Journalism
The reporting and argument behind the headlines — at the pace it deserves.
The peg rests on the ability to hand tokens back and receive a dollar. Almost nobody holding a stablecoin can actually do that, and the arrangement works anyway for a reason worth understanding before you rely on it.
Emily Volker · 8 min read
A stablecoin trading below a dollar is one observation with four possible causes, and they range from a temporary liquidity inconvenience to a total loss. Distinguishing them is the entire skill, and the chart does not help.
Olivia Bennett · November 10, 2026→
The documents stablecoin issuers publish are real work by real accountants, and they are not audits. Understanding precisely what an attestation covers — and the specific questions it is not asked — is the difference between reading a report and being reassured by one.
James Park · November 8, 2026→
Two stablecoins can both be fully reserved and behave completely differently when holders want out at once. The reason is that reserves are a portfolio, and the three risks inside it — duration, credit and access — fail on different timescales.
Emily Volker · November 6, 2026→
The most reliable observation in market structure is that liquidity is abundant when you do not need it and absent when you do. That is not a failure of the participants providing it — it is the direct consequence of how they get paid and how they lose.
Olivia Bennett · November 4, 2026→
Trading on a rollup is described as on-chain, and settlement genuinely is. Ordering usually is not. A single operator decides what goes into each block and in what order, and the protections against that are real but narrower than the phrase suggests.
James Park · November 2, 2026→
Derivatives venues advertise an insurance fund as though it were deposit protection. It is a buffer against one specific accounting problem, it is funded by the traders it protects, and the number that matters is not its size but its size relative to what could hit it.
Emily Volker · October 31, 2026→
Proof of reserves is the standard answer to whether an exchange has your money, and it answers a narrower question than the name implies. Knowing exactly which question it answers is the difference between a useful check and false comfort.
Olivia Bennett · October 29, 2026→
A lending protocol cannot see the market. It sees whatever its oracle last told it, and every liquidation, every borrow limit and every solvency check runs on that figure. The gap between the reported price and the real one is where a specific and expensive class of failure lives.
James Park · October 27, 2026→
Every leveraged venue has a mechanism for closing positions that can no longer support themselves. The design of that mechanism decides whether a sharp move costs you your position, part of it, or more than you deposited.
Emily Volker · October 25, 2026→
Funding is the mechanism that stops a contract with no expiry from drifting away from the asset it tracks. It is routinely read as a measure of market sentiment, which is a plausible interpretation and an unreliable one.
Olivia Bennett · October 23, 2026→
On a public chain, a transaction is visible to everyone before it is final. That visibility has a price, most traders pay it without noticing, and the amount they pay is partly set by a wallet setting they were told to increase when transactions failed.
James Park · October 21, 2026→
Almost every venue charges more to take liquidity than to provide it, and some pay providers outright. The stated reason is fairness to market makers. The actual effect is that the depth on your screen is partly a product of the fee schedule rather than of genuine willingness to trade.
Emily Volker · October 19, 2026→
Traders bundle three distinct costs under one word, which makes it impossible to work out where money is actually going. They have different causes, different sizes and different remedies, and only one of them is unavoidable.
Olivia Bennett · October 17, 2026→
An order book and an automated market maker solve the same problem — matching a buyer to a seller — with opposite assumptions about who is willing to wait. Neither is better in general, and knowing which is better for a given trade is a question with an actual answer.
James Park · October 15, 2026→
Institutional custody is often discussed as a single product. It is three arrangements with different legal consequences, and the difference that matters is not technical — it is who owns the asset when the custodian fails.
Emily Volker · October 13, 2026→
Everything about hardware wallet security assumes the device you received is the device the manufacturer shipped. That assumption has been broken repeatedly, and most of the checks users are told to perform would not have caught any of it.
Olivia Bennett · October 11, 2026→
The most useful safety feature in a software wallet answers a question the interface never used to: not what are you signing, but what will happen if you do. It catches the dominant loss vector, and it has blind spots worth knowing before you rely on it.
James Park · October 9, 2026→
The dominant way people lose funds from a self-custodial wallet is not a compromised key. It is a permission they granted deliberately, months earlier, to a contract they have long forgotten — and which never expires.
Emily Volker · October 7, 2026→
Every self-custody guide teaches you to make your seed impossible for anyone else to use. Almost none address what happens when the one person who could use it is no longer available, which is a certainty rather than a risk.
Olivia Bennett · October 5, 2026→
Every signing device has to receive an unsigned transaction and return a signature. How that data crosses the gap decides what a compromised computer can attempt, and the three common answers differ more than the marketing suggests.
James Park · October 3, 2026→
The passphrase is the most misunderstood feature on a signing device. It is genuinely powerful, it is the only defence against someone who has found your seed, and it is responsible for a large share of permanent self-custody losses.
Emily Volker · October 1, 2026→
People say seed phrase as though it were one thing. It is three separate standards doing three separate jobs, and almost every case of a correct phrase restoring an empty wallet is a mismatch at one specific seam between them.
Olivia Bennett · September 29, 2026→
Multisig is sold as strictly safer than holding one key, which is not what a threshold scheme does. It trades one failure mode for a different set, and whether that trade is good depends on which failure you are actually trying to survive.
James Park · September 27, 2026→
Open source is treated as the end of the security argument for a signing device. It is the beginning of one. Between published source and the binary on your device sits a compilation step, and only a reproducible build closes it.
Emily Volker · September 25, 2026→
A secure element is one of the few genuinely strong components in consumer crypto hardware, and its certification is a real, audited claim. It is also a claim about a narrow question, and the marketing that surrounds it routinely stretches it to cover things it was never about.
Olivia Bennett · September 23, 2026→
Depositing into a yield vault outsources a decision, and the thing most depositors miss is which decision. You are not buying a rate; you are underwriting a portfolio you did not select and cannot see, assembled by someone who can change it while your capital is inside.
James Park · September 21, 2026→
A liquidation cascade is not simply a lot of liquidations. It is a feedback loop in which the mechanism designed to protect the protocol becomes the thing driving the price down, and it has a recognisable sequence with identifiable points where it can be broken.
Emily Volker · September 19, 2026→
An on-chain lending market has no rate-setting committee. It has a curve, published in advance, that converts one observable number into the price of credit — and the shape of that curve encodes every decision the protocol has made about who it is protecting.
Olivia Bennett · September 17, 2026→
Two protocols advertise the same rate. One is distributing money that users paid it. The other is distributing tokens it created for the purpose. Nothing on the interface distinguishes them, and the difference is the whole of the analysis.
James Park · September 15, 2026→
Every staking protocol describes itself as decentralised. The claim is measurable from public data, the measurement takes an afternoon, and the results routinely differ from the marketing in ways that matter to anyone holding the receipt token.
Emily Volker · September 13, 2026→
Restaking sells one idea: capital already securing a network can secure others at the same time and earn twice. The arithmetic on the reward side is straightforward. The arithmetic on the risk side is where the argument is, because the failures are not independent events.
Olivia Bennett · September 11, 2026→
A staking receipt trades at one price and redeems at another. The gap between them is not a malfunction — it is the market pricing the exit queue — and reading it correctly means knowing which of the two numbers is a promise.
James Park · September 9, 2026→
Every proof-of-stake network puts a delay between deciding to unstake and holding the asset again. That delay is not an inconvenience the designers failed to remove; it is load-bearing, and it lengthens under precisely the conditions that make people want to leave.
Emily Volker · September 7, 2026→
Slashing is treated as a vague background risk in most staking marketing. It is not vague: it punishes a specific, provable class of behaviour, it is separate from the penalty for simply being offline, and the question of who absorbs it is answered in a document almost nobody reads.
Olivia Bennett · September 5, 2026→
Commission is the single largest controllable variable in staking, it is deducted before you ever see the number, and the range between the cheapest and most expensive route to the same protocol reward is wide enough to dwarf every other decision you make.
James Park · September 3, 2026→
A staking return is not one number. It is three separate revenue streams with different origins, different volatility and different answers to the only question that matters: is anyone actually paying you, or are you being handed a larger slice of a diluted pie?
Emily Volker · September 1, 2026→
Buying Bitcoin safely means using a regulated exchange, verifying your identity, paying through secure methods, and moving your coins into a wallet you control.
Emily Volker · June 24, 2026→
Ethereum is a global, programmable blockchain where developers build apps and ETH pays for the computing. Here is how the network actually works, from smart contracts to validators.
Emily Volker · June 23, 2026→
DeFi rebuilds financial services on public blockchains so anyone with a wallet can lend, borrow, and trade without a bank or broker in the middle. Here is how it actually works.
Emily Volker · June 22, 2026→
Crypto rules vary by country, but most regimes circle the same goals: stopping fraud, protecting users and tracing illicit money. Here is how the global picture fits together.
Emily Volker · June 16, 2026→
Crypto moves in repeating cycles of expansion and contraction. Understanding the four phases of a market cycle helps you set expectations and avoid buying euphoria or selling fear.
Emily Volker · June 16, 2026→
Roughly every four years Bitcoin halves the reward paid to miners, slowing new supply. Here is how the halving works and why investors pay attention.
James Park · June 16, 2026→
Staking lets ETH holders earn rewards while helping secure Ethereum. Here is how staking works, the different ways to do it, and the trade-offs to weigh first.
James Park · June 14, 2026→
Yield farming lets you earn returns by supplying assets to DeFi protocols, often through liquidity pools. Here is where those returns come from and what can go wrong.
James Park · June 12, 2026→
Selling, swapping, spending or earning crypto can create a tax bill. Here is how the main concepts work and why your records matter more than you think.
James Park · June 10, 2026→
On-chain data turns a public blockchain into a window on real user behaviour. Here is how to read the core metrics, and how to avoid drawing the wrong conclusions from them.
James Park · June 10, 2026→
Bitcoin is often called digital gold, but the two assets store value very differently. Here is how they compare on scarcity, volatility, and risk.
Olivia Bennett · June 5, 2026→
Gas fees are the cost of doing anything on Ethereum. Here is what gas is, why it gets expensive, and concrete tactics to pay less without taking shortcuts on security.
Olivia Bennett · June 4, 2026→
Stablecoins aim to hold a steady value, usually one US dollar, so crypto users can move and store money without volatility. Here is how USDT, USDC, and DAI differ.
Olivia Bennett · June 4, 2026→
MiCA gives the European Union a single framework for crypto-assets and the firms that service them. Here is what it covers and why it changed the game in Europe.
Olivia Bennett · June 3, 2026→
Market cap is the headline number everyone quotes, but few use it correctly. Here is how it is calculated, what it really tells you, and where it can be misleading.
Olivia Bennett · June 1, 2026→
A spot Bitcoin ETF holds actual bitcoin and lets investors gain exposure through a brokerage account. Here is how it works and what you give up.
Emily Volker · June 1, 2026→
Layer 2 rollups make Ethereum faster and cheaper by moving activity off the main chain. Here is how rollups work, what Arbitrum, Optimism, and Base offer, and what to watch.
Emily Volker · May 26, 2026→
Centralized exchanges hold your funds and feel like apps; decentralized exchanges let you trade from your own wallet. Here is how the two compare and when to use each.
Emily Volker · May 26, 2026→
Stablecoins promise a steady value, and that promise is exactly what regulators scrutinize. Here is how stablecoin rules tend to work and why reserves sit at the center.
Emily Volker · May 26, 2026→
Telling a bull market from a bear is easy in hindsight and hard in the moment. These are the signals that help you read the broader trend without chasing noise.
Emily Volker · May 26, 2026→
Self-custody means holding your own keys. Here is how hardware wallets and seed phrases protect Bitcoin, and the security habits that prevent loss.
James Park · May 25, 2026→
Ethereum and Bitcoin are the two largest crypto networks, but they were built for different goals. Here is a clear comparison of how they differ and where each one shines.
James Park · May 24, 2026→
DeFi opens powerful financial tools to anyone, but it also removes the safety nets of traditional finance. Here are the main risks and the habits that help you avoid them.
James Park · May 24, 2026→
Whether a token is a security or a commodity decides which rules apply and who supervises it. Here is how regulators draw that line and why it is so contested.
James Park · May 22, 2026→
Returns get the attention, but risk management decides who survives. Here is how position sizing, stop-losses, and sensible limits keep you in the game.
James Park · May 19, 2026→