Remember Crypto?

Taking a break from AI to check in on the wonderful world of crypto that still fully exists even though nobody cares anymore.

I shouldn't say that. People do still care and there's a lot of exciting stuff being built.

This is arguably a much better time to be building and investing in crypto because so much of the noise has been washed out of the market. Personally, I'm still a big believer in a decentralized and transparent financial future.

Some of the core storylines from last year are still playing out though and it's worth keeping an eye on. At least for a second before we go back to gushing over ChatGPT.

The main points:

Binance is sketchy. Most of us could have guessed this, but it's becoming more and more apparent that they played a very similar game to FTX in terms of customer funds.

No hard evidence yet, but Coindesk published a great breakdown yesterday that comments on some of the drama that has been stirred up by a Forbes article and Binance's inconsistent repsonses.

As Bitcoiners love to remind people: "Not your keys, not your coins."

Outside of Binance, the ripples of the FTX fiasco continue to move through the market. Silvergate, the crypto-friendly bank, is down *checks notes* more than 40% *checks notes again* just this morning.

This is coming off the back of Silvergate asking for an extra two weeks to get their annual report together. Which the market seems to feel is not a good sign.

Silvergate is trading at ~$8 per share down from a high over ~$200 per share in November 2021.

I think it's important to circle back on stories after they move out of the public discussion. So often we'll see a headline that is only the beginning of a long drawn out issue.

I don't bring this all up to simply update (although hopefully that's helpful), but rather to point out how much this most recent cycle seems to illustrate the need to stay outside of what's hot.

Rewind to 2021, the only thing anyone is talking about is Crypto. OpenSea volume. Crazy rounds. What was the best area to invest in at that time? Artificial Intelligence.

So many of the companies leading AI now were drowned out by the crypto stuff. What is AI currently drowning out?

Maybe now is actually the time to be investing in crypto and the time to be investing in AI was two years ago.