Adam Nelson

@cpaik Loved this

As a corollary, the dynamics in this essay are why "taste" is so important in a post-labor world. To quote Francois Truffaut, "Taste is the result of a thousand distastes." When we inevitably reallocate more and more time into social jousting/positioning as newfound members of the leisure class, this is the defining engine that underpins its physics.

Payy is built on Ethereum. @payy_link is a privacy-first stablecoin chain designed so your transactions aren’t exposed to the world. It brings programmable payments to Ethereum, without sacrificing privacy by default.

Payy Network is now live on @ethereum.

Rain made the @Forbes Fintech 50. Tokenized money doesn’t matter if it can’t be spent. We build the infrastructure that makes it usable at scale, from compliant card issuing to global payments. Respect to the partners and teams pushing this transition forward 🙏 forbes.com/sites/jeffkauf…

@dealmomentum has entered a definitive agreement to be acquired by @salesforce. Much will be written and said about what an awesome business and product they've built, and what an incredibly smart pairing this will be, but I want to express my deepest gratitude and pride for @santiycr, @awilson820, @moizjv and the rest of the team. There is truly not a more deserving and wonderful group of people in the world, and it's been some of the most rewarding time of my career having worked with you all. Congratulations team Momentum!

We started Unlimited because we were fed up hedge fund managers taking 50% of their client returns for themselves. Four years in, we are proud to show that our clients have received 95% of returns, proving there is a better way.

@JoshuaKushner Love it--excited for what's ahead

We are pleased to announce the close of Thrive X. Exceeding $10 billion, Thrive X comprises $1 billion designated for early-stage investments and $9 billion designated for growth-stage investments. We do not view this as a milestone, but as a commitment to the long work ahead. We view Thrive as a company. Our product is partnership - the willingness to commit deeply to a small number of founders, and to stand with them through momentum and adversity. This is the discipline we bring to our work, and the responsibility we accept when founders partner with Thrive. We do not hedge. Concentration demands loyalty to the founders and missions we back. In this moment, exposure alone is not a strategy. Judgment without commitment is not enough. Advantage will accrue to those who choose deliberately, commit deeply, and endure through difficult moments. Thrive was founded to be an enabling technology for the world we want to see. We are deeply aware that we are not the main character. The founders that we are fortunate enough to partner with are the artists. Our role is to help create the conditions where great work can come to life. We take a long view grounded in the belief that category-defining companies tend to create structural compounding advantages over long arcs. This fund reflects the continuity of our approach and the ways our work has deepened alongside the founders we support. We are grateful for the trust our Limited Partners place in us, and for the opportunity to work alongside those who are building with purpose, integrity, and courage. thrivecap.com/thrive-x

Damn! Bought this shitcoin back in 2013, and now I am down 50%.

100mln AUM in less than 12 months is a testament to the hard work of the whole @UnlimitedFnds team. Thank you to everyone who has supported us along the way. Onward! x.com/UnlimitedFnds/…

Every human worker needs a computer. Soon, every AI agent will too, but not one: millions, provisioned instantly, securely isolated, and running in parallel. Thrilled to be partnering with @ivanburazin (who didn't a break during the holidays), @JukicVedran and @daytonaio (+ @upfrontvc, @datadoghq, @figma, @PaceCap) mattturck.com/daytona

Excited to announce our investment in @VillageSQL, the innovation platform for MySQL with extensions for the agentic AI era. We've known Dominic Preuss and Steve Schirripa for years and couldn't be more proud to be partnering with them 🚀 firstmark.com/story/why-we-i… @deesix

Congratulations to @sidgandhi_xyz @calummoore and the @payy_link team on the announcement of their new Privacy focused chain! Privacy is coming up more and more in the discussions we are having and Payy is building something really interesting here

Today, Payy becomes a network, and privacy becomes native to onchain money. For the past three years, we’ve held an unwavering focus on perfecting onchain privacy. You’ve seen it take shape through Payy Wallet and Payy Card, with 100k organic users and $130M/year in unincentivized stablecoin volume. But while we were building the product, something unexpected happened: dozens of crypto and fintech teams began asking how they could add Payy-level privacy to their own products. These conversations revealed a growing institutional problem. Nearly every bank, fintech, and enterprise is telling us the same thing: They cannot move real capital flows onchain if their financial data is exposed to the world. That’s when it became clear: the infra powering Payy wasn’t just an internal advantage, it was the only battle tested, compliant privacy infrastructure in the market that others could actually use. So we quietly expanded it. And slowly, it became a network. Today we’re announcing Payy Network: Ethereum’s first and only privacy-native EVM L2. How does it work? Every ERC-20 lives in a chain-native privacy pool by default. Direct transfers happen inside the pool, while smart contract interactions automatically pull funds out of the pool to a fresh EVM address. Users and developers don't have to think about privacy, it's magically added to every transaction. - Send an ERC-20 on MetaMask? Private. - Swap on a DEX? Uses a new address every time. - Deposit to liquidity pool? Unlinkable to your other transactions. I firmly believe privacy is the final barrier to critical mass adoption. By removing it, we’re unblocking the path for the $2 quadrillion global payments economy to move onchain, without turning every transaction into a data leak. Finally, privacy isn’t a tradeoff, it’s a default. Welcome to the era of invisible privacy.

@Ro’s first Super Bowl ad. Featuring the GOAT, @serenawilliams, and her journey on Ro—from weight loss to steady blood sugar levels to, as Serena says, having “knees like Megan.” Check out our spot. Couldn’t be more proud of the team. Still just the beginning!

Very excited to announce our $20m Series A in @porterdotrun, led by the fantastic Justin Rhee (@rheejust). Porter was built to make infrastructure something startups don’t have to relearn as they scale, delivering a full PaaS experience inside their customer’s own cloud accounts. Porter has quickly become the default choice for this generation of AI companies (cc @TennrOfficial, @outtake_ai, @ModelML_, @GigaAI), already a top-five all time most used dev tool in YC, but impressively touts public companies and $1bn+ revenue businesses as customers as well. Their product roadmap is endless and we couldn’t be more excited to be on the journey with Justin and team.

We’re thrilled to announce that @DavidWaltcher has been promoted to Partner at FirstMark, where he will be leading deals across developer tools, AI, infrastructure, and security. Congratulations David!

Ukraine, Trump and the changing nature of war: the need for European defense is as immediate, urgent and visceral as it gets. Harmattan AI (where we led the Series A) is emerging out of stealth today and announcing a $200M Series B led by Dassault Aviation, and breaking records. Thoughts here: mattturck.com/new-investment…

So excited to finally have the opportunity to partner with @rooqster,@cnaut and the entire Rain team — what a journey it's already been. With 200+ partners, $3B+ annualized volume, and cards up 30x YoY they've emerged as the clear leader in the market and a leading example of what's possible as stablecoins become core financial infrastructure. With ~$300B in circulation and ~$27T in annual volume, tokenized dollars are crossing the chasm from crypto-native to mainstream payments. At FirstMark, our view is simple: the biggest winners won’t be new apps — they’ll be the companies rebuilding the financial core so stablecoins just work inside existing systems. Rain is building the tokenized money core: enterprise-grade infrastructure that enables global stablecoin payments through familiar cards and wallets, with real on-chain settlement and compliance handled behind the scenes. Real volume. Real partners. Real rails. As money becomes tokenized, every institution will modernize how it moves value. Rain is showing what that future looks like and we couldn't be more excited for the future