Bits + Bips

The $290 million Kelp DAO hack, attributed to North Korea's Lazarus Group, has DeFi TVL down $13 billion in 48 hours. Do DeFi's foundational assumptions need to change? --- Heads up! If you haven’t yet, be sure to subscribe to Bits + Bips, since the show will migrate there in a few weeks. Follow us on ⁠Apple Podcasts⁠, ⁠YouTube⁠, ⁠Spotify⁠, ⁠X⁠, ⁠Unchained⁠ and wherever you get your podcasts. ----...

FalconX global co-head of markets Josh Lim explains what's keeping Bitcoin range-bound near $75-76K: miner selling to fund high-performance compute transitions, breakeven retail holders looking for an exit, and an options market oversupplied with calls.  He also covers why the negative funding rates and low vol environment are less bearish than they appear when spot is cash-funded, not levered.  T...

Bitcoin's spot-led rally looks healthy on the surface. But derivatives say conviction is thin. Josh Lim from FalconX on what the market structure is actually telling you right now. --- Thank you to our sponsors! MultiChain Advisors is an emerging technology growth firm that has helped create $50B+ in enterprise value for 80+ clients over the past 4 years. They're the partner to help navigate marke...

Anthropic previewed Mythos, a model it says autonomously found 181 Firefox JavaScript exploits and vulnerabilities in OpenBSD that had been missed for decades. Cybersecurity stocks fell. Ram Ahluwalia says it’s masterclass marketing — a Keyser Soze play designed to win back DOD contracts and rattle OpenAI. Chris Perkins thinks the threat is real and the opportunity is bigger than the fear. Austin...

Ram Ahluwalia argues that CENTCOM’s move to enforce the US Naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz was exquisitely timed — placing the IRGC in a vice with no clean exit. He walks through why Iran can’t escalate without facing worse outcomes, and can’t stand down without ceding economic control. Austin Campbell adds the market dimension: we’ve shifted from kinetic escalation to long-term economic at...

The US Naval blockade is live, markets are holding, and Ram thinks the bottom is in. Austin and Chris are not so sure. --- Thank you to our sponsors: ⁠Citrea⁠⁠ ⁠ As Bitcoin's application layer, Citrea gives you access to the first trust-minimized BTC on a fully programmable platform and a native stablecoin for Bitcoin, ctUSD.  You can now participate in Bitcoin capital markets with lending, privac...

Why ETH outperformed Bitcoin this past week, what's really behind the prediction market activity during the Iran situation, and what comes next for institutional crypto adoption. --- Thank you to our sponsors! ⁠Ether.fi⁠ — 15% cash back on food and rideshare apps, 3% on everything else, borrow at 4% or less ⁠Citrea⁠ — Trust minimized BTC, native stablecoin CT-USD, Bitcoin capital markets --- A ten...

Iran's IRGC has reportedly set up a crypto toll system at the Strait of Hormuz, collecting $1 per barrel to $2 million per supertanker in yuan or USDT via Tron. The IRGC moved $3 billion through crypto in 2025 according to Chainalysis, and the Ministry of Defense has begun accepting crypto for arms exports. Is this a gift to US intelligence (freeze and seize) or proof that stablecoins are enabling...

The biggest DeFi hack of 2026 wasn't a code exploit. It was a six-month North Korean social engineering campaign that ended with $285M drained from Drift protocol in 12 minutes. Circle had six hours to freeze $232M in USDC moving through its own bridge.  Should stablecoin issuers be liable? Is a 2-of-5 multisig really decentralized?  Austin Campbell (NYU Stern, Zero Knowledge Consulting), Ram Ahlu...

A nation state hacked a startup and won. The hosts debate who's liable, what's fixable, and what isn't. --- Thank you to our sponsors: Bitcoin’s application layer, Citrea, launched its mainnet, expanding Bitcoin’s utility to privacy, lending, BTC yields, and more. Citrea enables: cBTC: The first trust-minimized Bitcoin on a fully programmable platform. ctUSD: A native stablecoin for Bitcoin, allow...

Charles Schwab’s chief crypto strategist breaks down why traditional finance valuation frameworks, not narratives, are finally taking hold in digital assets. --- Multichain Advisors is an emerging technology growth firm that has helped create over $50 billion in enterprise value for 80+ clients. Services include TGE support, go-to-market strategy, BD, partnerships, capital markets advisory, PR, me...

Jim Ferraioli, Director of Crypto Strategy and Research at Charles Schwab, applies a GDP-equivalent framework to smart contract platforms: sum the trailing one-year fees across a network, compare that to market cap, and you get a Buffett-indicator-style read on whether it's cheap or expensive. By that measure, Ethereum has traded in a reliable range for years, and it's currently at the low end. Bu...

The S&P just closed its worst month since March 2025 at 6,368, marking a fifth straight weekly decline. Moody’s puts recession probability at 50%. Goldman is at 30%. But this isn’t just another pullback: with Brent crude at $116, inflationary supply shocks are compounding the damage in ways that monetary policy tools can’t fix. Ram names his specific buys (Berkshire Hathaway at 1.3x tangible book,...

When do oil prices force a ceasefire? Why is crypto holding firm while equities crack? And does Canton or Ethereum win the institutional race? --- Thank you to our sponsor: ⁠Nexo⁠ — the premier digital wealth platform. Receive interest on your digital assets, borrow against them without selling, and trade a wide range of cryptocurrencies all in one place. Now available in the US with 30 days of ex...

With European gas prices running 50-70% above normal, Steven Ehrlich sits down with Sean Murray, Head of Special Projects and Crypto Lead at Fuse Energy, to map the cascade: why gas, not oil, drives what consumers pay for electricity; how the Strait of Hormuz closure and the attack on Qatar's LNG processing facility are rippling through fertilizers, jet fuel, and copper markets; and why Sean argue...

Jeff Bezos is raising $100 billion for Project Prometheus to acquire manufacturing companies and transform them with AI. Mark Zuckerberg is building a personal AI CEO agent to bypass management layers at Meta. The question: where does AI value actually accrue? Ram Ahluwalia argues the consumer wins. Venture capital is subsidizing the real economy through tools like Claude that lose money but deliv...

Elon Musk announced TeraFab, a $25 billion joint chip fabrication venture between Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI targeting two-nanometer process technology. Ram Ahluwalia calls the entire thing bullshit. TSM has invested hundreds of billions to build chip fabs. Tesla generates $3-6 billion in free cash flow. The math doesn’t work without massive dilution. Jensen Huang himself has said data centers in spac...

Coinbase x402 has processed $34M. Tempo just launched its mainnet. Steven and Laurens discuss how the agentic commerce war is shaping up, why stablecoins are the infrastructure layer underneath it, how to tell real adoption from inflated metrics, and what happens when AI agents start getting scammed.

Ram calls industrials a bubble that's already popped — Caterpillar at 35x PE, hedge funds still deleveraging, and no real capitulation yet. Austin and Chris push back.

General Spider Marks has a brother-in-law who's Iranian — and what he says about why 93 million Persians won't rise up should reframe how investors are reading this war.

A retired U.S. Major General just explained why Iran's navy is at the bottom of the Gulf — and why the Strait of Hormuz was never actually at risk.

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