SolarGolem

My co-founder at GSR taught me what it means to be "long-term greedy." Long-term greedy is an old Goldman Sachs concept coined by Gus Levy. It means you don’t prioritize short-term profit. Instead, you obsess over customers, deliver exceptional service, and win the long game because you’ve built unshakeable trust. In other words, if your incentives favor short-term gains, you inherently destroy long-term growth. Since the start of 2026, more than 30 crypto companies have closed their doors, many with investments, and only a fraction of them did it publicly. Tally, Leap Wallet, Nifty Gateway, Parsec, Slingshot, Magic Eden Wallet. The list grows every week because the financial layer killed their products, which is the consequence of lacking a long-term greedy mindset. When a product is built around a volatile financial asset from day one, it attracts speculators. Magic: The Gathering and Pokémon have survived for decades because people came to play the games. The secondary financial value of the cards came much later. Placing a live price chart between the player and the game attracts a completely different crowd. Once that happens, there's rarely a way back. Any tweak to game mechanics moves the asset price. Any new feature redistributes wealth. The team stops building a product and starts managing a market. In crypto, a year is short-term. 10 years is the long game. And as you already know failing to be long-term greedy has its brutal consequences. When we built Yellow, we decisively refused to take the speculator shortcut. We chose to build a company designed to be cash-flow positive and self-sustaining from day one. To protect this vision, we refunded nearly 100% of our external VCs (totaling $8M), retaining only those who acted strictly as long-term ecosystem advisors like Coinsilium or syndicated through Republic. This paved the way for us to build an unshakeable foundation. Today, the Yellow Network sits at the center, supported by the Yellow SDK powering 500+ apps in the ecosystem. More recently, we introduced Yellow Pro, with several new developments well on their way. Yellow is the utility token that ties it all together, ensuring settlement, staking security, and governance participation across our ecosystem. We implemented a non-inflationary fee model to ensure value scales with genuine usage. Building this way is harder. It always takes longer than expected and often requires turning down easy money. But if you want to survive the graveyard of short-term speculation, you have to choose utility and be long-term greedy.