A list of things Sam Bankman-Fried hasn’t screwed up for us |
November 24, 2022
Exploring transformation of value in the digital age
By Michael J. Casey, Chief Content Officer
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Happy Thanksgiving to all of you!
Offering up a shortened newsletter on this holiday week. Also, there’s no Money Reimagined podcast.
Five Things I’m Grateful For Amid the FTX Chaos
(Rachel Sun/CoinDesk)
As some of you know, I’m a transplanted Aussie who’s been living in the New York area for 20 of the past 30 years. Like many who immigrated to this country as an adult, I’ve developed an abiding respect for Thanksgiving.
I love the no-strings attached idea of gathering with those dearest to you to express thanks for the bounty life has given you. It helps to put all the madness of your day-to-day existence into perspective. You can probably guess where this is going.
Yes, there are more important things in life than the FTX meltdown – which, by the way, will pass.
So, in the spirit of Crypto Thanksgiving, here are five things that Sam Bankman-Fried has not screwed up for us and for which I’m truly grateful.
Launched in September 2017, KuCoin is a global cryptocurrency exchange with its operational headquarters in Seychelles. As a user-oriented platform with focus on inclusiveness and community action reach, it offers over 700 digital assets, and currently provides spot trading, margin trading, P2P fiat trading, futures trading, staking, and lending to its 20 million users in 207 countries and regions.
In 2022, KuCoin raised over $150 million in investments through a pre-Series B round, bringing total investments to $170 million with Round A combined, at a total valuation of $10 billion. KuCoin is currently one of the top 5 crypto exchanges according to CoinMarketCap. Forbes also named KuCoin one of the Best Crypto Exchanges in 2021. In 2022, The Ascent named KuCoin the Best Crypto App for enthusiasts.
1. Crypto Twitter’s Meme Game
Alright, so I’ve already started with an FTX-themed item. But the point is that the evaporation of tens of billions of dollars of wealth has not blunted this community’s capacity to poke irreverent fun at its fallen icons. For a good collection of the best SBF memes, check out this post by El Gato Malo.
2. The Bitcoin Supply Chart
Even as markets go into turmoil, the Bitcoin protocol just keeps on keeping on, with no one in charge. That never ceases to awe me:
(Sage Young/CoinDesk)
3. The Platypus
I’ve always looked upon this native of my homeland as a warning to us humans not to get too full of ourselves. Through history, we’ve named and identified every creature in our midst, meticulously distinguishing them into categories we think we can understand. But the platypus, while classified as a mammal, lays eggs and has a duck’s bill. At a time when the crypto community is learning the harsh lessons of our hubris, I find the humbling thought of this defiance of human classification satisfying.
The crypto market is at a critical juncture – we need strong players to act and lead.
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Without forgetting the previous point about the limits of human power, let’s be thankful for human ingenuity. What better way to do that than to celebrate innovation itself – no, not the outcomes of innovation, but that we can and do continue to innovate relentlessly. To symbolize this, I want to focus on this most American of inventions (which I was reminded of when a colleague who brought a delicious peach cobbler to our office potluck and insisted it be served with a dollop of Cool Whip. Thanks Collette! It rocked!).
Is Cool Whip a “good” food? As in, good for us? I don’t want to dwell on that. I just want to celebrate the fact that some lab scientist somewhere discovered they could create a substitute for cream by combining water, hydrogenated vegetable oil (including coconut and palm oils), high fructose corn syrup, skimmed milk, light cream, sodium caseinate, natural and artificial flavors, xanthan and guar gums, polysorbate 60, sorbitan monostearate, and beta carotene. Yum!
5. CoinDesk, and journalists generally
This is a bit self-serving, I know. But the past few weeks have made me deeply grateful for being part of this profession. You’ve heard me, and others from inside and outside our organization, sing the praises of the CoinDesk news team, which first ran Ian Allison’s groundbreaking story on Alameda Research’s suspect balance sheet and later covered the fallout. They have shown the importance of independent journalism. But the point I want to make is bigger than that: it’s about all journalists.
An editor once told me that if you’ve annoyed both sides of a story, you’ve done your job. It speaks to how lonely our profession can be sometimes. People from all stripes love to hate journalists; they become an easy scapegoat for whatever gripe critics have with the world and, worse, are used to deflect blame when fault actually lies with them. There are plenty of examples of this from past crypto journalism moments. But every now and then we get to prove our worth. We get to show that an open, transparent, and professional approach to the news (with guardrails of process and ethics that Twitter’s citizen journalist bots don’t have) ultimately helps everyone, even when publicly disclosing the information creates pain. So, here’s to all the muckrakers!
