🟪 Thursday Links

Strategy's STRC preferred shares

Gilliam amplifies Cameron's view that STRC is an 'unsecured, discretionary yield from a loss-making issuer' with a real after-tax return of ~6.9%, implying Saylor's marketing is fundamentally misleading.

Prediction markets attracting professional sharks

While peer-to-peer prediction markets are good for platform neutrality, the influx of professional trading firms with data and algorithms makes winning much harder for retail participants.

Crypto financializing AI compute

Gilliam suggests crypto may beat TradFi giants like BlackRock to creating AI compute futures markets, drawing an analogy to Enron beating banks to energy financialization.

Crypto Beats TradFi to AI Compute Futures

MNX, a crypto-based AI exchange, is already testing perpetual futures tracking H100 GPU rental costs before BlackRock or any major investment bank enters the space, following the Enron playbook of financializing a commodity before Wall Street does.

Crypto infrastructure is ahead of TradFi in creating a derivatives market for AI compute, an asset class Larry Fink just called the next big thing for investors.

Sanctioned Entities Prefer Liquidity Over Privacy

Despite privacy coins like Zcash being available, sanctioned entities overwhelmingly use stablecoins and compliant CEXs, accepting the $1.5B in frozen funds as the price of liquidity—less than 1% of volume goes through privacy-enhancing services.

Conventional wisdom assumes bad actors maximize anonymity; data shows they actually optimize for liquidity and accept enforcement risk.