In economic news, we are seeing crypto exchanges unraveling (failing) in real time. I’m not sure of the underlying cause. On the blockchain, you can’t print money with a magic money printer like governments have been doing for a century; and now centralized exchanges (CEX’s) are scrambling for “liquidity”, or crypto on hand.

• FTX, this is a spectacular case of fraud and corruption. Declared bankruptcy last week.
• Blockfi halts originations and withdrawals this week.

You might have missed it and it is old news, but 3 Arrow Capital, Celsius ( https://celsius.network/ ), Voyager, Luna were all big players that have failed and vanished. In the future, the expectation is that Tether will fail soon, by depegging from its 1:1 peg to US Dollar, and getting wiped out as soon as that happens.

Once Tether is in its death spiral, $66B (with a B) worth of assets may get liquidated and/or moved around. This event will present a buying opportunity for BTC and ETH, as prices are expected to be extremely depressed in the short term. This is not financial advice – please exercise caution if you gamble with this.

~ * ~ * ~ * ~

“CEX is for dummies,” by the way. Everyone knows that. DEX, or decentralized exchanges, is the way to go. People worry about the price of BTC, ETH tanking from these events but actually, this is not a threat to decentralized finance, quite the opposite. The sooner CEX’s fail by attempting fake money generation on the blockchain, the better it will be for the blockchain. A quick look at the year’s worth of price action of Bitcoin, Ethereum (in dollars) shows that it is basically unaffected by these developments. ETH and BTC are trending down this year, to reflect the miserable economic conditions and rising interest rates. Long-term, I’m expecting the BTC value to trend towards infinity. In my opinion, the failure of CEX’s only strengthens decentralized “currencies.”