In a decisive conclusion to a high-profile case that has gripped the financial world, SBF—Sam Bankman-Fried—faced the music as a jury found him guilty on all seven counts of fraud and conspiracy.

This landmark decision signals a watershed moment in the crypto universe, bringing a stark end to the erstwhile billionaire’s fall from grace.

The weight of the verdict was palpable as SBF, once a cryptocurrency titan at the helm of FTX, stood in the courtroom, a stark contrast to the vibrant figure who once graced industry conferences.

The jury took less than a full working day to deliberate his fate, signifying a clear-cut decision. His parents, enveloped in the emotional gravity of the moment, could only offer a silent, supportive presence as their son faced the repercussions of his actions.

The downfall of a crypto mogul

SBF’s descent is as dramatic as it is cautionary, casting a long shadow over the crypto empire he built. FTX, once a cornerstone in the market, touted itself as a beacon of innovation and security in the volatile world of digital assets.

Yet, behind the veneer of success lay a labyrinth of financial misappropriations that would unravel, bringing the company to its knees.

The charges painted a damning picture of SBF’s conduct, revealing that he systematically pilfered billions from customer accounts to prop up Alameda Research, his trading house.

Despite becoming aware of the intertwining finances of FTX and Alameda, SBF failed to enact safeguards, a negligence that culminated in an $8 billion debt hole with no repercussions for those responsible.

SBF’s trial was not just the trial of an individual but an entire ethos that the crypto world, to some extent, embodied. The speed of FTX’s rise and fall mirrors the volatile nature of the crypto markets it once navigated.

The platform, known for its aggressive marketing and celebrity endorsements, crashed spectacularly, leaving a wake of financial devastation.

The saga unfolded as a grim reminder of the dot-com bubble, resonating with a modern echo of unchecked ambition and the perils of speculative investments.

The impact of SBF’s actions

Beyond the courtroom, the implications of SBF’s guilty verdict resonate deeply within the crypto industry and regulatory landscape.

The rapid jury decision underscores the gravity of SBF’s misconduct and reflects an intolerance for the reckless disregard for principled financial stewardship.

SBF’s trial has also provided a stark tableau of betrayal, with former confidants turning state’s evidence against him. These testimonies, especially that of Caroline Ellison, former CEO of Alameda and SBF’s ex-girlfriend, have been instrumental in sealing his fate.

The intimate access Ellison had to the inner workings of SBF’s empire allowed her to offer the jury a clear view of the machinations behind the scenes, ultimately portraying SBF as the architect of a grandiose scheme.

Awaiting the final sentence

The journey for SBF is far from over; a second trial looms on the horizon, bringing with it the potential for further revelations. However, his immediate future is now confined to the stark reality of a federal jail cell, where he will await sentencing.

The date set for his sentencing, March 28, 2024, is likely marked on many calendars, as the crypto community and its observers await the final act of this dramatic downfall.

As the dust settles in the courtroom, the story of SBF is a sobering narrative of unchecked power and the perils of a modern-day Icarus flying too close to the sun.

The verdict serves as a potent reminder that no matter how innovative or cutting-edge, the fundamental principles of integrity and accountability remain the bedrock of financial trust and security.

In any case, let’s all take a drink or two in celebration. SBF is going to jail, after all.

I think there are only 3 things relevant right now and here are the 3 things.
The halving is coming with 100% certainty.
And as far as I can see, most of the selling of #BTC    in the market is the bitcoin miners that have to sell in order to pay their electricity bills & pay their debt expenses & their operating expenses.
So that amount of selling pressure is going to be cut in half in a few months, so we know that’s coming.
And then we know there a spot Bitcoin ETF coming and when that comes we plug into Wall Street and the entire banking system.
And then finally that fair value accounting is coming and when that happens the objective will go away.
And now you’re going to introduce this as a conversation into hundreds of boardrooms.
They will not move in a week. They move quarterly but over the course of 12 quarters, you’ll start to see company after company looking at this & you’ll start to see a reallocation of assets.
At the end of the day, corporations only hold 2 assets.
They hold cash and they hold bonds and so if Bitcoin is available as an asset pari passu to a bond, then you’ll see a reallocation from bonds to Bitcoin.
And then in the institutional investor side, you’ve got all these people holding real estate, holding commodities, holding gold, holding ETF and S&P indexes and the like.
And if they start to reallocate and they will, 1% and 2% and 5%. Then you’re going to have something that has never happened in the history of the world which is you’ve got an ETF on a commodity that is scarce.
Every other ETF in the world is on an asset that is not scarce, it’s inflationary.
You can make more buildings, you can make more real estate, you can make more gold, you can make more commodities.
You can make $4 billion worth of any of any of those things.
The underlying producers produce more of the asset to deflate or to depreciate the price.
With Bitcoin, when $100 billion flows into the Bitcoin Spot ETF, there won’t be any ability for any producer to produce any more bitcoin.
And so you can’t really compare it to the spot and ETF of gold because gold is an inflationary asset and you can’t compare it to ETF’s on real estate or on bonds or on equity.
You really have to say this is the first time we ever plugged Wall Street into an asset that you cannot produce any more of.
And so nobody knows what will happen except that if you reason from first principles, you know that it’s got to actually perform better than all the other asset ETFs because the underlying fundamentals are just better.
But let me lay out three possible ways to invest in Bitcoin.
One if you buy Bitcoin, the underlying asset.
The second is you buy the Spot ETF.
The third is you buy @MicroStrategy.
Okay, so we talked about the headaches of buying Bitcoin, the underlying asset.
You have to do it on a crypto exchange and put in place parallel custody, compliance, compensation control systems. So that’s the challenge of that.
The closest thing, the most compelling idea for a plain vanilla Bitcoin investment of an institutional investor is you buy the Spot ETF, you’re be getting 1 to 1 correlation.
For $1 million you put in you’re getting $1 million of Bitcoin. What’s the positive?
It’s marginal, it’s good collateral. I can buy in a second no money down and I don’t need to build parallel custody control compensation systems.
So all my problems are handled by Wall Street.
What’s the cost? 50 to 100 basis points a year.
Okay so if I charge you 1% per year over the course of 20 years or over the course of your lifetime, it means that kinda I take 20% of the money you invested at 1%.
So there’s a cost 50 basis points means I get 10% of your money approximately.
But having said it all, I would pay you 50 to 100 basis point in order to be plugged in to Wall Street and it’s not a problem.
It’s a lot better than the alternative which is rebuild all their systems and then finance themselves.
So MSTR is not that. MSTR you can think of as a levered long Bitcoin company that pays you a yield.
Okay, so I’m not going to call it an ETF, because we are not a financial company but we have $4.4 billion plus of Bitcoin and $2 billion plus of debt.
So what we’ve done is we’ve levered the balance sheet with debt that cost us about one and a half percent interest.
So MSTR takes advantage of its position as an operating company to do something that an ETF can’t do.
An ETF can’t issue junk bonds. An ETF can’t issue convertible bonds. An ETF can’t do like an ATM, like we can could do, and an ETF can’t buy Bitcoin with cash flows.
So we have a lot of flexibility as an operating company and we don’t charge that fee.
So we have $4.5 billion of bitcoin but we don’t charge $45 million a year.
So the real idea here is, what if I created an investment vehicle that paid you a yield instead of charging you a fee?
And what If I was able to borrow money at one and a half percent interest?
I borrowed a billion dollars at 0% interest and bought Bitcoin with it.
Let me give you a theoretical, if you get a 2% yield instead of paying a 1% fee, it’s 60% difference over the lifetime of your asset.
So if you have a billion dollars invested and you’re getting a 2% yield, you’re actually picking up $20 million a year. Instead of paying $10 million a year.
So the dynamic of the company is very important.
So you can imagine that if I don’t charge you a fee and if I have cheap leverage, the stock, the benefit accrues to the common stock shareholders.
Because I went and I borrowed $2.2 billion at 1.5% interest and I bought Bitcoin with it.
So what’s the logical theoretical yield of Bitcoin?
Is it more than 1.5% a year?
Well let's say it was 15% a year.
Then we’re scraping 14% positive real yield off of the debt.
And so that would be 14% of a billion dollars or more, actually 14% of $2.2 billion.
So that would be $300 million a year that accrues to the benefit of the common stock shareholders, you see.
This is the benefit of being an operating company. We can every quarter choose what to do.
So some quarters we would issue junk bonds, other quarters we would issue convertible bonds, other quarters we would sell the equity, other quarters we would just use our own cash.
So the answer is there’s always going to be a good market and there’s always going to be a bad market.
There’s things you shouldn’t do and there are things you should do.
So MSTR, to make a long story short, is a bit more complicated than a spot ETF, right?
If you want something plain vanilla and simple, that it should basically correlate 1 to 1 with Bitcoin, after you pay the fee.
Then you buy a Spot ETF.
But if you wanted to actually try to outperform Bitcoin like MSTR’s outperformed Bitcoin.
Our performance over the course of the three years is higher than bitcoin’s performance.
So if you want to outperform bitcoin or outperform the Spot ETF, you would do that by accretive financings.
Like for example, if our stock trades at 30% premium to the underlying assets, and we sell a billion dollars of equity, we actually capture $300 million of accretion to our shareholders." - Michael Saylor 💎

Our experts tell us why all major crypto exchanges supported the MEME token. Which "does not represent any usefulness or value" and what provoked demand for it
On November 3, cryptocurrency exchanges started trading Memecoin (MEME) token. MEME rate was fixed at $0.02, which is 2000% higher than the price. At which the project participants received tokens at the pre-sale, organized earlier on its official website.
The token launch was announced by the developers of the Memeland project. Participants of the community formed around it, performing a certain set of activities. And could get on the list of those who will have access to the sale of MEME. According to the project's website, they collectively invested $10 million in just 40 minutes from the start of the token sale.
All major exchanges, including Binance, Bybit, OKX, KuCoin and HTX (formerly Huobi) launched token trading on the spot market. And later announced the launch of open-ended futures on MEME with leverage up to 50x. The token's capitalization at the time of publication exceeds $200 million, and the daily trading volume is $600 million, according to Coinmarketcap.
MEME Ecosystem
Memeland was created by the team that founded 9GAG. It is a popular meme and news sharing site that has received support from YCombinator and other influential investors. The project team has branded three NFT collections (You The Real MVP, The Potatoz, and The Capatainz). And has developed apps for games and meta universes. And where their NFTs are also zapped and the token will be involved.
According to the developers, players can earn MEME by holding the token in stacking. Or by actively playing and creating content. And along with NFT, its owner gets the rights to commercialize the associated image.
According to published details, Memeland's upcoming platforms include travel service Holders.com, video sharing service GMGM.com, cryptocurrency app Stakeland and service Petsland. The team also noted that MEME does not represent "any voting rights" in the Memeland ecosystem. And that is, it is not a so-called governance token.
Large audience of this project and its prospects for further growth
The website 9GAG was created in 2008 by Ray Cheng, a student at the University of Hong Kong, and his brother Chris Cheng as an alternative online platform for socializing. And on which users could share humorous photos or videos. 9GAG's main server is located in Hong Kong. Ray Cheng's account on social network X (formerly Twitter) has 2.4 million followers. And he is a well-known influencer, including in the cryptocurrency community clarify our experts.
According to 9GAG itself, 150 million people visit the site every month. The service has 40 million active users and 3.5 billion page views. The information is generally confirmed by Similarweb statistics - according to the analytical service. That 9GAG is among the 500 most visited sites on the Internet.
"9GAG has more social potential than all existing cryptocurrency apps today combined," said investor Jason Choi of the Tangent fund, which invested in Memeland. It was the fund's most unconventional bet, he noted. And the investment decision was made without the usual pitch deck or roadmap presented explicitly.
That said, he said, the project has a ready-made strategy already lined up. "With every investment we try to bring cryptocurrency to people. What if we, on the contrary, try to bring people to cryptocurrency?", - wrote Choi. Our experts are closely following the development of this project, it is too early to say and the price in the future. $MEME
#MemeLand #MEME