Rational thinker Cofounder @ISC_money
Joined March 2023
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Richard | ISC retweeted
3 in 4 Hyperliquid traders lose money. We dug into the data to find out why: for its earliest traders, fees made up over half their losses.
We built Bullet to fix that, and keep traders in the game.
Richard | ISC retweeted
Most things that are old/unmaintained will get exploited as AI advances. Swallowed up by the rising tide.
This includes old smart contracts, even if immutable.
If you have funds in wound down protocols, or protocols where the team has gone quiet, you should withdraw.
Apparently there’s a patch for the critical PHP vulnerabilities but a few things that are alarming.
1) Many websites that use php with sensitive information are simply abandoned. There will be no upgrade. That means they’re going to get pwned and leaked. That’s a LOT of the internet
2) This requires active participants to upgrade their sites that even know about this vulnerability. If you’re on X you’re at the tip of the tip of the spear. Most people don’t know about this.
3) Anthropic says that this is ONE of SEVERAL critical vulnerabilities that they have found. Which means there’s more chaos coming.
TLDR: A large portion of the unmaintained internet is about to be pwned and god help us all or something like that.
Richard | ISC retweeted
Pretty funny to see everyone blame this (rightly condemned, to be clear) on whatever their political bogeyman is: I've just seen people say that this is because of, take your pick, "communism," "Islamism," "third worldism," "Russia," and "China".
As if France needed any outside help to riot... Maybe some people need to brush up on our history, or read Victor Hugo's "Les Misérables"...
This isn't to romanticize the rioters in the least. A reminder that in Les Misérables there's the figure of Thénardier, a horrendous scoundrel who exploits the chaos around him, robbing corpses and fleecing anyone he can.
Every chaotic moment in French history has its share of Thénardiers, and this one is no exception.
It's just too easy, and actually useful to those in power, to blame this on outside forces. At the end of the day, this anger was made in France, is happening in France, and can only be solved in France.
And, as painful as it is to hear, if one studies history, this is pretty much exactly what's expected at the stage France is at.
People have studied this. Whether you take Ray Dalio’s six-stage cycle theory, Peter Turchin’s "elite overproduction" thesis or the Chinese dynastic cycle framework, they all come to the same conclusion: when debt piles up, public services crumble and those in power become incapable, the streets eventually explode.
In fact it's almost eerie how France ticks almost every box of most cycle theories:
- Fiscal distress (debt is 119% of GDP and we now pay more to borrow than Italy or Greece),
- Crumbling public services: a reminder that these protests (now turning into riots) started with high school students protesting over the state of education
- Political paralysis and a legitimacy crisis (Macron has an insane 82% disapproval rate, he's definitely lost the Mandate of Heaven...)
- Popular immiseration with a record poverty rate at 15.4% and a median wage at only €2,190 net per month for a full-time private sector employee (you can't even afford to rent a decent flat in any major French city with this)
"Third worldism" or "Islamism" isn't the cause of any of this: French governments didn't borrow like there's no tomorrow (the last balanced budget dates back to 1974!) because the "Muslim Brotherhood" told them to, and it wasn’t Putin or Xi who left French classrooms without teachers...
Sadly the reactions - scapegoating - are ALSO typical of this stage of the cycle: Dalio lists among the classic markers of Stage 5 the emergence of "scapegoat classes who are commonly believed to be the source of the problems" (linkedin.com/pulse/delving-s…), alongside a "loss of truth in the public domain," with people more interested in hunting for culprits than looking for solutions.
So what is the solution? Well, the way the Chinese dealt with it was basically a reset - regime-changing themselves with a new dynasty claiming the Mandate of Heaven, usually after decades of rebellion and war. Not exactly a hopeful prospect...
There is also the exception where a dynasty managed what the Chinese call a 中兴 (zhōngxīng, "restoration"): profound reform from within before the whole house came down. It succeeded a few times (e.g. the Tongzhi restoration during the Qing dynasty) but usually could only buy a few more decades, rarely more.
In 1945, the writer Huang Yanpei famously asked Mao how to break free of the cycle (cn.vlex.com/vid/constitution…), framing it in those terms: "People are careful and hard-working at first, for bold measures are the only possible ways to break through difficult conditions. But when things gradually get better, people begin slacking off: laziness may spread through a long history and is impossible to be corrected when it becomes a common practice. Gradually expanded territory requires corresponding increases in talent, but when the latter is insufficient, the central control will become weak. In a word, no one can escape the 'vicious cycle' of dynastic rise and collapse."
Mao replied that democracy was the answer, because "as long as the people can supervise the government, the government dare not slacken." And Xi later added a "second answer" (chinadailyhk.com/hk/article/…): a system capable of "resolute self-reform".
The jury is still out on whether China has broken the cycle, but if France has any hope of escaping it, it will need both answers at once: a government that truly answers to its people, and very resolute self-reform.
One thing the answer definitely isn’t: turning on each other. In all these cycle theories, division and scapegoating appear on the way down, never on the way back up.
⚠️🔴 À REGARDER JUSQU'À LA FIN
JE NE PEUX PAS DÉCRIRE CE QUE JE VIENS DE VIVRE À MARSEILLE.
#17octobre
Richard | ISC retweeted
I don't usually do long posts, but I wanted to thank the @SuperteamSG community for banding together to help make Solana Summit a success :)
Solana Summit had 7K+ builders and traders from 110+ countries signup, and generated 2.3M+ impressions from 2.3K+ posts on X. But just two months ago, we had no sponsors and no sign-ups.
That's when the community stepped in to help and became our first believers.
@nansen_ai doesn't usually do booths, but they trusted our idea for doing an interactive trading personality quiz. Thank you Ingrid and @ASvanevik
@MeteoraAG's trading game and protein drinks were a highlight, with long queues all day. Claps to @0xmiir, @0x_Malc, @pranave and @dannxbt!
@SafePal designed a limited-edition Solana Summit wallet on a crazy tight timeline and gave them out as prizes. Thank you @CheongCJ1, @V_SafePal and Dada!
@sanctumso hosted their VIP happy hour inside the summit. Thank you @eggpanned, @soleconomist and team!
@traded_gg gave so many people their first-ever Pokémon card opening experience.
And when I complained coffee was too expensive, @JupiterExchange sponsored it. Thanks @eleesatt!
And then the circle kept widening:
@SuperteamKZ introduced us to @kase_kz (Kazakhstan Stock Exchange), who were super cool and nothing like the boring TradFi folks I'd imagined.
@decentra1ized_ introduced us to @KoreaPanda_ from @ZetaChain, and we got to be part of their Solana launch!
@Helius and @debridge sponsored the VIP brunch and lounge. Thank you @bradyowen, @Sherrypeter and @EmsleyJonnie!
@SuperteamMY rallied Superteams across the region and turned the summit into a real Solana APAC gathering. Thank you @tuakdotsol :)
No one just came to just network. Everyone pitched in to make this a success. @shizudio agreed to MC last min, @yx3142 giving us free discounts for solana summit @OnchainAditi helping out with the hectic ops, and the superteam community members just helped out at every step along the way whether its inviting ppl or sharing on socials.
And most importantly, thank you @0xSoju and @xianxlb. Two months ago they asked me, "Kimmi, how important is this summit to you?" I said "100%." And the rest is history. They've just been all in ever since, pulling many late night shifts together and helping out all the way.
Solana Summit was truly built together, as a community, as an ecosystem, and I'm so grateful to have been part of it 💜
Richard | ISC retweeted
Here's a normie friendly reading of the Hayden, Ben Chow, Meteora class action re M3M3 and Libra. Its actually quite fun.
Key headline points.
- Ben Chow is clean
- Hayden is not in New York
- Burwick are terrible lawyers
Ben Chow was actually the only person that was actually actively cleared of fraud in this case, not Hayden.
Let me begin by explaining Burwick's strategy to non-lawyers.
Burwick is a third rate ambulance chasing success-fee based law firm. That means they find a claim, try to be very annoying and hope that the defendants settle.
The target for this specific lawsuit is not Ben Chow, because Ben Chow has no money. The target is not Hayden, because he is not in New York and it is very hard to get money out of a crypto fugitive that doesn't care about their reputation and the law and can operate outside the financial system. Hayden is also ostensibly based in Miami and I'm assuming it would be more expensive for Burwick to find a real lawyer to go after Hayden in Miami bc Burwick is based in New York.
The real target for this lawsuit is @MeteoraAG.
Meteora continues to run as a business. Meteora has money. And Meteora has a brand it wants to protect.
This is why you rarely see Burwick go after the main scammers who orchestrate the rugpulls, they always go after the celebrities and the tech platforms.
Now in order to go after Meteora's money, Burwick needs to achieve a few things.
First Burwick needs to establish a connection to New York because otherwise the New York court has no 'jurisdiction'. For instance, a New York court would refuse to hear a case where a scam happened in Somalia.
Burwick can easily do this for Ben Chow, because Ben Chow lives in New York.
Burwick could not do this as easily for Hayden because he is not in New York, so Burwick tries to tie this to Ben Chow. Hayden 'conspired' with Ben Chow knowing he was in New York so maybe the New York court has jurisdiction? We will come back to this later.
And Burwick attempted to do this for Meteora which is the crown jewel he is going after by saying that Ben Chow was part of a 'stable unincorporated association' or a 'partnership' led by Ben Chow. Meteora is actually built by a company but Burwick needed to make it something else, because otherwise they can't pull Meteora into the New York lawsuit. The judge basically called Burwick's attempt to do so retarded in the opinion, I suggest reading it (Pages 21-28).
Now the judge starts looking at the RICO claim against the ones left. FYI, RICO is to allow crime bosses to be persecuted even if they did not personally perform the crime.
Why did Burwick need a RICO charge? Because they wanted to get Meteora in - because thats where the money is at. But since the judge had already told Burwick to fuck off re Meteora and that Meteora is not part of this lawsuit, this portion was actually functionally pointless.
But the judge went through it anyway and found that Ben Chow's activity with Hayden (the ones left) was not in duration and scope large enough to fall under a RICO claim. In other words, Ben was not close enough buddies with Hayden and hadn't been involved in enough thing together to make them a criminal organisation. So the judge nuked the RICO claim too.
Now the meaty one - fraud against Ben Chow.
7 counts of fraud against Ben Chow. They range from setting up the launch of M3M3, conspiracy to deceptive statements to marketing the launch etc.
Literally all dismissed.
Because for there to be fraud, there needs to be dishonesty. And even though Ben Chow said he regretted his role after the launches, he did not know beforehand that Hayden was a fraudster. The court found that even though he had the opportunity to commit fraud as CEO of Meteora, he did not actually have the motive to do so.
Burwick tried saying he was reckless in his behavior even if he wasn't dishonest - again dismissed. Unjust enrichment - also dismissed. Ben was just doing his job.
Conspiracy to defraud was also dismissed against Ben because Ben did not commit fraud. Similarly for misleading and deceptive statements - fully dismissed.
In other words, Ben Chow met all the fraud allegations head on and beat them.
Hayden however did not beat the fraud charges, he simply avoided them (legally). As per the above, Hayden's entire argument was that he is not actually in New York and therefore the New York court has no jurisdiction over him.
Remember, the best chance they had of getting Hayden under New York jurisdiction is under Ben Chow. But given the RICO charge didn't stick, they couldn't extend it to Hayden.
So Hayden gets off in New York on jurisdiction, the judge never considered the fraud claims against him and Burwick never sued him in Florida where there is actual jurisdiction over him (his assets etc are there).
Honestly, am very glad we ended up with this result (but wish someone actually properly went after Hayden).
The headlines will say 'crime is legal' but this is really just Burwick trying to shake down Meteora via Ben Chow who worked with the wrong guy.
Its a win for Meteora but a huge win for @hellochow personally.
I suggested to @weremeow in February last year (before I joined Jupiter) that Ben should resign from Meteora. Meow insisted he trusted Ben completely but agreed that the optics required Ben to leave until the truth is established.
I've gotten to know Ben over the past year and know the stress that this lawsuit has had on him and am very glad that he has been vindicated and that this load is off his back.
Someone should still go after Hayden.
🚨 Hayden Davis, Ben Chow, Kelsier, and Meteora just beat the $LIBRA / $M3M3 class action.
Not after a trial. After an 81-page opinion.
Judge Rochon dismissed the ENTIRE case with prejudice. You cannot RICO a six-month memecoin launch. You cannot sue a Solana DEX as if it were a partnership. And “Milei posted it” is not a fraud claim against the guy who built the liquidity pool.
This was the SDNY class action over the December 2024 $M3M3 launch and the February 2025 $LIBRA token - the one tied to Javier Milei’s “Viva La Libertad” post. Plaintiffs also tried to pull in $MELANIA and other launches in a proposed second amended complaint.
The story in the complaint if you can recall, is cinematic. Insiders allegedly freeze the pool, fill wallets before the public can buy, inflate the cap, dump, and leave retail with a 90% crash. One named plaintiff lost about $19,000 on $M3M3. The other bought $LIBRA on launch day.
The court never decided whether that happened.
It decided plaintiffs sued the wrong thing, under the wrong statute, with the wrong facts.
Meteora is not a defendant.
Dynamic Labs intervened and said Meteora is software. The court agreed plaintiffs never pleaded a real unincorporated association - no identified members, no president or treasurer, no mutual consent to a common objective. Calling a protocol a “team” does not make it suable.
All claims against Meteora are gone.
RICO is gone.
Closed-ended continuity needs a substantial period. Six months of token launches is not enough. Adding $MELANIA / $ENRON / $TRUST in the proposed amendment stretched it to about seven. Still not enough. Open-ended continuity also fails: Meteora and Kelsier are alleged as primarily legitimate businesses, and wire fraud is not inherently a criminal way of life. No pattern, no RICO, no RICO conspiracy.
Fraud against Chow is gone. Rule 9(b) scienter. Profit is not motive. A post-crash “I f*cked up because I enabled the guy” is not a strong inference he intended to defraud buyers on day one.
Conspiracy dies with the underlying tort.
Kelsier is gone on jurisdiction. Once RICO drops, there is no nationwide service hook, and New York long-arm does not reach the Davis family on these facts.
Leave to amend: denied as futile. Case closed.
The takeaway is not “memecoins are legal.” The takeaway is that a viral launch plus a famous tweet is still not a RICO enterprise, and you cannot name the smart contracts as Defendant No. 5.
Richard | ISC retweeted
This would make airport security lines 20% more efficient overnight
🤖 Made with AI
Richard | ISC retweeted
The culmination of 2 years of hard engineering work to bring our latencies within the same order of magnitude of centralized exchanges. In turn this is already allowing market makers to quote 0.1bps spreads at the top of the book.
1ms p50 and 5m p99 are on the horizon.
Richard | ISC retweeted
𝐀𝐮𝐭𝐨𝐛𝐞𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐲 [𝑛𝑜𝑢𝑛]: the alarming growth of private cars in height, width, length and weight at the expense of public space, the environment and overall safety.
Richard | ISC retweeted
Important retrospective from former Silvergate CEO Alan Lane on the liquidation of the bank
silvergateceo.substack.com/p…
Richard | ISC retweeted
INF is an extremely simple idea (staking yields + trading fees between LSTs => supernormal returns), taken seriously and executed well. Come to INF for the best risk-adjusted yields on your SOL.
Only took 3 weeks to prove.
In the below tweet I said if (when) LST swaps on Solana pick back up, INF will outperform most.
Last week, it happened (see red arrow).
Crypto market rally caused a spike in LST swap volumes on Solana - profit taking, unwinding multiply positions in defi, other general capital rotation.
INF APY spiked to just shy of 7% while other large LSTs earned around 5.5%. INF remained elevated for around 3 epochs.
Richard | ISC retweeted
We resolved the vulnerability upon discovery and released an update on August 11. Please ensure your Rabby extension is up to date. The mobile app is unaffected.
The conditions required to trigger this vulnerability are extremely limited:
1/ The wallet must be connected to a malicious website.
2/ The user must have manually set their auto-lock timer to specifically 10 minutes (all other timer settings are completely unaffected).
No exploits have been detected in the wild.
Richard | ISC retweeted
> Thoughtful post on winding down operations
> Takes full responsibility despite lots of external issues
> One point about Solana Foundation
CT: SOLANA FOUNDATION KILLED FLASH
Seek therapy.
Winding down is stressful enough. I imagine becoming the thunder rod for SF hate is 🫠
In pain, been frozen in my tracks for a week now, but a decision had to be made and we are shutting down Flash. I sincerely take full responsibility of this failure and trying my best to find a possible acquisition of the tech stack we have right now to make FAF holders whole.
There were 3 major reasons to this decision:
1. Deep team unalignment
I really don't want to comment much on this point bcz I've burnt some bridges which were almost a decade old and it was all due to being not competent enough, and I was getting stretched thin trying to fill in in as many ways as possible while burning out.
2. Shrinking market and Solana alignment
The crypto users have been shrinking and that's typical of bear markets, but when you are on the forefront of it all it really hurts to feel it up close and ship things regardless. The thing that hurt me personally was the sincere disregard by the folks at the foundation. It was really painful, you never expect such coldness, supporting only one team so dearly bcz it help Solana succeed in their view.
It really didn't sit well with me and I know I am fully wrong abt this and became unnecessarily emotional about it, and I also got to know abt the plan that was gonna back them to the teeth leading up to breakpoint bcz Solana needs one winner, and they really do.
(I am not blaming them for their decision, it's just my stupid emotional state of watching one team being crowned dearly, which is wrong of me)
3. Exhaustion overall due to not making much money
Being fully bootstrapped is very sexy but it's kind of sad too, and interestingly I managed all the finances of Flash and I am kind of happy to be able to make it through so long and keep everything alive, but I guess something inside me was dying given the ruggedness of standing so tall of doing things the right way was eating me from inside.
And on top of all this, our recent close call with the minor exploit is what really broke something in me. I became too much of a paranoid and started not trusting anyone's work bcz AI was too good and I wanted to review everything myself, which stretched me too thin. Although our whole system didn't suffer any problem and it was more hardened after the incident, me feeling so weak about every $$ moving in the exchange was mentally exhausting.
I failed massively and I take full ownership of this closure, and we had sincerely believed in this thing, reason why we built it all with our efforts, suffering and money, and nothing about it was easy or rewarding.
May God have peace on us all!
Richard | ISC retweeted
every *big* hardware wallet i know has either:
- been physically extracted (trezor, keepkey via voltage glitching)
- leaked its customer data (ledger, 2020)
- shipped firmware capable of exporting your seed (ledger recover, 2023)
- failed its own unhackable bounty (bitfi, 2018)
- shipped broken entropy for years (coldcard, this week)
the ones that haven't are either too new to have been attacked or too obscure to be worth attacking.
this likely gets worse from here as AI lowers the cost of finding bugs in public codebases.
absence of disclosed vulnerabilities is not evidence of security. it's in fact usually evidence of LOW scrutiny.
i don't believe there is one perfect wallet. it doesn't exist. and for that reason, i stopped betting everything on one.
rotate to multisigs. distribute the risk.
Richard | ISC retweeted
people who stored their btc on coldcard got drained because of entropy.
the seed generation was reproducible, anyone could recompute their keys.
so i went through every other hardware wallet to see how they make your seed, and whether the same thing can happen again.
@Trezor: mixes the device's randomness with randomness from your computer, and the device has to prove it used both. even if its chip is fully broken, you're still fine. the best design here by far.
@BitBoxSwiss: 5 separate sources of randomness combined. one bad source can't sink you. open source, reproducible builds, dice supported.
@FoundationHQ: built their own randomness circuit out of plain resistors and capacitors, open source, on top of two other sources. no black-box chip to trust. supports dice.
@KeystoneWallet: 2 secure chips from 2 different manufacturers, combined. also lets you roll 99 dice and publishes how to check the result yourself.
@Blockstream: jade pulls from 7 things: radio noise, cpu counters, battery, temperature, camera, your input, the app. very hard to break all of them.
@SeedSigner: your dice are the only source. no chip to trust at all. and they ship a guide teaching you to verify their own math. weakest hardware, strongest proof.
@OneKey: secure element plus mcu combined on device, open source firmware. solid, but you can't add your own randomness.
@Ledger: one certified chip (AIS-31, EAL5+). good randomness. but it's a single source, closed source, and you cannot verify any of it. you're trusting them completely.
@Tangem: key is born inside the chip and never comes out. audited by three firms. same trade: strong, and impossible for you to check by design.
@ngrave_official: mixes chip randomness with your fingerprint and room light. clever. but the "EAL7" badge covers one software component, not the whole device.
@ELLIPAL: single certified chip, no software fallback, fails closed instead of guessing. closed source, so take it on faith.
@SafePal: 2 chips mixed. they've never published the details.
@COLDCARDwallet: patched now, and dice on coldcard were always verifiable. but every seed made between 2021 and 2026 is permanently burned.
one source = ledger, tangem, ellipal. that one source fails, everything fails. their answer is to make it excellent and certified. that's exactly the bet coldcard lost.
many sources = trezor, bitbox, passport, jade, keystone. one broken source never reaches your key.
and every one of these claims 128 or 256 bits.
coldcard did too. certification doesn't help either, coldcard's chip was fine, the code just stopped calling it.
the only thing that saves you is being able to check.
roll your own dice. verify the words yourself.
Richard | ISC retweeted
Every time something bad happens to self custody we justify it by saying “they weren’t smart enough”
Hardware wallet? Well obviously you need a dedicated signing device. That hardware wallet? Well obviously not THAT one. Who puts all their eggs in one basket?! Clearly you need 12 hardware wallets.
The people aren’t the problem. The systems we have for self custody are complicated, shitty, and require a level of paranoia no normal person can be expected to attain. We *have* to do better or this industry is dead on arrival.
