How a betting platform called a Nobel Prize 10 hours early.
Last Friday, while France was stunned to learn that Sébastien Lecornu, the prime minister who had just resigned, would be succeeded by... Sébastien Lecornu (48 hours of suspense, after a week of suspense, for that), the crypto market treated itself to its biggest dive of the year. $20bn went up in smoke in barely the lifespan of Lecornu’s first government, which fell apart in less than a day. Bitcoin dropped 16%, Ethereum sank below $3,800.
The trigger? Trump slapped 100% tariffs on Chinese tech. Not an executive order, not a bill. Not even a speech. Just a post on his own social network, now the official propaganda outlet. All this more than two weeks into a US government shutdown.
A memorable Friday on which 1.6M traders learned that “100x leverage” was not necessarily a great idea. And a reminder, along the way, that there is nothing virtual about markets, as shown by the suicide of Konstantin Galich, better known as Kostya Kudo. The Ukrainian influencer, who sold crypto trading courses, was found dead in his Lamborghini Urus after taking his own life1. The link between the two events has not been formally established, but it is the main line of inquiry.
But the biggest story may lie elsewhere: an anonymous trader pocketed $88M in 30 minutes, having mysteriously opened massive short positions just before the presidential announcement. Possible insider trading?
Hard to say at this stage. Because there is always survivorship bias in these affairs: had the market not moved, nobody would have reacted. But because the market turned, any move made beforehand can look suspicious.
That said, there are reasons to be wary. Last April, I was already writing in this very newsletter (in French) about the heavy suspicions hanging over several positions... opened a few minutes before Trump’s announcement... on those very same tariffs.
Except that, unless whoever is behind these moves slips up, we will never know. Because those who tell you everything is public on the blockchain, and so nothing can be hidden, are here face to face with their pseudo-libertarian contradictions. These wallets systematically use complex methods to hide not only their identity, but also the other wallets or exchanges (centralised and decentralised alike) they might be linked to.
And while everyone had their eyes glued to the crypto market, some very strange positions were being taken on Polymarket. Tens of thousands of dollars were pouring in on the name of the future Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Nearly ten hours before the official announcement.