Are rich crypto bros worse than other rich tech bros?

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My wife sent me a link to a New York Times article over the weekend with the short comment, These guys are great assholes. I was pretty sure what the article would be. My wife is thankfully indifferent to the world of crypto, but she’s not above a good hate read on the subject and, as I guessed correctly, she wanted to share the Times account of recent antics of the loathsome duo behind failed hedge fund Three Arrows Capital. .

You might remember these guys from a sublime teardown in New York magazine last summer. The article, titled The Crypto Geniuses Who Vaporized a Trillion Dollars, revealed how boundless greed and faith in their own bullshit led the pair to destroy both their fund and much of the crypto market. cryptography. Now we learn from The Times that the pair don’t have a shred of remorse. Instead, they’re living their best life in Balidoing mushrooms, learning to surf, and posting selfies with captured tigers. And say things like, you eat very fatty pork dishes, and you drink a lot of alcohol, and you go to the beach and you meditate. You have these magical experiences.

Great showers indeed. This episode made me wonder, however, if this kind of horror runs deeper and more prevalent in crypto than elsewhere. It’s easy to think it is. After all, the last bull market produced not only an endless series of quacks and scams, but also a bro culture that produced the mantra of having fun staying poor. And in the case of the Three Arrows brothers, one of them was known for arguing that crypto has entered a super-cycle that will not come down.

It is this combination of greed and selfishness often wrapped up in chatter about crypto bringing democracy or freedom that makes it so off-putting to many. That said, I don’t think crypto bros like the Three Arrows pair are any worse or more prevalent than other types of bro hustlers.

Bloombergs Matt Levine says the same, comparing the Three Arrows duo to Adam Neumann, who turned startup WeWork into a debacle for the ages. He says the business model of seeing a bubble and then ruthlessly diverting investors from their money is the same. In the case of Neumanns, Levine explains that the hustle was scaling the fastest, talking the most nonsense, having the worst unit economics, and raising the most money by slashing the most with SoftBanks Masayoshi Son.

The founders of Three Arrows didn’t have their hooks in Son, a fund manager notorious for bad decisions, but instead they’ve been able to extract huge sums from those behind crypto lending services now. bankrupt Voyager, Celsius and Genesis. And like Neumann, they now live large and completely unconcerned with the shipwreck they caused.

The bottom line is that bad crypto brothers are no worse than their counterparts in tech or other industries. The more difficult question is how these people can support themselves after failing in ways that would shame us deeply for years.

Jeff John [email protected]@jeffjohnroberts

DECENTRALIZED NEWS

Robinhood’s crypto exchange volume fell 43% in May to $2.1 billion, and the company has since withdrawn three of the tokens it was offering. (Coindesk)

A video has surfaced from 2018 that shows future SEC Chairman Gary Gensler telling hedge funds that Ethereum and Litecoin are “not securities.” (Fortune)

A judge has ruled that crypto fund Galaxy had a “clean termination right” when it backed out of a $1.2 billion acquisition of BitGo after the latter failed to provide clean audits. (Bloomberg)

Solana executives are showing courage despite the token being labeled a security, while the developers seem indifferent to the new legal peril. (Fortune)

An analyst note from JPMorgan predicts that US exchanges like Coinbase will need to register with the SEC, and Ethereum’s dominance is likely to grow. (The block)

EVEN OF THE MOMENT

Crypto in the UK continued:

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