Why Crypto Buybacks Are 'the Wrong Way to Allocate Capital'

ARK Invest's Lorenzo Valente says quantum fears and the Ledger hack are speeding up the death of self-custody, that Ethereum has to pick a lane, and buybacks are “crazy.”

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Justin Drake warned that ECDSA, the cryptography securing Bitcoin and Ethereum, could break before Q-Day, in the worst case "in months, not years," and an attack on Ledger devices sold through a third-party reseller has led to about $100 million in losses. Lorenzo Valente, Director of Research, Digital Assets at ARK Invest, says both threats speed up a trend ARK already saw: self-custody is slowly dying.

He tells Laura Shin why ARK favors a barbell of exchanges that own the user and infrastructure like Solana, Uniswap, and Aave, and why he would point a first-time Bitcoin buyer to an ETF. They also cover Satoshi's coins, why Ethereum's L1 accrues so little while Robinhood makes millions, and why he calls the buyback craze irrational.