Bits + Bips

From inventing DeFi's first oracle at MakerDAO to auditing BlackRock's tokenized billions, Niklas Kunkel maps the hidden plumbing behind the RWA boom. Sponsors Cape: Your biggest crypto vulnerability isn't your wallet, it's your phone number. Cape is America's privacy-first mobile carrier that rotates your SIM identity daily and blocks SIM swaps before they happen. Get 33% off your first six month...

Strategy sold $216M more Bitcoin. Ram, Austin, and Chris ask if Saylor's now a recurring seller, and whether tokens can ever coexist with equity. Plus: the stablecoin wars get real. --- Thank you to our sponsors: ⁠⁠⁠Cape⁠⁠⁠: Your biggest crypto vulnerability isn't your wallet, it's your phone number. Cape is America's privacy-first mobile carrier that rotates your SIM identity daily and blocks SIM...

Fear and greed says panic. The options market says something else. David Lawant of Anchorage Digital walks through the signals that matter right now. Sponsors Fidelity: Fidelity has been building in crypto and DeFi since 2014 — now they're hiring. Explore career opportunities at one of the most forward-thinking names in finance here: ⁠⁠https://crypto.fidelitycareers.com⁠⁠. Cape: Your biggest crypt...

Bitcoin logged its worst ETF month on record, and the hosts debate whether Strategy has become the marginal seller dragging the whole market down. --- Thank you to our sponsors: ⁠⁠⁠Fidelity⁠⁠⁠: Fidelity has been building in crypto and DeFi since 2014 — now they're hiring. Explore career opportunities at one of the most forward-thinking names in finance here: ⁠⁠⁠crypto.fidelitycareers.com⁠⁠⁠. ⁠⁠⁠Ca...

Carmen Li is bringing GPU futures to the CME while crypto perp venues court her index. She lays out which financial wrappers actually fit which assets. Sponsors Fidelity: Fidelity has been building in crypto and DeFi since 2014 — now they're hiring. Explore career opportunities at one of the most forward-thinking names in finance here: ⁠https://crypto.fidelitycareers.com⁠. Cape: Your biggest crypt...

Coinbase is tokenizing US stocks for the rest of the world — but what makes a token 'real,' and who owns it? Plus: the AI trade wobbles and the CME sues its own regulator. --- Thank you to our sponsors: ⁠⁠Fidelity⁠⁠: Fidelity has been building in crypto and DeFi since 2014 — now they're hiring. Explore career opportunities at one of the most forward-thinking names in finance here: ⁠⁠crypto.fidelit...

The Fed dropped its easing bias and half the FOMC penciled in rate hikes. Zach Pandl on what Kevin Warsh's first meeting means for Bitcoin, gold, and Strategy. Sponsors Fidelity: Fidelity has been building in crypto and DeFi since 2014 — now they're hiring. Explore career opportunities at one of the most forward-thinking names in finance here: https://crypto.fidelitycareers.com. Cape: Your biggest...

A Friday-night directive banned Anthropic's Fable 5 with no public explanation — Sam Enzer on what it means for AI, crypto, and who controls the national security card next. --- Thank you to our sponsors: ⁠Fidelity⁠: Fidelity has been building in crypto and DeFi since 2014 — now they're hiring. Explore career opportunities at one of the most forward-thinking names in finance here: ⁠crypto.fidelity...

Strategy owes $3.4 billion over two years on its preferreds. Austin maps the three exits: issue more stock, sell Bitcoin, or suspend dividends. None are good. --- Thank you to our sponsors: Fidelity: Fidelity has been building in crypto and DeFi since 2014 — now they're hiring. Explore career opportunities at one of the most forward-thinking names in finance here: crypto.fidelitycareers.com. Cape:...

Strategy sold Bitcoin in May and disclosed the sale via SEC filing in June. The Polymarket market on that sale resolved to no sale in May, with tens of millions of dollars on one question: does the trade date control, or the disclosure date? Sam Enzer and Steven Ehrlich map the dispute, the oracle governance concentration risk behind it, and the practical checklist for diligencing any prediction m...

Strategy sold Bitcoin for the first time since 2022 — a small sale, but a meaningful signal. Ram, Austin, and Chris work through the capital stack math: $15 billion in preferred stock needs Bitcoin to appreciate 11.5% annually just to cover dividends. What happens if it doesn't? With: Austin Campbell, Founder, Zero Knowledge Consulting; Adjunct Professor, NYU Stern - https://x.com/austincampbell R...

Bitcoin’s implied volatility just hit a nine-month low. ETF outflows have been running for weeks. And a memory chip ETF may have matched IBIT for the fastest ETF launch in history. So what’s happening to crypto? Steve Sosnick, chief strategist at Interactive Brokers, and Steve Ehrlich break down the structural forces working against crypto right now: AI stocks doing the heavy lifting in portfolios...

What does Pope Leo's first AI encyclical have to do with the Bitcoin white paper? Arjun Sethi, co-CEO of Kraken, traces a philosophical thread from Augustine's City of God through Catholic social teaching's subsidiarity principle to Satoshi's monetary architecture. Austin Campbell finds the same argument in the Federalist Papers. Ram Ahluwalia brings in Immanuel Kant and the Tower of Babel. And Ch...

Kevin Warsh is confirmed as Fed chair today. He says he wants a smaller balance sheet, fewer dot plots, less forward guidance, and new ways to measure inflation. In this clip, Noelle Acheson tells Steve Ehrlich why the bond market will veto the balance sheet goal, why fewer FOMC press conferences may increase volatility rather than reduce noise, and why the most likely outcome for the next few Fed...

The TACO trade — the assumption that Trump will always walk back market damage — is temporary. The BLISS trade is not. In this clip, Noelle Acheson explains Gita Gopinath's thesis from the Financial Times: no government, regardless of political party or political system, will be voted out for spending to protect citizens from hardship. The put under markets is now structural. Noelle and Steve Ehrl...

If the risk is the same, why would any rational agent choose a stablecoin that pays nothing over a money market fund that does?  In this clip, Chris Perkins puts the question directly to Circle’s Gordon Liao, who walks through USYC — Circle's yield-bearing instrument — and the seamless toggle between it and USDC.  Austin Campbell frames the winners as "transformers": platforms that can move fluidl...

Matteo Pandolfi of Pareto puts a number on the table: on-chain repo reaches $1 trillion within five years. He makes the case using the current pipeline of traditional institutions entering the space and the hybrid infrastructure model that does not require full on-chain execution. Craig Burchell of FalconX gives you both sides. The bull case: the facilities are already being built, the demand is r...

On-chain private credit has crossed $5 billion across more than 2,000 assets. The borrower side has matured significantly — institutional counterparties like FalconX are accessing credit on-chain with clear terms, legal structures that hold up to institutional scrutiny, and professional underwriters applying real credit discipline. But the liquidity side remains the visible gap. Tokenization impro...

Semiconductors now make up 18% of the S&P 500 — a record — as capital floods into AI infrastructure. Is this another dotcom bubble, or something structurally different? Ram Ahluwalia says the spending is coming from the world’s most profitable companies and the returns are already showing up in cloud growth. Christopher Perkins says every mania eventually reaches an extreme. Austin Campbell argues...

Paul Tudor Jones called Bitcoin the best inflation hedge the same day it broke through 80 while equities sold off. The Bits + Bips crew debates whether he’s right — and what comes next for the store of value. Ram Ahluwalia sees quantum-resistant successor coins on the horizon. Chris Perkins argues the next backed asset may rely on energy or compute — not gold or Treasuries. Featuring Austin Campbe...

Why does Delphi call itself an information market instead of a prediction market? Ben Fielding, CEO of Gensys, says the difference is the direction of the question. On Polymarket, users cannot create markets — only suggest them. On Delphi, anyone can pose a question and pay for the world to answer it. Ben walks through the full thesis: the orange farmer who can finally hedge drought risk without g...

How does a decentralized AI network compete with companies spending hundreds of billions on data centers? Ben Fielding, CEO of Gensys, says the question misunderstands what scale actually means. The big AI labs are building walled gardens, exactly the way AOL built one in the early internet era. They will attract users, extract value, and make great products, but they will not reach the scale of a...

The Kelp hack exposed a flaw at the center of monolithic DeFi lending. What comes next for Aave, for looping traders caught underwater, and for users who never knew the risk. A single compromised signature was enough.  When an attacker exploited Layer Zero's DVN network to mint 116,000 unbacked rsETH on Ethereum mainnet, Aave's unified pool design did the rest: within minutes, a $193M loan was ori...

After Bybit, the CDS hack, and Kelp DAO, Austin Campbell argues that DeFi's foundational assumption — that incoming transactions should be treated as legitimate — may no longer hold. Ram Ahluwalia pushes back: change that assumption and you risk giving up immutability and finality. Austin draws the distinction: an immutable chain and a skeptical transaction queue aren't mutually exclusive.   Micha...

North Korea's Lazarus Group drained $290 million from Kelp DAO by compromising two RPC nodes feeding Layer Zero's single DVN, swapping the binary for a malicious one, and DDoSing clean nodes to force a failover. In 46 minutes, Kelp DAO managed to stop the bleed — but not before $290M was gone and DeFi TVL dropped $13 billion in 48 hours. Now Layer Zero and Kelp DAO are fighting publicly, with thir...