Money 2.0 Stuff: Crypto exchanges like volatility, but not that kind of volatility

If you read Matt Levine you’ll know that everything everywhere is securities fraud and perhaps also a hint of insider trading. In the cryptocurrency universe, everything everywhere is oracle manipulation. The general idea is to build some kind of exposure where the payout is dependent on some underlying index, put pressure on said some underlying index, and earn some profit. Nice. 

Oracle manipulation is amorphous: last week I wrote about an exploit of the Synthetix inverse MKR product while previously I have discussed MakerDAO governance as a form of oracle and its potential to be manipulated by miners. Squint a bit and you’ll see that double spends also fall into the ‘oracle manipulation’ definition, with attackers manipulating network ledgers in an attempt to arbitrarily inflate the value of their holdings.