André De Castro 🟧

Binance has been insolvent for 2 years. This is how I know. This is what we do

The Binance theft has demonstrated that holding stablecoins offers greater security than holding dollars. When a bank fails, insurance pays up to $250k, if a hacker takes $10mill, the stablecoins are frozen & restored. Never before has holding dollars been as secure as now.

The @binance hacker might have just pulled off one of the smartest moves I’ve seen in crypto. First, Tether froze $1.5 billion in USDT. Then Circle froze another $800 million in USDC. At that point, it looked like the hacker’s money was trapped. But apparently, he had already planned for that. Instead of holding the stolen USDT in a wallet, he allegedly deposited it into Aave and used it as collateral to borrow ETH. Then he walked away. That’s where the story gets crazy. Tether can freeze the USDT sitting in the wallet. But it can’t freeze the ETH he already borrowed. So now Aave is left holding frozen collateral, while the hacker is sitting on liquid ETH. And unless the protocol can recover it somehow, he may not even need to pay the loan back. Two companies froze billions of dollars in seconds. But someone who understood how to use DeFi may have found a way around both of them. Pretty insane when you think about it.

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Everyone who holds gold should look at how worthless diamonds have become. Then how long it took to go from showing the tech was capable of producing perfect diamonds to mass production. Then consider the path to gold is ten-fold easier as it only requires electricity. Then realize a company is already funded to produce mass amounts of gold from mercury. Sell your gold my friends. Long bitcoin.

THIS IS INSANE!!! A San Francisco startup says it just turned mercury into real gold. The company is Marathon Fusion. This week they announced they'd made stable gold using fusion neutrons, at 10x the record CERN set in 2025. CERN's record was 29 picograms over four years. So nobody's pouring bars yet. The method is what got me. You hit mercury-198 with a fusion neutron. It loses a neutron, becomes mercury-197, and over the next few days decays into gold-197. The exact same gold sitting in central bank vaults. Their 2025 paper says a one-gigawatt fusion plant built this way could make around 2 tonnes of gold a year as a side product, while it's selling electricity. I've said it for years. Gold is a shiny rock. It's valuable because there's only so much of it and pulling it out of the ground is hard and expensive. If this holds up, gold's scarcity turns into an engineering problem. And you can only delay technical progress. You can't stop it. To be fair, the gold comes out mixed with radioactive isotopes and would need to sit for well over a decade before it's safe to touch. Nobody outside the company has verified the result yet, and commercial fusion is still years away. Peter Schiff has spent years telling everyone Bitcoin has no intrinsic value. This week a startup says it made gold out of mercury. There will only ever be 21 million Bitcoin. No reactor on Earth can make one more.

Trending Story: Saudi Arabia has exe/cuted two Bangladeshi nationals, Nazrul Islam Abdul Basir and Siri Akhtar, following conviction of immoral sexual act inside a mosque in Mecca. The “immoral act” was apparently a kiss on the forehead. They were newlyweds who decided to spend their honeymoon in Mecca. According to reports in Bangladesh, Saudi authorities refused to consider they were a couple, and the forehead kiss was an expression of appreciation to Allah for a beautiful bride. Their bodies have arrived in Bangladesh in two coffins for traditional burial rites. Follow @TrendingEx for dailies..

Ledger theft, day two. Since yesterday the thief has pushed ether through Tornado Cash three times, and each time on into Zcash's shielded pool. We followed every lot out the far side. Here is how, step by step. 1. THE SAME BUILD, THREE TIMES An ether wallet pays a fresh splitter. The splitter pays four fresh wallets. The four drop it into Tornado Cash's 100, 10 and 1 ETH pools. Minutes, every time. Run 1, yesterday 15:17: 1,254 ETH. Run 2, today 09:42: 1,291 ETH. Run 3, today 11:56: 450 ETH from 0xfa4EaBB840A33C156E600311433AE261CBfCb0e2, in the pools by 12:15. 2. OUT OF TORNADO CASH The mixer breaks the link between a deposit and a withdrawal. We do not need the link. Our tooling fingerprints the withdrawal transactions themselves: how each one is constructed, who constructs it, and when. Yesterday's 65 withdrawals (1,084 ETH) and today's 96 (1,726 ETH) all carry the same signature. The six other withdrawals from those pools in today's windows do not. Run 3 came out from 12:18 into 0x0d697aa182801566d87adc86e68e95fd3b2f5f82 (213 ETH) and 0x676b16cc18542f37d202a1a79ac05463395496a4 (122 ETH), and 195 ETH of it was inside a cross-chain swap service by 12:38. Forty-two minutes, end to end. 3. INTO ZCASH, AND OUT AGAIN The swap service turns the ether into shielded ZEC, where sender, amount and recipient vanish. But the service's own shielding of each lot is public, and from it we derive a value signature for that lot's exit, then scan every transparent exit from the pool. 108 of 108 exits across both days match their lot to the zatoshi. Not one other exit from the pool does. First lot today: in at 10:18:18, out at 11:06:16 in block 3512847 (8d26a9b095d4d28373527f7a6eb81a3be7f906d1e2190960c0512ff64f369418 and 738c6d1261e79766e4dd16bdbd38dced91b8e3a86ce41dcda83eda1f19208fbf), straight into a ZEC to USDC order. Today so far: 20 lots ordered (2,379 ZEC, $2.9m), 14 out, 5 inside the pool, 1 still settling. Every exit feeds a ZEC to USDC order paying two wallets born at 11:11, 22 of the 28 paid by 12:43: 0x816D5Ee17DB1495d1409F135b98FF3edc5F3cDf8: 940,561 USDC 0xBA736A4b616e79867B6d586293966b552883f3F3: 852,258 USDC 1.79m USDC, unspent. @Circle can freeze it. (1/2) 🧵⤵️

BREAKING: Anthropic insider claims that they have an internal finding that Uniswap AMM math doesn't work for LPs. Source says, "it's a losers game."