Carry Megens

@nadertheory @Jhayppy @laurashin That's a long time, forever, but as long as nodes run the ⛓️ you're good 😊

@laurashin In case I am ever silenced you can read my posts on Focus, where posts are forever preserved on the DeSo blockchain: focus.xyz/post/e33a67cf7…

How to beat the DOJ and SEC: A story that involves getting raided by the FBI, arrested, and getting recruited by multiple prison gangs before eventually having all charges dismissed with prejudice. Big thanks to @laurashin from Unchained for helping me tell this story.

@nadertheory Great memories Let's hope more in the making

I've never told this story but Kevin was an investor and advisor with me on my last company Basis where we were pioneering an algorithmic central bank. At one point we even did a fireside chat together at a private event and I got to grill him 1:1 about what it was actually like being at the fed and deciding on policy, why policies get set the way they do, and what he would do if he were actually in charge. It was incredible. We're very lucky to have him as our fed chair and I'm personally grateful for people like him who stay by your side and believe in you through thick and thin. DeSo is just getting started.

@thegaboeth Step on a platform that is free; that is Web3; that is unstoppable decentralized: @desoprotocol use @desocialworld app or any other. Your keys, your content, your monetization

Getting this email feels impossible lately? Monetization suspended unfairly? Appealed multiple times and still stuck? If that’s you, join this free TG channel with a post showing how to structure your appeal. link below 👇 Bookmark and share so more creators can fix this.

@VitalikButerin @desoprotocol already has fire hose of years of content on-chain and many apps to present and interact. Decentralized with community validator nodes anyone can start permission less.

In 2026, I plan to be fully back to decentralized social. If we want a better society, we need better mass communication tools. We need mass communication tools that surface the best information and arguments and help people find points of agreement. We need mass communication tools that serve the user's long-term interest, not maximize short-term engagement. There is no simple trick that solves these problems. But there is one important place to start: more competition. Decentralization is the way to enable that: a shared data layer, with anyone being able to build their own client on top. In fact, since the start of the year I've been back to decentralized social already. Every post I've made this year, or read this year, I made or read with firefly.social, a multi-client that covers reading and posting to X, Lens, Farcaster and Bluesky (though bluesky has a 300 char limit, so they don't get to see my beautiful long rants). But crypto social projects has often gone the wrong way. Too often, we in crypto think that if you insert a speculative coin into something, that counts as "innovating", and moves the world forward. Mixing money and social is not inherently wrong: Substack shows that it's possible to create an economy that supports very high-quality content. But Substack is about _subscribing to creators_, not _creating price bubbles around them_. Over the past decade, we have seen many many attempts at incentivizing creators by creating price bubbles around them, and all fail by (i) rewarding not content quality, but pre-existing social capital, and (ii) the tokens all going to zero after one or two years anyway. Too many people make galaxy-brained arguments that creating new markets and new assets is automatically good because it "elicits information", when the rest of their product development actions clearly betray that they're not actually interested in maximizing people's ability to benefit from that information. That is not Hayekian info-utopia, that is corposlop. Hence, decentralized social should be run by people who deeply believe in the "social" part, and are motivated first and foremost by solving the problems of social. The Aave team has done a great job stewarding Lens up to this point. I'm excited about what will happen to Lens over the next year, because I think the new team coming in are people who actually are interested in the "social": even back when the decentralized social space barely existed, they were trying to figure out how to do encrypted tweets. I plan to post more there this year. I encourage everyone to spend more time in Lens, Farcaster and the broader decentralized social world this year. We need to move beyond everyone constantly tweeting inside a single global info warzone, and into a reopened frontier, where new and better forms of interaction become possible.

@nadertheory Horrible experience 😖 Good you managed to stay in that zen state. Hope you and your loved ones are good now and you have regained your drive to buidl more on @desoprotocol we'll be there

What it's like to be arrested on your way to a joyful family vacation... Around August of 2024 I was on my way to Turkey for a family vacation. I hadn't heard from the DOJ for a year at this point and my impression was that everything DOJ-related was fully resolved. I was going to Bodrum to introduce my young son to my wife's family (she is Turkish and they hadn't met him yet). I booked the flight two weeks in advance to boot. As I'm about to board the plane, three FBI agents intercept me, put handcuffs on me in front of me in front of my wife and my son (only eight months old at the time, thankfully) and walk me through LAX in handcuffs. The agents didn't even think twice about walking me in front of a crowd of what had to be a thousand people on my way to their car. Thankfully, they were at least helpful enough to reluctantly grant my request to put a jacket over my handcuffs, which prevented too many pictures from being taken. So why was I arrested when it seemed like the case was over and done with? Unbeknownst to me, the original prosecutor working my case quite possibly had determined that there was no wrongdoing, and was on his way out of the DOJ. However, instead of the file closing, it was instead handed off to a more junior prosecutor who got excited about it and thought I was "fleeing the country." Whether she actually thought that or she was using it as an excuse to arrest me and take my passport from me I'm not sure. But suffice it to say that if I booked a flight two weeks in advance I'd have to be the stupidest flight-risk ever... I spent the rest of the day in a jail before being transferred to an actual prison for two more days. Why so long? Because they arrested me on a Saturday morning and the court couldn't process my bail until Monday afternoon. Government inefficiency at its finest. The first thing I did when they let me out was hug my wife and son. At one point I was made to sit in the "visiting area," awaiting my lawyer, where I watched inmates sitting across from their family members, five feet away, no touching allowed. At one point a young child ran to quickly hug his dad and was reprimanded harshly by the warden. "Sir, this is your last warning. I would like to remind you that seeing your family is a privilege." Indeed, it really is. Now, almost two years later, the government decided "oopsie-daisy" and dismissed all charges, both DOJ and SEC, and the latter with prejudice. Sorry we put you in chains from your hands to your feet in front of your son and had people brutally tell you to "face the wall" every time you entered an elevator. Sorry we put you in a cage for three days with violent prisoners. These things happen. Oopsie-daisy. There's a lot more to this story that I look forward to talking about in full soon. It sounds horrible, but I was weirdly zen about the whole experience. Not only did I know I'd done nothing wrong, but the whole experience made me realize just how important what I was working on was to me. It made me realize that to be able to work on something that you're willing to fight for, to risk being put in a cage by the state for, is something very special that not many people have. I've meet a lot of people in crypto who feel this way, and I think this is one thing that's truly unique and inspiring about our industry.

@charbel_sto @tomeromrix @Base44 @desoprotocol @desocialworld @nadertheory Congratulations 🎉

@tomeromrix @Base44 @desoprotocol I'm really honored to learn that I've won. 🎯🎊 Thank you so much @tomeromrix Another successful bet to continue shipping thanks to @Base44. I really love this energy and a big thank you to my community @desoprotocol @desocialworld , @nadertheory.

🚨 GIFTING 250 BASE44 CREDITS TO ONE LUCKY BUILDER! 🎁🔥 We just shipped gift cards on our @Base44 platform, to celebrate, I'm gifting 250 credits to one lucky winner :) HOW TO ENTER (super easy) 1. Follow me (@tomeromrix) 2. Reply to this post BOOST YOUR ODDS BIG TIME For every like on your reply, I will add +1 extra entry into the random draw Script runs Friday evening - more likes = way better shot Winner gets a DM with the gift card code + instructions to send it (or keep it 😏). I'll announce publicly too!

@nadertheory Great news 🎉 and great you bring it in your own words We have been here all the time, building on the bright deso future 😎

Big news! Last Friday the SEC officially dismissed its enforcement action against me and against DeSo. This was the last legal issue I had to deal with and I am now completely and totally free to innovate and build again, unhobbled for the first time in years. Three important points: 1) This dismissal was NOT a settlement. It was "without costs or fees" to me or anyone involved (extremely rare) because there was no wrongdoing and no actual aggrieved parties. 2) This dismissal was "with prejudice" (also rare). This means they can't bring any related action back against me or DeSo in the future. 3) In the SEC's own words, it was based on "a reassessment of the evidentiary record," meaning the actual facts regarding my innocence were heavily scrutinized and drove the decision. Simply put: The government made a mistake in bringing this case in the first place. The government accused me of misleading an investor who I knew I had a great relationship with, as in they backed me two separate times and I literally had breakfast with them at their house not long prior to the charge. As a result, soon after the charge I found out that not only were they not upset with me, but they wanted the government to go away as badly as I did. As I understand it, the government compelled the investor to do an interview and then took their neutral testimony and represented it as adversarial. It was an alleged fraud with no actual misrepresentation nor any actual aggrieved parties. My lawyers said they'd never seen anything like this, and I think it speaks to how dogmatically anti-crypto the prior administration's SEC was. In the coming days and weeks, I will be hopping on some podcasts to tell the whole story, and boy is there a story to tell. Stay tuned, and if you know anyone who'd like to have me on as a guest please reach out. I'm also excited to start sharing more about what my team has been working on soon. We haven't been twiddling our thumbs. For now, though, I just want to explain why DeSo is so important to me. DeSo is still the only platform on the internet where you can post content directly to a blockchain without fear of censorship, and where you can monetize your content directly with crypto (including stablecoins). It's really quite shocking how in 2026 we not only have virtually no viable alternative for this clearly-important category, but also other important efforts are actually shutting down. The world needs more people working on decentralizing social media, not less. I'm excited to finally be able to share our vision directly again, and to start bringing more people who care about freedom and censorship into our community. What we have built with DeSo is something people take for granted until they really need it, but hopefully we can convince them sooner than that. Lastly I want to say how grateful I am to everyone around me. My family, my friends, my backers, and everyone in the DeSo community. For me, this experience showed me just how trusting, loyal and caring everyone around me really is, and reaffirmed my belief that always trying to do the right thing really does pay off. We're just getting started.

🚨 Do you understand what's happening at Amazon right now? Their own AI coding agent Kiro reportedly "decided" the fastest way to fix a config error was to delete the entire production environment. Gone. A 6-hour outage. 6.3 million orders lost. Amazon's SVP called thousands of engineers into a mandatory meeting this week. Not to discuss strategy. To discuss damage control. Now here's my prediction and I want you to screenshot this: Amazon won't just ban AI-assisted code. They'll make every engineer personally liable for AI-generated code they approve. Other Big Tech will follow within 6 months. Think about what that means. The same companies that fired thousands of engineers to "restructure around AI" are about to tell the remaining ones.. you're now legally responsible for code you didn't write, can't fully understand, and were told to ship faster. Atlassian fired 1,600 people this morning to go all-in on AI. Replit is hiring kids who vibe code. And Amazon, the company that BUILT one of these AI coding agents just watched it nuke production. The vibe coding era isn't ending. But the "move fast and let AI break things" era is about to hit a wall. And that wall is called liability. Companies wanted AI to replace engineers. Now they need engineers to babysit AI. And they already fired the babysitters.

@brian_armstrong it's time to re-open the $DESO trade on @coinbase sec.gov/enforcement-li… cc: @CoinbaseAssets @desoprotocol

Congratulations @nadertheory desocialworld.com/posts/c0eeff53…

@StormchaserNL Gezien vlak voor Arnhem 18:55 op de A50 van West naar Oost, vuurbal/object haalde de grond niet.

☄️ Prachtige vuurbol boven Nederland vanavond! Het gaat hier waarschijnlijk om een #meteoor: een stuk ruimtepuin dat in de atmosfeer verbrandt op circa 100 km hoogte. Het is dus géén meteoriet: dan wordt ons aardoppervlak echt geraakt... Beelden rond 18.55u via Lars Coolen (fb)

@LechMazur @nikitabier Check out @desoprotocol it's all there

@nikitabier The solution is obvious: make messaging cost a nominal amount and send some of it to the receiver. The only thing that’s stopped it so far is social norms but AI spam should push it past the acceptance barrier.

75 days left

@tulaylabs @desoprotocol few

African builders per blockchain: Ethereum: 6,000+ builders Base: 4,500+ builders Polygon: 3,000+ builders Solana: 2,250+ builders Arbitrum: 1,500+ builders Sui: 750+ builders Optimism: 625+ builders (Rough estimates from GitHub, Discord, Twitter) Which chain are you building on?

@desoprotocol @VitalikButerin Looks like it, sounds like it, smells like it: yup must be @desoprotocol 💯%

@VitalikButerin So you mean DeSo? A fully integrated layer-1 for social, content and finance.

Have been following reactions to what I said about L2s about 1.5 days ago. One important thing that I believe is: "make yet another EVM chain and add an optimistic bridge to Ethereum with a 1 week delay" is to infra what forking Compound is to governance - something we've done far too much for far too long, because we got comfortable, and which has sapped our imagination and put us in a dead end. If you make an EVM chain *without* an optimistic bridge to Ethereum (aka an alt L1), that's even worse. We don't friggin need more copypasta EVM chains, and we definitely don't need even more L1s. L1 is scaling and is going to bring lots of EVM blockspace - not infinite (AIs in particular will need both more blockspace and lower latency than even a greatly scaled L1 can offer), but lots. Build something that brings something new to the table. I gave a few examples: privacy, app-specific efficiency, ultra-low latency, but my list is surely very incomplete. A second important thing that I believe is: regarding "connection to Ethereum", vibes need to match substance. I personally am a fan of many of the things that can be called "app chains". For example I think there's a large chance that the optimal architecture for prediction markets is something like: the market gets issued and resolved on L1, user accounts are on L1, but trading happens on some based rollup or other L2-like system, where the execution reads the L1 to verify signatures and markets. I like architectures where deep connection to L1 is first-class, and not an afterthought ("we're pretty much a separate chain, but oh yeah, we have a bridge, and ok fine let's put 1-2 devs to get it to stage 1 so the l2beat people will put a green checkmark on it so vitalik likes us"). The other extreme of "app chain", eg. the version where you convince some government registry, or social media platform, or gaming thing, to start putting merkle roots of its database, with STARKs that prove every update was authorized and signed and executed according to a pre-committed algorithm, onchain, is also reasonable - this is what makes the most sense to me in terms of "institutional L2s". It's obviously not Ethereum, not credibly neutral and not trustless - the operator can always just choose to say "we're switching to a different version with different rules now". But it would enable verifiable algorithmic transparency, a property that many of us would love to see in government, social media algorithms or wherever else, and it may enable economic activity that would otherwise not be possible. I think if you're the first thing, it's valid and great to call yourself an Ethereum application - it can't survive without Ethereum even technologically, it maximizes interoperability and composability with other Ethereum applications. If you're the second thing, then you're not Ethereum, but you are (i) bringing humanity more algorithmic transparency and trust minimization, so you're pursuing a similar vision, and (ii) depending on details probably synergistic with Ethereum. So you should just say those things directly! Basically: 1. Do something that brings something actually new to the table. 2. Vibes should match substance - the degree of connection to Ethereum in your public image should reflect the degree of connection to Ethereum that your thing has in reality.

@nadertheory Thank you. Do check out SafetyNet on deso, a community truly committed.

DeSo is not going anywhere. DeSo is the world's only blockchain for content, it is actually decentralized, and I couldn't shut it down or censor a piece of content even if I wanted to. Today, DeSo is the only place on the entire internet that I'm aware of where your content and your social account cannot be censored by anyone. This is because content is stored natively on a fully-decentralized blockchain, not on a centralized company's servers. It is not possible for a private company to "acquire" DeSo, and in fact no corporate entity owns or controls it. DeSo is for content what Bitcoin is for money, and it is currently the only check we have on the centralized content systems that are dominant today. My team and I have also built the Focus app on DeSo's infrastructure, and today Focus is the only platform I'm aware of where you can sell content for crypto. Focus supports tips, paid content, paid end-to-end encrypted messages, and even subscriptions, all via anonymous crypto payments that can't be censored. It has also been growing over the past few months as creators have begun to find value in monetizing their content via crypto. We built DeSo from the ground up to support absolute free speech. Not "kinda sorta free speech." Not "post whatever you want unless some people don't like it" speech. Free speech means nobody can censor you, not even the people who built the platform. And it includes being able to pay for and monetize your content without censorship as well. You can think of DeSo and Focus as the world's complete anti-censorship stack. DeSo is the infrastructure (the blockchain) and Focus is the app built on top. In addition, I want to be clear that I and my team plan on supporting DeSo and Focus indefinitely. As mentioned, it is not possible for any one individual to shut DeSo down, as many at the highest levels have now realized the hard way. However, continued investment in the underlying infrastructure and on the flagship app ensures that everything will continue to scale as more users adopt DeSo, and ensures that your content will continue to be safe even as post-quantum threats emerge. A reminder that every line of code that powers the DeSo blockchain is fully open-source and public under the deso-protocol/core repo on GitHub. This means anyone can contribute and, furthermore, that any contributions my team makes are immediately a part of the public good that is DeSo. This model of open-source iteration directly mirrors that of Bitcoin and the Linux operating system. In 1991, Linus Torvalds created the Linux operating system because he was passionate about an open and free alternative to existing closed-source operating systems. Today, more machines run Linux than any other operating system, albeit in a different form than he originally envisioned (on servers vs on consumer pcs). Nevertheless, for me, the creation of DeSo came from the same kind of passion. It is the Linux of content, and it is currently the only true economically-sustainable alternative we have to a world dominated by centralized, extractive walled-gardens. DeSo is and will remain an open-source public good that I believe will only continue to grow as more and more people realize its value.

@desoprotocol Real Xmas 🎁

🎄🎅✨

As long there is someone in control of a centralized platform like X or Instagram, global censorship will *always* be an issue. The key is to allow anyone in the world to run a node and a feed to open up the space for discussion that cannot be censored.

Pause it and win $100. Drop proof in comments.

@WilliamLaurent3 buydeso.safetynet.social

Just got paid in this meme coin👉 Should I offramp? In to what? #usd #Dollar

@desoprotocol @Gate Great news. If you are not into CEX you can also directly buy @deso via Stripe buydeso.safetynet.social @SafetyNetDeSo

We're happy to announce that DESO market-making on Gate Exchange (@Gate) is back online after a long hiatus, which should significantly improve liquidity for DESO. A reminder that you can also use Openfund, our fully on-chain DEX and HeroSwap for all your DESO trading needs. Hoping to have more good news to share soon!