**Ban vs Ire: The Global Showdown You Didn’t Know You Needed** Alright, folks, buckle up. We’re diving headfirst into the latest global drama that’s got everyone from your local coffee shop to the halls of international diplomacy buzzing. It’s not about who wore it best or which celebrity couple called it quits this time. No,…
Binance, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Crypto Bomb By Our Man in 200 Jurisdictions (and Counting) If you stare long enough at the Binance logo—two diagonal rectangles forever sliding past each other—you start to see the entire twenty-first-century condition: frictionless, borderless, lawless, and just one fat-fingered trade away from total…
World Liberty Financial: The Newest Crypto Casino Where Everyone’s a High-Roller Until They’re Not By Dave’s Locker’s Resident Chronicler of Collapse Zurich—In a nondescript WeWork above a fondue franchise, two twenty-somethings from three different passports just pledged their grandmothers’ pensions to a liquidity pool called “World Liberty Financial.” If that sentence makes you wince, congratulations:…
From Manila to Manchester, the same little green-and-yellow icon now glows on 90 million phones like a tiny, pixelated promise that tomorrow’s rent can be tripled by a last-minute VAR decision. Welcome to the Church of bet365, the Stoke-on-Trent outfit that has quietly become the Vatican of 24-hour dopamine—a parish whose confessionals are live-chat windows…
Crypto: The Global Casino Where Everyone’s a High Roller Until They’re Not By Our Man in the Wreckage, filed from somewhere with spotty Wi-Fi and excellent whiskey In the beginning, there was the blockchain, and the blockchain was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of fiat. Then someone said, “Let there…
Betfair: The Global Casino Where Nations Come to Whisper Odds By our resident correspondent, still recovering from last night’s in-play volatility LONDON – Somewhere between the forex desks of Singapore and the cigarette-scented betting shops of Manchester, humanity decided that the future wasn’t uncertain enough. Enter Betfair, the London-born exchange that turned “I bet you”…
DraftKings: How a Boston Start-Up Turned the World’s Oldest Vice into a Stock Ticker By our correspondent, still recovering from last night’s “risk-free” bet on Peruvian llama racing BOSTON—MASSACHUSETTS, USA—It began, as most moral panics do, with a PowerPoint deck. Somewhere around 2012, three guys who looked like they still got carded at Applebee’s convinced…
Jarrett Maki and the Quiet Art of Global Self-Reinvention By Dave’s Locker International Desk Somewhere between Reykjavik and Riyadh, a man named Jarrett Maki has become the world’s most polite ghost. Not the chain-rattling, moaning variety—more the kind who politely signs NDAs before haunting your boardroom. If that sounds like faint praise, congratulations: you’ve grasped…
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…
Metro Bank and the Fine Art of Lending Gravity to the World By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Over the Atlantic It begins, as all modern tragedies do, with an innocuous push-notification. Somewhere between the canapés in Davos and the humid back-alleys of Manila, Metro Bank—once the plucky British challenger that painted its branches in garish “store”…
Seoul, South Korea – At 3:14 a.m. local time, when most of this megacity’s 9.7 million residents were asleep, a 14-year-old coder in Gangnam discovered that a Roblox experience titled “Steal a Brainrot” had been quietly translated into Korean, Arabic, Spanish and Tagalog. Within four hours, the game’s concurrent player count leapt from 12,000 to…
