Public Chain, Private Room
Notes from a boardroom in Singapore, May 2022.
The thing about the Lazarus Group, the sheer, novelistic audacity of the name, is that it suggests a resurrection while performing a burial.
Last week the very same Lazarus Group drained the Kelp DAO bridge and left Aave with two hundred and thirty million in bad debt. Five days later Aave, Arbitrum, Mantle, Ether.fi, Lido, Kelp, and the Golem Foundation pooled three hundred million across organizational lines and called it DeFi United. A syndicate. A central bank in t-shirts. It is the exact same shape J.P. Morgan summoned in his library in 1907, locking the bankers in until they’d agreed to hold the floor.
The shape, of course, is a circle. And the thing about a circle is that it only protects what is inside it. I watched this same geometry from a boardroom in Singapore four years ago, and I am watching it again now.
I advised friends against Anchor. My own money was in it. I sold at ninety-one cents through someone else’s Binance account. This is not the part I still struggle to explain.
The address was the point. One Shenton was one of the spots the city-state wants you to want, all glass skin and reflective surfaces and a doorman with a kind of terrifying efficiency, memorized your face within a week. The boardroom was four floors up across the road. Lau Pa Sat was at the corner. To walk between them was to move through a fluently mixed piece of real estate, a stacking of cultural registers so dense it felt almost literary. Colonial shophouses; satay aunties firing up their grills at five; the trade-finance towers looming like silent parents.
I was making roughly what an average Singaporean household stretched toward on two paychecks. The equity upside was a number nobody working the cai fan stall would ever be on a path to.
That was the architecture of the year: funded startups, liquid positions, protocols vetted on Tuesdays and deployed into on Fridays. The math of Anchor did not survive the most basic question of who paid for it, so we kept the clients out. I kept my own position because I thought I could outrun the clock.
That was the calculation. A vanity of the intellect.
The morning the peg started to slip, I’d stayed at the apartment an hour later than usual. I left the building, crossed the road, the chart open on my phone for the entirety of the five-minute walk. By the time the lift doors opened on the office floor I had already had the thought that the rest of this was going to happen and I was going to watch it.
The thought had a sentence inside it. *Go back to the apartment. Open the cold wallet. Move what can be moved.*
I did not turn around.
We sat in that boardroom for ninety minutes, pulling up retail positions with the grim meticulousness of people walking a building after an earthquake. Someone made coffee. We checked the client exposure line by line. There wasn’t any. The sound of the room when the last sheet came up clean - that collective, held-breath releasing is a sound I haven't heard since.
Then the second realization arrived, slower, and the room got quiet.
Every one of us was personally in.
Here is the part I still cannot explain. I had written a piece in 2018 about the “sovereignty” of the cold wallet with the kind of breezy confidence only a person who has never been tested can manage. But the bridge off Terra was saturated. It was non-functional. Binance was the only exit, and Binance had been off-limits to Singaporeans since the regulator’s notice the year before.
The regulator had walked the public off the exchange to save them from themselves. In practice, they had simply removed the ladder from a burning building, leaving the back stairs for those of us with the right phone numbers. There were no rails available to me that were actually mine.
I told myself the steady lads would deploy more capital while I scrolled my contacts. I told myself too big to fail while the boardroom emptied around me.
Jump deployed the capital. The peg climbed. For a brief, shimmering window, it looked like it might hold. The bridge was still frozen, but I borrowed a friend’s account. I ran a test transaction…a tiny, shivering bird of a transfer, and watched it confirm for longer than I care to admit. The bigger transfer landed. I sold at ninety-one cents.
The position would have funded twenty months of runway. The exit happened on someone else’s account, on a route the people we had told “no” were not on a path to. Neither version of me: the fearless one or the defensive one, did the right thing.
The story other people wrote about Terra in the months that followed was about mechanics. Reflexive collateral, seigniorage math, the specific failure of the LFG reserve. The mechanics were the public part. The chain doesn't log the call that made the call. It doesn't log the contact who took the test transaction. It doesn't log the room.
The form changes. The room remains.