Mac Budkowski
11.8K posts
@MacBudkowski
Non-bs perspective on building in crypto @ https://t.co/l2tNqoDnTm | Startups, tech & random stuff @ https://t.co/HfZp8rrrnC
What happens when you post a real Monet and say it’s AI? The coolest art social experiment I’ve seen in a while. Thank you @SHL0MS
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: You can't earn a billion dollars. Ilana Glazer: That's right. AOC: You just can't earn that. Glazer: That's exactly correct. AOC: You can get market power. You can break rules. You can do all sorts of things. You can abuse labor laws. Glazer: Yup. AOC: You can pay people less than what they're worth. Glazer: Yup. AOC: But you can't earn that, right? Glazer: That's right. AOC: And so you have to create a myth that -- since you didn't earn that, you have to create a myth of earning it.
── Dappcon 2026 Speaker ── Great products don't spread automatically. They never did. 🎙 @MacBudkowski ↳ "Distribution Advantage: How to Set Up GTM for Your Crypto Product without BS" He will give a talk about the real growth dynamics behind Aave, ZORA, Uniswap, Tether, and others — and what founders actually did to get attention from the right users, in a world where building is cheap and attention is the real bottleneck.
Jane Street made ~$40B in 2025 with 3,500 employees, a ~2x from the year before. At ~65-70% profit margin, that's $8M profit / employee, the highest for a 1000+ ppl company. High-frequency trading continues to be the most efficient money making engine. I want to share an old story about my Jane Street interview in 2014. Jane Street was known for hiring a lot of math, physics and CS olympiad winners from top universities and putting them through many rounds - including, for trading roles, a gauntlet of mental math. It was my 6th interview and my final round and I recall being asked "What is the next day after today in DD/MM/YYYY where all the digits are unique?" They'd toy with you and say "You can use a pencil and paper, if you want" but you knew that was an instant no. Painstakingly and as quickly as I could, I came to an answer. "How confident are you that this is correct on a 0-1 probability scale?" the interviewer said. "0.95", I blurted out, not fully knowing how to answer that. "Are you sure?" After thinking harder for a few more seconds, I realized I could've flipped the digits around to get a closer date. I gave the interviewer my answer. It was correct. "0.95 huh?" he chuckled. That's when I knew I failed. Note: fwiw, other companies that come close in efficiency are - Tether ($90M+ profit/emp) - Hyperliquid ($80M+ profit/emp) and on revenue: - Valve ($50M/emp) - OnlyFans ($37M/emp) - Craigslist ($14M/emp) - Anthropic ($12M/emp, run rate) - OpenAI ($8M/emp, run rate) For comparison, Nvidia is very efficient at scale and is $4.4M/emp.
Following the KelpDAO hack, we built an open analysis of DVN security configurations across every active OApp on LayerZero over the last 90 days. Of ~2,665 unique OApp contracts: 47% run a 1-of-1 DVN security floor, 45% run 2-of-2, and ~5% run 3-of-3 or higher. As we know, KelpDAO's rsETH sat in the first bucket. Open query, public methodology, feedback welcome: dune.com/dune/layerzero…
Following the KelpDAO hack, we built an open analysis of DVN security configurations across every active OApp on LayerZero over the last 90 days. Of ~2,665 unique OApp contracts: 47% run a 1-of-1 DVN security floor, 45% run 2-of-2, and ~5% run 3-of-3 or higher. As we know, KelpDAO's rsETH sat in the first bucket. Open query, public methodology, feedback welcome: dune.com/dune/layerzero…
Aave V4 is now live on @ethereum.
