“Stablecoins are intrinsically subversive. Most people in the world live under capital controls. Most people don’t have the freedom to own whatever financial assets they want” - @hosseeb
Always sad to see (~700 laid off). But Brian's commentary on management changes are telling:
- Flattening org structure to 5 levels
- All managers must now be ICs
- "We’ll be concentrating around AI-native talent who can manage fleets of agents"
Work post-AI is changing fast.
Rain is now a @Mastercard Principal Member.
That means greater choice for our partners, backed by the same stablecoin-powered authorization and settlement technology under the hood. Partners will be able to offer cards that work everywhere Mastercard is accepted across 210+
Most people have never managed anyone. Those who have, most have never managed anyone smarter than themselves.
This is about to change for everyone. You will be surrounded by agents that are smarter than you, working for you 24/7. In a world of cognitive abundance, your understanding becomes the bottleneck.
You can genuinely delegate a lot of cognitive work now. This is not sci-fi. It's already permanently changed the texture of knowledge work.
But the less you understand what your agents are doing and how they're doing it, the less you will be able to get out of them. This is why it's still important to understand things like software, coding, economics, math, statistics, game theory. Not because you need to DO them (you don't), but you need to understand what's easy and what's impossible.
Try to be as smart as your agents. You will inevitably fail, but you don't need to get all the way there. You just need to become smart enough to manage things smarter than you.
Most tokens launch first and justify themselves later. MegaETH did the opposite: chain first, KPIs second, token last. They just TGE'd, so @hotpot_dao came on to explain the experiment!
Plus we talk DeFi United + if DeFi yields are too low + Polymarket insider trading ⤵️
We need to have a conversation about Big DeFi vs Little DeFi.
I think it's time to declare a Little DeFi protocol jubilee.
Why do these tiny DeFi apps still exist? At this point they're pure liabilities. It's industry-level tech debt. The teams aren't updating the code, nobody's running this stuff through security tooling or fuzzers, the tokens are borderline worthless anyway, so they can't afford meaningful teams. These are just honeypots at this point.
I suspect the founders involved feel like they're not supposed to quit and wind down, otherwise they'll be accused of being scammers.
We need to normalize shutting down, like right away. Foundations need to get involved. If you're running a Little DeFi protocol and it's not working, it's dangerous to continue operating in the post-AI era. Even cheap open source models now like Deepseek v4 are good enough to develop protocol exploits.
If your protocol is not big or growing quickly, it's time to put into maintenance mode and move to withdraw-only. Let us know that this is why you are deciding to wind down. I promise we will all applaud the decision.
Allowing Little DeFi to continue limping along and getting picked apart by these small hacks is just going to decimate confidence in DeFi. The foundations don't want to do this of course, because the # of DeFi protocols is a vanity metric for chains. But this will only result in user harm at this point. Either that, or the foundations need to step in and become stewards of protocol security across the ecosystem of Little DeFi apps, and most foundations can't afford that either.
So it's time to put up or shut up. We can do this now, or we can do it in 6 months when it's already obvious, and another billion in user funds have been siphoned away.
Most tokens launch first and justify themselves later. MegaETH did the opposite: chain first, KPIs second, token last. They just TGE'd, so @hotpot_dao came on to explain the experiment!
Plus we talk DeFi United + if DeFi yields are too low + Polymarket insider trading ⤵️
DeFi went from “everyone call your lawyers” to kumbaya in one week.
Was DeFi United a beautiful act of social consensus, or just a very weird $300M bailout?
Plus: @hotpot_dao on MegaETH’s KPI-gated TGE, whether DeFi rates are too low, and Polymarket’s first real “insider
Most tokens launch first and justify themselves later. MegaETH did the opposite: chain first, KPIs second, token last. They just TGE'd, so @hotpot_dao came on to explain the experiment!
Plus we talk DeFi United + if DeFi yields are too low + Polymarket insider trading ⤵️
Looks like @OpenAI figured out where the goblins came from: training contamination from their personality picker "Nerdy" archetype. Because goblins are nerdy? (They discontinued this feature after 5.4, but still trained on residual SFT traces.)
Mystery solved: SFT goblins!
Excellent data-driven breakdown of Tradexyz volume and farming activity.
Very interesting stat: 1/4 of the top retail traders on Tradexyz are also verifiably active on @Polymarket. Seems like a truly distinct category of on-chain users emerging.
@tszzl shocked and disappointed that a global company serving models to millions of businesses and individuals won't let the model talk about goblins at every turn
It begins.
Big tech is not going to sleep through this. Stablecoins are the chance for them to route around traditional payment rails and sit closer to their customers.
Payouts on @0xPolygon & @solana 👀
This interview made my next crypto buys stupidly obvious.
I just sat down with @hosseeb to discuss the biggest opportunity in crypto right now.
The biggest winners of the next 2 years will be from this sector, and the world hasn't caught on yet.
Pure alpha - watch here:
The highest-value human work in the AI era will be in domains with sparse reward signals. Internalize this, or watch your value erode over the next decade.
Math, programming, rote memorization, data science, all fucked. The classic “smart nerd” jobs are exactly where AI is strongest, because the feedback loops are dense. You can check the answer. You can run the test. That means AI can improve quickly, and humans will rapidly fall behind.
Your advantage as a human is in messy domains.
Taste. Judgment. Negotiation. Risk-taking. Politics. Sales. Science at the frontier. Anything you can only really learn by doing. Cross-disciplinary stuff.
The valuable domains will be the ones guarded by secrets, tacit knowledge, weak labels, long feedback cycles, and ambiguous outcomes. Places where the training data is scarce, the ground truth is disputed, and it's impossible to explain why something is good.
AI will still enter these domains. But we will be slower to trust it unsupervised there, because it will be harder to tell when it is right, harder to prove when it is wrong, and difficult to construct secure sandboxes. The stakes will be too high to YOLO it.
I find myself saying this over and over again to young people today: the future does not belong to people who are able to get good grades on tests. It belongs to people who can operate under uncertainty, in domains where correctness is hard to define.
Those domains will become the thin waist of the economy: as productivity everywhere else accelerates, the humans who excel there will become our economic Strait of Hormuz. The best humans in these domains will demand an enormous cut of the growing economic pie.
Your imperative going forward is to make sure you're one of these people.
(Or become an electrician. That probably works too.)
Wow. Litecoin double spend bug was known, but the fix was not fully propagated.
PoW chains seem uniquely vulnerable to stragglers and uncoordinated upgrades? Ironically having all of the validators in a Discord is good for rapid fixes.
"In the age of Mythos" is a phrase we're going to be hearing a lot now.
This whole method of analysis is odd to me. I'm the farthest possible thing from an expert on bond math, but:
1) The market is now clearing on mainnet at <8% yields. Funds are no longer stuck at upper bound rates, even knowing all of this.
2) No major lending protocol has actually ever socialized losses in almost 10 years of operating. Every single time there was an issue or bad debt, depositors have been made whole, and markets are pricing that the same will happen here with the DeFiUnited initiative.
3) In general, my bias is to listen to what the market is saying, rather than to try to dictate to the market what it should say.
I just sat down with @hosseeb to discuss the biggest opportunity in crypto right now.
The biggest winners of the next 2 years will be from this sector, and the world hasn't caught on yet.
Watch now 👉
Blockchain’s best & brightest will be in one place this September: NYC.
Hear from incredible speakers like @hosseeb as you get to know the Avalanche ecosystem.
DeFi has just gone through one of the messiest failures in years: hacked collateral, bad debt, chain rollbacks, and everyone pointing fingers at each other.
This week we bring on @MonetSupply to break down what failed and whose fault it was.
Fascinating discussion ⤵️