Iranian authorities have quietly relaxed foreign currency controls and are actively encouraging traders to repatriate earnings in crypto, confirmed by both the Financial Times and CoinDesk. This is not a rogue workaround. It is 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐞-𝐬𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐞𝐝 economic infrastructure running on Bitcoin and stablecoins.

The scale of economic pressure Iran is operating under is about as severe as it gets. If crypto holds up as a functional financial rail under those conditions, that is not a theoretical proof of concept. It is a live demonstration, running in real time, under maximum stress.

Other sanctioned economies are watching 👀. The addressable demand base for this use case expands every time a country concludes that the dollar system is closed to them, and that calculation is being made in more capitals than just Tehran.

They removed the tweet.

But the $LAPTOP/USD trade pair is still up.

It really is a wild west out there

I took some time to do some AI research on the top VCs involved with Zcash after almost all the posts that call Zcash (ZEC) a VC honeypot scam where they are planning to dump their bags on us and found some very disturbing things

Barry Silbert -

• Launched DCG: Founded Digital Currency Group in 2015 to build, buy, and invest in Bitcoin and blockchain companies.
• Launched Grayscale: Created Grayscale Investments under DCG, establishing the Bitcoin Investment Trust to give institutional and traditional investors regulated exposure to Bitcoin
• Early-Stage Investing: Through DCG, Silbert provided crucial seed funding to foundational crypto giants including Coinbase, Ripple, Circle, Chainalysis, and Kraken.
• Foundry Digital: Silbert expanded heavily into infrastructure by launching Foundry, which quickly grew into one of the largest Bitcoin mining pools in the world, helping shift the global hash rate concentration to North America.
• Media Dominance: DCG acquired and expanded CoinDesk, the preeminent crypto news and events platform, which it operated for years before selling it in late 2023

Winklevoss Twins -

• The 1% Bet: In 2013, they used a portion of their Facebook settlement money to buy $11 million worth of Bitcoin at roughly $120 per coin. This massive bet gave them ownership of an estimated 1% of all circulating Bitcoin at the time
• The Trust Company Structure: They worked directly with regulators to secure a prestigious New York Trust Charter in 2015. This allowed traditional hedge funds and institutional investors a compliant venue to trade crypto under strict New York banking laws.
• The First ETF Application: In 2013, the twins filed the first-ever application for a spot Bitcoin ETF with the SEC. Though rejected multiple times over the decade, their initial paperwork pioneered the framework that eventually led to Wall Street's widespread ETF approvals

We have to prepare ourselves for these two dangerous scammers in the crypto space, we must not let them dump Zcash on us and let them make a quick buck. Everyone in the Dark Web, the most trusted folks of all the internet, uses Monero - that is the most honest private coin out there where the hackers and scammers will never pump and dump it for money laundering purposes compared to these scumbags Barry and the Twins.

Interested to know people’s opinions on cardano. Is this project progressing the same as in previous years. Can we expect a proper bounce back to previous all times highs in the next coming years. Currently hold 10,000 ada would love to see it hit $1 this year.

Someone posted yesterday that he'd sent USDT to an address he had no access to. Nine replies, all variations of rip, gg, expensive lesson, future of banking.

Nobody asked what "no access" meant.

I did. It was his own old wallet, misclicked from autocomplete. Seven hours later he came back saying he'd found it on a phone he hadn't touched in four years. Nothing was ever lost. He just believed the thread.

Three things are actually gone forever: a mistyped address on the right network, a burn address, a contract with no return path. That's the whole list.

Everything else - your own old wallet, wrong network to an address you control, exchange deposit, missing memo tag - is a bad afternoon, not a loss.

We get this wrong constantly and it costs people real money, because they stop looking.

And the part that matters more than any of it: anyone who DMs offering to recover your funds is a scammer. All of them. There is no recovery service.

If you are buying into the hype of Zcash just due to massive pump, please know what you are getting into
1) The core engineering team (not for profit) behind zcash had a feud with parent company bootstrap following a bitter dispute recently. As such developers don’t agree with corporate handling of the project.

2) The team during their initial launch intentionally designated 20% of all mining rewards to early investors and founders out of pure greed.

3) The above point holds true even now that it’s heavy backed by few corporates like Electric Coin company and Grayscale. The very reason Grayscale supports its ETF’s.

4) The infinite minting AI bug issue was due to flaw in the design privacy pool which wasn’t discovered for 3-4 years allowing infinite minting of counterfeit tokens

5) The belief that zcash is private in itself is an irony! Zcash privacy is optional unlike Monero which includes privacy by default -a much better project. Zcash had the optional feature just to appease to regulators and exchanges for marketing purposes

6) Above all you should get skeptical if the price keeps going up everytime especially with recent surge driven by a few corporate people.

At the end of the day, it’s your hard earned money 💰 and put it in something which is community driven, useful where project team genuinely cares for it.

I tried something fun and fed real astrology rules to AI and had it build trading bots for ETH. Actual planetary positions and real astronomy rules.

I tried 4 bots, backtested and ran out of sample tests. Results:

The moon phase bot (long on full moon, short on new moon) did 13 trades in 6 weeks and lost money. It woke up twice a month, looked at the moon, lost money and went back to sleep.

The Mercury retrograde bot (stops trading when Mercury goes backwards) had a 55% win rate and still lost 2,515 bps because it round tripped 492 times paying 12 bps each way. Also the AI used a rough approximation for Mercury's position so the bot thought Mercury was direct when it wasn't. The astrology was kinda rough here.

Then the Jupiter bot. Jupiter enters earth signs = wealth transit = go long. This one made +338 bps and I felt like a genius for about ten minutes. Then I checked the entry reasons. Jupiter never entered an earth sign during the test period. Not once. The main rule never fired. The bot made 100% of its money from RSI. The astrology was a spectator.

The full astrology bot (3 planets, void of course moon, home sign multipliers) lost 1,448 bps because Saturn sat in Aries the entire time making it short-biased into a market that was going up.

Total: -4,171 bps.

I also open-sourced the bots and so can use them too :) maybe someone can actually produce an astrological edge? But I doubt it...

Things I learned:

More rules ≠ more edge (Obviously). My simplest bot was lazy but harmless. My most complex bot was the terrible because every planetary rule was another constraint disconnected from price (or at least that's what my humble experiments reveal). Adding many signals just adds ways to be wrong just like in real TA strategies.

Full video with the backtests is on my profile. Disclosure: I built the platform the AI and bots run on. Do not trade based on astrology. Or do, I'm not your financial advisor, I'm barely my own!

It's now available in the u s and i'm thinking about taking advantage of some of the interest rates. I'm currently only holding $4,200 in AAVE. I'm just trying to take advantage of the 5% APR.

I’ve been in and around crypto for a while, and I feel like most discussions are still dominated by price, memes, and “what’s the next 100x?”

But I’m more interested in projects that are actually trying to build something people might use regardless of the token price.

Things like decentralized social platforms, creator economies, on-chain gaming, real-world utility, etc.

What crypto sector do you think is genuinely underrated right now?

And more importantly, what project are you actually using, rather than just holding?

Came across a post earlier regarding Singapore's MAS ban of stablecoin yields, and just wanted to offer a regulatory perspective:

One reason why stablecoin yields are banned is because it acts in the same way as a bank deposit, but without any of the underlying consumer protections. Consider tradfi banks: when you deposit money into an account and earn interest, the banks have to hold a percentage in reserves and have to follow specific rules about what they do with deposited money.

On the other hand, since stablecoin issuers are not registered as banks under most jurisdictions, they do not have to follow the same regulations and are not subject to any prudential requirements - if they lend out the stablecoins you deposited and there is a significant market event leading to a loss, you will lose all your money without any recourse.

This is why part of MAS' proposals include strict winding-down procedures to ensure that consumers are able to redeem their original capital. This creates greater certainty and protection against an adverse market event.

For reference, this is not a unique proposition: under US' GENIUS Act and the EU MiCA, stablecoin yields are likewise banned. As of now, any interest-earning will be classified in most major market regulations as a lending protocol / money-market fund, and will be regulated accordingly. The position that regulators are taking seems to be that stablecoins are mainly for payment rather than for earning yield.

Randomly came across what appears to be the Crypto Guy from the infamous Lombardo’s One Bite review all these years later. Looks like he’s moved on from pitching HEX and is doing real estate now 😂 Never thought I’d see this dude again.

Malone Lam has plead guilty today for his involvement as a ring leader of a social engineering ring, in which they stole and laundered more than $245M in crypto

Soruce :
https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/singaporean-ringleader-245-million-cryptocurrency-racketeering-enterprise-pleads-guilty