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Who Is Satoshi? Benjamin Wallace Goes Down the Rabbit Hole in New Book

Who created Bitcoin?
More than 16 years ago, on Halloween Day of 2008, an entity by the name of Satoshi Nakamoto sent out the whitepaper for a peer-to-peer electronic cash system to a cypherpunk email list. Bitcoin launched shortly thereafter; it quickly spawned a global cultural movement and a multi-trillion dollar industry.
Benjamin Wallace wrote a piece on the phenomenon for WIRED in November 2011, making him one of the very first mainstream journalists to ever cover the crypto space. Back then, nobody seemed to know Nakamoto’s identity, and despite robust efforts, Wallace couldn’t figure it out either.
Amusingly, the author of “The Billionaire’s Vinegar: The Mystery of the World’s Most Expensive Bottle of Wine” (2009) was sucked back into the enigma in 2022 after receiving persistent emails from an ex-Tesla employee who was absolutely convinced that Elon Musk was Nakamoto all along. Wallace stays clear of that particular theory, but he lays out his own findings in “The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto,” a 342-page investigation set for release on March 18.
Read more: Marc Hochstein — Satoshi Nakamoto: The Mystery That (Probably) Will Never Be Solved
The conclusion? Well, by the end of it, Wallace is forced to admit that he failed to solve the Nakamoto riddle once again. But his obsession yielded a thoughtful survey of Bitcoin’s history with a special emphasis on the cypherpunks whose ideas contributed to the cryptocurrency’s birth. “The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto” is a perfect work for crypto veterans and beginners alike who are curious to know more about Bitcoin’s origins; in that respect, it’s comparable to Laura Shin’s “The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze” (2022), which focuses on Vitalik Buterin and Ethereum’s early days.
Wallace shuffles through a long list of suspects throughout the book. His favourites include Hal Finney, the recipient of the first-ever bitcoin transaction; Nick Szabo, who designed a digital currency in the 1990s called “bit gold”; Len Sassaman, one of the main developers and operators of the Mixmaster remailer; the relatively obscure cypherpunk James A. Donald; and longtime Bitcoin critic Ben Laurie.
One of the things that makes “The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto” a fun read is that you can watch Wallace slowly go insane as he bounces back and forth between these names. Each time he narrows it down to one person, a new piece of information rolls in and detonates his theory. Wallace deserves credit for his multi-faceted approach to the affair. He makes abundant use of stylometry for Nakamoto’s emails and code, deeply investigates circumstantial evidence, interviews almost all of the potential candidates, and even learns to code to get a better grasp of what the cypherpunks are talking about.
Looming over the investigation, of course, is the debate over whether Satoshi Nakamoto’s identity even matters in the first place. There has been renewed interest in the question lately, between HBO’s “Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery” documentary (which came out last fall) and VanEck’s head of digital assets Matthew Sigel stating in February that he believed Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey created Bitcoin.
As Wallace notes, Nakamoto’s identity is one of the great secrets of the 21st century. With Wall Street and the White House beginning to fully embrace the crypto sector, there is perhaps a feeling that putting a face on Bitcoin’s inventor is necessary to make the digital asset a little cleaner and safer to integrate into the global financial system.
Nakamoto’s identity is crucial because its discovery would impact the way people see Bitcoin, Wallace argues. Crypto folks, he says, prefer to think of Satoshi as a kind of promethean figure that unleashed Bitcoin as a gift to mankind before disappearing for the greater good. But what if Nakamoto was an outright criminal like former cartel boss Paul Le Roux who simply cannot access his private keys because he’s behind bars? Would BlackRock and Fidelity still race to recommend exposure to the cryptocurrency to their clients?
Wallace eventually sort of settles on the idea that Hal Finney probably took part in Bitcoin’s creation, but that he likely wasn’t working alone, and that in any case any theory is almost impossible to verify without Nakamoto providing irrevocable proof. But “The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto” is crafted intelligently and the lack of resolution does not feel anti-climactic. At the end of the day, it’s all about the chase.
“What could we possibly learn from Nakomoto’s biography?” Wallace muses at some point, after a friend of his suggests the story would be better without an answer. “That he was a random professor who’d had a lucky brainstorm? No, what was most interesting about Nakamoto was his absence. He was defined by what we didn’t know about him.”
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Hashdex Seeks to Expand U.S. Crypto ETF to Include Litecoin, XRP and Other Altcoins

Crypto asset manager Hashdex filed an amendment with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) seeking to add litecoin (LTC) and XRP among other cryptocurrencies to its Nasdaq Crypto Index US ETF.
The proposal also lists cardano’s ADA, solana’s SOL and other altcoins including LINK, AVAX and UNI. The fund is currently mostly bitcoin (BTC) with some exposure to ether (ETH), according to Hashdex’s website.
An alternative version of the fund traded on the Bermuda Stock Exchange, the Hashdex Nasdaq Crypto Index ETF, already offers exposure to the broader basket of cryptocurrencies. The Hashdex Nasdaq Crypto Index US ETF is designed to track a diversified set of digital assets, offering investors regulated exposure to the crypto market.
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Tokenization Specialists Securitize and Ethena Unveil Institutional DeFi Blockchain

Securitize and Ethena Labs, two firms working closely with BlackRock’s money market token BUIDL, have created an Ethereum-compatible blockchain called Converge, designed to house tokenized assets and provide institutional investors with the innovation of decentralized finance (DeFi).
Ethena, which offers a yield-bearing USDe token as well as a BUIDL-backed USDtb stablecoin, will migrate its $6 billion DeFi ecosystem to Converge, while Securitize, the transfer agent for BlackRock’s BUIDL token, will bring its suite of tokenized real world assets (RWAs), like the recently-issued Apollo credit fund token, to the new chain.
From in the early days of DeFi there has been a concerted effort to expand beyond cryptocurrencies and bring traditional assets on chain as collateral. Today, traditional financial firms are clamouring to get in the tokenization race, so it makes sense for firms like Securitize and Ethena to create an institutional-friendly path to DeFi.
“Tokenization, per se, is just putting your securities on a different ledger, and it produces cost savings and efficiencies, but it doesn’t necessarily lead to anything significantly different in terms of what you can do with these assets,” said Securitize CEO Carlos Domingo in an interview. “On the other hand, crypto has been developing very novel ways of using digital assets. If you could actually bring that DeFi innovation back into the RWA space it could make it explode.”
Securitize and Ethena have brought a sturdy firm of initial partners to Converge, including Pendle, Avara (the parent company of Aave Labs), Ethereal, Morpho, and Maple Finance. Custodial services will be provided by Copper, Fireblocks, Komainu, and Zodia, while interoperability will come via LayerZero, Wormhole and oracle support from RedStone.
Looking ahead to what can be built using the Converge blockchain, Ethena founder Guy Young said there will be new products courtesy of Securitize to be housed on the chain, opening up new use cases.
“That might be using this stuff as collateral within tailor-made money markets, or it could be trading of different assets which don’t exist on-chain now at real scale, so that might be equities or whatever, going forward,” Young said in an interview. “We think something that’s purpose built for this intersection of TradFi and Defi is going to be one of the largest opportunities over the next few years.”
Converge will be compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), enabling it to run Ethereum-based smart contracts, dApps, and tools without modification. It will boast performance that is in line with industry-leading blockchains, according to a press release.
Ethena’s native governance token, ENA, will serve as a stakeable asset (via sENA) for Converge, securing the network with a permissioned validator set composed of traditional finance entities and centralized exchanges. Both USDe and USDtb will serve as gas tokens for the network.
Converge is a public open chain with a kind of know-your-customer (KYC) wrapper, which goes beyond mere whitelisting of wallets, Domingo said.
“DeFi today is designed specifically for permissionless and anonymous market participants and freely transactable assets,” Domingo said. “To bring that innovation in a context where the collateral and the asset that you’re pledging into the protocol is actually a regulated instrument, there are a bunch of things beyond purely white listing wallets and KYC.”
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Canary Capital Files for SUI ETF After Reserve Deal With World Liberty Financial

Canary Capital has submitted paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to launch an exchange-traded fund (ETF) tracking the price of Sui (SUI), a layer-1 blockchain.
The hedge fund manager on Monday submitted an S-1 filing with the SEC after previously registering a trust entity in the state of Delaware — on March 7 — which appeared on the state’s Division of Corporations website.
Canary Capital has filed several crypto ETF filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in recent months, including for Dogecoin (DOGE), Solana (SOL) and XRP, among others.
The decision to launch a SUI ETF comes 10 days after Trump-affiliated decentralized finance (DeFi) platform World Liberty Financial (WLFI), said that it would add Sui assets to its token reserve and explore product development opportunities.
SUI jumped on the news, currently trading at $2.34. While the token is up over 52% over the past 12 months, zooming into the past month, it is down about 31%.
Canary Capital is now expected to file a 19b-4 document with the SEC, making its plans for a SUI fund official.
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