1DC

🚨 TODAY: Grayscale’s Chairman Barry Silbert says, “The "privacy" era in crypto has officially begun.”

🚨 THE AI COST CRISIS HAS STARTED. Microsoft reportedly told engineers to stop using Claude because AI bills were exploding, while Uber says its entire yearly AI budget was already destroyed by April.

We just wrapped what began as an 8-hour challenge - and it ran for 200 hours without a failure Shoutout to the team for the hardcore engineering behind F.03 and the robust Helix models powering it

Microsoft pulling Claude is the first, but not the last. The issue isn't that the tool isn't useful. The issue is that without context and oversight, the tool can spin forever and generates an enormous cost burden that, when cascaded across an entire employee population, makes using the tool economically untenable. 8090's Software Factory is the control plane that is becoming increasingly used by Enterprises to get the job done but do it in a smart and scaleable way.

After 5 months of silence, it's time to say it officially. Polkadot Africa is closing. This was never just a funded initiative. It was a movement, built by builders, dreamers across the continent who saw the promise of Web3 before it was fashionable to say so in Africa.

🦔Microsoft canceled its internal Claude Code licenses this week after token-based billing made the cost untenable, even for a company with effectively infinite cloud resources. Uber's CTO sent an internal memo warning the company burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in just four months. American AI software prices have jumped 20% to 37%, and GitHub (owned by Microsoft) is dropping flat-rate plans for usage-based billing across its products. My Take The AI subsidy era is ending in real time. The same company that put $13 billion into OpenAI and built the Azure infrastructure powering most of Anthropic's compute just looked at the bill from a competitor's coding tool and decided it was not worth paying. That is not a productivity failure on Anthropic's end. Token-based pricing is forcing every enterprise customer to confront the actual cost of running these models at scale, and the number turns out to be far higher than the flat-rate experiments suggested. This ties directly to my Gemini Flash post yesterday. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google all raised effective prices in the last six months. Enterprises that built workflows assuming AI costs would keep falling are now watching annual budgets evaporate in months. Two outcomes look likely from here. Either enterprises scale back AI usage to fit budgets, which slows the revenue ramp the labs need to justify their valuations ahead of IPOs, or the labs cut prices and absorb the losses, which makes the unit economics worse at exactly the wrong moment. Both paths land in the same place, the numbers stop working, and somebody has to take the writedown. Hedgie🤗