👋 Our final email

So it’s come to this. Friday.

MegaETH successfully raised $1.4 billion with an ICO. OpenAI wants to IPO at a trillion dollars. Zcash is still going up. The Japanese yen is still going down. 

Brian Armstrong even minted a ton of winners by rattling off every word he was tipped to say on Polymarket and Kalshi at the end of Coinbase’s earning’s call yesterday. 

This is the ideal bull market. You might not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.

So, it’s fitting that today’s episode of the Empire podcast is a special one, with all three hosts in the same room! 

Yano, Santi and Rob share their perspectives on the most important stories from this past week: Mastercard potentially acquiring Zerohash for almost $2 billion, Consensys and Securitize planning to go public, Western Union’s stablecoin on Solana and more.

Catch the full episode on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and X.

I’m commandeering this week’s segment, as today is momentous. 

Sadly, this will be the last time we send you an email, at least for the foreseeable future. 

You might’ve heard that Blockworks wound down its newsroom this week (tune into the podcast for more on that from Yano), which means we’re also slimming down our newsletter offerings.

How appropriate: The last edition of the Empire newsletter will be its 404th, like the HTTP error message for when your favorite websites are down.

Katherine and I launched this newsletter almost two years ago with one goal: to entertain and inform an already deeply informed audience. One that wants more from the written content they consume. I hope that we succeeded.

Crypto is absurdly interesting, exciting, messy and hilarious, all at once. Personally, I wanted to thank you for allowing me to share my (mostly) unfiltered perspective each day, directly to your inbox. The fact that so many of you regularly opened this email, in spite of my ramblings, made it possible to write so freely. I’m grateful.

In real time, we are all figuring out what any of this really means and how to best position ourselves in the new chain-enabled world.

I wish little more than to know that I may have given you one or two ideas to bounce around as you go about your own day, navigating this crazy space. Here’s the archive if you’d like to flick through past editions.

So, see you around! The Empire podcast will continue as usual and you should subscribe to daily The Breakdown and 0xResearch newsletters, as those will also continue. 

As for what’s next for me at Blockworks, follow me on X for updates (and say hi!). It’s been a pleasure.

Oh, BTW. Last week, we asked: “Is the war on crypto really over?”

44% of you replied: “Sure, until the next big scandal hits.” Only 11% of you said, “Duh.” 

Scary stuff. Perfect for Halloween. 👋👻