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My conversation with @brianmerchant about “Speaking Truth to Crypto Power” at SXSW was one of the few crypto-related events. Crypto prices may be back up, but crypto excitement has not followed.
One noticeable source of excitement at SXSW this year was to do with federated social media and individual sovereignty online. My conversation with @mike on the topic was only one of many: https://schedule.sxsw.com/2025/events/PP147154 (audio only)
Jay Graber, the CEO of BlueSky, gave a great keynote. She wore a t-shirt that read “mundus sine Caesaribus” (“a world without Caesars”): immediately recognizable to those who had seen Mark Zuckerberg’s custom black-on-black “aut Zuck aut nihil” shirt at a Meta event last year.
Sadly, for now we remain in a very much not billionaire-proof world, so I will now update you on how that’s all been going.
Substantially all remaining enforcement cases from the SEC against cryptocurrency companies (and political megadonors) have been dropped, including the lingering cases against Ripple and Kraken I mentioned last issue.
The Trump family has reportedly had conversations about acquiring a stake in Binance — as Binance founder and former CEO Changpeng Zhao is reportedly seeking a pardon from the president.
Congress has been debating stablecoin bills, and one has advanced to the full Senate thanks to five Democrats who joined all Republicans to vote for it — despite concerns about the power it grants to giant companies and the threat of introducing 2008-esque financial contagion risk.
Despite Solana's primary claim to fame these days being a memecoin launchpad currently offering “on-chain ballsack” and “Depressed Couch Fart”, the ad depicts a man named “America”, sitting on a therapist’s couch comparing Solana to “multi-planetary travel” and nuclear energy.
Finally, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian seems to be permanently several years slow in picking up on tech trends. After insisting in 2023 that play-to-earn games were still the future of gaming, he has now proposed buying TikTok and putting it on the blockchain.
![Frank McCourt and his Project Liberty project will be joined by Reddit co-founder and ex-CEO Alexis Ohanian in their effort to buy Tiktok, with a new addendum by Ohanian: “—and bring it on-chain”. One is forced to wonder if Ohanian has just woken up from a three-year-long nap still believing that “web3” is a buzzword that gets everyone excited these days.31 While Project Liberty has spoken about wanting to “put people in control of their digital identities and data” and suggested “migrat[ing] the [TikTok] platform to a new digital open-source protocol”32 — ideas that sound compelling (if vague) — it’s a shame that Ohanian seems to want to focus their efforts on blockchains.
It’s perhaps not surprising, though, given Ohanian’s past investments in crypto-related projects primarily to do with blockchain-based gaming — including the ill-fated Axie Infinity game which suffered a $625 million hack [W3IGG] and then, separately, a total collapse of its in-game economy from which it has never recovered. In January 2022, Ohanian predicted that within five years, 90% of people would refuse to play a game unless they were being paid to do so in crypto (the premise known as play-to-earn).33 He re-upped the five year prediction in 2023, though I’m not sure you’re allowed to just continuously reset the clock like that.34 Given his past blockchain gaming predictions, McCourt might be wise to be a bit more skeptical about Ohanian’s assertions that blockchains will form the futur](https://media.hachyderm.io/media_attachments/files/114/195/440/150/158/669/original/df6a737e1af45edf.png "Frank McCourt and his Project Liberty project will be joined by Reddit co-founder and ex-CEO Alexis Ohanian in their effort to buy Tiktok, with a new addendum by Ohanian: “—and bring it on-chain”. One is forced to wonder if Ohanian has just woken up from a three-year-long nap still believing that “web3” is a buzzword that gets everyone excited these days.31 While Project Liberty has spoken about wanting to “put people in control of their digital identities and data” and suggested “migrat[ing] the [TikTok] platform to a new digital open-source protocol”32 — ideas that sound compelling (if vague) — it’s a shame that Ohanian seems to want to focus their efforts on blockchains.
It’s perhaps not surprising, though, given Ohanian’s past investments in crypto-related projects primarily to do with blockchain-based gaming — including the ill-fated Axie Infinity game which suffered a $625 million hack [W3IGG] and then, separately, a total collapse of its in-game economy from which it has never recovered. In January 2022, Ohanian predicted that within five years, 90% of people would refuse to play a game unless they were being paid to do so in crypto (the premise known as play-to-earn).33 He re-upped the five year prediction in 2023, though I’m not sure you’re allowed to just continuously reset the clock like that.34 Given his past blockchain gaming predictions, McCourt might be wise to be a bit more skeptical about Ohanian’s assertions that blockchains will form the futur")
That and more in this week’s issue of Citation Needed, a completely independent publication supported by subscribers like you. Paid subscribers help me keep doing this work, which is always free and never paywalled or regwalled. Consider signing up to support: https://www.citationneeded.news/signup/
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