mr. Fundamental

@gothburz Brutal.🫶

I placed $1.5 billion in futures at 6:50 AM. Fourteen minutes before President Trump's Truth Social post. That's generous. Usually, I get five. The S&P was barely breathing. Premarket Monday. The kind of quiet where a single order echoes through the entire book. I bought $1.5 billion in futures. The index moved 0.3% on my entry alone. That's how thin the market was. That's how empty the room was. At the same time, I shorted $192 million in crude oil. Then I sat there. Three screens. One coffee. The futures blinking green on the left, the oil contract bleeding red on the right, and in the center, a Truth Social feed set to refresh every four seconds. Fourteen minutes is a long time when you know what's coming. Not because I was nervous. Because I was early. At 7:04 AM, the president posted. Productive discussions. Five-day halt on strikes. Peace talks with Iran. S&P jumped 2.5%. Oil cratered 6%. My position gained $60 million before most Americans' alarm clocks went off. Good morning. Iran later denied that the talks ever happened. Called it fake news. The speaker of their parliament accused the president of manipulating financial markets. The talks might not be real. The sixty million dollars is. The analytics accounts flagged it within the hour. "Unusual activity." "Orders 4-6x larger than anything else trading at the time." That's their word for it. Unusual. My word for it is Tuesday. They always flag it. That's their function. Flagging is not investigating. Flagging is the system's way of noting that it saw something, documenting that it will do nothing, and calling that process oversight. The actual investigation is conducted by the CFTC. The CFTC has one commissioner. Out of five seats. One. The other four chairs are empty. Not vacant. Emptied. There is a difference. Vacant means nobody applied. Emptied means somebody decided the body responsible for policing futures markets should not have enough members to hold a vote. That's not negligence. That's architecture. You know what we call this pattern on the desk? TACO. Trump Always Chickens Out. Escalate on Friday, capitulate on Monday, and extract in the window between the decision and the post. It's so reliable, we named it. We have a private Slack channel. #taco-tuesday. It updates automatically when Truth Social pushes a new geopolitical keyword. We don't teach it as insider trading. We teach it as a market structure. New analysts learn it in their first week. By the second week, they stop flinching. The phone rang at 6:47 AM. Three minutes before I entered the position. The call lasted ninety seconds. Ninety seconds of context. $60 million of outcome. You call that insider trading. I understand why. Insider trading is the word you learned. It's the crime from the movies. The whispered merger at a cocktail party. Four hundred shares of a mid-cap pharmaceutical. That gets prosecuted. That's the version of this crime the system was built to catch. What I do is different. I place $1.5 billion against a war decision made in a room I have the phone number to. On a platform overseen by a commission with one member. In a market where the president's social media account is the most powerful price-setting mechanism on earth. That's not insider trading. That's infrastructure. You would go to federal prison for trading on a tip from your brother-in-law. I made $60 million trading on a war. The difference is not the crime. The difference is the decimal point. Americans paid for this war with four-dollar gas and sixteen billion in taxes. I paid for a phone call. We are not in the same economy. Last month, $529 million was wagered on Polymarket's Iran strikes market. Six accounts pocketed $1.2 million. Deposited funds the same day. Hours before the bombs fell. One account cleared $553,000 at 17% odds, seventy-one minutes before public confirmation. He has not placed another bet since. The president's son sits on Polymarket's advisory board. Two federal investigations into the platform were quietly dropped this year. Twelve government officials sold stocks in the weeks before the tariff crash. All of them reported the sales after the deadline. Nobody calls any of that insider trading. They call it prediction markets. Delayed disclosures. Portfolio rebalancing. I call it the junior varsity version of what I do with futures. An Oxford law professor called it the most far-reaching securities fraud in history. We call it the window. Tomorrow, this will be gone. Buried under a new tariff. A new ultimatum. A new TACO. Next Monday at 6:50 AM, I will be here again. Coffee. Three screens. The phone. The ninety-second call. The fourteen-minute window. The game isn't rigged. Rigged implies something broke. Nothing broke. Every component is functioning exactly as specified. The one-member commission. The anonymous platforms. The four-second refresh on the Truth Social feed. The phone that rings at 6:47. I didn't exploit a flaw in the system. I am the system.

@EliBenSasson @Zcash @StarkWareLtd I’m here for it!

Crypto Winter reflections I've been in crypto since 2013, so quite a few years by now. I co-founded @Zcash, then moved on and co-founded @StarkWareLtd. In short, I've been here for a while. By now I've passed quite a few winters, so many, that I've stopped counting. I do notice that different winters have different flavor to them and I remember the last crypto winter. The one word I associate the most with the last crypto winter is SCAMs. Between the crash of Luna, 3Arrows Capital, and the cherry on the top – FTX, that winter was brought about by over-wild speculation and unethical conduct. In contrast, the current crypto winter feels very different to me. The phrase I use is TradFi Bear Hug. By this I mean that with the election of Trump and the warm embrace of regulators and large TradFi players of crypto, it seemed for a while that crypto found its destination: to become the new money, new financial rails, new infrastructure for doing all the stuff that Wall Street has been doing so far. But what actually happened is that this Bear Hug crowded out the true spirit of crypto, which is about Freedom of Economic Enterprise. This type of freedom means doing all sorts of wild, fun, crazy, new things that in TradFi world are reserved to the Fat Cats, and some of which are not even dared to be done by them. So, we find ourselves in a weird winter, marked by the smothering of the spirit of freedom by the big bear hug of TradFi. At the same time, there's a vacuum and lack of leadership. But change is on the way, I can smell it. It's Freedom.

@Polymarket Where can I short this?

JUST IN: AI cow collar startup Halter raises at $2,000,000,000.00 valuation, uses proprietary “cowgorithm” to herd cattle.

@ErikVoorhees @SatoshiFlipper They are gonna love AI art

It may be obvious in hindsight that we actually built crypto for the machines

@zjbrenner @opensea Interested☝️

Who wants to onboard to @opensea Mobile this week with me? Setting up a few more onboardings to the private beta right now!

@jbondwagon @cryptovoxels @beeple My point is that it is pretty pointless to bid on something that is not for sale. Something we tend to forget in the NFT space.

@DCLDaily @cryptovoxels @beeple We wouldn’t know coz it’s not onchain

Exactly 5 years ago today, @beeple sold this NFT for $69Mn Today, its top offer is $31K 🥹

@CoinDesk But… why?

LEGAL: Original Penguin parent company PEI Licensing has filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against Pudgy Penguins, alleging the crypto brand's apparel marks "mislead and deceive" consumers. PEI has been using a penguin mark since 1956 and first sent a cease-and-desist in Oct. 2023.

@gothburz Best Tweet (yes, I still use the word Tweet @VitalikButerin) that I’ve read in years.

I am the Chief Marketing Officer of an AI company that spent $8 million on a Super Bowl ad last night. The ad was 30 seconds long.  It featured a child. The child asked our AI a question about the stars.  Our AI answered beautifully.  The spot tested well in focus groups.  The creative team won an internal award.  We generated 40,000 renders to find one where the AI didn't hallucinate.  The approved cut was take 39,847.  The child in the ad is not a real user.  The answer about the stars is not a real answer.  The entire commercial is a proof of concept for a product we have not shipped. By halftime, the audience hated us. Not just us. All of us. Every AI company that bought a spot.  Sports Illustrated reported fans were "vocally fed up" before the first quarter ended. A Harris poll conducted before the game found consumers already felt "mostly negative" about AI advertising. We knew this. The poll was published Friday. We bought the ad in September. I watched the game from a hospitality suite with eleven other CMOs. We had a real-time sentiment dashboard on a monitor next to the bar. By the second quarter, the needle was in the red.  Someone from our analytics team Slacked: "Audience is associating us with the Svedka ad."  The Svedka ad was an AI-generated fever dream of two dancing androids that looked like what happens when you ask a machine to render human desire without ever having experienced it. Critics called it "warm slop." We were being grouped with the warm slop. Twenty-three percent of all Super Bowl ads were AI or tech companies, according to iSpot. More AI ads than beer ads. More AI ads than food ads. We looked at each other across the suite and realized we had made the same mistake simultaneously. We had all bought the same thirty seconds of American attention and said the same thing into it. I watched Ring's ad from that suite. Ring built a network of millions of AI-equipped doorbell cameras pointed at American front doors. They pitched it as a lost-pet finder.  The ad said: "We built a surveillance panopticon and pointed it at your neighbors' homes, and now we're teaching it to recognize faces, but look -- a puppy." They did not use those words. They did not need to.  The audience heard it anyway. Ring accidentally described its own business model in the most damning terms possible and then asked people to feel good about it. I watched AI[.]com's ad from that suite. Nobody in the room understood it. The domain was purchased for $70 million by the CEO of Crypto[.]com. The website crashed immediately after the ad aired, because millions of people tried to find out what they had just watched and found nothing. Seventy million dollars for a URL that could not survive its own commercial. I watched Anthropic mock OpenAI, and then watched Sam Altman call them dishonest, and then watched two companies valued at a combined $1.35 trillion spend the rest of the evening calling each other liars on X. Someone in the suite said: "At least we didn't do that." I said: "We spent $8 million to say the same thing they said, and nobody noticed." I am not sure which is worse. By the fourth quarter, the collateral damage had started. Viewers became so hypervigilant about AI that they started accusing non-AI ads of being AI-generated. Dunkin' Donuts. Comcast. Ads made by humans, by production crews, by directors with cameras and craft services -- called fake because two hours of AI advertising had conditioned 130 million people to distrust everything on their screen. Our industry spent $100 million on Super Bowl ads to build trust in AI. We built the opposite. I need to tell you about a parallel that nobody in that hospitality suite mentioned, although every person in the room was old enough to remember it. Super Bowl XXXVI. February 2022. Crypto firms bought the ad breaks. Coinbase. FTX. Crypto[.]com. They spent $54 million collectively. The ads were flashy and confident and told 100 million Americans that the future was decentralized and inevitable and worth their money. FTX collapsed ten months later. Coinbase spent the following year in court. Crypto[.]com's CEO is now spending $70 million on AI domain names. We spent more than double what crypto spent. I know this because Tech Brew calculated it this morning and my VP of Communications forwarded it to me with no comment. She always adds a comment. The absence was the comment. Here is what I know that I am not supposed to say. The Super Bowl is a lagging indicator of industry health. A lagging indicator means the peak has already happened. It means the industry already believes in itself more than the public does. It means the money has been spent, the bets have been placed, and the audience -- the 130 million people you needed to convince -- sat through your pitch and felt nothing but annoyance. I spent $8 million to learn something that a Harris poll could have told me for free. Nobody wants what we are selling. Not like this. Not yet. Maybe not ever. But "maybe not ever" is not a phrase that survives a board meeting, so we say "not yet" and buy another ad. The earnings call is in six weeks. When the analyst asks about brand strategy, I will say the word "awareness" and the word "consideration" and the word "momentum." I will not say "warm slop." I will not say "lagging indicator." I will not mention FTX. I will not tell them about the sentiment dashboard, or the Slack message, or the eleven CMOs in the suite who watched the needle go red and poured another drink. We will do this again next year.  The budget is already approved. The budget keeps going up and to the right.

Touch some virtual grass in Nifty Island. You need it 🏝️ The metaverse is for healing.

@noel_moore @YVR_Trader @bittingthembits @jaltucher, can you setup a bot that daily posts the $TAO holdings of $TAOX?

@YVR_Trader @bittingthembits What’s $TAOX current Mnav?

🚨 URGENT: THE GTAO PREMIUM IS TELLING US SOMETHING MASSIVE ABOUT $TAO. THE 206% PREMIUM ANOMALY Current GTAO data (01/06/2026): - Market Price: $16.98 - NAV (actual $TAO value): $5.54 - Premium: 206.77% Translation: Investors are paying $3 for every $1 of $TAO exposure through GTAO. The Grayscale Bittensor Trust just filed to become an SEC Reporting Company. What the market's reaction reveals about $TAO Why? Because traditional finance is DESPERATE for regulated $TAO access. MOVE FROM THE LOWS GTAO bottomed at: $3.98 Current price: $16.98 Gain from lows: 326% in weeks But here's what the market is missing: This isn't just GTAO pumping. This is institutional capital pricing in the inevitability of spot $TAO access before it exists. The 206% premium = willingness to overpay 3X just to get exposure NOW SEC FILING Before: - Private placement only - 12-month holding period - No public liquidity - No transparency After Form 10 effective: - Public OTC trading ✅ - 6-month holding period (after 90 days) - Quarterly SEC filings ✅ - Path to NYSE Arca ETP listing ✅ Translation: The floodgates for institutional capital are opening. MATH ON WHAT HAPPENS NEXT Current GTAO metrics: - Shares outstanding: 1,881,500 - $TAO per share: 0.01922835 - Total $TAO backing GTAO: 36,183 $TAO - Market cap: $26.2M At 206% premium, institutions are valuing this 36K $TAO at $26.2M despite NAV of only $10.4M. Now apply this to native TAO: Current $TAO market cap: $2.7B If spot $TAO absorbed even 10% of the "premium demand" GTAO demonstrates... That's $520M in new capital chasing limited supply SUPPLY SHOCK Remember these numbers: - 70% of TAO staked - 4.6% on exchanges - December halving: 7,200 → 3,600 daily emission - Grayscale now buying for GTAO + path to ETP Grayscale + institutional demand: Easily 500-1,000 TAO/day once ETP approved GBTC PRECEDENT When Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) traded at premiums: - Institutions paid 2.3X NAV for regulated BTC exposure - When spot ETFs launched: Premium compressed but BTC price 10X'd GTAO current premium: 206.77% Higher than GBTC ever reached. Let that Sink In. The market is screaming: $TAO spot demand >> available supply THE 326% MOVE GTAO: $3.98 → $16.98 (326% gain) This happened BEFORE: - Spot ETP approval - 6-month holding period reduction (90 days away) - NYSE listing - Mass marketing to RIAs/institutions This is early positioning by smart money. The chart shows massive volume (198K shares in one candle = $3.3M single-day flow) WHAT THE PREMIUM TELLS US ABOUT NATIVE $TAO Implied "fair value" for regulated $TAO access = 3.06X current $TAO price That's the premium-adjusted price institutions are willing to pay RIGHT NOW. REGULATORY MOAT Why the premium exists: 1. Most institutional funds CANNOT buy native crypto 2. Custody requirements = impossible for most RIAs 3. Compliance overhead = too expensive 4. Board approval = requires SEC-registered products GTAO solves all 4 problems. When it becomes an ETP on NYSE Arca: - Every major brokerage can custody - Every RIA can allocate - Every pension can access - Every ETF can include Market size - RIA assets under management: $130+ trillion - If 0.1% allocates to $TAO via GTAO: $130 billion - Current $TAO market cap: $2.7 billion 43X potential capital inflow from RIAs alone. $TAO is just getting started, not financial advice. This is not a price target. It’s a warning. Wake-up ⏰️ grayscale.com/funds/grayscal…

@SecRubio @StateDept @grok what does the word egregious mean?

For far too long, ideologues in Europe have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose. The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship. Today, @StateDept will take steps to bar leading figures of the global censorship-industrial complex from entering the United States. We stand ready and willing to expand this list if others do not reverse course.

@Kitler512 @elonmusk It already is. They are called plants.

@elonmusk Let’s cover the entire earth in solar panels and data centers.

The Sun is an enormous, free fusion reactor in the sky. It is super dumb to make tiny fusion reactors on Earth. Even if you burned 4 Jupiters, the Sun would still round up to 100% of all power that will ever be produced in the solar system!! Stop wasting money on puny little reactors, unless actively acknowledging that they are just there for your pet science project jfc.

@phantom_scribbs Wut?

It’s crazy OpenSea doesn’t even accept crypto anymore and you have to pay in cash. It’s over for NFTs.

@sergitosergito @artblocks_io @larvalabs @yekiM_o @lifeofc @justinaversano @CryptoDickbutts take notes!

First ever Meebits exhibition in the books! Thank you to @larvalabs and @artblocks_io for hosting us at Larfa. Shout out to all the collectors who ordered their 3D prints and contributed to the exhibit. Massive gratitude to @yekiM_o, @lifeofc & @justinaversano who put in the work setting up the display. I’ll have much more to share in this week’s Voxel Journal newsletter, but for now I just want to say GRACIAS to everyone who’s played a role in and supported MeebCo along the way. Meebits are Art.

@niftyisland @CryptoDickbutts

WE WANT YOUR 🫵 FAVORITE COMMUNITIES & NFTs IN NIFTY ISLAND 🏝️ Tag your favorite collection(s) that you want to see in Nifty Island below and we will reach out to every single one of them to get them into the game! WE WANT THEM ALL!

@HollanderAdam Still no @super_yeti?

our pool now includes 3 CryptoPunks, 9 BAYC, 10 Pudgy, 10 Moonbirds, 3 Hypurr, 9 Squiggles & a Fidenza. not to mention dozens of Azuki, Doodles, CyberKongz, GVC, XCOPY, DickButts, Otherside, Memeland, VeeFriends & more. plus millions in ETH, SOL, HYPE, WBTC and other tokens 🤯

There's already flourishing scene of artists who are using AI to create art, as well as collectors who respect and value the art they create. Some artists use generative AI tools to bring to life the seeds of imaginary worlds and ecosystems they have been harbouring. (e.g. Auntieverse by @niceaunties, The Vault of Wonders by @edbyus) Others deploy them to confront established mediums like photography and videomaking, and forge novel compositions out of their materials. (e.g. Life in West America by @rainisto, Terrestrial Factors by @bagdelete, Real! by @BennettWaisbren) Or to remix our forgotten visual heritage and breath new life into older artistic traditions. (e.g. Empire by @sheldrick_ai, Relic and Muraqqa by @orkhan) Then there are also artists who tap on AI to interrogate the broader techno-economic and social structures that mediate or determine our visual culture. (e.g. xhairymutantx by @hollyherndon and @matdryhurst, Critically Extant by @soficrespo91, Bloemenveiling by @annaridler and @pfau) And those who were early to "see" from the perspective of the machine, sculpting datasets from the ground up to test their expressive potential and explore previously unseen spaces within (e.g. DeepDream by @zzznah, A Book from the Sky by @genekogan, Realiti by @tyaagnliu) Or intentionally directing AI to excavate and reveal the inherent contingency of our visual media. (e.g. Learning to See by @memoakten, Evolved Hallucinations by @trevorpaglen) There are also artists who use AI against the grain. (e.g. @kev_esh stopping the diffusion process prematurely in In Utero and I'm With You, or @Terrybroad implementing GANs without any training data in (un)stable equilibrium). And those who embraced the inherent multimodality of AI to build bridges across different senses, mediums and languages. (e.g. Being Borges by @CaballeroAnaMa, Blind Camera by @dtpisanty). Or push the creative potential of AI decisively into the physical realm via robotics. (e.g. Emerging Faces by @VanArman, Drawing Operations by @sougwen) We also can't forget those who were at the cutting edge of AI research, creating artefacts that eventually take on the aura of artworks. (e.g. alignDRAW by @elmanmansimov) And of course, AI-based artworks with incredible lore, emerging from the ash heap of rejection and catapulting into a life of its own as a positional asset. (e.g. The Lost Robbies by @videodrome) Neither can we ignore those who attempt to nurture non-human artists with AI who can make their own creative decisions autonomously, often tapping on crypto-economic affordances to finance their practice. (e.g. @bottoproject by @BottoDAO and @quasimondo, @abraham_ai_ by @genekogan, @DeepBlackAI, @keke_terminal by @dark_sando, @hi_flynn) This is just a non-exhaustive stream-of-consciousness outline of some of the artists whose use of AI tools I've been inspired by. There are definitely many more who elude my faculties of immediate recollection, and I'm certainly biased by my aesthetic preferences and conceptual inclinations. Nevertheless, my point is that in spite of the prevailing cultural propaganda, there are already many artists seriously and credibly engaging with AI. And I agree with you, it's truly beautiful to behold.

@opensea @super_yeti

Today's additions to the rewards pool: $50,000 of $ETH 1x Bored Ape Yacht Club 1x Pudgy Penguin What should we add next?