-bearers are not dying quite yet, but nothing new is being born either. In the meantime, some would argue, morbid symptoms have appeared. In May, the share price of Coinbase,| The Crypto Syllabus
The crypto world has changed dramatically in recent months, as promises of emancipation give way to harsh reality. The second-largest NFT platform, OpenSea, has acknowledged that 80% of its products are fraud; according to some estimates, $14 billion worth of cryptocurrencies were stolen in 2021 alone. Meanwhile, on February 24,| The Crypto Syllabus
Technical mastery has long been part of religious or spiritual awe, as well as a means to create or strengthen power relations... Bitcoin and all the aura surrounding its creation had this same characteristic.| The Crypto Syllabus
"Within our present oligarchic, exploitative, irrational, and inhuman world system, the rise of crypto applications will only make our society more oligarchic, more exploitative, more irrational, and more inhuman."| The Crypto Syllabus
"Monetary policy is not a curse to be driven out by some non-political binding mechanism, algorithmic or otherwise, but an opportunity to expand the range of our politics and collective self-organization."| The Crypto Syllabus
This is the boringly-obvious Oedipus tragedy of Bitcoin. It is as if this histrionic “rebellious child” of neoliberalism suddenly began demanding consistency from the father, the neoliberal establishment...| The Crypto Syllabus
Of all the promises made in the name of Web3, two stand out as particularly radical and democracy-enhancing. First, some expect it to accelerate the process of decentralisation, which is already apace in many institutions, industries, and infrastructures. Second, we are assured that, in liberating artists from the extractivist data| The Crypto Syllabus
Web3 is self-referential in the extreme. The value of the tokens is expected to grow as everything is to become more liquid and interconnected: tokens from one DAO will be valuable in another; more activities will be fractionalized; more institutions will turn into DAOs; more objects into NFTs...| The Crypto Syllabus
