saj

Four years ago, I quit my job as a field engineer and took a blind leap into crypto—with no experience and no real plan. What started as a search for meaning during the pandemic turned into the most challenging and rewarding journey of my life. Here’s how it happened. 🧵👇

San José del Cabo is also part of "Cabo" and it is amazing. You should check it out, specially its art district on Thursdays. Cabo San Lucas also has some beautiful spots and a rich local heritage. I grew up in Cabo and trust me, there's more beyond the ill curated view you were sadly sold.

Cabo San Lucas… It’s one of the worst places on earth. But Baja California… is the most beautiful region in Mexico 🇲🇽 You just have to leave Cabo. Drive north… Empty beaches in Todos Santos. World-class kite surfing in La Ventana. Fish tacos on the side of the road you’ll never forget. Miles of coastline with no one asking you for anything. Whales surfacing as you stare out at the horizon. Wine growing out of the desert in Valle de Guadalupe… This is the real Baja… But most people never make it out of Cabo.

The line "decentralization doesn't matter" is getting repeated more and more these days. I recently broke out into debate on-stage with @masonnystrom about why decentralization was essential to prediction markets existing at all. It got heated. Worth the 5 minutes:

People in our space took real risk early. Built real capital. And the products that are supposed to serve and benefit them are all limited by traditional banking infrastructure that wasn't built for them. I’m one of those people. Premium fiat-backed cards can't enable global access because their rails won't let them. Crypto cards have the rails but not the access. We built on different rails so we could deliver both. Premium access, globally, for the people the traditional system was never designed to serve.

The access you've been missing. Luxe · Dining · Travel · Events usecorn.com

@tallyxyz What a great run. Thanks for everything you did for the ecosystem and best of luck to the team!

In January I shared where we were, what building the Corn network taught us, where real demand lives, and why stablecoins have become impossible to ignore. What I didn't say is what we were already building. We've been heads down since. Not talking about it. Not teasing it. Building it. Quietly. I'm not sure how many more signs the industry needs. Every major fintech and payments company has or is in the process of adopting and integrating stablecoin rails. Stablecoins have graduated from experimentation to infrastructure serving hundreds of millions of people. That's not a narrative. That's a foundation worth building on. For Corn to enter its next chapter, it has to close the door on the one before it. In order to dedicate the entirety of our focus and resources on what's next, we will be sunsetting the network over the coming months. We are proud of the work we did and who we built alongside, but infrastructure without sustained organic demand is a lesson, not a product. What’s next for Corn isn't an evolution of what came before. It's a different product, for a different purpose, on a different set of rails. Something uniquely re-imagined. This is the most convicted I've been over the last 10 years building in the space. For anyone who's been here through the experimentation, the uncertainty, and the resets, I don't take that lightly. Tomorrow you'll see what your conviction and belief helped us to build. The future of Corn starts tomorrow.

😏

Mexican cuisine is one of only 4 cuisines recognized as World Cultural Heritage by UNESCO, and for good reason. It's extraordinarily complex and varied. Recipes shaped by ancient indigenous traditions and Spanish influence, with something for every taste. From fresh seafood like ceviche and aguachile, to dishes cooked for days like mole or cochinita pibil. And contrary to popular belief, most of it isn't spicy. The heat usually comes from the optional salsa served on the side. Also worth noting: Tex-Mex can be great, but it isn't Mexican food. If your idea of Mexican cuisine comes from Chipotle or Taco Bell, you haven't actually tried it yet. I encourage you to fix that.

Days like this hit harder and lonelier without CT to go to...

Markets will bleed, tourists will leave. But there's still so much to do. World powers forced everyone to put their trust in the system and now they are carelessly wrecking it. The world needs trustless systems more than ever. The world needs crypto. Let's keep building.

A solid team growing the @pyefinance

@pyefinance @variantfund @cbventures This is huge. Congrats team!

We’ve raised a $5M seed round led by @variantfund and @cbventures to build Solana’s first market for term-based staking. Staking is evolving beyond set-and-forget delegation. Validators and stakers need clear terms, predictable rewards, and real price discovery.

@hosseeb Great take

There have always been casinos in crypto. The first viral application on Bitcoin was Satoshi Dice (2012). The first viral smart contract on Ethereum was King of the Ether Throne (2015), which was basically a hot potato ponzi scheme. Once you have programmable money, the first thing people will do is gamble and play stupid games. It's human nature. There's always been a hot casino in crypto. Always. The ICO casino, the DeFi food coin casinos, the NFT casinos, and now the memecoin casino. It evolves over time, but gambling is deeply ingrained in human nature. Literally as soon as humanity invented writing (ancient Sumeria in 3000 BC), there's records of people gambling. The casino is shiny and gets a lot of attention on social media (it's where fortunes are quickly won and lost, and it's easy to convince yourself that this is your lucky break), but if you only pay attention to the shimmer of the casinos, you're missing the bigger story. The story I originally got into this industry for, that sounded like sci-fi to me ten years ago—that crypto is a better substrate for finance, that it will forever alter the nature of money, and that the balance of power between individuals and governments will be permanently changed—that story is actually happening. Bitcoin is challenging nation states. They are now buying it on their own balance sheets. Stablecoins are bending monetary policy. Central banks are scrambling to respond. Permissionless smart contracts like Uniswap and AAVE are now bigger and more valuable than unicorn fintechs. The world is warping around crypto. Maybe it took longer than you thought, but transformative technologies almost always take longer to diffuse than you think. I thought generative AI would completely transform the job market within a couple years, but three years after ChatGPT, it still doesn't show up in GDP or employment stats. It's hard to change the world. Takes work. The industrial revolution began with the commercialization of the steam engine in 1781, but even the industrial revolution didn't have any impact on productivity, employment, or wage growth until 1830—that's 50 years later. The Internet, as we all know, took 20+ years. Did you think we'd be displacing all of finance, the most regulated and governmentally sensitive industry in the world, in the span of just 5 years? If you're despondent that you were working on a memecoin L2 or whatever and didn't get rich, take a deep fucking breath. This industry doesn't owe you that. And yet, all this spiritual capitulation on the timeline, believe it or not, is healthy. A forest only stays robust when it periodically sheds the deadwood. Without occasional fires to clear it out, decay spreads and the whole forest rots. It's a harsh reality, but the only way to keep growing is to clear out whatever's no longer contributing. All this negativity on the timeline needs to flush out one way or another. Let people keep shuffling out, and the air will clear. Either these people must change their minds and refocus on the future, or they need to leave so the rest of us can do our jobs. Because the job is not yet done.

Is this the first time that Mainnet base gas fee is under 0.1 gwei?

@elsultanbitcoin @eldoradoio Big fan of @eldoradoio already! Interesting. So users don't tend to hold dollars (USDT) in the platform but rather use them as a pathway for cross-border payments from their original currency?

@sajrajdev check out @eldoradoio, we power a USDT wallet + a P2P marketplace for LATAM. Most of our users don't want stablecoins, or dollars, rather they do cross-border, cross-currency payments

Stablecoins through neobanks are the Trojan Horse of crypto to the masses

Today, I’m incredibly excited to make my first proposal to Uniswap governance on behalf of @Uniswap alongside @devinawalsh and @nkennethk This proposal turns on protocol fees and aligns incentives across the Uniswap ecosystem Uniswap has been my passion and singular focus for the past 8 years. What started as a small side project is now global financial infrastructure powering thousands of applications with ~$1.8 trillion in annual trading UNI launched in 2020, but for the past 5 years Labs has been unable to meaningfully participate in Uniswap governance, and has been greatly restricted in the ways it can build value for the Uniswap community. That ends today! This restriction was in great part due to a hostile regulatory environment that cost thousands of hours and tens of millions in legal fees. Fortunately, the regulatory environment has shifted This proposal comes from a strong desire to see the Uniswap protocol win as the global decentralized exchange for tokenized value At a high level, the proposal: 1. Turns on protocol fees and uses them to burn UNI 2. Sends @unichain sequencer fees to the UNI burn 3. Burns 100M UNI from the treasury representing the protocol fees that could have been burned if fees were turned on at token launch 4. Introduces Protocol Fee Discount Auctions, a new way to improve LP outcomes and internalize MEV to the protocol 5. Introduces "aggregator hooks” which will turns Uniswap v4 into an onchain aggregator that collects protocol fees on external liquidity sources 6. Focus Labs on driving protocol growth and adoption, including a contractual agreement to only pursue initiatives that align with Uniswap governance interests ^ As part of this, Labs will stop collecting fees on its interface, wallet, and API to supercharge distribution and adoption of the Uniswap protocol 7. Moves Foundation employees to Labs with a shared goal of accelerating protocol growth, under a growth fund from the treasury 8. Move governance-owned Unisocks liquidity to v4 on Unichain and burn the LP position I believe Uniswap protocol can be the primary place tokens are traded. This proposal sets the stage for the next decade of its growth @Uniswap will ship relentlessly over the coming years and supercharge the ecosystem of developers, LPs, and traders building on top I'm so grateful to the community that has made this all possible, and excited for what's next 🦄

@zerolore It will be so worth it!

@stats_feed Eating metal nails

Forget drugs, smoking and alcohol, what is something BAD for your health that people don't talk about enough?