11th April 2025 > > Mullets & scammers.

tl;dr

Mullets are back, if you haven’t been paying attention. A Coinbase scam, and a repeat of a general crypto warning we must never forget.

Market Snap

Market Wrap

As one commentator wisely remarked yesterday:

“Whatever one thinks of Trump’s tariffs, the world has to confront the reality that China – a totalitarian state that severely limits the rights of its own citizens, uses slave labour, and has tried to erase the identity of Tibetans and Uyghurs – has become a dominant producer of consumer goods on which we have created an unhealthy dependency.”

If Trump is serious about reordering world trade to curtail pernicious Chinese influence, risk assets are in for a rocky 2025. Our desire to buy cheap goods with a far weightier environmental impact than otherwise is to blame. A period of pain seems a suitable penance.

Occasional Series – India

We Brits love India for so many reasons.

My personal experience of China, and its all-encompassing subjugation of basic human rights, does make one wonder how two totally different political philosophies can exist side by side.

Apparently, they cannot.

I fear that the Chinese approach embodied in Warren’s anti-liberty and anti-freedom desire for total control is starting to impact on India:

 Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – DeFi useability

Just yesterday, the CCC was complaining that the user experience for DeFi leaves an awful lot to be desired.

Shortly afterwards, the Milk Road (https://themilkroad.beehiiv.com/subscribe?ref=o5CmCFhBAK) responded with a piece on that exact subject, specifically Coinbase’s DeFi Mullet, which is a new expression for me:

The idea is very simple, and very effective. Users interact with the centralised Coinbase exchange to access DeFi functions at the back end, provided by Morpho Labs. At a stroke all the barriers to DeFi adoption are removed – ease of use and record-keeping being the two biggest obstacles.

Chris Campbell explains:

“Similar to how nobody knows how TCP/IP works, but they still use the Internet, users won’t have to know how blockchains and private keys work to use them either.”

Bingo! Mass adoption just got a whole lot closer.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – A convincing Coinbase scam

A scam email aims to fool Coinbase clients into moving assets held at Coinbase into a wallet for which the scammers know the secret phrase:

Note there are no deliberate or unintentional grammatical errors or spelling mistakes, which is a rare feature. The “from” identifier shows up as “Coinbase” but on closer inspection the email originates from support@textinchurch.com which is most definitely not a Coinbase account. The body of the email is correct in stating that the SEC launched legal action against Coinbase in June 2023 for acting as an unregistered securities exchange, despite the SEC having previously given its approval for the listing of Coinbase on the stock market (Gensler was always ever so muddled in his thinking). It is also correct that the SEC has dropped its action, though that was in February 2025 not April 2025, so the feral scumbags behind this email are too lazy to do proper research.

The conclusion – that Coinbase has agreed to move all crypto assets into self-custodial wallets – seems entirely reasonable on first sight. The links to both the Coinbase wallet and FAQs (not shown in the screenshot above) are valid links, adding a veneer of respectability to proceedings.

Sadly, though it might seem obvious to us, I fear that some naïve people might go ahead and set up a wallet with the supplied 12-word recovery phrase. Let me categorically assure you that any assets that are moved to this wallet are immediately transferred elsewhere.

…

Whilst investigating this scam – specifically finding online wallets that I would never otherwise use to test the 12-word recovery phrase – I came across loads of fake wallets, which will simply steal your crypto funds. One, called Free Wallet, made me splutter, as it will free you from your crypto assets, a joke that will not help mitigate your financial loss.

I would never use any online hot wallet (https://www.curiouscryptos.com/course-modules) except for MetaMask or Phantom, and this is the reason why. Please only ever stick to tried and trusted apps, wallets, exchanges etc. There is no need to go off-piste in the crypto space.