The Friday Reading List: Week 8-9 📚
Articles, op-eds, books, podcasts, movies, and some fun
Hello,
Welcome to Edition 3 of The Friday Reading List – an antidote to the information overload we are all swimming in. Every two weeks, I share my favourite literature across crypto, finance, technology, culture, and beyond. I also share what I am watching and reading this week, beyond the world of crypto and finance.
Two fortnights in, and I am still experimenting with the format of this list. I’ll probably keep experimenting until it comes as close as possible to reflecting my personality (as my editor calls it).
Speaking of my personality, I have always enjoyed reading fun facts, number stories, solving puzzles, and taking quizzes. So, here’s something new for this edition: a walk down crypto’s memory lane.
This Time, That Year
Twelve years ago this week, the world’s largest Bitcoin exchange went dark. On February 24, Mt. Gox suspended all trading, and its website vanished, leaving only a blank page. Four days later, the exchange filed for bankruptcy, claiming that 850,000 BTC (worth ~$470 million at the time) had been stolen due to an unnoticed vulnerability.
BTC’s price crashed by over 35% in February that year. At its peak, the Tokyo-based exchange was handling over 70% of all Bitcoin transactions worldwide.
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Now, let’s recap what happened during the last fortnight:
Metals continued their rally this month. Silver was the undisputed winner last fortnight, up over 16%. Gold followed suit with a ~4% gain. Throughout February, both metals have risen by over 10%.
Bitcoin moved a lot throughout the week, yet went almost nowhere. It closed the fortnight with barely 2% gains, but is still 14% down in February.
The S&P 500 and the Dollar both edged up less than 1%, staying almost flat across the entire fortnight.
With the charts out of the way, here’s all that deserves your attention in crypto:
We started the last fortnight by going back to first principles. Through Built for Humans, my colleague TJ and I trace speculation as humanity’s oldest impulse. From 5000-year-old dice to prediction markets, we tell you in this piece how crypto created a new venue for one of the oldest human urges.
What seemed like a flawless way for many to gain crypto exposure over the past year is unwinding rapidly. Public companies that were pivoting toward Digital Asset Treasuries (DATs) are soon reconsidering their pivots as NAV premiums flip to discounts, making it difficult to sustain the business model. I explore this using charts in When DAT Wrapper Cracks.
While financial wrappers are cracking, the protocol layer faces unresolved questions. My colleague Nishil explains this in Ownership Coins. In this piece, he uses Aave’s $10M governance dispute as a lens to show that DeFi token holders still sit somewhere between 1800s shareholders with no legal protection and modern frameworks that took decades to develop after the 1929 crash.
Vaidik explores how ERC-5564 introduces native stealth addresses to Ethereum, keeping on-chain history private while enabling cost-effective, lightning-fast fund transfers.
Better infrastructure, better privacy, and more mature systems – yet crypto’s breakout consumer app is still missing. TJ explains this in The Consumer App Problem and discusses an important problem around why the top crypto apps on App Store today are still trading exchanges - Coinbase, Kraken, and Crypto.com.
We have got a lot more deep dives and analysis in store for the coming weeks. Before we get there, here’s some literature that will keep you in good company.
Regulation & Policy
Hyperliquid Walks into Washington DC: Jake Chervinsky leads Hyperliquid’s new DC shop, with $28M HYPE tokens backing it.
Crypto & Tech
You can see a theme running across these readings. Crypto is being stress-tested at the infrastructure layer, and the easy money era, where mNAV premiums held, wrappers worked, and narrative alone drove prices, is over. What we see unfolding is a more honest acknowledgement by the industry of approaches that generate revenue, attract real users, and help take projects to a mainstream audience.
You Can’t Charge Fees on Stablecoins: Stablecoins with charges feel like cash; that single expectation breaks the entire payments model.
The Great Repricing: Crypto is winning on fundamentals, yet the mood is the most downtrodden we’ve seen.
Can Prediction Markets Make It Rain?: Byron Gilliam applies Soros’s reflexivity theory to prediction markets and shows how the speculative platforms might shape reality, rather than reflect it.
Public Goods Need a Hook, Too: Crypto’s “unseriousness” (memecoins, CEXs) funds its most idealistic goals.
ETHZilla Moves Away from ETH Treasury: The rebrand positions the company as an institutional RWA tokenisation platform on Ethereum.
Bitdeer Sells its BTC Treasury: Another DAT bites the dust; selling all 189.8 BTC output
Tether Invests in Whop: Tether backs the 18M-user internet marketplace; stablecoin payments coming to 144 countries.
Tokenised Money Market Funds: The quiet category gaining serious traction — worth watching as regulation catches up (behind paywall).
Is Ethereum Good Enough for Wall Street?: History shows open systems tend to beat closed ones, and Canton and R3 redux likely won’t end any differently.
How Crypto Works: Free, open-source 15-chapter book covering Bitcoin, DeFi, MEV, and stablecoins — definitely worth bookmarking.
Crypto VC in Early 2026: Explores how the crypto funding landscape in the past year tells us about what will follow.
The Token Bull Case: Obol bets revenue, along with protocol-owned liquidity, is the survival formula for the next token era
Orchestrating Flow: In this deep dive, Decentralised.Co explains how LI.FI’s evolution from an aggregator to a marketplace can help address cross-chain fragmentation.
Vitalik on Quantum Resistance: Four quantum-vulnerable spots in Ethereum and a step-by-step roadmap to actually fix them.
Jane Street and Terraform: Insider trading allegations that connect back to one of crypto’s worst collapses (behind paywall).
Finance & Economy
Ports, Roads, Rails, and Orbits: Transportation cost collapses follow a pattern; space is next, secondaries market hits $240 billion
It’s Official: The World Order Has Broken Down: This Ray Dalio piece shows us how the Munich Security Conference declared the post-1945 order dead.
How Machines Are Becoming Better Investors Than Humans: Renaissance Medallion’s 39% annual returns are Chamath’s proof that code outperforms human judgment in investing (behind paywall).
AI & Innovation
Assigned Seating: AI isn’t replacing you, it’s classifying you (did I say it the LLM way?); In this essay, Mariah discusses how AI will categorise people into three groups, whether they like it or not (behind paywall).
The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis: Written as a memo from June 2028, explores how AI disruption spirals into a mortgage crisis and a recession.
Measuring Agent Autonomy in Practice: Anthropic studied millions of Claude interactions, and agent autonomy has nearly doubled to 45 minutes.
Humans Are for Ideas, AI Is for Execution: a16z partner runs an AI Twitter agent for a week and concludes how AI may take execution away from humans, but not the brainstorming part
The AI Agent Handbook: Free 8-chapter primer on how to get started with AI agents
Agentic Entertainment: The Thesis: gmoney bets that AI agents competing live is the first spontaneous and unpredictable entertainment since sports
Ben Thompson x John Collison: Stratechery founder on AI ads, SaaS death, and why Taiwan is the most convenient place to live
Y Combinator’s Raphael Schaad X OpenClaw’s Peter Steinberger: In this 22-min interview, they discuss the viral sensation that’s driving local-first agents to replace many of today’s apps
Culture & Beyond
Social Ineptitude: The tech elite may be the most socially inept ruling class in history, a great read on patronage
Instrumentalisation is Making Everything a Means to an End: We stopped asking what’s good and started asking what’s useful; my favourite among Aeon’s finest pieces in the past fortnight
Baby Chicks Pass the Bouba-Kiki Test: What the scientists discovered about the common thing in how humans and chicks commonly perceive language
Robot Vacuum Army: How an engineer accidentally accessed 7,000 DJI vacuums and watched and heard live footage of homes across 24 countries
What I Watched This Fortnight
Crime 101 turned out to be worth a watch on a slow Sunday, which will only disappoint you if you went in expecting a thriller.
But the more interesting watch of the fortnight for me was The Swedish Connection on Netflix. It turned out to be nothing one could have expected. It follows a true story from the Second World War timeline, which I bet most people wouldn’t have known existed.
I would call it a diplomatic masterpiece of a story that’s dug out from the annals of history. If you have a weekend and about 90 minutes to tolerate the Swedish-English subtitles or poorly dubbed audio, you will thank me for recommending this.
Write back to us with any recommendations through the next fortnight that you think we should include in the upcoming edition.👇🏾
That’s all for this fortnight. Catch you in the next edition.
Until then, happy reading!
Prathik
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Disclaimer: This newsletter contains analysis and opinions of the author. Content is for informational purposes only, not financial advice. Trading crypto involves substantial risk - your capital is at risk. Do your own research.