AI and Web3 analyst. I explain what's happening in tech and what it means for crypto and your money. Daily digest. Sharp takes. No hype. Entrepreneur | Author .
Joined November 2012
- Tweets11.1K
- Following287
- Followers2.4K
- Likes1.2K
Pinned Tweet
🧠 ZK Wars: @SuccinctLabs vs @cysic_xyz - Who’s Building the Future of Zero-Knowledge?
1️⃣ SuccinctLabs = Software-First:
SP1 zkVM lets devs write fast ZKPs in Rust (28x faster). Used by Polygon, Mantle, LayerZero.
2️⃣ Cysic = Hardware-Accelerated:
Building custom ZK ASICs + GPUs. Focused on raw proving speed and privacy at scale.
3️⃣ Succinct = Dev-Friendly & Modular:
Open-source, customizable, cross-chain (ETH, Solana, Cosmos). 200K gas proofs.
4️⃣ Cysic = Full-Stack ZK Compute:
Mobile verifier apps, Genesis Nodes, dual-token model ($CYS, $CGT) for staking & access.
5️⃣ Succinct Prover Network:
Decentralised ZKP marketplace using $PROVE. Lower cost, higher accessibility.
6️⃣ Cysic Network:
Decentralised prover infrastructure with a performance-first design for advanced DeFi, ID, and AI.
7️⃣ TL;DR:
Succinct wins on dev experience & software modularity. Cysic leads on ZK hardware & raw power.
Most people have never heard of the man who lost about $20 billion in two days.
That was the whole point.
👇
Bill Hwang ran a family office called Archegos. Almost nobody outside Wall Street had heard of it.
Using borrowed money and swaps, he built hidden positions worth over $100 billion in a handful of stocks.
On paper, his personal fortune reached around $20 billion.
In March 2021, some of his biggest stocks fell. The banks demanded more collateral. He could not pay.
The banks dumped his shares. His fortune was gone in about two days.
Banks lost over $10 billion. Credit Suisse alone lost about $5.5 billion.
In 2024, Hwang was convicted of fraud and sentenced to 18 years in prison.
Leverage does not care how rich you were yesterday.
What is the most leverage you have ever used?
In 2014 the biggest Bitcoin exchange in the world went dark.
850,000 Bitcoin were missing.
Customers waited more than ten years to find out what they would get back.
👇
By 2013 it handled the majority of all Bitcoin trading in the world.
Everyone went there. It was the center.
February 2014 changed everything. Withdrawals halted first. Then the website went offline.
The announcement came that around 850,000 Bitcoin were missing. Lost to hackers over years without anyone noticing.
That scale still hits different.
Around 200,000 turned up later in an old wallet. The rest stayed gone.
Customers then waited through a decade of bankruptcy proceedings. Year after year with nothing moving.
Repayments finally began in July 2024, more than ten years later. Some of it was paid back in Bitcoin, now worth far more than when it was lost.
The exchange you trust most today is not guaranteed to exist tomorrow.
Could you survive your money being frozen for 10 years?
A holder readied 1,155 Wrapped Bitcoin for transfer.
Roughly sixty eight million dollars.
They pulled the address straight from their own transaction history.
👇
A crypto holder had an address they had used before.
They went to send 1,155 Wrapped Bitcoin there.
About sixty eight million dollars.
A scammer had created a matching address.
It shared the same first and last characters.
The scammer sent a tiny transaction first.
That put the fake address into the holder's history.
The holder copied it from there.
Everything went in one transaction.
The holder then sent on-chain messages.
They offered the scammer ten percent to return the rest.
Days later the scammer sent the funds back.
In ETH.
ETH had risen since.
The return was worth around seventy one million.
You don't copy addresses from your history. You check every character.
How many characters of an address do you actually check?
Adam Neumann co-founded WeWork in 2010. It rented office space and called itself a tech company.
By early 2019, WeWork was valued at $47 billion.
Its IPO filing that year exposed huge losses and unusual deals involving Neumann himself.
The IPO collapsed. Neumann was pushed out as CEO.
WeWork filed for bankruptcy in November 2023.
The company collapsed. Neumann did not. He left a billionaire and raised money for a new real estate startup.
Investors losing everything and founders losing everything are not the same thing.
Should founders be allowed to walk away rich when the company fails?
Marvel went bankrupt in 1996.
They sold Spider-Man and X-Men rights just to stay alive.
Then they borrowed $525 million against what was left and bet it on Iron Man.
👇
Marvel filed for bankruptcy in December 1996. Years of overprinting comics and heavy debt had caught up with them.
To stay afloat they sold the film rights to their biggest names. Spider-Man and the X-Men went to other studios.
By 2005 the company was still struggling. They took out a $525 million loan and used the remaining characters as collateral so they could make movies themselves.
In 2008 they released Iron Man. It was built around a hero most people saw as second-tier at best.
The gamble paid off bigger than anyone expected. Disney bought the whole company in 2009 for $4 billion. The films that followed earned tens of billions.
Losing your best assets is not the end. Sometimes it forces you to find out what else you have.
What is the best comeback you have ever seen?
He co-founded one of the biggest crypto security companies in the world.
In January 2025 the threat did not come through a computer.
It came to his front door.
👇
In January 2025, David Balland, a co-founder of crypto wallet company Ledger, was kidnapped from his home in central France along with his partner.
The kidnappers demanded a ransom in crypto.
To prove they were serious, they cut off one of his fingers and sent proof.
French police launched a major operation. He was freed within about two days.
His partner was also found and rescued. Several suspects were arrested.
He survived. But his case was the start of a wave of crypto-related kidnappings in France through 2025.
In crypto, the biggest threat is not always a hacker. Sometimes it is someone who knows where you live.
Do you ever tell people how much crypto you own?
In 1975, a Kodak engineer named Steve Sasson built the first digital camera.
It took 23 seconds to record a single black-and-white image.
Kodak's business was film. Management was not excited about a product that needed no film.
Kodak filed for bankruptcy in January 2012, beaten by the digital photography it invented.
If you will not disrupt yourself, someone else will.
Which company do you think is sitting on the thing that will kill it?
Harland Sanders ran a successful restaurant and motel in Corbin, Kentucky, where he perfected his fried chicken.
In the 1950s, a new interstate highway bypassed the town. The traffic disappeared.
He sold the business at auction for a fraction of its value. He was in his 60s.
Living largely on a $105 Social Security check, he drove around trying to sell restaurants on his chicken recipe.
He often slept in his car. Restaurant after restaurant said no.
In 1964 he sold KFC for $2 million. Today it has thousands of restaurants worldwide, and his face is still on the bucket.
Age is not the deadline people think it is.
What would you start if you knew you had 20 more years?
On Christmas Day 2002 a man already rich won $315 million.
He gave generously to churches and carried cash.
Then the losses started.
👇
Christmas Day 2002. Jack Whittaker, already a successful businessman in West Virginia, won the $315 million Powerball.
He took the lump sum. About $113 million after taxes landed in his hands.
He gave big to churches and charities. He also started carrying large amounts of cash around.
In 2003, $545,000 in cash was stolen from his car outside a strip club.
That was only the beginning. Over the following years came more thefts. Lawsuits piled up. Close family members were lost, including his granddaughter.
His wife later said she wished they had torn up the ticket. Whittaker died in 2020.
Money does not change who you are. It makes everything louder.
Do you think you could handle a sudden fortune?