When Michael Lewis talks to crypto bros, he tends to get bored within about six hours.
But when Large card the author was searching for inspiration for his next book, he went hiking with an unnamed man in the crypto industry.
“At the end of the hike, I said, ‘Holy shit.’ Suddenly I became interested in crypto,” he told Financial News.
Lewis’ interest in Wall Street – an adaptation of his most famous book, The big shortwon an Oscar for best screenplay — has returned “entirely because of the person,” he said in an interview.
The talk has sparked speculation about who the mystery man, apparently the subject of Lewis’s next opus, could be. An early front-runner, according to Twitter gossip, is Sam Bankman-Fried.
The FTX frontman is certainly quirky enough for one Large cardfilm treatment, but with a number of crypto takeover bids on the move in recent months, it begs the question: does SBF have time to go hiking with the likes of Lewis?
Then again, if he our to be on the big screen, Fintech files would really like him to be played by Gaten Matarazzo – aka Dustin from the Netflix horror series Stranger Things.
Any other suggestions – either for the potential protagonist of Lewis’s next book, or for who should play Bankman-Fried in a film – on a postcard please: [email protected]
Crypto headlines this week
Former CMA chairman sues Binance, Kraken for £10bn – here’s why
How Revolut, Fidelity and Binance want to capitalize on crypto crash
Former chancellor Philip Hammond joins the new UK fintech fund
BlackRock increases the brothers..
It was only in June that BlackRock’s Salim Ranji said the firm was not planning to launch a bitcoin product.
But life comes at you fast in cryptoland, and on August 4, the world’s largest money manager announced that it would allow customers to buy and sell bitcoin on its Aladdin investment platform.
The move means a warm new partnership with Coinbase. You may remember the boss, Brian Armstrong—he fired a fifth of his staff in June by locking them out of their work emails to “make sure not a single person made a rash decision that hurt the business or themselves.” Gulp.
Coinbase was recently hit by two lawsuits in the US, where regulators said several digital assets traded on its exchange actually qualify as securities. That could cast doubt on Coinbase’s business model.
No wonder senior executives, starved of good publicity for months, rushed to call it “an exciting milestone”.
…but bitcoin rallied not
That’s all very well, but while bitcoin’s price rose on August 8, following macro risk trends, it actually fell the day the BlackRock news was announced.
Write for BloombergJared Dillian, an investment strategist at Mauldin Economics, said that if that happened last year, bitcoin “would have gone up and all the crypto evangelists on Twitter would have been out proselytizing in full force preaching to all non-believers to have fun staying poor .'”
Ouch.
And the deal is just the latest development that should have boosted the price of the biggest cryptocurrency, but didn’t. When Fidelity Investments said it would offer bitcoin retirement plans for clients, nothing happened either.
So is crypto winter really over yet? Fintech files will believe it when we see it.
Our favorite stories from elsewhere
Speaking of Sam Bankman-Fried, Bloomberg takes a look at why US antitrust authorities may be coming after crypto’s billionaire buyout kings.
Meanwhile, Guardian delves into a recent court case over whether Craig Wright, an Australian computer scientist living in Surrey, is actually the pseudonymous creator of bitcoin…
…and Decrypt reports on the ethereum miners opposing the second largest cryptocurrency’s upcoming transition from a proof-of-work blockchain model to its faster, more scalable proof-of-stake.
The last word
As many trad-fi financiers are aware, BlackRock’s Aladdin platform has nothing to do with a magic carpet, a genie, or even a monkey named Abu.
Instead, it’s an acronym: Asset, Liability, Debt and Derivative Investment Network.
It will make the crypto bros float.
To contact the author of this story with feedback or news, email Alex Daniel
