GM, frens! ☕️

There’s a reason we separate work from play, but the best stuff tends to happen when the two overlap a little. Work gives you something to take seriously, play gives you room to experiment, make weird choices and occasionally stumble into something better than what you planned 🫠 

Crypto has always had plenty of both. Half the industry exists because someone took an idea seriously enough to build it, while having enough fun with it to try something nobody sensible would have approved.

Here’s what we’re looking at this week:

• 🫣 GTA VI leaker turns stolen footage into a token play

• 💰️ Why wallet names still matter

• 🍊 Crypto gets a seat at Trump’s table (once again)

• 🤦‍♂️ The App Store keeps learning nothing

• 🥷 FTX snitches get their final deals

Work, play or a questionable mixture of both, there’s always something happening in our Discord 🫡 

GTA VI leaker turns stolen footage into a token play

Grand Theft Auto VI has leaked again, and this time the people behind it brought a Solana token along for the ride. A person or group calling itself Cyberleek released what appears to be real gameplay footage and images of the map, then used the attention to promote its own coin 🤡 

Cyberleek also published a manifesto demanding an end to digital preorders, paid access to content already sitting inside a game and the loss of single player games when companies turn off their servers 🙄 

The group says its token will fund a secret project to defend gamers and insists this is not a cash grab, which is always a very reassuring sentence to see next to a button asking people to buy a coin. Take Two has already started sending takedown demands over the leaked material 🔨 

It is easy to look at this and ask how crypto became the place where leaked game footage, blackmail and a manifesto can be bundled into a token launch. The more honest answer is that crypto did not create any of the behavior. It just gave people a fast way to put a price on it 🤷‍♂️ 

People have always gambled on gossip, sold stolen information and turned personal grudges into public entertainment. Crypto just removes most of the waiting. Anyone with an audience and a few minutes can create a coin, attach it to whatever everyone is already watching and invite strangers to join with their wallets 🪙 

In 2023, an early GTA VI trailer leak carried a “Buy BTC” watermark and briefly became free Bitcoin advertising. The new leak simply takes the same habit further by combining stolen footage, demands aimed at a game publisher and a token sold as “part of the cause” 😐️ 

Though blaming shameless degens as if they are some separate species here misses the point. We got the tools that let them act on greed without asking anyone first. That freedom also lets people fund work, send money across borders and build markets around ideas that traditional finance would never touch. The useful side and the ugly side come from the same place 🙃 

If you think about it, crypto is a mirror held close to our faces. It can show invention and cooperation or it can show a guy leaking the most anticipated game in the world and asking everyone to buy his shitcoin in the name of consumer rights.

The industry probably did not turn people petty but it just made pettiness easier to fund and there’s definitely plenty of demand 💵 

Why wallet names still matter

Crypto has made peace with a lot of bad UX, but wallet addresses are still near the top of the list.

Most people are not built to remember or safely read strings like 0x742d...fA2e they copy, paste, waste time triple checking but get nervous over anyway. That’s just not exactly how normal payments are supposed to feel.

Naming services try to fix that by turning raw wallet addresses into readable names. Instead of sending to a long string, users can send to something like ambire.eth, .wei, .gwei, or another human readable name 👓️ 

Different teams are taking different approaches. Some focus on domains. Some think names should behave more like usernames. Some care about making them short and easy to type. Others care more about standards, compatibility and how these names work across wallets, apps and chains.

Ambire hosted the people in charge of .wei, .gwei, and XNS on its broadcast to talk through exactly that: why naming is imporant, where current wallet addresses still fail normal users, and how different naming systems are trying to solve the same problem from different angles 👇️ 

The full conversation is worth watching if you want the argument straight from the teams building it 🧠 

Crypto gets a seat at Trump’s table (once again)

Donald Trump gathered executives from Coinbase, Robinhood, Kraken, Ripple, Gemini and several major finance companies at the White House on August 19. SEC Chair Paul Atkins and CFTC Chair Michael Selig were there too, giving the president a room full of people who agree that the United States needs clearer crypto rules and would very much like Congress to finish writing them 👇️ 

Trump called to pass a “fair version” of the CLARITY Act and repeated his promise to make the United States the crypto capital of the world. The meeting covered market rules, bringing crypto businesses back into the country and ways for more products to operate legally in the US 🙊 

Trump also addressed the rather large elephant at the table: his own family has made serious money from crypto businesses. Though he said he is not involved in their daily operation and that the investments are independently managed 🤨 

The SEC, meanwhile, has started building a legal route for token sales without waiting for Congress.

• Its new proposal would create a smaller startup exemption that could allow projects to raise up to $5 million over four years, plus a larger fundraising exemption for up to $75 million during any 12 month period 💰️ 

• Projects would still have to provide disclosures about the token, the business and their finances.

The proposal also includes a safe harbor for cases where the team behind a token has permanently stopped the main work that originally made the sale an investment contract - i.e project could raise funds under set rules, build the network and later leave SEC oversight if the token no longer depends on the original team doing what it promised 🤔 

It is a proposal, not a free pass for every token sale tomorrow, and it will go through public comments before anything becomes final.

In the meantime, the CLARITY Act is still stalled in the Senate. It would settle bigger questions that an SEC rule cannot answer alone, including which assets fall under the SEC, which fall under the CFTC and how exchanges, brokers and custodians should be supervised 🕵️‍♂️ 

It passed the House with support from both parties, but the Senate left for its August recess without holding a vote.

The current plan is to bring it back in September.

The main points of conflict include ethics rules for public officials with crypto interests, stablecoin rewards and protections against illicit finance. Republicans hold 53 seats but need 60 votes to advance the bill, so it’s unlikely a Truth Social post of some sort can resolve this problem any time soon 🥱 

The meet and the SEC proposal show that Washington is still making progress around crypto, even while technically the approach completely failed previously. The SEC can open useful doors, but agency rules can also be changed by the next administration. A law passed by Congress would be harder to undo, which is why community is glued to any new developments regarding CLARITY 👴 

The App Store keeps learning nothing

DefiLlama (largest open source DeFi aggregator in the space) finally released its official mobile app, but the launch came after months of fake versions beating it into Apple’s App Store 🤯 

According to DefiLlama founder 0xngmi, the team kept reporting the copycats for impersonation and trademark violations, yet Apple left them up 😐️ 

• DefiLlama eventually made a small test wallet, installed one of the fake apps and watched the funds disappear 📱 

• Once the team could show Apple that the app really drained a wallet, it was removed within days.

• DefiLlama held back its public launch until the fake versions were gone because announcing the real app while copycats were still sitting in search results would have sent users straight into a trap 👇️ 

Apple’s own rules ban apps that impersonate other services. The company also likes to point out how many misleading and fraudulent submissions it rejects every year. That sounds good until we literally see how a real crypto company has to donate money to a scammer just to get an obvious fake removed 💀 

• This has not been a one time fail. We have already covered Apple allowing fake crypto apps through review before. A fake Ledger Live app was tied to roughly $9.5 million stolen from more than 50 people earlier this year. Apple removed it after the money was gone. A separate lawsuit says three users lost more than $1.8 million through a fake Sparrow Wallet app, even though the real Sparrow Wallet does not have an iOS app at all 🤦‍♂️ 

• Google has the same disease. We have covered its crappy drainer ads disguised as Uniswap (they returned at least four times since then, kept coming back after tens of thousands of people flagged them, only stopped after some big news sites wrote about the scam) = the fake result could sit above the real Uniswap site because the scammer paid for the spot. Victims connected their wallets, signed what looked like a normal transaction and got drained 💸 

Big tech companies never had great moderation, but the switch to AI seems to have killed what little ability remained. Instead of giving human reviewers better tools, they handed the whole job to systems that check whether a submission looks ok on the surface. But the scammers aren’t stupid, they are also using automated tools, so the result is machines approving scams made by other machines while actual people only enter the process after somebody loses their savings 🤖 

Paying enough real reviewers to catch this would cost money, of course, and apparently every extra salary comes directly out of an executive’s astronomical compensation package. Better to let the algorithm approve another drainer, remove it after the damage and publish a large number about how many bad submissions were stopped 🥸 

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FTX snitches get their final deals

Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang have reached their final deals with the CFTC over their roles in the FTX scam. Ellison received a five year trading ban and a ten year ban on registering with the regulator. Wang also received a five year trading ban, plus an eight year registration ban 🔨 

The CFTC did not ask either of them for more money, citing the “help they gave investigators and prosecutors” 🤡 

Both pleaded guilty after FTX collapsed and became major witnesses against Sam Bankman Fried. In other words, the snitches got the cooperation package.

That does not make them some innocent bystanders who happened to notice something strange at work.

• Wang actually built features that gave Alameda an essentially unlimited line of credit on FTX and exempted it from the normal liquidation system.

• Ellison ran Alameda while it used billions in FTX customer money for trading, investments and loans, then made public statements that helped maintain the story that the two companies operated separately 📃 

They helped build the scam before they helped the government explain it. Implying they’re heroes would be a joke.

Ellison had already been sentenced to two years in prison and served about 14 months before her release in January. Her criminal case also included an order to forfeit $11 billion. Wang got a sentence of time served and supervised release after his cooperation. The new CFTC deals close another part of the case and make sure neither gets to stroll back into regulated trading as if FTX was just an awkward gap on the resume 😶 

SBF, meanwhile, is serving 25 years in prison. He built a company around friends, roommates and people tied together by work, money and relationships, then learned that loyalty has a very clear limit once prison starts shining on the horizon. His former inner circle supplied prosecutors with the code, messages and testimony needed to explain how the whole operation worked 💀 

There is no reason to feel sorry for him. Being snitched on does not turn the person running the fraud into a victim. It just means he trusted accomplices who liked their own freedom more than they liked him, which was probably the first sensible trade anyone in that office made 🤔 

The punishments Ellison and Wang received will still look soft to plenty of FTX customers. Ellison spent a little over a year behind bars, Wang avoided another prison term and the CFTC chose bans instead of new fines. Cooperation clearly paid better than loyalty.

Other worthy reads

“Many ways to win” - kepano:

“Arkham’s Guide to Smart Contract Hacks”:

“Securing the Infrastructure of Intelligence” - Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang:

MEMES

That's all for now, frens.

We'll meet in a week! And remember, the market conditions are temporary, but our commitment to building a better Web3 is here to stay. Thanks for joining us, and we look forward to seeing you back next week. Cheers!

Yours, The 🔥 Team

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