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Why Celsius Network's depositors won't get their money back
The crypto lender Celsius has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. This should come as a surprise to absolutely no-one, though the grief and pain on Twitter and Reddit suggests that quite a few "Celsians"...
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Where has all the money gone?
The collapse of Terra in May sent shock waves round the crypto world, triggering domino-like collapses of crypto companies. One of those companies was the investment fund Three Arrows Capital. At the...
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The ones who stay in Omelas
Ursula Le Guin's short story "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" contains a terrible moral conundrum. Many people have agonised over it: to my knowledge, no-one has solved it. Attempts that I have...
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Why Coinbase's balance sheet has massively inflated
Coinbase recently filed its interim financial report. It makes pretty grim reading. A quarterly net loss of over $1bn, net cash drain of £4.6bn in 6 months, fair value losses of over 600k... To be...
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Celsius is heading for absolute zero
Yesterday, the failed crypto lender Celsius filed a monthy cash flowforecast and a statement of its assets and liabilities held in the form of cryptocurrency and stablecoins. They showed that the...
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Snake oil sellers in the stablecoin world
It's been evident for some years now that those selling risky crypto products to risk-averse investors like to have federal branding on their snake oil. Tether claimed to have 100% actual dollar...
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Hollow Promises
Today, I bring you the sad tale of a crypto lender that promised safety and high returns to its depositors, but whose promises have proved to be as hollow as its name. Donut Inc., a self-proclaimed...
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The fatal flaws of Celsius Network
Celsius Network was never a real business. It did not have a viable business model. Really, it was a momentum trading scheme that relied on the premise that crypto prices would always rise. And when...
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Binance and its stablecoins
Yesterday, the SEC issued a Wells notice to the stablecoin issuer Paxos, warning it that the SEC intended to take legal action against it for issuing an unregistered security. The security in question...
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Proof of reserves is proof of nothing
Proof of reserves is all the rage on crypto platforms. The idea is that if the platform can prove to its customers' satisfaction that their deposits are fully matched by equivalent assets on the...
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WASPI Campaign's legal action is morally wrong
I haven't written a post about WASPI for a very long time. I felt I had said everything I wanted to say, and it had become evident that the WASPI campaign and its offshoots had neither the widespread...
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Lessons from the disaster engulfing Silvergate Capital
This is the story of a bank that put all its eggs into an emerging digital basket, believing that providing non-interest-bearing deposit and payment services to crypto exchanges and platforms would be...
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Silvergate Bank - a post mortem
Silvergate Bank died yesterday. Its parent, Silvergate Capital Corporation, posted an obituary notice (click for larger image):Silvergate Bank bled to death after announcing significant delay to its...
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What really happened to Signature Bank NY?
As the world reeled in shock at the sudden collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), another bank quietly went under. On Sunday 12th March, the U.S. Treasury, Federal Reserve and FDIC announced that all...
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The Peston effect
The last week or so has seen some of the worst bank communications since 2007, when the Bank of England started a bank run by leaking news of Northern Rock's emergency liquidity request to the...
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A fractional reserve crisis
This is a slightly amended version of a keynote speech I gave on 14th April 2023 at the University of Ghent, for the Workshop on Fintech 2023. The crisis that has engulfed crypto in the last year is a...
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Sunset
Dear friends, this is my last post on this site. Coppola Comment has moved to Substack. You can find the new site here. Why the move? Well, Blogger has become increasingly difficult to use. The code...
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The tragedy of Gaza
Dear friends, I said I wouldn't post any more on this site. But Elon Musk doesn't like me posting Substack links on Twitter. And Substack itself is a mess. The home page looks amateurish, and new posts...
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We need to talk about the state pension
My post-Budget article for the Radix thinktank considers the future of the State Pension in the light of the Chancellor's changes to National Insurance. The headline news in the Budget was a 2p cut in...
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Is Gaza starving?
“Over one million people in Gaza are starving,” proclaims a dramatic headline in the Wall Street Journal. Citing a new report from the International Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a...
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The West must no longer tolerate Israel's human rights breaches
My latest post at Substack examines the state of play in Gaza after six months of war. Fair to say, it is truly horrible. But more importantly, there is now overwhelming evidence that Israel has...
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