It is a decentralized finance thingy — not a public company, not a stock, not in your brokerage account, just a crypto token — that purports to offer “convertible bonds” and “at-the-money offerings” to raise money to buy Fartcoin, much like MicroStrategy does for Bitcoin. “If the total market cap of $FSTR trades significantly above the total value of its Fartcoin holdings,” it says, it will sell tokens to buy Fartcoin, “thus accelerating the ‘Fartcoin Flywheel.’” One of the readers who sent it to me called it “sublime and transcendent nihilism,” and I can’t really improve on that.

MicroStrategy is good at marketing this: Its chief executive officer, Michael Saylor, is a noisy and articulate spokesperson for the strategy. It sizes deals using crypto-y numbers like 21. [3] It has metrics like “Bitcoin yield” to make investors feel like this makes more sense than it does.

Crypto, I often say, is constantly relearning the lessons of traditional finance. But because it is learning those lessons from scratch, by experience, it often uses different words for them, and it can be instructive to say “this crypto thing is basically this traditional finance thing, but louder.” So I would do that from time to time, and it was fun for me.