Crypto Long & Short
Crypto Long & Short: Zcash and the case for privacy in the age of AI
AI has made it cheap to link wallet addresses to the people behind them, and the permanence of the blockchain means records don’t age out. Michael Zhao of Grayscale Research explains how Zcash’s shielded transactions address this problem, and why close to 29% of all ZEC ever mined now sits in the shielded pool.
Crypto Long & Short: Inside the chain settling $150 billion of stablecoins a week
Tron launched as a content-distribution project and has become the settlement layer for a large share of the world's USDT, processing roughly $150 billion to $190 billion of stablecoin transfers a week. Josh Olszewicz of Canary Capital breaks down how the network's economics work and what stablecoin regulation could do to the thesis.
Crypto Long & Short: Inside the 300-to-1 onchain gap between the dollar and euro
Ryan Connor of RockawayX writes that the dollar leads the euro about 3 to 1 across the offchain economy and more than 300 to 1 onchain. Euro-pegged stablecoins total €711 million, under 1% of supply. He traces the gap to path dependency and missing euro DeFi infrastructure, and argues MiCA-regulated issuance and euro vault rails are changing it.
Crypto Long & Short: Crypto VCs are mistaking consensus for discipline
In this week's Crypto Long & Short, Varun Datta of Truth Ventures writes that crypto venture capital's retreat to later-stage deals is a consensus trade dressed as discipline. With proven companies taking 57% of last quarter's capital, he argues the founding-stage gap is where the returns are, and lays out three things to look for.
Crypto Long & Short: Tokenized equities: the model underneath the trade
In this week's Crypto Long & Short, CoinDesk's Joshua DeVos writes that demand for tokenized equities is accelerating fast, from $16 billion to more than $590 billion in perpetual futures in a single year, but that the headline growth hides the question that matters most. Two tokens can trade under the same ticker while granting entirely different rights, and the structure underneath, whether it conveys real ownership or a synthetic claim, determines the risks and protections a holder actually has.
Crypto Long & Short: Where DeFi yield really comes from (and why it broke this spring)
In this week's Crypto Long & Short, Solstice Finance's David Plisek argues that most of the money lost in DeFi this spring wasn't taken by hackers but by yield strategies that quietly stopped working. Looking at April's $13 billion drawdown, he shows that a headline yield number reveals almost nothing about whether it will hold under stress, laying out four questions an allocator should ask before committing capital.
Crypto Long & Short: When capital can't move fast enough, markets pay the price
In this week's Crypto Long & Short, LMAX Group's Jenna Wright argues that markets break down not from too little capital but from capital stuck in the wrong place, trapped by settlement cycles while risk reprices by the minute. She makes the case that stablecoins and tokenization are quietly becoming the plumbing that lets money move as fast as the risk it supports.
