Keongtae Kim

Could AI chatbots undo the harms of social media? (Financial Times Asia), 28 Mar 2026 Very interesting! This prediction appears right. digitaleditionapp.ft.com/i9DX/7doxzdwa

Read this. It's important. It's from a Silicon Valley guy talking about what AI is about to do to us, whether we want it or not. sahajgarg.github.io/blog/cognitive…

Everyone’s talking about @erikbryn, @econ_b & @RuyuChen’s excellent new paper Canaries in the Coal Mine. It shows entry-level jobs shrinking in AI-exposed occupations. But wait: earlier studies found AI helps novices most. So why are entry-level jobs disappearing? (1/n)

We've seen this before 🪞 Carlos Alcaraz wins his fifth Grand Slam title at the exact same age that Rafael Nadal reached the same feat at Wimbledon 2008

@Wimbledon @RafaelNadal @carlosalcaraz Love this picture 📸

The Infinite Node Foundation (NODE) is pleased to announce the acquisition of the intellectual property of @cryptopunks from @yugalabs. Launched by Larva Labs in 2017, CryptoPunks are widely regarded as the catalyst for the modern digital art movement. Their $3.07B in sales have established Matt Hall and John Watkinson as the highest-selling living artists of our time. The pioneering collection of 10,000 unique, algorithmically generated pixel art characters now lives within the most well-capitalized nonprofit dedicated solely to digital art in the United States. Formed in 2025 by Micky Malka and Becky Kleiner, NODE’s purchase of the the IP and additional $25M endowment outpaces the digital art funding of all major U.S. institutions. NODE exists to build networked architecture for digital works like CryptoPunks to be studied, exhibited, and contextualized within the art-historical canon. This transition isn’t about ownership, but liberation. Freed from corporate friction and limitations, the Punk ethos can now thrive through a decentralized, community-driven future. To guide this journey, NODE has assembled a Punks advisory board led by Matt Hall and John Watkinson (Larva Labs) along with visionary voices in the project’s history, Wylie Aronow (Yuga Labs), and Erick Calderon (Art Blocks). In addition, we are happy to share that we will be enlisting Natalie Stone as a consultant to support the NODE team during this transition. This vision begins with a major exhibition of the full 10K collection, to debut alongside the opening of NODE’s permanent hub and exhibition space in Palo Alto. Here, NODE will host a full Ethereum node to contribute towards the permanence of the works housed within. Under our stewardship, CryptoPunks will remain as the artists intended, while continuing to stand as the defining collection of this century’s defining art movement. Thank you to all who have been a part of the Punks journey. Our new chapter together begins now.

Stablecoins: Payments Without Intermediaries The internet made information free and global. So why is it still so hard — and expensive — to move money? The early internet promised a future where anyone could publish, build, or transact without permission. Protocols like email and the web were open and neutral — and they sparked an explosion of creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship. But somewhere along the way, we veered off course. Today, the global financial system resembles a patchwork of corporate networks: centralized, closed, and extractive. Behind every transaction is a Rube Goldberg-machine of intermediaries — points of sale, payment processors, acquiring banks, issuing banks, local banks, correspondent banks, foreign exchanges, card networks, and others — each taking a cut, adding latency, and imposing rules. These networks levy unnecessary taxes on commerce and curb innovation. They turn what should be neutral plumbing into high-friction bottlenecks. Stablecoins, or cryptocurrencies pegged to stable assets like the U.S. dollar, are a way out, a reset — a way to bring the internet’s original vision to money. The Disruptive Opportunity of Stablecoins The current payments stack wasn’t built for the internet — it was built for a world rife with fee-taking middlemen (who had been necessary to manage local partnerships, fraud, and operations). Even today, international remittances can cost up to 10% in fees. (A $200 remittance cost 6.62% on average in September 2024.) These aren’t just friction points — they’re effectively regressive taxes on some of the world’s poorest workers. The system we’ve inherited is slow, opaque, and exclusionary, and it leaves billions of people underserved or entirely cut off from the global financial system. For many businesses, the inefficiencies of traditional payments are also massive. Stablecoins could dramatically improve the situation. B2B payments from Mexico to Vietnam take 3-to-7 days to clear and can cost anywhere from $14-to-$150 per $1000 transacted, passing through as many as five intermediaries along the way, each of whom takes a cut. Stablecoins could bypass legacy systems, like the international SWIFT network and associated clearing and settlement processes, and make such transactions nearly free and instant. This isn’t theoretical — it’s already happening. Right now, companies like SpaceX are using stablecoins to manage their corporate treasuries (including by repatriating funds from countries with volatile local currencies, like Argentina and Nigeria). Other companies, like ScaleAI, are using stablecoins to make faster, cheaper payouts to global workforces. Meanwhile, on the B2C side, Stripe is the first widely used service to offer crypto payments and it is already offering 1.5% on checkout — half what incumbents charge. This could drastically improve certain businesses’ profit margins: As a16z crypto’s @SamBroner has shown, for a very low margin business like a grocery store, a 1.5% improvement could potentially double net income. (And in a competitive, blockchain-based market, I would expect transaction fees to go much lower.) Unlike the old financial stack, which evolved in silos, stablecoins are global by default. They live on blockchains: open, programmable networks that anyone can build on. There’s no need to negotiate with dozens of banks across borders. You just plug into the network. People are already recognizing the advantages. In 2024, stablecoins moved $15.6 trillion in value, effectively matching Visa’s volume. While that figure mostly represents financial flows (versus retail payments), its magnitude still suggests we’re on the verge of a financial infrastructure shift, one that doesn’t rely on duct-taping 20th-century systems together. Instead, we can build something new, something truly internet-native — or what Stripe calls “room-temperature superconductors for financial services,” where rather than lossless energy transmission, you get lossless value transmission. The WhatsApp Moment for Money Stablecoins are our first real shot at doing for money what email did for communication: make it open, instant, and borderless. Consider the evolution of text messaging. Before apps like WhatsApp, sending a text across borders meant paying 30 cents per message. Even then, you were lucky if it actually got delivered. Then came internet-native messaging: instant, global, free. Payments are now where messaging was in 2008: Fragmented by borders. Burdened by middlemen. Gatekept by design. Stablecoins offer a clean-slate alternative. Instead of stitching together clunky, costly, and outdated systems, stablecoins flow seamlessly on top of global blockchains. These systems are programmable, composable, and designed to scale across borders. Already, stablecoins are slashing the cost of remittances: Sending $200 from the U.S. to Columbia using traditional methods will cost you $12.13; with stablecoins, it costs $0.01. (Fees to convert from stablecoins to local currencies can range from as high as 5% to as low as 0%, and prices continue to fall due to competition.) Just as WhatsApp disrupted costly international phone calls, blockchain payments and stablecoins are transforming global money transfers. Regulation: From Bottleneck to Breakthrough It’s tempting to frame regulation as an obstacle — but smart legislation is actually the unlock. Clear rules of the road for stablecoins and crypto market structure could finally allow these technologies to move out of the sandbox and toward widespread adoption. For years, decentralized finance (DeFi) was trapped in a kind of self-contained, circular, “crypto-for-crypto” economy. Not because the tools weren’t useful, but because regulators made it incredibly difficult to bridge into traditional financial systems. That’s changing. Policymakers are now actively shaping rules to recognize and regulate stablecoins in ways that maintain U.S. competitiveness, protect consumers, and allow innovation to flourish. Thoughtful regulation — like frameworks that differentiate network tokens from security tokens — can protect against bad actors while giving good actors the clarity they need to build. In fact, a forthcoming bill clarifying this regulation could pave the way for even broader adoption and integration into the global financial system. (Congress is hashing out the details as I write.) Building Public Goods for Everyone’s Benefit Traditional finance is built on private, closed networks. But the internet showed us the power of open protocols — like TCP/IP and email — to drive global coordination and innovation. Blockchains are the internet’s native financial layer. They combine the composability of public protocols with the economic strength of private enterprise. They are credibly neutral, auditable, and programmable. Add stablecoins on top and you get something we’ve never really had before: open money infrastructure. Think of it like a public highway system. Private companies can still build the vehicles, the businesses, the roadside attractions. But the roads themselves are neutral and open for everyone. Blockchain networks and stablecoins are doing more than just cutting fees. They’re enabling new categories of software: - Programmatic payments between machines: Imagine AI agent-powered marketplaces automatically brokering deals for computer resources and other services. - Micropayments for media, music, and AI contributions: Imagine setting a budget with some simple rules and leaving it to “smart” wallets to disburse the payments. - Transparent payouts with full audit trails: Imagine using these systems to track spending in government. - Global commerce without a mess of intermediaries: Imagine settling international transactions instantly at negligible cost — in fact, you don’t have to imagine it as it’s already happening. The moment for blockchain networks and stablecoins is now: Technology, market demand, and political will are lining up and making these applications a reality. A stablecoin bill could be on the floor this year, and regulatory agencies are weighing frameworks that finally align risk with the right oversight. In the same way that early internet startups were able to thrive once it was clear they wouldn’t be shut down by telcos or copyright lawyers, crypto is ready to cross the chasm from financial experiment to infrastructure backbone, with stablecoins leading the way. We don’t have to patch the old system. We can make a better one.

A summary of my thinking on shared prosperity, work and AI in ten bullet points. This is partly motivated by the fact that I have received questions from several people on these issues, and I feel like it may be useful to lay out my thinking in simple terms in one place. We are also about to have a new administration in the United States, so perhaps it’s a good time to think about some aspirations (even though I view it very unlikely that the incoming administration will move us in this direction). 1. Shared prosperity is key. By shared prosperity I mean economic growth from which most groups (e.g., men vs. women, different ethnic groups, different education groups, different regions, etc.) benefit more or less in the same way (e.g., their incomes growing at similar rates). Economic growth that just enriches one group greatly and generates only small benefits for many other groups is not shared prosperity. This is mostly an ethical precept, but it can also be justified because a peaceful, harmonious society does require shared prosperity. It is also a realistic one. It does not require that all inequalities are wiped away at one fell swoop. 2. Shared prosperity cannot be achieved just with redistribution. It needs to be rooted in the labor market, in (good) jobs and in wage growth. The safety net and some amount of redistribution are important. But these are not sufficient to generate shared prosperity. Even in social democratic Nordic countries, where redistribution is most robust, it is not the source of shared prosperity. Wage and employment growth have been much more important historically. Redistribution-based shared prosperity doesn’t make political economic sense either: if some portion of the population is continuously impoverished, they wouldn’t have the political power to ensure that robust redistribution remains. Moreover, even if we had a system where pre-tax inequality was growing a lot but there was enough redistribution to ensure the disposable incomes of all demographic groups grew robustly, it would have other serious problems. People without jobs and those whose pre-tax incomes were not growing wouldn’t feel that they were contributing to society. Worse, we would head towards a truly two-tier society with just some fraction of the population flourishing economically and receiving all the social status as they are the source of all earnings and tax revenues out of which others are receiving redistribution. 3. AI is here to stay and will be very impactful. I have little doubt that AI will be a defining technology for our future. It can also deliver significant productivity benefits, though I think whether it will do so or not is contingent on how we develop it, and its full effects will take a while to be materialized. There is a lot of uncertainty about AI’s effects. In my opinion, it is also difficult to know what AGI (artificial general intelligence) would mean and when it may arrive, and this adds to the uncertainty about AI. In sum, we cannot think of the future of work and shared prosperity without understanding AI’s impact. 4. AI’s direction can be pro-worker or anti-worker. A basic pillar of my thinking and my research is that all technologies are malleable – meaning that they can be developed in many different ways, with very different consequences about who wins and who loses. This is doubly and triply true for AI, which is a broad, flexible technological platform. AI can be developed for prediction tasks; it could be developed for generating text and images; it can be used as an informational tool, etc. In all of these cases, AI can be more anti-worker (meaning that it focuses on automating tasks and disempowering workers) or pro-worker (meaning that it can become an information technology for enabling workers to perform their tasks better and to be able to branch into more sophisticated and new tasks). How AI will be developed is a choice. 5. Currently it is being developed as an anti-worker technology. The main way in which companies are thinking of monetizing AI is by automation and more powerful digital ads, and neither of which would contribute to a pro-worker agenda. Moreover, the way in which foundation models are developed and trained is shaped by the expectation and desire to reach AGI. But AGI would mean more automation – if AI can achieve general intelligence and perform almost all tasks as well as most humans, then it will take away these tasks from humans. This current path will therefore lead to job displacement and lower wages, and is thus inconsistent with shared prosperity. 6. To redirect it, you need policies. Putting the previous two points together, we can conclude that while there was a direction for AI consistent with shared prosperity, we are not pursuing it. Moreover, the industry will not suddenly change direction. Therefore, there needs to be an intervention, and this can only come from government policies (across the world) to encourage new directions and also put regulations to prevent the more harmful uses of AI (some of which are synergistic with the anti-worker direction). 7. To redirect it, you need competition. New technologies especially radically new directions typically come from new companies, not established incumbents. This is doubly so when the incumbents we are talking about are the largest corporations humanity has ever seen. Hence, the pro-worker AI agenda should be symbiotic with agenda of increasing competition and breaking the hold of the existing powerful incumbents on the tech sector and the direction of AI. 8. To redirect it, you need different architectural choices. Perhaps even more controversially, redirecting AI may need architectural choices. To put it simply, pro-worker AI need to be an information tool in the hands of workers. This is impossible unless AI provides reliable, understandable and real-time information to workers in a range of occupations. The current architecture of AI (partly fueled by AGI dreams) is about AI acting autonomously and has also led to a black box structure of AI. Instead, the pro-worker direction AI needs the tools to provide advice to human decision-makers (rather than make autonomous decisions), and the best autonomous decisions are not necessarily the best advice/recommendation/information to workers. Moreover, pro-worker AI needs to be understandable by human decision-makers, which is not possible with current black box structure of foundation models complemented with fine-tuning and other kinds of ex post training of pre-trained models. Stepping back, in an ideal world government intervention should be neutral towards different technological choices. After all, entrepreneurs and innovators know which technologies to develop and how to develop them much better than bureaucrats and lawmakers. But in certain situations where different directions of technologies have major social consequences (for example, in the choice of fossil-fuel versus green technologies), then government intervention may need to impact technology and design choices as well. Nevertheless, it is important that this is done in the most minimalist possible way, so that innovation incentives and choices are not impacted beyond the extent necessary for a more socially beneficial direction to emerge. 9. All of this requires democracy. Since the current direction is chosen and supported by the largest and most powerful corporations in the world, only robust democratic pressure can lay the foundations of a redirection. 10. The Catch-22: AI endangers democracy. Tech choices in the past, especially those surrounding social media, have been damaging to democracy and active political participation of the citizenry. The same is likely to be true for AI, and even more so. First, AI is likely to be a very powerful technology for manipulation, and this can exacerbate platform choices that can make money while discouraging democratic citizenship. Second, the current ethos in the AI sector is quite anti-democratic, with leading technologists and entrepreneurs believing that experts (themselves) should be empowered to make all key decisions and democratic processes get in the way of the necessary AI acceleration. This not only creates a Catch-22 (we need democracy to redirect AI, but AI has already damaged democracies) it also suggests that redirecting AI will be very difficult. But I still believe it’s not completely hopeless.

I've decided to collect my DiD materials in a single place. psantanna.com/did-resources There, you will find - 14 lectures of my comprehensive DiD course - Shorter lectures/talks I have given on DiD - My DiD R packages - Some DiD checklists - DiD materials from my friends Enjoy!

Cheers to $200B of stablecoin supply 🥳

You’ve heard a lot about how crypto and AI can work together. But what does this actually look like? Today, we’re releasing our predictions for the future of AI. Introducing the Crypto x AI stack

Today we released our latest State of Crypto report. It shares insights on key trends — like stablecoins, L2s, and AI — plus, crypto’s rise as a policy issue, new data on builders and users, and more. 7 takeaways from the report: 1. Crypto activity and usage hit all-time highs 2. Crypto has become a key political issue ahead of the U.S. election 3. Stablecoins have found product-market fit 4. Major scaling upgrades have drastically reduced onchain transaction costs 5. DeFi remains popular — and it’s growing 6. Crypto could solve some of AI’s most pressing challenges 7. More scalable infrastructure has unlocked new onchain applications Read the full report here: a16zcrypto.com/posts/article/…

Great letter on Bitcoin to @TheEconomist from @RobertKennedyJr today. Every statement by RFK is backed up by both peer review research and the firsthand experience of grid operators. archive.ph/AO4un

BTC and ETH ETFs (actually ETPs!) were approved and listed earlier this year. Here's what it means for crypto as an asset class: a16zcrypto.com/posts/article/…

Your guide to tokens: How to design, launch, structure rights, and more. 🧵

In a forthcoming Handbook of Labor Economics chapter, @DAcemogluMIT & co-authors find that the impacts of a new technology depend on whether it is used to (1) augment labor, (2) augment capital, (3) automate labor, or (4) create new tasks. Read the paper: shapingwork.mit.edu/research/tasks…

How NFT royalties work: Designs, challenges, and new ideas w/ @blauyourmind, @skominers, & @DarenMatsuoka a16zcrypto.com/posts/article/…

Technology is about driving innovation, with products and services for all. FIT21, an important bill for the crypto industry, just passed in the House of Representatives, with bipartisan support. Here’s more about it and why it matters: a16zcrypto.com/posts/article/…