bitbanter

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In an announcement that surprised no one who’s ever worked for a fast-growing startup that gets acquired by a dubious parent company for dubious reasons, BitGo announced a plan to move the multisig underlying their wildly successful wBTC product from its current configuration to a 1-of-5 multisig for “operational and security reasons.” The new multisig holders consist of Justin Sun, Su Zhu, Do Kwon’s Montenegrin Lawyer Who’s Also Suing Him, A Trezor Smuggled In a “Vegan” Care Package for Sam Bankman-Fried, and the Lazarus Group.

“On the surface, this seems unusual, but hear me out,” said CEO and Founder Mike Belshe, squatting atop a pile of bearer bonds bought from his windfall acquisition profits that he — unlike any of his customers — has sovereign control over.

After an awkward, long pause, Mike took the old BitGo multi-sig private keys — which seemed to be written on a crumpled, soiled Chili’s bar napkin — and using a worn Ledger as a flint, lit them on fire. While they burned, he rolled a hundred dollar bill and hundred euro note into each of his nostrils, threw an unspecified powder on the still-warm ashes, then snorted the whole mixture in one clean sweep.

”…where was I?” he continued. “Oh yeah, you’ve got to think about the security of the system as a whole. See it’s a lot like the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, except instead of a 3-way stand-off it’s 5-way, and everyone is Ugly.” Mike took one of the bearer bonds from his comically large pile and absent-mindedly began singeing the edges with a diamond-encrusted butane lighter. “Anyway, not my department anymore, talk to Justin.”

Justin could miraculously be reached for comment, as he was on an X space promoting three other algorithmic stablecoins on two networks where he retains majority-stake control. “I think wBTC is great. Why would I do anything bad to anything great?” he asked Mario Nawfal rhetorically, before telling him he should buy the BitTorrent Token for some reason. He proceeded to announce that he won 3 additional Warren Buffet lunches and has purchased 50 acres of land completely surrounding Charlie Munger’s grave, without specifying the source of the funds.

Other multisig holders could not be reached for comment, except Zhu, who cryptically said “[I’m] retardio.” On-chain analysis indicates that no bitcoin has actually moved from the newly formed multisig, except many wasteful transactions in the mempool with progressively higher RBF fees from each holder. “The supermajority of miners have a backroom deal to just keep these in the mempool,” said an unnamed anonymous source at a large American mining company. “At this rate we think it’s likely one of them will send $8bn in fees just to move whatever’s left, which we’ve all agreed to share.”

Most experts agree that this is the beginning of the end for wBTC, but what comes next? “Who cares?” responded one anonymous insider. “It’s not like anyone does any DeFi anymore.”