Matt Levine, Columnist

ICOs, Airlines and Bitcoin ETFs

Also hedge funds, blockchain diplomas, FIZZ and the Great Snake of Risk.

October 20, 2017 at 1:37 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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Tezos.

Here is a fun Reuters investigation of events at Tezos, one of the more successful initial coin offerings in terms of fundraising (it raised $232 million worth of bitcoin and ether, now worth some $400 million), but one that has been less successful in doing anything with the money. "Progress since July has fallen short of our expectations, and the community has understandably expressed concerns over the lack of communication around this sudden change of pace," said Tezos co-founders Arthur and Kathleen Breitman ominously in a Medium post this week, and derivatives on Tezos tokens -- "Tezzies" -- "fell as much as 31 percent." Also back when Tezos was doing the ICO, its public-relations company claimed that its technology had been adopted by Ernst & Young, Deloitte, and LexiFi, none of which was true. Oops!