Gemini: The Heavenly Twins Go Global, Again By the time you finish this sentence, three new AI models will have been trained, two crypto exchanges will have imploded, and one astrologer in Mumbai will have blamed Mercury retrograde for all of it. Yet amid the perpetual churn of modernity, the word “Gemini” keeps bobbing to…
Necaxa vs Juárez: A Quiet Border War the World Pretends Not to Notice By Santiago “Sam” Valdez, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker The first rule of international journalism is that nothing is ever “just a game,” especially when the fixture is played within mortar range of the U.S. border, under floodlights paid for by a cryptocurrency…
**The Winklevoss Twins: Bitcoin’s Poster Boys for the Global Age of Digital Delusion** In an era where the line between visionary and opportunist blurs faster than a Tokyo salaryman after his fifth shochu, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss have managed to transform themselves from Harvard’s most famous aggrieved parties into the poster children of cryptocurrency’s promise—and…
Diego Lopes and the Quiet Collapse of Geography by Our Man in Everywhere Somewhere above the Sea of Japan, Diego Lopes is probably snoring—mouth open, noise-canceling headphones askew, drool pooling on a $4 neck pillow that will outlive us all. To the flight-tracking apps, he’s just another purple blip slicing through the jet stream. To…
Solana: The Blockchain That Promised to Cure Everything Except Human Greed By Our Correspondent Who Has Watched Empires Burn Faster Than a Stablecoin Peg ZURICH—While the rest of us were busy panic-buying toilet paper and existential dread in 2020, a small band of San Diego coders quietly christened a new blockchain they claimed could process…
The “Crypto Arena” Isn’t a Building—It’s the Planet, and We’re All in the Cheap Seats By our jaded correspondent, still nursing a $4 bottle of stadium water LOS ANGELES, DUBAI, DAKAR—Pick your time zone, the opening whistle already blew. Staples Center may have rebranded itself Crypto.com Arena for a tidy $700 million, but the real…
Binance: The Borderless Bazaar Where Nations Go to Window-Shop Sovereignty By Diego “Ledger” Mercier, Dave’s Locker International Desk It is 3:14 a.m. in Singapore, 7:14 p.m. in Lagos, and wherever you are, Changpeng Zhao—better known as CZ, the hoodie-wearing Houdini of high finance—is probably still awake, jogging in place on a yacht that exists only…
TOKYO—At 3:47 a.m. local time, while the rest of the city pretended to sleep off another salary-man sake bender, 27-year-old Hoshino Yui refreshed her phone and watched Dogecoin tick up 11 percent. Halfway around the world, in a São Paulo favela where the power flickers more often than a Tinder date, 19-year-old Lucas was doing…
Solana Price: The Global Mood-Ring Nobody Asked For By our correspondent in transit between time zones and tax shelters Singapore, 3 a.m. local time—while the rest of the city-state pretends to sleep, three screens glow in a co-working pod that smells faintly of Tiger beer and existential dread. On them: Solana flickering at $142.78, up…
COPENHAGEN—Somewhere between the hygge glow of a Danish bodega and the neon anxiety of a 24-hour Bloomberg terminal, NBIS stock (Nordic Blockchain Infrastructure Services A/S) has become the world’s favorite new punch line about how we never actually learn. The Copenhagen-based firm, whose logo looks suspiciously like a QR code having a mid-life crisis, claims…
Dodgers: The Art of Slipping Away, From Tokyo Tax Shelters to Mediterranean Deck Chairs By Our Correspondent, Still Counting the Empty Seats GENEVA—The word “dodger” once evoked muddy Brooklyn baseball and the crack of post-war innocence. Today it is a cosmopolitan chameleon, changing its accent in every time zone. In Hong Kong it answers to…
Marvel Tokon Beta: When the World’s Favorite Superhero Franchise Decides to Issue Its Own Currency (and Nobody Tells the IMF) By the time most of you woke up this morning, some kid in Lagos had already flipped a pixelated Captain America shield NFT for enough Marvel Tokon Beta (MTB) to buy three weeks of actual…
