igor 👾

Accidentally pressed A near my buddy who works in finance and got hit with the 5 minute unskippable maximizing credit card points advice cutscene

New for financial services: ready-to-run Claude agent templates for building pitches, conducting valuation reviews, closing the books at month-end, and more. Install them as plugins in Cowork and Claude Code, or use our cookbooks to run them in production as Managed Agents.

Andrej Karpathy on the shift to agentic engineering

Spirit Airlines died tonight at the hands of the socialist crusader, Elizabeth Warren She must be so proud to add another casket to her achievements. Tonight at 3am, Spirit turns off the lights. 14,000 jobs gone. 30+ smaller airports lose service. JetBlue offered $3.8 BILLION in cash to buy Spirit in 2022. Shareholders, flight attendants union, literally everyone voted yes. The combined company would have held 9% of the US market against a Big 4 that already owned 80%. For anyone who understands numbers: 9% isn’t a monopoly against 80%. Warren said no. She wrote letters. She pressured Buttigieg. Biden’s DOJ sued. A federal judge killed the deal in January 2024. Her argument: the merger would cost consumers $1 billion a year. Now look at her collateral damage she dusts under the rug. 510 pilots gone in the months after. 1,800 flight attendants furloughed in December. 14,000 jobs in 2023. 7,500 last week. Zero tonight. And that’s just the people in Spirit uniforms. Catering goes. Fuel guys go. Baggage crews, gate agents, airport coffee shops, hotels and rental cars in 70 cities Spirit flew to. Every airline job carries 3 more on its back. 40,000 people out of work because of one woman’s moronic crusade against the market. And the math ain’t mathing. Spirit abandoned 90 routes during the death spiral. Fares on those routes are up 14% on average. Oakland to Newark: $135 to $288. Fort Myers to San Juan: $92 to $219. Kansas City to Newark up 66%. That’s reality. Not some BS number from a “study.” So @SenWarren tell me how this saves the consumer money? Cheap carriers in a market drop fares 21% across the board. Southwest did this in the 90s and saved Americans $68 BILLION over 20 years. Warren killed it. That’s what moronic politicians led by socialism do. Then with her own blind arrogance, she tweeted Spirit’s collapse is “a Biden win for flyers.” A win. 14,000 people are reading termination letters tonight. And she’s taking credit. This is socialism in 2026. A senator who’s never made payroll thinks she knows how to run a market better than the people who own and work in the company. She saved you a billion on imaginary paper. She cost you ten times that in real life. She didn’t protect consumers from anything. 14,000+ will go from working to welfare. She will make sure to blame billionaires, hardworking tax payers, AI, capitalism and whatever monster they will make up tomorrow hiding under your bed. Higher taxes. Fewer jobs. More expensive everything. She called it a win. I hope you enjoy winning.

plan A is to lock in, plan B is to blow my shit smoove off

my friends talk ab visiting mexico city like it’s japan

@exk200 On policy & payments side at least: Efficiencies of stables as a payment method beyond speed (Ex. Cost, programmability) are taken away in emerging markets as frameworks increasingly focus on FX controls, adding fees and friction (e.g. BR, SK, AR, etc). Trading is interesting tho

The opportunity for FX onchain is massive across trading, risk hedging, payments, banking etc Think there’s a couple reasons why FX stables haven’t taken off (yet): Regulatory: FX stables are best issued from the countries they originate from. Issue is, many don’t yet have clear stablecoin regulations. Examples: S Korea has been trying to launch sandboxes via bank consortiums for years now. Canada just opened up pathways that don’t involve securitization (5+ years after QCAD first launched) Infrastructure: Non USD issuers usually have to build infra (including off chain banking relationships) from scratch. Depending on where you are, this can be very challenging. I remember when Circle first launched EURC, they relied on OTC partners for the first 6+ months for mint/redeem which introduces friction in terms of both speed & cost Liquidity: Onchain AMM/DEX liquidity is thin for most pairs which prevents any sort of size. Coupled w capital requirements and infra dependencies above, this creates very inefficient markets. On top of that, FX trading is far more mature than crypto makers and toxic flow is a real problem. Ultimately, there’s a fundamental misalignment between MMs, issuers, and the ultimate end users of these stables. Think RFQ/propAMMs could work quite well here to facilitate size via direct integrations into issuer APIs Luckily all of the above have seen meaningful improvements in few months. As you can imagine, this is a topic we think about a lot at @tempo

Someone out there dreams of having your flaws and challenges

Company Brain @t_blom Every company has critical know-how scattered across people's heads, old Slack threads, support tickets, and databases, and AI agents can't operate like that. We think every company in the world is going to need a new primitive: a living map of how the company works that turns its own artifacts into an executable skills file for AI.

Monthly transfer volume in BRLA — a Brazilian real-backed stablecoin — has grown from near zero in early 2023 to roughly 400M/month by early 2026. Integration with Brazil’s instant payments network PIX has helped drive adoption.

i hope this email kills us both instantly

When you’re out with friends then suddenly remember you roundtripped 7 figures in 2021 and 2024

Look guys, it's actually really straightforward, a bunch of people staked their ETH on the Ethereum blockchain to earn yield, except they didn't want their capital to be locked up, so they actually staked with a liquid staking protocol called Lido who provided them a liquid staking receipt token called stETH, except they decided to juice their yield further by depositing their stETH receipt tokens into a restaking protocol called Eigenlayer, except they didn't want to lock up their capital, so they actually restaked with a liquid restaking protocol called KelpDAO who provided them with a liquid restaking receipt token called rsETH, except they decided to juice their yield further by depositing their rsETH tokens into a lending protocol called Aave so that they could open a leveraged looping position that borrows ETH against the rsETH collateral and restakes the ETH into rsETH which is then deposited as collateral, except it turns out rsETH used a cross-chain bridge called LayerZero that was hacked by north koreans causing rsETH to become undercollateralized and now these looping positions are stuck and unprofitable, and everyone is pointing fingers at each other, and also DeFi is a very serious industry

I'm dropping a thread of all the protocols that had to freeze their interop because of LayerZero being compromised. Let's go:

🚨 I don't think people realize how bad things are at @aave right now. All core markets are at 100% utilization, that includes $3 bil in USDT and $2 bil in USDC stuck! That means you CAN'T WITHDRAW your money! A long post on why and how we ended up here. When the rsETH exploit happened and AAVE incurred bad debt, whales like Justin Sun, MEXC exchange, and others immediately withdrew billions from AAVE. This instantly drained all available liquidity in key core markets like ETH, USDT, USDC and so on. Those first to withdraw got out, laggers got trapped. Initially, the ETH market hit 100% utilization, meaning you could not withdraw your ETH from AAVE. Worse, this also means the protocol can't process ETH liquidations should ETH price fall/crash. If you can't sell any ETH, you can't liquidate to cover debt obligations. That means the risk of more bad debt incurred by AAVE is increasing the longer its markets remain stuck. Nevertheless, users can still sell at a minor loss the aETHwETH tokens on Uniswap or similar aggregators. That exit door is the last one remaining for ETH depositors on AAVE. The same cannot be said by depositors of USDT and USDC. They are stuck. That's because AAVE lost over $6 billion in liquidity in the past 24h. As whales took out their money, USDT and USDC also hit 100% utilization. These markets are now also stuck with money locked. Panic is spreading and desperate times call for desperate measures. Some users decided to borrow against USDT/USDC and exit via other markets at a 10-25% loss (90-75% LTV). Basically you borrow GHO/DAI/USDe against your locked USDT/C. But as more liquidity leaves AAVE, more markets get to 100% utilization and get locked/stuck due to low liquidity. This is quickly cascading across all available markets. Luckily the crypto market was rather flat today so liquidation risks were marginal, but if things change there are billions in stablecoins and other assets locked on AAVE that can't process liquidations = more bad debt for AAVE. If users or related protocols that are stuck need access to their money to prevent liquidations or other critical function, they have a huge problem on their hands. Plus, nobody wants to deposit (or provide liquidity) in these markets now since your ETH, BTC, USDC/T could be stuck there for who know how long. As soon as any available liquidity is made available, it is instantly taken out by bots fighting to get out. As I wrote this I saw 250k in liquidity on USDC vanish in seconds. Then there is the bad debt question. There's over $200 mil in bad debt incurred by AAVE via rsETH that's like a hot potato. Nobody knows who will eventually pay this bill. If you didn't remove your assets from AAVE, you risk receiving at least part of that bill in some form. Not having access to your money is part of that risk too. Contagion is also extremely high. Many protocols and apps rely on AAVE for their earn mechanics. These protocols and their users are stuck too and may be forced to incur bad debt with no fault of their own. October 10th was a CEX driven crash, this is a DeFi risk mitigation failure of epic proportions. AAVE should have never onboarded rsETH as a collateral asset, at least not to the size of hundreds of millions that allowed the hacker to walk away (i.e. borrow) over $200M in ETH after posting fake collateral. Rumors on X are saying rsETH was onboarded by AAVE due to a conflict of interest (lobbying) by a given service provider. If true, this is a major failure of its governance structure (nothing new). The folks at @KelpDAO who manage rsETH also have a tough decision to make on who will actually pay for the $200M exploit. AAVE users? L2 rsETH users? Everyone affected gets a haircut to account for the loss? The AAVE team and its founder, Stani, have been quiet for over 20h since the exploit after initially announcing the rsETH market freeze. They have a pretty big problem on their hands since the whole protocol is at risk right now. Trust is already lost as AAVE is bleeding billions in TVL to the level of hitting 100% utilization on all core markets. Maybe some key actors in the space will step in to provide liquidity to stabilize the markets on AAVE before this gets even worse. I got lucky to get out of AAVE early when I first saw this. I also removed all assets from DeFi and will not touch any protocol in the next few weeks. Too much risk for a few percentage points in yield. If you found this informative, like, share, and follow @duonine

Current list of DeFi protocols with frozen markets/pauses ongoing after $280M rsETH exploit: - Aave V3 (could be in a bad debt) - SparkLend - Lido Earn - Fluid - Ethena - Compound - Yearn - LayerZero - Euler - Upshift - Pendle PT/YT tokens - Beefy