The Merkle
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Inside A Brutal Month For Hardware Wallets : Was ZachXBT Right All Along?
One month ago, ZachXBT said something that got him buried in backlash: that hardware wallets, the devices the entire crypto industry tells people to trust with their life savings, were "complete garbage." He wasn't vague about it either, singling out Ledger by name. The community pushed back hard. Then, in the span of a few weeks, two of the industry's most…
What 14 Years Of Bitcoin's Yearly Lows Actually Reveal
Ask most people when Bitcoin was "cheap" and they'll point to some vague memory of buying it for pizza money.I went back and pulled the actual yearly low for Bitcoin, year by year, since 2012, and honestly, the pattern surprised me more than I expected. It's not a straight climb. It's not even a clean staircase. It's a currency that spent 2015 falling below…
The Retail Onramp Effect: How Robinhood Overtook Established Layer 2s in Just Six Weeks
Six weeks. That's how long it took a retail brokerage app to overtake every established Ethereum Layer 2 in the one metric that actually measures economic weight: fees paid back to Ethereum itself. Base, Optimism, Arbitrum's own ecosystem chains, all of them now sit behind a network that didn't even exist before July. I've watched a lot of L2 launches come a…
NFTs Are Roaring Back And So Is The Man Zachxbt Investigated Years Ago
When I saw this thread circulating during NFT season, my first reaction wasn't shock, it was déjà vu. It comes back, and somehow so does every familiar name from the last cycle, the good, the bad, and apparently the previously investigated.This time it's Cole Villemain, better known online as ColeThereum, a Pudgy Penguins co-founder who was pushed out of his…
Replays, Master Keys, and Silent Prompts: Unpacking the Hidden Infrastructural Flaws Behind FIDO2
I've spent the last few years telling friends and family the same thing: switch to passkeys, they can't be phished. That advice wasn't wrong exactly, but reading through this new research left me a little humbled. Three separate teams just showed that you don't need to break FIDO2's cryptography to beat it. You just need to find the messy human infrastructur…
How Taunt Tapes, Flex Wars, and Doctored Wallets Exposed a $5M Crypto "Caller"
Tiffany Milanovich apparently never got the memo on an old rule in crime: the moment you start showing off, you start leaving evidence. While allegedly draining victims of millions in crypto, she wasn't hiding in the shadows, she was posting the receipts herself, recording her own taunts, and flexing stolen funds like trophies. Now, on-chain investigator Zac…