Camila Russo

@binji_x so good

(1/2): I have met this person at nearly every crypto conference I have ever attended, and by now I can usually identify him before he even reaches the registration desk, because he arrives wearing the unmistakable expression of a man who has crossed three time zones, answered forty-seven Telegram messages from people he does not like, and paid twelve euros for airport water in order to be physically present at a gathering devoted to the future, only to discover, almost immediately, that the future appears to consist largely of men standing beneath purple lighting and discussing distribution. He checks into the hotel, opens the conference app, scrolls through a schedule containing panels called things like “Reimagining Coordination at Scale” and “The New Institutional Frontier,” and feels, for one brief and embarrassing moment, the stirring of hope, because perhaps this will be the one, perhaps this will be the conference where somebody says something real, where a conversation escapes the gravitational pull of fundraising announcements, ecosystem grants, and whatever the phrase “go-to-market motion” is currently being asked to conceal. By ten in the morning he has received a tote bag made from allegedly regenerative fabric, a metal water bottle that leaks from the lid, a lanyard large enough to function as a municipal permit, and three invitations to side events taking place simultaneously in different parts of the city, each one described as “intimate,” despite having eight hundred RSVPs and a DJ flown in from Berlin. He goes to the first panel. A founder says we are still early and venture capitalist says the next billion users are coming. Eventually a moderator, with the glazed composure of somebody who has already moderated this exact conversation in Singapore, Dubai, Paris, Denver, and a yacht off Mykonos, asks what needs to happen for mass adoption. Everyone agrees that UX must improve and the audience nods with the solemnity of a parliamentary vote. Nothing has technically been said, but the applause is loud. By lunch he has participated in six conversations, all of which begin with “What are you working on?” and end with “We should definitely find a way to collaborate,” which in conference language means that both parties will add one another on Telegram, exchange a fire emoji beneath a future announcement post, and never again occupy the same emotional universe. He meets a man building infrastructure for autonomous agents, although the infrastructure is not yet built and the agents are not yet autonomous. He meets another man launching a protocol for decentralized reputation, who spends most of the conversation explaining which well-known investors already trust him. He meets a founder who says he is obsessed with user sovereignty, then glances every twenty seconds toward the entrance in case someone more important has arrived. By the evening he is standing in a cavernous venue once used to manufacture turbines, now filled with dry ice, ornamental lasers, and several thousand people discussing credible neutrality while trying to get past a velvet rope. There is free food, technically, although it consists of two miniature tacos placed on a slate tile by a person wearing black gloves, and there is free alcohol, abundantly, which may explain why the revolution against extractive intermediaries has temporarily organized itself around a sponsored bar requiring three wristbands and a QR code.

@lindaxie @willwarren Ahh congrats!! 💕

Personal news: my husband @willwarren and I are expecting a baby girl this winter and we couldn't be more excited! 😊

@sebaudet26 sorry to hear seb, all the best for what's next ✨

Perps, HIP-3, and the fight for on-chain derivatives Discussing this and more with @tahathinks, founder of @tradeparagon, the team letting you long or short crypto with index perps built on @HyperliquidX. LIVE at 12pm ET 👇 x.com/i/broadcasts/1…

Can't wait to kick off The Bootcamp tomorrow! We've got a stacked lineup of special guests this season: @arlery, CMO at Octant David Shamash, VC at Circle Ventures @lou3ee, Visual Director at Ethereum Foundation @paulhsu, Founder & CEO of Decasonic @whosknave, Prev: Fortune Fellow, Soon: AI Reporter at The Dispatch @kashvii, Social Marketing Lead at Boundless @CamiRusso, Founder of The Defiant @rinaldimanuel, Ecosystem at Monad To book your last-minute slot for the summer cohort, visit bootcamp.hy.pe or send us a DM.

KAST FACES BACKLASH OVER DELAYED TOKEN SALE & CONTROVERSIAL ToS Crypto-backed card company KAST's terms of service said depositing your crypto meant effectively selling it to KAST. Ether.FI CEO called them out on X. Then they rewrote the clause. Read more here: thedefiant.io/news/cefi/kast…

The worst part about Zohran Mamdani’s relentless America bashing is his ingratitude. America was already the most tolerant and prosperous nation on Earth when his wealthy family of Upper Caste Indian Colonizers in Uganda chose to come here over anywhere else in the world. Americans had spent over 200 years sacrificing, and building New York City into the place it was when they arrived. Yet he repays that legacy by spitting on their graves, painting them as nothing but bigots and oppressors. He acts this way while never having filled out a real job application, and never once worried about making rent or a living here. Zohran is a lifelong attention seeking narcissist who was handed every advantage, and he now devotes himself to reprimanding the country that gave his family sanctuary. He is truly the elitist bigot he pretends the men before him were.

Vote Defiant fam ✊

"I'm sad," @blockchainjames said in one of the most vulnerable takes we've seen. @CamiRusso talks with James Waugh about what it feels like to keep building in Ethereum while so much of crypto feels driven by greed, bad incentives, and people losing faith. And why what’s happening at @ensdomains feels so far from what Ethereum is supposed to stand for. Watch the full episode here x.com/DefiantNews/st…

Hard governance lesson in all this: Legitimacy is an asset in itself. Like neutrality, it’s slow to build and easy to erode. The test isn’t whether those exercising power have good intentions (or what they believe are good intentions). It’s whether the same actions would be considered legitimate regardless of who was exercising it! Imagine the exact same situation, the exact same actions but a different person/org doing all this. (veil of ignorance test) If that changes whether the arrangement feels acceptable then the legitimacy is borrowed from the individual.

@carlosdomingo Felicidades! 🎉

New milestone accomplished. Now a new era starts for us as a publicly traded company at NYSE under the ticker $SECZ (yes, you are meant to pronounce it SEXY). Thanks to all the employees, customers, partners and investors that helped us get here over the years. And for more to come.

Nick Johnson @nicksdjohnson holds 3.26M ENS tokens. The next biggest delegate holds 200K. That's 16x every other voter in the DAO, which is why @CamiRusso asked him, is there even a point in having this debate at all if he can just pass whatever proposal he wants? Nick admitted, "I don't want a DAO that is just Nick, the DAO." Full clip 👉 x.com/DefiantNews/st…

In February, Rocket Pool (@Rocket_Pool) had its biggest upgrade ever with Saturn 1: 🪐Cut bonds to 4 ETH from 8 ETH— half the capital to run a validator 🪐Megapools, which bundle validators and ~2.3x commission per ETH 🪐RPL → ETH-accrual asset — stakers earn real ETH yield, inflation phases out 🪐Instant rETH liquidity — withdrawal buffer kills exit-queue waits Darren Langley (@langerstwit) tells @CamiRusso what these changes unlock for Ethereum staking. 🚀

1/ Today, the Global Policy Strategy (GPS) team is publishing Ethereum Basics for Governments and Institutions, a non-technical primer to equip the leaders making policy and deployment decisions with an understanding of how Ethereum works, how it's governed, and how it compares with perceived alternatives.

@udiWertheimer hunt* and yes :(

@CamiRusso it's just a normal monday in crypto now

every jewish or israeli founder in crypto has to contend with conspiracy theories about being "deeply tied to israeli interests" this only happens in crypto and i'm sick of pretending it's not a thing if you're a spanish founder no one would accuse you of being a co-conspirator of the spanish government but if you're jewish then your project is definitely a mossad op polymarket has been accused of this, zcash has been accused of this, pumpfun has been accused of this, heck even i am routinely being accused of this and i just sell wizard jpegs you guys are welcome to keep wasting your time making up stories if you want. have fun. sam altman and dario are jewish too, the conspiracy runs deep. even zuck keep hating jews losers, and the jews will keep winning

we've reached the stage of the 2026 Jewish witch hunt where a project's early, tenuous connection to Bancor's founders, who happen to be Israeli, is enough to conclude that: 1) the project is "tied to Israeli interests," and 2) that's automatically disqualifying, because anything remotely connected to Israel must be bad. claim 1 is lazy and dumb. claim 2 is bigoted and vile.

We've been quiet recently because Mark Goodwin and I have been working to write the most comprehensive investigation into Polymarket's origins and ambitions to date. We found that Polymarket's "official" origin story, that Shayne Coplan founded the company alone in 2020 and then built "the company in his bathroom", is a lie. Polymarket really started years earlier as another company called TokenBnk that was deeply tied to Israeli interests, specifically a crypto company founded by Benjamin Netanyahu's niece and nephew. Coplan has actively tried to obfuscate this company from his story and it's not the only thing either. In Part 1 of this two-part series, we unravel the real history of Polymarket, directly connecting the company to Peter Thiel's efforts to resurrect controversial DARPA programs from its now defunct Information Awareness Office. Polymarket appears to have been chosen by Thiel and his associates to succeed in resurrecting DARPA's Policy Analysis Market where another Thiel-linked company, Augur, had previously failed. Stay tuned for Part 2, where we explore the current influence of prediction markets and Polymarket, including how an insidious effort to have prediction markets replace representative democracy as a governance model is already being slowly implemented by the White House. Read Part 1 here: unlimitedhangout.com/2026/06/invest…

We’re live now!

It's a rounding error.' @scottmelker explains why Strategy's Bitcoin sale isn't the crisis Crypto Twitter is making it out to be. Confidence question ≠ math problem 🧵👇 x.com/DefiantNews/st…