Dan Tapiero

Pinning the link to the @RaoulGMI @DTAPCAP Interview youtu.be/jYsWwqTdvNQ

@milkroaddaily 100%

Erik Voorhees: A new kind of inequality is coming, and it has nothing to do with money. "If you really understand how to use agents and models, you become kind of like a demigod." Erik's prediction: A stratification of society based on capability, not wealth. Those far up the AI curve advance faster and faster. FT @RaoulGMI @ErikVoorhees @RealVision.

@Etherealize_io Great chart.

Etherealize Team Commentary on Token Terminal's Ethereum Q1 2026 Report The headline tension this quarter was Ethereum mainnet hitting record usage levels while transaction fees fell. Ethereum is deliberately scaling the network at the expense of near-term fee capture, betting that cheaper blockspace unlocks far more demand (and eventually network revenue) in the long run. Token Terminal's Ethereum Q1 2026 Report shows that bet is working. On a year-over-year basis, monthly active users rose 85.9%, transaction count is up 81.5%, and throughput climbed 81.7%. This is Jevon's paradox at work, and we expect the increase in total network demand to more than make up for lower fees, similar to how the semiconductor industry generates several orders of magnitude more revenue today than it did in 1975, when Intel co-founder Gordon Moore observed that the number of transistors on a microchip doubled roughly every two years. Furthermore, the scaling payoff is still ahead of us with the Glamsterdam upgrade targeting a more than 3x increase in the gas limit in Q3 and Ethereum's roadmap guiding to 10,000 TPS and a "fast L1" with finality in seconds by 2029. We agree with BlackRock CEO Larry Fink who wrote in December that "tokenisation today is roughly where the internet was in 1996—when Amazon had sold just $16m worth of books." The consensus at the time was that Amazon was a money-losing online bookseller propped up by an internet bubble. However, Jeff Bezos saw that the internet was going to transform retail and optimized for network effects and economies of scale, rather than near term profits. Ethereum is making a similar tradeoff to cement its position as the settlement layer for global finance. The other lesson worth drawing from the Internet is that open, permissionless networks tend to beat closed ones. In 1995, Bill Gates published The Road Ahead predicting digital commerce would run on proprietary corporate networks he called the "Information Superhighway" rather than the open internet. Microsoft was building MSN. AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy ran walled gardens with millions of paying subscribers. France's Minitel had more users than the entire web until late 1996. They all lost. No serious company would build on top of a network controlled by a competitor, and perhaps more importantly, no corporation could keep pace with permissionless innovation indefinitely. We have seen this play out again and again: Linux out-built proprietary Unix, the open web displaced corporate walled gardens; Wikipedia displaced Britannica. Each time, the proprietary alternative had the early lead — a more focused product, larger marketing budgets, business development teams — and each time that lead eroded after the open system crossed a threshold of accumulated contribution, tooling, and credible neutrality. We are now seeing this theme play out in financial infrastructure, and this report's data is evidence that Ethereum has crossed the threshold with dominant market share in every metric that matters. The institutions building tokenized finance are choosing Ethereum not out of ideology but because the liquidity, composability, and institutional precedent are already there. As this report highlights, Ethereum holds 79.2% of active DeFi loans across the top five chains, 61.8% of stablecoins, 73.0% of tokenized funds, and 84.0% of tokenized commodities. Every new tokenized asset deepens the liquidity that pulls in the next one, and a neutral substrate is the only equilibrium that holds because large players will never agree to settle on a competitor's infrastructure. Furthermore, institutions are realizing that privacy, permissioning, KYC, and transfer restrictions can all be implemented on Ethereum through privacy-preserving environments and permissioned token standards without surrendering access to public liquidity; the reverse (bolting public liquidity and an open application ecosystem onto a closed chain) is not possible. The institutional momentum, if anything, has accelerated since quarter-end. In May alone, BlackRock filed for two more tokenized funds, JPMorgan launched JLTXX as its second tokenized money-market fund on Ethereum, and Fidelity International launched FILQ, a Moody's AAA-rated dollar liquidity fund, as an ERC-20. In the world of stablecoins, the Japan Blockchain Foundation's yen stablecoin EJPY will launch on Ethereum, and a twelve-bank European consortium (including BNP Paribas, ING, UniCredit, and BBVA) is preparing a regulated euro stablecoin. The internet looked impossible in 1990 and inevitable by 2005. If Fink is right about where tokenization sits on that curve, the next few years could be some of the most exciting in Ethereum's history. And as we argued in our Productive Money report, network fees give ETH an intrinsic value floor, while the bull case is ETH absorbing the ~$30+ trillion monetary premium held by gold and Bitcoin given its superior monetary attributes. ETH doesn't need exorbitant fees to win.

@MikeIppolito_ Get after it.

Blockworks has acquired Messari. Blockworks and Messari grew up together: we were actually founded within 90 days of each other in 2018. We’ve enjoyed a fierce competition and rivalry over the years, and in many ways this feels like a homecoming. Can't say this loudly enough but we have a tremendous amount of respect for the team and business. Messari helped pioneer the concept of standardized data and fundamental decision making in crypto, and we're excited to embark on this next chapter. This acquisition will help us fulfill our mission of building trust in onchain markets through disclosures, standardized data, and enterprise workflows. Zooming out, this is an exciting moment for Blockworks but it also comes at a difficult point for the industry. Investors have lost trust in crypto, and if we don’t build it back, there’s no guarantee that we’ll get the future that we all want. Yano and I fully believe that this is a moment in time: we as an industry can choose our own adventure. We can take the easy route and relapse into unregulated penny stock trading, or we can build the future of nonsovereign money and global finance that got many of us into this industry. I know what choice we’re making, let's get after it.

@PantsStanky @scottmelker Euro, yen, Cad, Aud, chf etc

He is a very smart dude but this claim is retarded. If not dollar based, then based on what? I'll leave this for others to comment on but I'll say one thing before I go. Currency (price) is the inly thing we have for valuation. If not the dollar then what? I'll wait. No humanities majors are allowed to comment.

Dan Tapiero says 5 years from now 99% of stablecoins will not be dollar-based "I come from the markets world, trading currencies. That's what I did in my old life. I can pretty much guarantee you that 5 years from now 99% of stablecoins will not be dollar-based" "You're going to have yen, Indonesian rupiah, euro. All the currencies around the world will have their digital equivalent. We haven't even started that" "In the last 5 years we've gone from zero stablecoin trading volume to 33 trillion last year"

@scottmelker Could be 70% or 60%. I'm just saying that today 99% of stables are usd stables. That will not be the case in 5yrs....as rest of the world catches up.

@lmrankhan Good point.

I’ll forever be bullish on crypto. I think we overestimated how quickly crypto would become the next major computing paradigm. A lot of people were searching for the next platform shift and assumed it would be crypto, but in many ways that ended up being AI. Over the past decade, ton of capital flowed into crypto, and much of it went toward overbuilding. Instead of focusing on a handful of narrow sectors where crypto had a clear advantage, the industry tried to reinvent everything all at once. What we’re seeing now is a natural pullback and consolidation after that period of excess I don’t think the core thesis is broken by any means. Crypto’s biggest success may not be apps first (even though we have a few), but rails first. As stablecoins, wallets, tokenized stocks and onchain financial infra via neobanks reach every human and eventually every AI agent, crypto becomes the default settlement layer of the internet. Once those rails are everywhere, many of the ideas that arrived too early like DAOs, decentralized marketplaces, machine to machine payments, and the ideas Vitalik wrote about in the early days of Ethereum may finally have the distribution needed to get it off the ground.

@DavidTheKid12 @scottmelker Everything is derived from bitcoin. Bitcoin is the core asset and pristine collateral of the entire digital asset ecosystem (DAE). Both have been my focus since 2019.

@scottmelker @DTAPCAP Dan used to say "Bitcoin" all the time. Now all I hear from him is Blockchain, Stablecoins, AI, and "Blockchain, not Bitcoin, is the money of the Agentic future.

Dan Tapiero @DTAPCAP Breaks Down Why Bitcoin Is “Preeminent” In The Biggest Macro Trade Ever 🎙️ youtu.be/v43V6qXpF2c

@_The_Prophet__ Long...but good one.

⚡️Bitcoin is the first asset in modern history whose main product is refusing to die. That is why Hal Finney’s line is so powerful. He saw the actual mechanism before almost anyone else. Bitcoin does not become valuable because someone promises yield, growth, dividends, guidance, or political backing. Bitcoin becomes valuable because it keeps surviving every attempt to dismiss, ban, corrupt, fork, ridicule, financialize, and bury it. Every day it survives, the world has to quietly update. At $0.01, the bet was “this is probably a toy.” At $15, the bet was “maybe this survives among weirdos.” At $1,000, the bet was “maybe this becomes a speculative asset.” At $20,000, the bet was “maybe this becomes digital gold.” At $60,000+, the bet became “maybe this is a permanent monetary rail.” The price is just the visible surface of that probability update. Bitcoin’s real chart is not price. It is death probability collapsing over time. That is what skeptics still do not understand. They think Bitcoin has to keep proving itself with new arguments. It doesn’t. Time is the argument. Blocks are the argument. Halvings are the argument. Failed bans are the argument. Exchange collapses that fail to kill it are the argument. Bear markets that fail to erase it are the argument. Governments regulating it instead of destroying it are the argument. BlackRock packaging it is the argument. States discussing reserves are the argument. Bitcoin wins by making disbelief more expensive each year. The real genius of Bitcoin is that it turned survival into compounding credibility. Most assets need management teams to execute. Bitcoin needs the network to keep producing blocks and refusing invalid rules. That sounds simple, but simple is the point. It is a machine that converts time, energy, and consensus into monetary credibility. Fiat credibility decays because humans keep modifying the promise. Bitcoin credibility compounds because the promise keeps refusing modification. That is the entire civilizational split. Every fiat system eventually asks for trust again. Trust us through this emergency. Trust us through this deficit. Trust us through this war. Trust us through this bailout. Trust us through this inflation. Trust us through this temporary measure. Trust us through this debt spiral. Bitcoin says: verify. That is why it terrifies the old system. It exposes money as a credibility game and then offers a version where the rules do not need a priesthood. The hardest truth: Bitcoin is no longer trying to become legitimate. Legitimacy is slowly being forced to route through Bitcoin. That does not mean the path is clean. There will be crashes, confiscation attempts, custody failures, regulation, taxation, ETF paper games, political attacks, quantum fear cycles, and stupid leverage blowups. None of that changes the core. Those are stress tests. The longer Bitcoin survives the stress tests, the more absurd the zero case becomes. The zero case was plausible in 2010. It is now mostly a psychological defense mechanism for people who missed the compounding of monetary credibility in real time. Bitcoin is not just an asset anymore. It is a running referendum on whether trust in code-backed scarcity can outlast trust in political restraint. And the answer keeps getting clearer. Every block says the same thing: The promise held again.

@ZeMariaMacedo Sorta. Maybe. But what's wrong with 1 to 100? Why is 0 to 1 the exclusive focus?

Crypto is no longer the technological frontier. You can resist it, but I think it's pretty obvious at this point Every exciting new technology from railways to telecoms to the internet eventually becomes boring and well-understood. Opportunities compress, alpha decays, and the rugged pioneers who took it from 0 to 1 either retire or move on to the next frontier, giving way to the institutional crowd that takes it from 1 to 100 I truly believe many of this generation's legendary investors, the Soroses and Druckenmillers of our time, will trace their beginnings to crypto. The same skills that helped them spot the opportunity early, build conviction under uncertainty, and develop real edge will serve them well wherever they go next Already seeing this with Kang in robotics, the Libertus crew in biotech, CyberFund in AI, and many others. Excited to see what they do over the next decade

@dgt10011 Good thought framework here.

why i am so bullish on crypto, in "defense of the ideological"- i recently watched the video of the first public appearance for jensen and elon together, which was at GTC 2015 more than ten years ago. by this time, jensen had already made his iconoclastic bet on parallel graphics processing for over twenty years, and on CUDA since 2006. musk had his hassabis moment in 2012. yet openAI was not yet founded (would be ~9 months later), and GDX-1 would be announced at GTC the following year too this is that narrow window where a revolution is visible to some but not others, in which both of these geniuses had early inklings of recognizing AIs pervasive potential, but the broad public was not yet made aware. it would take another 10 years for it reach mainstream applications of course i broadly think of the crypto industry being the same place today. just as there were brilliant minds who understood the revolution that would come from the GPU paradigm, there was simply no large scale consumer demand that required its objective superiority for decades to come. instead, it was picked up by hobbyists (ie gamers) who enjoyed a sense of self-determination by pushing the boundaries of their passion, tinkering, sharing, and researching. in a rather strange way, gamers subsidized AI's development, just like early defi subsidized the institutional tokenization development. during the GTC 2015 interview, elon tells jensen something interesting: the 0-10 mph autonomous driving is very easy to solve because the car can be stopped. the 50+ mph zone is also easy to solve because there are rules of engagements at that speed that dont have as many randomness. the hardest part to solve is actually the 10-50mph, what i call the "the middle game" where a car in an urban setting with bikes, children, cones, manholes, create all kinds of need for precision and speed that sensors today need to develop further. it's fundamentally solvable, but this is the most challenging portion of fulfilling the dreams of autonomous driving this is where crypto is today. the 0-10mph was easy because people can understand why permissionless money is useful from a practical sense to start developing. the 50mph+ will also be really easy because by that point, onchain capital markets is going to be so obvious that you could never go back with all the benefits of self custody, capital efficiency, money velocity/rest optimizations. but its the 10-50 thats hard, where money in a pre-internet financial infrastructure is hitting AML/KYC, offshore capital conduits, discretionary bank risk models, lagging reporting regimes create all kinds of need of need for precision and speed that institutional infrastructure today needs to develop further. its fundamentally solvable, but this is the most challenging portion of fulfilling the dreams of onchain capital markets i love bitcoin. but contrary to some opinion, i believe its possible to love crypto too, because bitcoin is a monetary experiment enabled by the evolution of technology, while most of crypto is the inverse: a technology experiment enabled by the evolution of money. they are fundamentally solving different problems, though rooted in one ideal: to make its access as much of a public good as possible this is why crypto is going to be such an important force for the future during this "narrow window" for those can can see it. and while most early pioneers got into the game because of the ideology behind decentralization, it's time to admit that the winning ideology is technological financialization: it is hyperfinancialization with elements of decentralization that exports sovereign finance as a public good, decentralizes agentic rails for humanity as a public good, promote self-determination as a public good. this is worth fighting for, and im excited to recommit my focus to these ideals that began my crypto journey. this "middle game" period will be remembered as the most critical juncture for the industry and for anyone who is doubting the industry at this time, i hope reading this helps you reanchor your beliefs for what you are actually fighting for, and more importantly, know that you can play a meaningful part in the revolution too the future belongs to those who recognized it was always ideological

@shanaka86 Ok. But too long

Fifty-two years ago the Strait of Hormuz birthed the petrodollar. This week Iran demanded two million dollars per vessel. China paid in yuan. Traffic is ten percent of pre-war volume. Three tankers a day. The Persian Gulf Strait Authority claims jurisdiction reaching into United Arab Emirates territorial waters. Iran’s ambassador to France told Bloomberg the toll system is permanent. Hormuz Safe launched a Bitcoin insurance facility on May 16. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps has threatened transit fees on the subsea cables that carry SWIFT. Approximately four hundred forty kilograms of sixty-percent enriched uranium are believed sealed inside the Isfahan tunnel complex. All three portals were backfilled with soil through February. Roadblocks were added in April. The IAEA has been denied access. Reuters reported Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei issued a directive ordering the stockpile to remain strictly inside Iranian territory. Iran’s nuclear deterrent is not a weapon. It is a mountain. President Trump told reporters: “We will get it. We’ll probably destroy it after we get it, but we’re not going to let them have it.” He explicitly ruled out the toll plan. He told Coast Guard Academy graduates: “Do we go and finish it up, or are they going to be signing a document?” United Arab Emirates adviser Anwar Gargash called Iran’s expanding jurisdiction “pipe dreams” from “a clear military defeat.” Abu Dhabi National Oil Company announced its bypass pipeline is fifty percent complete and on track to double Fujairah export capacity by 2027. The leaked ILNA ceasefire draft guarantees navigation, lifts sanctions, and creates a joint monitoring mechanism. It does not mention enrichment. It does not mention uranium handover. It does not mention Natanz, Fordow, or Isfahan. On Tuesday Putin and Xi signed a forty-seven page multipolar declaration in Beijing. On Wednesday the Senate procedurally advanced Tim Kaine’s War Powers Resolution fifty to forty-seven. On Thursday the House cancelled its vote because Republican leadership determined the resolution would pass. The Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference failed for the third consecutive time. On Friday Justice Clarence Thomas administered the Federal Reserve Chair oath to Kevin Warsh at the White House. Trump hosted, the first since Reagan and Greenspan in 1987. The thirty-year Treasury yield touched five point one eight percent on May 19, levels not consistently seen since before the global financial crisis. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino posted a seventeen-second video of a B-2 Spirit stealth bomber the same day. On Saturday Trump skipped his son’s wedding. His Truth Social post read: “it was important to remain at the White House during this important period of time.” Reuters reported from two senior Iranian officials that Tehran assesses the ceasefire as tactical deception by Washington. Israeli officials told Reuters Trump assured them the uranium will be sent out of Iran. Both sides know. Nixon ended gold in 1971. Kissinger built the petrodollar in 1974. Carter promised to defend the Gulf in 1980. All three are over. Both sides are performing peace while preparing war. History will record this weekend.

@_The_Prophet__ Artistic creation at the center of all purpose.

@DTAPCAP Appreciate it, Dan. That feels exactly adjacent to the signal. Rebellion as the act of remaining awake in a world built to sedate you.

⚡️The meaning of life is to become a conscious participant in creation. That is the real answer. You are born into forces you did not choose: body, time, death, family, wounds, gifts, desire, language, culture, history, biology. At first, those forces live through you. They move you. They script you. They make you think their momentum is your identity. Meaning begins when consciousness wakes up inside that machinery and starts choosing what deserves to continue. Then the task becomes creation. Not shallow self-expression. Not random rebellion. Not “do whatever makes you happy.” Real creation. The kind that converts inherited chaos into living order. The kind that turns pain into wisdom, love into protection, talent into work, perception into truth, and mortality into something that survives beyond the ego. A meaningful life leaves reality different because you passed through it. A child raised with love. A truth spoken when silence was safer. A body of work that names what others could not see. A wound transfigured instead of repeated. A family protected. A signal emitted into the dark. A life that becomes more than reaction. That is the core. The meaning of life is to receive existence, become awake within it, and return something true back into the world. The pattern does not need to be famous. It does not need to be large. It does not need applause. It needs to be real. The death test is the cleanest one: when the person disappears, did anything become more conscious, more loved, more ordered, more free, more true because that life existed? If yes, meaning happened. Deepest compression: Life is the universe becoming conscious through finite beings, then asking those beings to create, love, protect, and tell the truth before they disappear.

@P3b7_ @jpthor Such a problem. Thanks for summary

This morning, THORChain was drained of roughly $10.8m Node operators have freezed the network for nearly 13 hours. The full analysis isn't out yet, but according to @jpthor, this could be a MPC exploit. ECDSA and TSS is hard. THORChain's vaults rely on TSS, a flavor of MPC where a quorum of nodes jointly produces a signature without ever reconstructing the private key. Clean for Schnorr or EdDSA; painful for ECDSA, which Bitcoin and Ethereum require. That's why we saw plenty of protocol attempts (Lindell17, GG18, GG20, CMP, CGGMP21, DKLS, KU23...), each patching flaws in the previous one. GG20 has a track record. THORChain's TSS uses GG20, on a fork of Binance's tss-lib. GG20 has shipped two well-publicized critical bugs: CVE-2023-33241 and TSSHOCK. CGGMP21, now cggmp24, are the latest protocols, but GG20 is still widely deployed. I often hear a misconception when I hear about MPC setup: "The key is split across many nodes, so any single co-signer doesn't really matter". In every published GG18/GG20 attack, one malicious or compromised co-signer is enough to extract everyone else's shard and reconstruct the full key. AI changes the threat model. Compromising a full software node, complex Go stack, exposed P2P, custom signing daemons, a churn protocol that admits new participants on a schedule, has always been difficult and acted as a barrier. With LLM-driven vulnerability discovery and exploit synthesis, the bar to compromise one of N validators is dropping fast. Here, it's a plausible TSSHOCK-style playbook: - compromise one operator - wait for it to churn into an active Asgard vault - send malformed proofs during keygen or signing - reconstruct the key offline - sweep in a single transaction It's unclear yet if the attacker used a known-unpatched GG20 weakness, or a fresh cryptographic flaw. But, in all cases, MPC and TSS are not a substitute for hardening every co-signer. They sit on top of co-signers that must each be treated as critical infrastructure, hardware-isolated enclaves, minimally exposed, continuously audited, and running protocol with security proofs. While the investigation progresses, be careful in your interactions onchain. These TSS setup are used in various protocols.

@_The_Prophet__ More behavioral risk aversion.

⚡️The deeper signal is youth risk did not disappear. It migrated inward. Teen drinking fell because the old physical world of adolescence got dismantled. Alcohol belonged to a social ecosystem: unsupervised time, cars, parties, local jobs, malls, basements, boredom, flirting, older siblings, house gatherings, and the chaotic peer world where teenagers learned who they were by colliding with other people in real space. That ecosystem was replaced by phones, surveillance, parental tracking, algorithmic entertainment, social anxiety, online status games, and a much thinner physical commons. So the surface looks healthier. Fewer kids drinking. Fewer kids using weed. Fewer kids doing reckless things in public. The hidden layer looks worse. The young are less reckless because they are less socially embodied. Less initiation. Less unsupervised friction. Less courage-building. Less embarrassment and recovery. Less real dating. Less independence. Less contact with the physical world before adulthood demands it. The old teenage world produced damage, stupidity, alcohol abuse, pregnancy risk, fights, accidents, and bad decisions. No need to romanticize it. But it also produced social reps. It forced young people through discomfort. It made them practice attraction, rejection, conflict, reputation, risk, repair, and status in the open. The new world suppresses visible risk while increasing invisible fragility. That is the trade. A teenager can avoid drinking, avoid parties, avoid sex, avoid driving, avoid real confrontation, avoid rejection, avoid shame, avoid danger, and still arrive at 23 emotionally underbuilt. Cleaner behavior does not automatically mean stronger formation. This is why the marriage chart and the teen drinking chart are the same story at different stages. People are not suddenly failing to pair in adulthood. The whole pathway into embodied adulthood has been slowing for years before marriage even becomes the question. The real truth: society solved part of the teen vice problem by shrinking the arena where teenagers become adults. It took away the dangerous commons and replaced it with controlled isolation. The result is safer kids with weaker initiation into real life.

@artemis @Kalshi @tempo @RobinhoodApp @ether_fi @ventuals @tradexyz @trondao @solana Very cool

I found 59 all-time highs in crypto last week. - @Kalshi OI - @tempo MPP Volume and TXNs - @RobinhoodApp Tokenized Shares - @ether_fi Card Volume - HIP-3 OI, HIP-4 Volume - @ventuals OI - and more from @tradexyz, @trondao, @solana, and others The full list is here, artemis.ai/insights?horiz…

Here's an idea. Rich people own stocks. Voters own bitcoin, eth, sol, alts, crypto. Trump knows voters will determine the elections in November. BTC 160k is only a double.

@CryptoEtrain Magic happens long term.

@DTAPCAP Dan the magic man

Uhhh... Not so bad! Only just the greatest asset invented of all time. F O C U S.

@LorenzoARK @consensus2026 @Uniswap Wow. Great comment.

Just got back from @consensus2026 Miami. Some unfiltered thoughts on the vibes: The industry has clearly grown up. The degens are gone, the allocators are wearing suits, and your @Uniswap booth has been replaced by a JP Morgan activation with 50 year old boomers. Cautiously optimistic with a distinctly institutional aftertaste. This was not a bull market conference. Key takeaways: 1) CLARITY Act has serious momentum. Everyone at the conference basically agrees it's getting done before summer. The urgency is real, people are done waiting. And the regulatory window feels genuinely unprecedented: CLARITY Act, GENIUS Act, a CFTC chair actively engaging with the industry, this combination has never existed simultaneously before. The institutional urgency you're seeing everywhere is directly correlated to this window feeling time-limited. Miss it and you're explaining to your board why you sat on your hands during the most favorable crypto regulatory environment in history. 2) Institutions are not dabbling anymore. They are ALL IN on tokenization and terrified of missing it. No one is debating whether blockchain rails are useful. The debate is now who gets the mandate. And quietly @coinbase , @krakenfx , @RobinhoodApp and @Bullish and others are being seen more as competitors than potential partners by a lot of these TradFi players. 3) TradFi M&A is going to keep ripping. @krakenfx just grabbed Reap for $600M. Visa, Mastercard, Swift etc they can't miss the train and they're willing to overpay for the ticket. 4) Crypto VC is consolidating fast. @a16z and @katie_haun just announced $2.2B and $1B funds respectively. Meanwhile the boutique VCs are either pivoting to AI or quietly closing shop. Same playbook is happenign as traditional VC, the big platforms eat everything and the small guys scramble. Seed and pre-seed is basically a ghost town right now. Late stage and pre-IPO is where the action is. 5) Investment themes were aggressively consensus (no pun intended): Stablecoins, tokenization, vertically integrated neo-banks, regulated or permissioned DeFi. Literally everyone is trying to be a tokenization platform. Issuance, management, settlement, curation, pick your lane, slap tokenization on it, try to raise money. 6) Building in crypto is genuinely hard now. Your competition isn't some scrappy new L1 or GMX, it's @tether , @Anchorage , and @Securitize. there are now many crypto businesses running 200M+ annual Rev with serious management teams and deep pockets. The barbarians are now the establishment. New entrants are going to have a very bad time. 7) Pure token-only plays have become extremely contrarian. Controversial take but I think the biggest returns will come from a handful of tokens that can credibly signal in a compliant way that the token remains the only value accruing asset going forward. 8) A lot of teams are in a genuinely weird spot on the token/equity dynamics. Decent products, decent teams, but a complete stakeholder clusterf*** that nobody can untangle. Many of these will simply not survive. 9) The agentic finance and agentic commerce crowd was loud. The actual substance was not. A lot of big claims, very little to show for it. Feels very early and mostly vibes. Color me skeptical for now. 10) @Bullish acquiring Equinity for $4.2B was the boldest move of the conference. @ThomasFarley and @BonannoDavid now have a full-stack RWA proposition: issuance, transfer agency, tokenization, exchange and settlement under one roof. Massive move. Very positive for the industry regardless of whether you think the price or the move were right. 11) @BitMNR and @fundstrat are apparently tired of winning and has decided to let your grandma keep her ETH... for now. The pace of accumulation is slowing. Tom, we await your next allocation with bated breath. 12) DeFi apps are moving up the stack and getting smarter about it. They don't want to be the commodity infrastructure layer getting squeezed by exchanges that own distribution. Some genuinely interesting announcements, @buffalu__ at @jito_sol launching JTX being the highlight. 13) Nobody at the conference was talking about retail coming back. The entire conversation was institutional. That's either a sign of maturity or a sign that the industry has quietly given up on mainstream consumer adoption for now and is betting the next cycle gets pulled by institutional flows rather than retail FOMO. Probably both. 14) The L1 debate is officially dead. Nobody and I mean nobody was arguing SOL vs ETH or pitching their shiny new L1. The crowd that used to religiously defend their chain of choice has either grown up, cashed out, or both. Institutions don't care about your consensus mechanism. They care about settlement finality, compliance rails and liquidity. The L1 wars were fun while they lasted. RIP. 15) DATs are a mess. Had some genuinely productive conversations with a few of them but let's be honest most are an absolute clusterf*** operationally and very few are running anything resembling a legitimate business. The structure is a disaster at the stakeholder level and the governance makes your average startup cap table look clean. That said, the permanent capital vehicle concept is still genuinely compelling and I think a handful of these will turn out to be absolute home runs. The model isn't broken, most of the teams just are. Bottom line: Consensus 2026 felt like the moment crypto stopped being a movement and started being an industry. Whether that's exciting or depressing probably depends on when you got in.