Ian Tan

Four moments from LEAP EAST. A small glimpse of a week we’ll never forget. 🇭🇰🤖 #ShadowCombatLeague #LEAPEAST2026 #RobotCombat

Last min decision to be Tokyo for 4 days - loads to do but happy to catch up w folks if you’re in town (:

Rex Tso gets the job done. 🥊 A clash of two Hong Kong icons brought skill, strategy, and unforgettable moments inside the SCL arena. Respect to both Rex Tso and Yat Siu for putting on a show. Who’s next? 👀 #ShadowCombatLeague #RexTso #YatSiu

Day 3 at LEAP EAST. More demos. More conversations. More people experiencing the future of robot combat. If you’re at LEAP EAST, stop by and say hi. #LEAPEAST2026 #ShadowCombatLeague #RobotCombat

BREAKING: Saun has escaped the arena. Current status: In the wild. 🌿🤖 Proceed with caution. #SaunCombatLeague #ShadowCombatLeague

update: after careful deliberation from the team in the last 24 hours SCL has made the decision to migrate off Base and onto the @Robinhoodcrypto chain this tactful pivot was not made lightly our sincere appreciation goes out to Base and the community

Tomorrow. One stage. Three special guests. We’re bringing Shadow Combat League to LEAP East 2026 with Yat Siu, Rex Tso, and Yu Yau Pui. 📍 Hong Kong 🗓️ July 8 | 4:00–6:00 PM (HKT) Streaming live on: ▶️ YouTube • ✖️ X • 🎥 Kick • 📸 Instagram • 🎵 TikTok Don’t miss it. #LEAPEast2026 #ShadowCombatLeague #RobotCombat #HumanoidRobots #ArtificialIntelligence #Robotics #AI #FutureOfSports #CombatSports #TechInnovation #HongKong #Startup #Web3 #AnimocaBrands #LiveStream

A champion enters the arena. We’re excited to welcome Rex Tso as our special guest at Shadow Combat League during LEAP EAST 2026. 📍 Hong Kong 📅 8 July 2026 The future of combat sports is here. #ShadowCombatLeague #RexTso #LEAPEAST2026

Nothing happens overnight. Behind every robot, every fight, and every event is a team putting in the work. Next stop: LEAP EAST 2026 🇭🇰 Powered by @animocabrands. #ShadowCombatLeague #LEAPEAST2026

Is introspection bad for founders? I’ve been pondering an apparent contradiction. To build something ambitious, you seem to need dissatisfaction. Almost every exceptional founder I’ve met has a deep dissatisfaction with the world, themselves, or both. Almost every tradition we’d call wisdom points the other way (buddhism, stoicism, meditation etc). The advice is almost always the same: want less. Be grateful. Become more content. Those two ideas don’t seem to fit together. Marc Andreessen has made his choice. He recently explained why he’ll never take ayahuasca. “There’s a possibility that there’s a better version of you or me on the other side,” he said, “but I’m not willing to find out.” He knows people who went looking for enlightenment and came back different. More chill. Less anxious. They quit their companies. I understand that fear. I’ve been on silent meditation retreats with part of me hoping it wouldn’t work too well. What if becoming more content also meant becoming less ambitious? For a while I assumed those two things rose and fell together. Now I’m not so sure. The people I know who meditate the most don’t seem less driven. If anything, they’re harder to distract. That seems to go against @pmarca point. Then I started wondering whether I’d mixed two things together. Maybe anxiety doesn’t create drive. Perhaps it simply claims credit for it. Five-year-olds don’t seem to need imposter syndrome before they become obsessed with Lego. Or dinosaurs. Or trains. They disappear into things because they’re interesting. The desire to build seems to arrive long before the anxiety, the "drive". Perhaps anxiety arrives later and latches onto whatever already has momentum. That could explain it. You can spend years trying to prove something. To yourself. To the father who wasn’t there, or the one who was always there but never satisfied. That sort of motivation clearly works. But does it create the innate desire to build? Or does it simply find the desire that was already there and recruit it? Elon Musk seems genuinely fascinated by rockets and going to mars. He also comes across as someone still trying to prove something to the kids who bullied him at school. Those don’t strike me as competing explanations. They look like two different engines that happen to be bolted together. Maybe that’s why meditation and introspection looks dangerous. If you think anxiety is the engine, then losing anxiety feels like losing the engine. But if anxiety has just been taking credit all this time, the picture changes completely. Some people disappear into therapy or meditation or trips and lose interest in startups. Others come back even more driven. That might seem like a contradiction. But really it looks more like a sorting process. Some motives survive being examined. Others don’t. That’s what makes Andreessen’s quote so interesting. “I’m not willing to find out.” It’s an unusual sentence from someone whose career has largely consisted of running toward uncertainty. Of course I’d like this theory to be true. It’s a convenient theory for an ambitious person to have. Could be right. On the other hand it’s exactly the sort of story ambitious people invent because they’d like it to be true. Hard to tell. But I do think the real risk was never losing an innate desire to build. It’s discovering that what you thought was your calling was really just anxiety. That you just spent twenty years trying to become a billionaire to impress a girl who rejected you when you were fifteen. That you aren't actually all that passionate about B2B SaaS.

I'm excited to launch Base Weekly with Episode 1 scheduled for Saturday 2am UTC! ➥ The start of a new show which will explore all that @base has to offer! ➥ I'll be joined by @Nibel_eth, @AhaanRaizada and @baseapac friends as we start the Base Weekly journey! We'll take a look at the current state of the chain and what we are excited about as we move into the second half of 2026. ➥ We'll cover the latest emerging themes of the week, highlighting some of the standout teams and events. ➥ There will be plenty of opportunity for community involvement. Come along, tell us what you looking at across Base, what you are trading, and fire in any questions you want answering. ↛. We go live at the below times. Set your reminders in the comments and we look forward to seeing you there; Saturday Midday Australia Saturday 10am Asia Saturday 2am UTC Friday 7pm Pacific Time

MECHA

Working with Peter in one video. Victor knows the feeling. #SCL #StartupLife

For those With Skill I firmly believe Upshot is one of the final frontiers for retail to do well!!! If we can get more people earning a McDonalds Salary on this, i’m sure it can be a new platform for Gen Zs and Millennials to get ahead… Then we’ll do our best to scale to be Higher than a McDonald’s Salary.

"Nitro Zeus!" Meanwhile... our robots. 🤖😂 #SCL #Transformers #Robotics

I’ve been thinking about how we discover our limits. I think the first time it happens to most people is through sport. When I was a kid I won sports day every year. Then one year another boy absolutely thrashed me. I remember walking away from that race with a strange feeling. I knew I’d run as fast as I could. There wasn’t another gear I’d somehow failed to find. If we’d run the race again the next day, the result would probably have been the same. It took me years to understand why that moment stayed with me. It wasn’t because I’d lost a race. It was because I’d discovered a limit. The strange thing about limits is that you don’t usually find them by reasoning. You find them by colliding with them. That race was probably the first time I realised that some futures quietly disappear. I think this keeps happening throughout life. At some point you realise you’re never going to play in the Premier League, become an Olympic athlete, win a Nobel Prize, or whatever improbable future you imagined when you were twelve. Usually there isn’t a dramatic moment when the door closes. The future just becomes a little less plausible each year until, one day, you notice you’ve stopped imagining it altogether. There’s something sad about that. Not because you’ve failed, but because you’re saying goodbye to someone you thought you might become. Most people accept this and move on. That’s probably the right decision most of the time. But some people don’t. They continue long after the evidence suggests they should stop. Many of them are making a mistake. Probably most. They spend years pursuing something that was never going to happen. They sacrifice opportunities they could actually have had. Eventually people stop taking them seriously. History forgets almost all of them. Occasionally, though, one of those people turns out to have been right. Looking back, it’s tempting to imagine they possessed some obvious quality that everyone else missed. I’m not convinced that’s true. Halfway through the story, I suspect the person who’s about to do something extraordinary often looks remarkably similar to the person who’s wasting years of their life. That makes persistence a stranger idea than we usually admit. We tend to treat it as a virtue. I think it’s better understood as a bet. You’re betting that the evidence you’ve seen so far is incomplete. You’re betting that you’ve misjudged where your limits really are. Most of those bets lose. A few pay off beyond anyone’s expectations. The difficult part is that you have to decide whether to place the bet before you know which kind it is.

full post mortem below thanks to the base core devs for resolving the issue, disclosing to others, and publishing a diligent post mortem making base reliable, globally available, and highly performant is our top priority. taking these learnings and getting better

One of the most visionary founders I've spoken to

base is already #1 for onchain spot trading of crypto majors like BTC and ETH next: #1 for every tokenized asset - stocks, commodities, everything