Laura Shin
@laurashin • 297,692 subscribers
Crypto journalist 🎧 Host @unchained_pod 📚 Author, The Cryptopians 💌 Sign up https://t.co/gf90Q5GrXy Ads [email protected]
Videos
WATCH: A North Korean hacker's response when asked to say something negative about Kim Jong Un:
Laura Shin863,564 views • 2 months ago
Taylor on Indian company eMudhra using just the number 4 as the private key to sign certificates, even through two audits "The specific company that we're talking about here is called eMudhra. An Indian company. Apparently, they're an authority. They do a lot of work, I guess, with India government and governments in that region." "Their entire job is to create a very secure private key and then sign these various certificates with those private keys, which then helps secure the internet on the whole for everyone around the world." "It turns out that instead of generating the private key in a secure way, where the private key was truly random, the private key was just the number four." "There's very little information on how exactly this happened. What we know right now, the private key has been the number four for over a year. It's been signing stuff since April 2025." "Apparently, they were audited twice in this period of time. Clearly, that needs to be reviewed."
Laura Shin36,346 views • 4 days ago
Taylor says she traced the $100M in laundered funds through gas transfers, not by breaking Zcash’s privacy "Everyone was like, oh my god. They traced through Zcash. It's not private anymore. Guys, I did not trace through Zcash." "They crossed their inputs and their outputs. Meaning that they have money over here that's going into Tornado and also into Zcash. Then they have money out over here that's coming out of Tornado and also out of Zcash." "Ideally, when you're laundering, money goes in one end and it comes out the other and you force everyone to properly follow you through. However, when you have, like, thousands of addresses, you have gas, you're funding. You get confused easily." "If you're moving fast, you're trying to launder the money, about $100M to get through. Gas will fuck you up every time, kids." "They come out in USDT because that's what has the most liquidity. But then they're very rapidly trying to get out of USDT because they can get frozen. And so then they send gas from over here to over here." "That is how I traced the Zcash. You just follow this little trail over here. Everyone else is, like, brute forcing it through the pools or whatever." "Zcash, still sufficiently private. Unless you're laundering $100M incredibly rapidly and stupid."
Laura Shin40,193 views • 11 days ago
Arthur Hayes says $ETH is his largest position outside bitcoin:native "ETH is some of the most hated large cap shitcoin out there, the number two largest coin by market cap that has not eclipsed its 2021 all time high" "From a risk reward perspective, at least the way I manage the portfolio at Maelstrom, this is our largest position outside of Bitcoin right now. I'm not particularly worried that if I wake up one morning ETH is going to zero. Obviously it could happen, but the risk of that versus another crypto is much lower, so I'm happy to put a lot of size on this trade" "Because it hasn't moved that much this past cycle, I think it has a lot of catching up to do. Once it starts moving, the reflexive train is going to get going. There are so many people who want to be long ETH for all sorts of reasons, and there are really good reasons why they haven't been for the past few years" "Once we break through the 3000 level, I think you're really going to start seeing the train moving on ETH, and it could quickly eclipse 5,000. My year end target is within reach"
Laura Shin148,329 views • 2 months ago
How a Spy Implant Turned Ledger's Authorized Resellers Into an Attack Vector "They spent months of research and development building this." 🛠️ Mark Karpelès on the spy implants that stole $100 million from Ledger devices, plus tanuki42 on how SEAL 911 spotted the drains and helped freeze $10M. 🎧 Timestamps: 🎬 00:00 Intro 🚨 03:50 How Jonty spotted the Ledger drains through SEAL 911 victim reports 📡 05:52 How the implant reads a 24-word seed phrase and sends it out by eSIM 🛫 11:33 Mark on the spy implant he found in a Ledger Flex bought in Singapore 🕵️ 15:16 CryptoBilis or a distributor? Mark and Jonty on who could be behind it 📣 17:38 Nexo: Generate daily interest on your crypto or borrow against your assets at 🇪🇺 18:19 MediaMarkt and Aqipa: has the Ledger implant reached Europe? 🛒 27:00 Buying direct vs. through a reseller, and why Vietnam needs resellers 🔐 31:30 Ledger's 'tamper-proof' notice and whether self-custody is dead 🔧 36:45 Mark opens a Nano X on camera to show how to check for an implant 🧊 40:33 Tether's $10M freeze and why Jonty says recovery could take years
Laura Shin20,118 views • 8 days ago
How Zcash and NEAR Are Driving This Crypto Bull Run Illia (root.near) (🇺🇦, ⋈) and mert joined me to unpack why Zcash 🛡️ and NEAR Protocol are both ripping right, and they say confidential transactions are what finally make crypto usable for real businesses. 🔐 Is this the dream of Bitcoin DeFi – but without BTC? 👀 Timestamps: 🚀 01:39 Guest intros, plus why ZEC (+32%) and NEAR (+69%) are ripping this week 🌐 03:13 Illia and Mert on why NEAR and ZEC's price action is turning heads 🟠 08:34 Is Zcash and NEAR the Bitcoin DeFi dream, minus Bitcoin? 🕵️ 11:54 Why coffee-shop-level balance visibility is a real business risk ✈️ 15:06 Mert's travel hack: booking flights and hotels privately via NEAR Intents 🧠 18:12 Why privacy is a retention tool first, not just an onboarding one 📣 25:11 1inch Aqua: back multiple liquidity positions with one wallet balance at 🔐 26:23 Privacy vs confidentiality: ZK proofs versus NEAR's MPC-and-enclave model 🛡️ 29:26 Inside NEAR's secure enclaves, and why store-of-value needs real privacy 🔄 33:59 How a NEAR Intents swap settles across chains, and its $206 million in TVL 🐛 39:09 The Zcash counterfeit bug, the Ironwood migration, and formal verification 🤖 45:49 How NEAR's Shield AI system and MPC guardrails manage solver risk ⚡ 51:33 Zcash's NU7 upgrade: faster blocks, quantum-proofing, and private voting
Laura Shin61,585 views • 1 month ago
"Ethereum has a million contributors and a million validators. Solana has less than 800 validators and 92% running on one client" Joseph Chalom pushes back on the idea that Ethereum has a culture problem "There's this view that Ethereum has something around the narrative that's missing. Just look at the scoreboard again. It passed a million contributors to the code and the ecosystem. I'm not sure there's any open source blockchain project that's even close" "It has over a million validators when Solana has less than 800. It has five or six credible diversified software clients, whereas 92% of Solana is running on one client software system the last time I checked" "All the elements that matter, uptime, liquidity, developer community, composability, Ethereum is leading by miles"
Laura Shin197,539 views • 3 months ago
"It's just complete balance sheet mismanagement" Jeff Dorman on why Strategy is being forced to sell Bitcoin "The market was worried they weren't gonna be able to satisfy the dividend. So they raised about $2 billion and said now you don't have to worry for a year and a half because we have this $2 billion sitting on the balance sheet solely to pay dividends. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief" "Then a month later he takes 1.4 billion of that cash cushion and buys back some of his convertible debt at 92 cents on the dollar, completely the opposite of what he said the cash was for. He retired 2029 maturity debt, which doesn't come due for three more years" "Now that one and a half year cash cushion suddenly fell to four months. He comes out on Monday and says we're actually gonna sell some Bitcoin. It's teasing the market that that's the only choice he has now. That's why Bitcoin's imploding, that's why the stock is imploding"
Laura Shin228,349 views • 4 months ago
Is Hunter Biden's $LAPTOP Coin a Scam? He Says the Wallets Prove It Isn't Hunter Biden says a market maker put about $5,000 of liquidity behind his $LAPTOP token at launch, so a $6 buy moved the market cap 5%. I asked Hunter Biden about that first minute, the critics calling it a scam, and why he thinks most Democrats misread crypto. 🎧 Timestamps: 🎨 01:26 How a blockchain-related initiative at the UN World Food Programme led Hunter to crypto 🏛️ 07:34 Why Hunter says most Democrats only know crypto through Trump's 'grift' 💧 12:47 1inch Aqua: See how LPs back multiple positions with one balance at 💻 13:46 Why Hunter launched $LAPTOP and what he says went wrong at its debut 🔍 21:14 Hunter answers critics who call $LAPTOP the scam he accuses Trump of 🎲 23:52 How $LAPTOP's built-in prediction market burns tokens or funds charity ⚖️ 33:35 Hunter's case against World Liberty Financial and the Trump family business 🗳️ 46:47 Can Democrats revive the Clarity Act if they take back Congress? 🏦 50:01 Why Hunter can't understand Elizabeth Warren siding with the banks
Laura Shin39,785 views • 23 days ago
"He cannot repeg this to $100. I will bet anyone this almost never gets to $100 ever again" Vinny Lingham on why STRC is broken and every move Saylor makes from here is a losing move "The market is speaking. STRC needs to trade at a 20% discount to give a 14.5% effective yield. The damage has been done" "There is a chess move for this. It is called zugzwang. Every move you make is a losing move"
Laura Shin154,331 views • 4 months ago
Taylor presses THORChain cofounder Chad Barraford on why the protocol wasn't shut down when stolen funds were nearly 100% of one route Taylor: "Okay, so what happened in this case?So the admin key was used as an interim stop. And then the protocol was upgraded to take the actions. In reaction to a situation that was deemed to be bad by the protocol. Chad: "By a 2/3 majority." Taylor: "Okay. So why couldn't you do that in any case where, let's say, the majority of funds on a certain route are known to be directly stolen funds? What you did for THORFi, right? You take an interim action and then you do whatever you want to do." Chad: "Right. So the action you're referring to is, like, turn off trading, for example, right? To be clear, the admin key that we're talking about doesn't even exist in the code base today. It did a while back, but it no longer exists. It was removed, I don't know, a year ago, a year and a half, I don't remember how long ago it was." "But even if it still was around, you want the protocol to turn off its entire system and all the trading that it does, and the source of revenue and income, for 1 to 2 weeks every time some external exchange or external thing gets hacked." Taylor: "I'm advocating for it if that's the only functionality you have, right? And the vast majority of funds. So, like, for example, the XRP to ETH route, right? We can look at the numbers, but it was not 20%. It was not 50%. It was nearly 100% of assets on that route for that period of time that were directly stolen funds." "If you turned it off, I'm not saying a time limit. I'm saying any amount of time, right? That would have cut them off somewhere else, right? And then you wouldn't have laundered stolen funds for DPRK." Chad: "No, that's not right. That's not correct."
Laura Shin28,501 views • 20 days ago
Mert drawing parallels between BTC & ZEC and NEAR & ETH "Analogies are always imperfect, but I think that's roughly correct. For example, we led the listing of ZEC on Solana, via NEAR. If you can kind of say that $ZEC is an alternative to $BTC, and some people will say it's a better BTC, perhaps you can just say it's different with different trade offs for different people." "You can also make the same argument that $NEAR is sort of what $ETH aimed at being. If you remember the sharding roadmap, where ETH wished to scale via sharding, well, who actually did that? NEAR did." "And then what about this being the hub where you connect different chains? Well, NEAR is demonstrably doing that right now, via NEAR Intents. And so there's kind of two parallels to both BTC and ETH."
Laura Shin42,350 views • 1 month ago
"THORChain voluntarily chose to launder sanctioned funds for the North Koreans. There are consequences for that." Austin on why THORChain is a cleaner DOJ case than Tornado Cash "This is where I think the THORChain folks have now got themselves in a serious pickle. You showed that you have the capability to stop your chain when you choose to do so, and you chose not to do so here. That is very different than infrastructure that has no off switch." "If you got exploited yourself and there was no way to fix it and it just happened, okay, I buy your claim of decentralization then, because the point at which you really would use it is when you are being harmed. And if you don't, that's pretty good evidence you can't." "However, THORChain did. They transparently did. They stopped the chain when there was an exploit. They've done it. They showed they have the capability." "So to me, this is actually a much cleaner case for people at the DOJ than something like Tornado Cash - where it was never turned off. This one's clearly, you have elective control over the network, and you're choosing when to use it and choosing when not to use it."
Laura Shin30,152 views • 27 days ago
Illia on the two types of post quantum cryptography, and which one Near prefers "There's a difference between types of cryptography, so-called lattice based and hash based, and there's a bit of a debate right now in the Web3 space about what should be used, with different tradeoffs" "People are used to signing with their wallet, the traditional way, but if we go to more institutional adoption, people use multi party computation, MPC. That's also what backs Near Intents and a lot of the cross chain work Near is doing. Today we have an announcement that we have a consortium testing multi party computation across custodians, banks and regulators, to showcase how this is going to work in production for real institutional use cases" "This is where we need the social consensus for the whole of Web3 to work together in a reasonable way, because hash based is actually very hard to support with hardware wallets and MPC solutions. So it's important for us that there's consensus on lattice based" "We want to be ahead of the curve and showcase how all of these tools work, and bring it to both individual users and institutional usage. That enables both security and trust in blockchain, which we've seen plummet a bit since post quantum concerns started coming out late last year"
Laura Shin60,788 views • 2 months ago
"It's almost ironic. Today ETH has the worst properties of any asset in the Ethereum ecosystem" Ansgar Dietrichs on ETH's overlooked interop problem "There are many assets that can directly teleport from chain to chain. If you use USDC via CCTP, you can instantly hop from one chain to the next. With your ETH, you cannot" "That seems like a problem. How is it that ETH, the native asset of the system, does not have the best properties? If I design my markets, it's much more convenient to base everything off of the assets that have the most convenient properties available" "In some places it's as simple as making sure that ETH is a first class citizen as we look at the Ethereum ecosystem as a whole"
Laura Shin103,468 views • 3 months ago
"If you short STRC at $100 your downside is capped because Strategy will come in and run the ATM right at $100. But your upside as a short is unlimited" Parker White on why STRC became a perfect short setup and why the violent selloff was shorts latching onto an opportunity rather than a fundamental problem "SATA did not have nearly as violent of a reaction. And Strive actually has a more vulnerable balance sheet position than Strategy with STRC. Yet the market was trading down for STRC" "This really was just a situation of shorts latching on to an opportunity and then people panicking, grabbing hold of a narrative, and selling"
Laura Shin97,302 views • 3 months ago
3AC’s Kyle Davies on Why He’s Crypto’s Lloyd Blankfein and Why He’s Not Sorry Few crypto figures have been as vilified as Kyle, the co-founder, along with Su Zhu, of crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital, which imploded in mid-2022, losing $3 billion and bringing many pillars of the crypto industry down with it. Davies and Zhu have been accused of, among other things, lying about 3AC’s assets as the firm was imploding, trying to borrow money when the firm was insolvent, and seeking funding from the Mafia, all of which Davies denies. But he remains unapologetic about 3AC’s demise, saying most, if not all, companies eventually go bankrupt, and that 3AC had a “pretty spectacular” ten-year run. He joined Unchained to explain why he and Su Zhu were ordered to prison in Singapore for non-compliance with the liquidation proceedings, Zhu’s “six weeks meditating” (in prison), where he’s living now, why he and Zhu went to Bali after the bankruptcy, his $25,000-a-month fee for consulting for crypto bankruptcy exchange OPNX, his and Zhu’s current work advising crypto derivatives platform and what he wishes he would have done differently in terms of 3AC’s wind down. Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction 02:43 Why Kyle continues to try to work in crypto 03:22 Kyle’s dealings with the 3AC liquidators Teneo and creditors 06:15 Kyle and Su’s prison sentences 13:15 Where Kyle is going to live now 15:18 Dubai fines Kyle 21:06 Whether Su and Kyle are being investigated 22:21 The final days of 3AC 24:31 Allegations of fraud 32:21 Post insolvency events 38:21 Kyle’s assets get frozen 43:40 Launching OPNX 50:34 ‘Almost all companies go bankrupt’ 55:48 58:50 Su’s prison ‘vibe’ 1:00:01 Cloud kitchen chicken dreams 1:03:46 Sixth Man Ventures lawsuit 1:05:18 Criticizing 3AC’s liquidators 1:06:46 Things Kyle would have done differently 1:11:27 Kyle’s lack of remorses
Laura Shin651,133 views • 2 years ago
Why the Crypto Market Cap Could Reach $50 Trillion This Cycle "I don't think we can comprehend how big this bull market is actually going to be." 🚀 Ran Neuner walked me through why trends in social trading and a new BlackRock report on AI agents and crypto helped form his thesis 🎧 Timestamps: 🏦 01:47 Why Ran thinks Bessent is engineering 'the ultimate short squeeze' 📊 04:45 Why an ETH/BTC breakout signals crypto's first real product-market fit 🎰 09:35 Social trading: a social network and a casino 'having a baby' 💧 14:03 1inch Aqua: Back multiple liquidity positions with one wallet balance at 🤖 15:06 How a billion AI agents could send altcoins far past Bitcoin ⏱️ 29:14 Why Ran thinks AI agents will borrow against compute and tell time in blocks 🌐 37:01 Will AI IPOs drain crypto liquidity? Ran on why AI isn't the dot-com bubble 🛡️ 40:05 Privacy vs. social trading, and why Ran calls Zcash 'more useful than Bitcoin'
Laura Shin30,211 views • 29 days ago
Vinny Lingham on exactly how the MSTR empire could crash step by step "The moment MSTR trades at a discount he cannot raise more cash. He is locked out. He cannot sell MSTR. He cannot sell STRC. Then he starts running out of cash. Call it nine months, eight months, seven months" "The market prices this in well in advance. The biggest buyer of Bitcoin is being removed. People selling Bitcoin are going to push the price down" "There is a void that forms in the market. The person who has been providing liquidity for years is no longer providing it. The price of Bitcoin goes into a deeper bear market. And then he has to sell Bitcoin to pay the interest on the preferreds"
Laura Shin98,694 views • 4 months ago