Fernando Nikolić 🇦🇷 🟠

The morning Swedish police raided The Pirate Bay I was in a strategy meeting at Universal Music in Norway. Everyone celebrated because the pirate ship was sinking. "The adults had won" (lol) Three days later the site was back online. Different servers and different jurisdiction. I looked around the office at my colleagues still planning next quarter's CD releases and realized something. I was working for people who thought they'd won a war that hadn't even started yet.

When I was 14, social media was my escape hatch from mediocrity. I did not relate to anyone at school. Online, I found people on the other side of the world who thought the way I did. That changed my life. It is how I ended up working with one of Silicon Valley’s most respected investors and some of the smartest engineers in the world. It is how I started a podcast and got into rooms school would never have opened for me. The UK wants to close that door for every weird, ambitious, hyper online 14-year-old. They say it is “for safety”. But there is a much greater danger in being trapped inside schools, consuming state-mandated narratives, and waiting for permission from people whose entire worldview is obedience. The internet lets kids escape the factory before the factory stamps them into shape. It lets them find mentors, employers, collaborators, friends, customers, and ideas no school would ever give them. It lets them discover that the classroom is not the world, and the adults around them are not the ceiling. A social media ban for under-16s protects the enforcement regime, not the child. Age verification is KYC with a child-safety sticker on it. First they ask if you are old enough. Then they ask who you are. Then the anonymous internet is gone. The excuse is children. The prize is obedience. Fight back, Britain.

An incredible amount of people seem to literally think that Elon Musk just casually opens his bank app and sees a trillion dollars on his screen 😂

"I don't think it is, mate." That is the default response from most British folks I've gotten whenever I mention that the country is collapsing. The modern UK is an administrative machine designed to manage the decline and they built their entire moral authority on teaching Brits to feel guilty for the greatest empire in history. Stop apologizing.

@JoeConsorti Well deserved man

25,000 subscribers on YouTube 🎉 I don't normally do this, but I want to take a second to thank you all. In 60 days, we've become the fastest growing Bitcoin-only channel on the platform, and it's all thanks to you. Onwards to 100,000 🫡

I’m absolutely blown away by the amount of fully grown people who feel entitled to someone else’s property.

It's Sunday June 12th, 2016 and the world is mourning the victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting. Trump, who recently clinched the Republican Party nomination, posts on Twitter that Obama should leave office over the shooting. You walk to a nearby cafe thinking about the possible implications of Move 37 (played a few months prior) and how neat the SpaceX reusable rockets are. On the way, a mysterious gentleman pulls a newspaper out of his cloak and hands it to you. It's dated June 12th, 2026. Top Headlines: - Elon Musk Becomes World's First Trillionaire as SpaceX IPO's - Department of War Publishes Third Release of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Files - Citing Safety Concerns, Trump Administration Places Anthropic's New 10T Parameter AI Models Under Export Control Huh? Still holding the newspaper, you look up... but the mysterious gentleman has already vanished. You look down... the headlines are also gone. Sipping your coffee, you think to yourself "Wow, these art students sure are are getting stranger and strfr!" Before heading home, you find yourself checking the price of BTC... honestly, $600 per BTC seems pretty high. Maybe it's time to sell??

The Financial Times when financials happens

So easy to get caught up in mixing Bitcoin with geopolitical headlines when they seem to always trigger short term market noise. But if you treat Bitcoin as a hedge against a weekly news cycle then you ultimately miss the actual scale of the asset. What matters is that it settles sovereign wealth outside the control of central banks, regardless of who is in the White House. Best you can do is ignore the daily press briefings and focus on the only trend that matters which is the long-term adoption metrics.

Cool to see Swan launching a service to let investors convert their paper Bitcoin directly into onchain coins. Weird that more companies haven't launched this. IMO this is the logical next step in institutional adoption because the ETF will always be just a temporary onboarding wrapper for traditional capital. Institutional investors are not noobs. They know that holding a paper share in a BlackRock fund is not the same as owning the underlying asset.

Synthetic SpaceX shares on Hyperliquid fell 27% percent while the actual Wall Street roadshow is four times oversubscribed. Do with that information what you will.

@stackhodler Proprietary data that connects to these tools = only moat left

I was a technical co-founder at three startups. Went through YC, raised millions, one company exited for 9 figures, yada yada... Fable 5 is an entire product team in a box. CTO, VP of engineering, product manager, senior dev, UX expert, UI designer, even sales/marketing... It does it all. And at a much higher level than most humans. Around the clock, multiple threads running simultaneously. I see people saying that token-based billing is a sign the AI bubble is nearing a peak. I don't see an AI bubble. I see a salaried employee bubble. After using Fable 5 I can confidently say: I'd much rather spend $200K on tokens for Fable 5 than hire a single human that does one of those roles (and only on weekdays when they're feeling focused, motivated, etc.) If token billing means choosing between cutting AI usage vs. cutting employees... Every CFO knows which line item goes first. But this tool only produces value in the right hands. The wrong employee will run up a token bill with nothing to show for it. The right employee will turn tokens into bottom-line improvements. If you're an employee, focus on proving you know how to turn tokens into value for your company. OR relationship-max harder than ever. If you're an entrepreneur, you have an entire expert product, marketing, and sales team at your fingertips for a fraction of the cost of the human equivalent. Use it to help other people at scale and you will win big. As an investor... this keeps me very bullish on AI. If you have capital to allocate, you want to put it into an industry seeing exponential growth. And you want to take advantage of all the moments that people lose sight of the big picture. This genie's not going back in the bottle. In fact, it only just escaped.

Think about how bank after back is entering crypto custody. And think about the years they spent warning retail that holding digital assets was too dangerous for the public. Now they want to charge a custody fee to hold the keys for you. Think about that.

@botanix Great comms. Respect 🫡

It is with a heavy heart that we announce we are winding down the Botanix network. This decision is the hardest one we have made in four years, and we want to share the reasoning openly because the people who backed us, built with us, and used what we shipped deserve more than a quiet shutdown notice. First off, an immediate practical consideration for the Botanix community: please withdraw your Bitcoin and other assets before July 9th, 2026. When we started in 2022, the pitch was simple enough to say in a sentence: bring real utility to Bitcoin. What that actually meant in practice, and what we have spent nearly four years building toward, was more ambitious than that sentence made it sound. We were trying to build a Bitcoin-based blockchain that could find genuine product-market fit as a platform for Bitcoin applications, without using token incentives to drive growth, manufacture users, or simulate utility. Almost every chain that has launched in the last cycle has reached for the same playbook (issue a token without PMF, engineer the incentive surface, point at the resulting metrics), and we did not believe this route is a viable strategy in the long term. We wanted to know whether a Bitcoin chain could earn its users on the strength of what was built on top of it, the value it brings in the market with Bitcoin itself as the only meaningful economic primitive in the system. And we built it. The Spiderchain went live and stayed live, a year of mainnet operation with one hundred percent uptime and zero security incidents on a genuinely novel cryptographic architecture. We built Dynafed, a dynamic federation that turned the Spiderchain from a static multisig set into a rotating, decentralized one, the technical milestone that most people in this space said could not be built on Bitcoin without compromising trust assumptions. Twenty-five million transactions, two hundred thousand wallets, and tens of millions of dollars in assets moved across the chain, every single number of that earned organically without a token, without airdrops, without points programs, or any of the manufactured-demand machinery. Chainlink, Morpho, GMX, Dolomite, Fireblocks, Alchemy, Galaxy, OKX Wallet, all integrated. We shipped a Bitcoin neobank with BINK on iOS and Android, with self-custodial email login for Bitcoin (something that had never existed before), native Bitcoin yield, and the lowest borrowing rates against Bitcoin anywhere in the world, all of it downstream of owning the infrastructure. The point of saying this is not to argue with our own conclusion. The protocol works, the product works, and our team and ecosystem worked in concert to do exceptional work. We have run this experiment in earnest, with a working protocol, real applications, and a serious team, for over a year on mainnet and nearly four years in total. The honest answer we have arrived at, after living inside it every day, is that it did not work, at least not in this market and not on this timeline. We want to share what we think we learned, with the caveat that some of this is conviction and some of this is still suspicion, and we would rather be transparent about the difference than pretend to have clarity we do not have. The first thing I've had to sit with is timing. Bitcoin utility, making Bitcoin programmable, productive, and integrated into real financial activity, isn't where the real world users sit right now. The conversation is still on Bitcoin as a reserve asset, on its monetary and political positioning, on base-layer conservatism. Those questions are upstream of the ones a Bitcoin L2 needs people to be asking. I still believe Bitcoin gets there, but belief in the destination is not the same as being able to predict when, and nobody can. It's also possible the destination never materialises at all, and that Bitcoin's role as a reserve asset is simply where it settles. If that's true, there will never be a market for what we were building, and no amount of time or capital would change that. The second is the token question. We intended to eventually launch a token. We saw it, and still see it, as a genuinely new form of equity, something closer to an IPO than an airdrop, to be done when you reach product market fit and the moment is right. That moment never came. What became clear over the last year is that the market largely stopped rewarding even the more considered versions of that playbook. Token launches across the board have broadly underperformed, and those that did go to market with tokens haven't seen the outcomes or PMF that the model is supposed to produce. The third lesson is about where DeFi demand on Bitcoin actually lives. For most use cases that exist today, lending, yield, leveraged exposure, WBTC on a mature general-purpose L2 is genuinely sufficient. Users have voted with their behaviour, and the verdict is that the trust assumptions of a wrapped representation on Ethereum are acceptable to almost everyone who wants Bitcoin-denominated DeFi. Decentralisation matters to people in principle and in conversation; in practice, when something cheaper and easier is in front of them, they use it. The security case for a dedicated Bitcoin L2 is real, but it only matters for a narrower band of applications than our thesis required, one of the clearer lessons this market has taught us. The fourth lesson is structural. The on-chain economy is consolidating around venues that own the user relationship: Hyperliquid, Robinhood, the major CEXes, and now TradFi participants absorbing an ever-larger share of attention, flow, and revenue. Convenience and institutional credibility win, every time, as soon as they're available. As retail participation thins, that concentration only deepens. We were, and still are, believers in decentralisation, but the current direction of on-chain growth is running through distribution, and any team building base-layer infrastructure today is rowing upstream against that current. We were no exception. The fifth lesson is the most concrete. Both of the above played out directly in our economics. The users we attracted were primarily using Bitcoin as a store of value for yield, a legitimate use case, but not the high-frequency transaction volume that drives fee revenue on a network like ours. BINK was our answer to that: a Bitcoin neobank designed to bring daily usage of BTC and stablecoins on-chain, driving the transaction volume the network needed. It was the right strategic instinct, and one we never got the chance to fully test. BINK only landed on both app stores in the last few weeks, a product that by its nature could only be built once the underlying infrastructure was proven and live. When users choose the convenient option and economic gravity pulls toward distribution, what's left on a decentralised infrastructure layer is a user base that costs more to serve than it generates. Infrastructure costs are what they are, and the fee income never came close to covering them. If you would like to see how we were imagining a Bitcoin future and what we have been working on since September, feel free to download BINK and give it a spin: it’s a full-fledged self-custodial Bitcoin Neobank with email login, one click borrowing, a Lightning integration and more. App store: apps.apple.com/us/app/bink-bi… Play store: play.google.com/store/apps/det… This UX is where we think Bitcoin is ultimately heading towards although it feels too early. You can use invite code 1SD31R, but remember to remove your funds by July 9th. We could keep going. We have chosen not to, however, because continuing past the point where additional time stops producing additional learning is not conviction, it is something that looks like conviction from the outside while corroding into something else on the inside. We would rather stop now, with integrity intact and resources available to take care of the people who took a chance on us, than push the experiment past the point where it still has something to teach us. Reminder: Please withdraw all your assets by July 9th. After this, the federation will sweep the remaining Bitcoin. Any other assets or tokens on the network from then onwards will unfortunately be unrecoverable. After this, the federation will sweep the remaining Bitcoin. Any other assets or tokens on the network from then onwards will unfortunately be unrecoverable. To our investors, who backed a thesis that was harder to defend than it should have been, to our partners who built alongside us and bet pieces of their own roadmaps on ours, to the developers who deployed on Spiderchain, to our users and the BINK community who showed up for something experimental and stayed, and most of all to the Botanix team who shipped a genuinely novel system with rigour and care and who made every hard day worth the difficulty: Thank you, more than the words available here can carry.

"Fork off and find out" is how consensus actually works. If you think your new code is better you do not lobby a committee. >copy the codebase >launch your own chain >let the market decide the value Every fork that tried this in the past eventually went to zero.

Today is a wonderful day to break the Bitcoin blockchain

@DSBatten hell yes

First new Bitcoin podcast for some time All new stuff in here - why some miners are paying -2c/kWh for power - why "Bitcoin Will Fix Energy Before Money" - why the mainstream is now a hair-breadth away from seeing the first (of many) society-transforming uses of Bitcoin

Has El Salvador really been buying one BTC every single day for five years now? Yes or no?

I do not care what other coins people buy or trade. If someone perceives value in a shitcoin, whether they are tricked into it or not, it is none of my business. Private money competition is healthy, and it ultimately makes Bitcoin stronger. Opting out of the central bank monopoly means supporting freedom of transaction. Let the market sort out the winners.

Russia imposing fees and limits on USDT is the logical next step in currency warfare. They call them "pro-Western" because they finally realized that centralized stablecoins are assets controlled by remote controls. US regulators can freeze or blacklist them in one click. No sovereign state can run their trade balance on assets that require permission from a compliance officer in New York. They are forced to look at gold or Bitcoin for physical settlement. Hold the actual keys or you hold nothing.