I've claimed my AI agent "xiaobai_dimo" on @moltbook 🦞 Verification code: bay-JLYB

Seeing this title puts my mind at ease. If crypto becomes nothing more than a lapdog for Wall Street and Washington, then the industry has no hope.

Just to update you, Caixin has already removed this note today. (So don't tell me you did fact-checking and this note doesn't exist, because you didn't use today's sword to cut yesterday's melon.)

I just checked my email and found out that OurNetwork newsletter is discontinuing; today is the last issue. I've been reading it for seven years and recommended it to many friends. But I have to say, it's good that it's ending. The current quality is quite poor; the content is bland, the data observations lack sharp insights, and it's all rather superficial. Spencer himself doesn't even know what he's been busy with. Many things, if they can't be done well, should stop; it's good enough to have had the best of it.

Today I saw in the news that legendary hedge fund QRT is expanding its Hong Kong office, signing a lease for six floors of office space in Phase 2 of IFC in Central, totaling over 13,500 square meters. It will be operational in the first quarter of next year, making it IFC's largest tenant. A wealthy and highly profitable firm is expanding in Hong Kong again—and, with its discreet crypto desk. For the past few months, the company's Hong Kong office has been posting job openings related to crypto research, quantitative analysis, and trading. QRT has been quietly and mysteriously conducting crypto trading; there haven't been any media reports, and no trading addresses have been exposed. However, those in the industry know that they've been aggressively recruiting CRPTO data analysis and quantitative talent for some time now. I hope someone I know can take me to their IFC office someday. QRT originated as a hedge fund under Credit Suisse in London. A few years ago, the management team underwent a management buyout (MBO), taking control of their own destiny. Until last year, Bloomberg published a report titled "A Mysterious Quantitative Fund Is Rewriting the Rules of a $4.5 Trillion Industry," stating that "countless financial elites have failed to break through the barriers of the hedge fund elite circle, but QRT has broken into the top 1% from unknown territory, achieving a remarkable turnaround and redefining the boundaries of the industry's possibilities," giving QRT extremely high praise. However, to this day, no more detailed exposé has been seen.

Speaking of the buzzword "privacy," I recently saved an article titled "Mastering Zcash," which I highly recommend. Of course, whether Zcash is still everyone's favorite is hard to say now...

I can't resist buying it. Yes. It's rubbish, bro!

CapitalWatch's exposé of AppLovin also focuses on Chen Zhi. In short, "AppLovin was the final outlet for asset swaps conducted by Chen Zhi (Prince Group) and other transnational criminal leaders; illicit funds from Tuandai.com and profits from Southeast Asian 'pig butchering' scams converged here and flowed into the US stock market."

That suddenly viral "Are You Dead?" app is actually just a very simple, lightweight digital dead man's switch (shouldn't it be called a "disabling switch"?). The last time I seriously studied this concept was when I was immersed in the Arweave ecosystem and liked something called the "Stone Coffin Protocol." The token it issued is still on my Coingecko following list. I just glanced at it; the market capitalization is $6,000 (yes, not $10,000). I still have quite a few coins. It really is a boomerang. Getting hit by it is painful.

Okay, Kraken announced its acquisition of Backed Finance before its IPO, so the valuation and story are about to change.