Adding Bailey, right after inviting Eric Trump in March (presumably to curate the board’s hair product recommendations), means Metaplanet’s boardroom now resembles the afterparty of a mid-tier cryptocon: a whirlwind of enthusiasm, dubious ties, and probably at least one PowerPoint rendered entirely in Comic Sans. Together, will they guide Bitcoin to glory—or just drive up the price of local sparkling water?
Both Litecoin and Solana, lauded for resembling commodities (though not nearly as sparkly as diamonds or witty as a Wilde epigram), twirl with a near-inevitable 90% approval waltz. The SEC and CFTC, those eternal gatekeepers of speculative dreams, seem utterly enchanted.
OP_RETURN, a simple opcode, allows when properly cajoled, for a sliver of data—barely the memory of a fever dream—to be secreted within a Bitcoin transaction. Until now, these dreams were restricted to 80 bytes, a nursery of information.
Picture the world, Dostoevskian reader, trembling on the brink. The institutions, with their wrinkled brows and starched collars, can no longer ignore the rumbling beneath their feet. Mastercard, in a fit of either genius or collective delirium, opens the gate: fiat and zeros, rubles and algorithms, all to flow together in an unholy sacrament. With a simple swipe—nay, a divine click—the masses are set free. Coffee, museum tickets, last-minute Dostoevsky novels—why not pay for all with the magical stablecoin? The tragedy, of course, is that it might just work.
If you plan to sell, your face and paperwork will be required — KYC on CEXs and P2P alike. Smile for the crypto bureaucracy!
Speaking at the TOKEN2049 event in Dubai (because where else do you make *game-changing* predictions?), Hayes confidently laid out the scenario that would see Bitcoin hitting that glorious million-dollar mark. As if that wasn’t enough to send crypto fanatics into a frenzy, BTC is currently trading around $95K, proving it’s still got some serious bullish muscle after a rocky start to the year. But wait, there’s more… 😱
Now, let’s try to wrap our minds around this masterpiece of modern finance, shall we? Telegram’s $2.4 billion worth of bonds—oh, what a weighty sum—will serve as the glorious backbone of this venture. And, of course, the beauty of tokenization, that magical process that makes everything sound so much cooler, will let these debts double as the latest crypto collateral. No more boring old bank loans when you can now borrow against on-chain assets, and maybe, just maybe, make a quick buck while doing it.
Inflation, that persistent spectre haunting the dreams of every middle-aged banker, is the gentle but inexorable rise of prices. It sighs through the drawing rooms of the economy, robbing your notes of their dignity with each passing season. As the price of luncheon soars and the Sunday roast becomes an extravagance, what once bought a round or two now purchases hardly half a cucumber sandwich. Statisticians, seeking meaning in misery, boast about indexes such as the CPI—presumably short for “Continually Pinched Income.”
Inflation, that persistent spectre haunting the dreams of every middle-aged banker, is the gentle but inexorable rise of prices. It sighs through the drawing rooms of the economy, robbing your notes of their dignity with each passing season. As the price of luncheon soars and the Sunday roast becomes an extravagance, what once bought a round or two now purchases hardly half a cucumber sandwich. Statisticians, seeking meaning in misery, boast about indexes such as the CPI—presumably short for “Continually Pinched Income.”
This time, it is Eric Trump, whose face bears that wistful ennui of someone never quite sure whether the soup is for eating or for staring into, who has taken to the grand stage (Dubai, naturally, where everyone goes when Manhattan isn’t enough) to declare that global banks must embrace crypto, lest they shuffle off this mortal coil in ten years’ time. According to Eric, the current system is “broken,” “slow,” and apparently designed for the ultra-wealthy. (Chekhov sighs somewhere in literary heaven: what else is new?)