Journal
Articles and commentary on digital assets, custody, policy, business, and where control actually sits.
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What a secure element does, and what an EAL rating certifies
Read article2026-08-01 · Hardware Almost every hardware wallet page states an EAL level, and the number describes something narrower than most buyers assume. It grades how hard a laboratory was required to look at one…
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Who owns the crypto held on a platform: what three courts decided
2026-08-01 · Custody & Security New Zealand’s High Court held that the account holders owned the coins left on a failed exchange. Courts in New York…
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What the ASUS ROG Equalizer actually does, and where the 87.5% figure comes from
Three laboratories have now measured ASUS’s $50 ROG Equalizer 12V-2×6 cable. The 87.5% voltage-drop figure traces to one Reddit user, and the balancing hardware measurably worsens…
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Drainer-as-a-service: the affiliate model behind crypto phishing
The person who writes a wallet drainer and the person who finds you are almost never the same person, and a smart contract pays them both…
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Blind signing: what your wallet shows you, and what you actually sign
Every signature a wallet produces commits to a 32-byte digest, and whether the wallet can turn that digest back into a readable sentence is decided by…
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Approval phishing and the drainer economy
An ERC-20 approval is a standing permission to take tokens out of a wallet later, and it is a separate thing from a transfer.
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Bybit: the largest theft in the asset class, and the signing interface behind it
On 21 February 2025 roughly $1.46 billion left one of Bybit’s Ethereum cold wallets in a single transaction carrying three valid signatures from the wallet’s own…
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FTX: what happens to your coins when the exchange holding them files Chapter 11
A customer who held one bitcoin at FTX ended up holding a claim valued at $16,871.63, the price the estate fixed as of the petition date.…
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Prime Trust: the custodian that could not open its own wallets
A regulated Nevada trust company lost access to a set of legacy wallets holding customer assets.
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Three Arrows Capital: what an offshore liquidation looks like when the founders will not say where they are
A British Virgin Islands court wound up the fund on 27 June 2022. The liquidators’ own US bankruptcy filing, four days later, recorded that they did…
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United States v. Chen Zhi: how 127,271 bitcoin became the largest forfeiture in US history
Prosecutors in Brooklyn say the coins are the proceeds of forced-labour scam compounds in Cambodia.
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Mirror Trading International: 29,421 bitcoin and a trading bot that never existed
A South African company took 29,421 bitcoin from at least 23,000 people in the United States and more around the world, on the promise that an…
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CFTC v. Ooki DAO: the judgment that decided a DAO can be sued as an unincorporated association
A federal judge in San Francisco held that a decentralised autonomous organisation could be sued in its own name as an unincorporated association made up of…