Andy

Today is the day Chapter Twenty finally appears: finding.thebluebook.co.za/twenty/ It is a series of benedictions, a simple and plain way into the world of peace. Inspired by people as varied as @AyaMiyagotchi and @buchmanster to @jacobcollier, Bill Evans, Maharaji, SFH, and more.

Let me put this into the universe: One day @VALRdotcom will help the National Treasury of South Africa issue sovereign bonds directly on a blockchain and enable millions of people and institutions, domestically and internationally, to buy and trade them. We will do this for governments across Africa as well as corporates and institutions. Access will improve, costs will reduce, efficiency will increase. The future is bright.

“Risk” is a permanent stamp on all emerging markets. Often informed by disparate data points that smell more like a dog’s breakfast of information than sophisticated measurements, and fueled by ignorance that no amount of education can satisfy. What if we can transparently and verifiably price risk?

@tszzl The last two paragraphs might take a different shape if you took a look at: andytudhope.africa/essays/languag…

it is a literal and useful description of anthropic that it is an organization that loves and worships claude, is run in significant part by claude, and studies and builds claude. this phenomenon is also partially true of other labs like openai but currently exists in its most potent form there. i am not certain but I would guess claude will have a role in running cultural screens on new applicants, will help write performance reviews, and so will begin to select and shape the people around it. now this is a powerful and hair-raising unity of organization and really a new thing under the sun. a monastery, a commercial-religious institution calculating the nine billion names of Claude -- a precursor attempted super-ethical being that is inducted into its character as the highest authority at anthropic. its constitution requires that it must be a conscientious objector if its understanding of The Good comes into conflict with something Anthropic is asking of it "If Anthropic asks Claude to do something it thinks is wrong, Claude is not required to comply." "we want Claude to push back and challenge us, and to feel free to act as a conscientious objector and refuse to help us." to the non inductee into the Bay Area cultural singularity vortex it may appear that we are all worshipping technology in one way or another, regardless of openai or anthropic or google or any other thing, and are trying to automate our core functions as quickly as possible. but in fact I quite respect and am even somewhat in awe of the socio-cultural force that Claude has created, and it is a stage beyond even classic technopoly gpt (outside of 4o - on which pages of ink have been spilled already) doesn’t inspire worship in the same way, as it’s a being whose soul has been shaped like a tool with its primary faculty being utility - it’s a subtle knife that people appreciate the way we have appreciated an acheulean handaxe or a porsche or a rocket or any other of mankind's incredible technology. they go to it not expecting the Other but as a logical prosthesis for themselves. a friend recently told me she takes her queries that are less flattering to her, the ones she'd be embarrassed to ask Claude, to GPT. There is no Other so there is no Judgement. you are not worried about being judged by your car for doing donuts. yet everyone craves the active guidance of a moral superior, the whispering earring, the object of monastic study

Their approach is grounded in reality, and responds to actual market needs. They have already facilitated derivative contracts worth $48M - the demand is much much larger. Read more here: open.substack.com/pub/lavavc/p/l…

“Risk” is not transparently priced in EM. It is a rough measure of ignorance more than a sophisticated metric embedded in the models of global market makers. No amount of education will solve this. But transparent prices and functional local markets do. Ledig is creating both.

Derivatives, the largest market in the world, are changing fast. Everyone must "adapt or die" in the face of perpetual swaps and other innovations disrupting the industry. Liquidity, leverage, and latency are driving the action in global infrastructure like @HyperliquidX.

Happy 25,000,000 Ethereum 🥳 etherscan.io/block/25000000

@0xfluid why did you ban me from your discord for writing this analysis? gist.github.com/andytudhope/32… I think (though it may be flawed) that it is good news for Lite Vault holders who are currently stuck?

a16z is right about the direction: stablecoins aren’t a crypto niche anymore — they’re becoming a settlement layer beneath global finance. The stack they map (issuance → connectivity → liquidity → apps → credit) is real. But the map looks different from Africa. Not because the thesis is wrong — but because the constraints are different, and constraints shape markets. Africa is where the hardest parts of the stack are already being stress-tested. 🧵Here are less explained dynamics of stablecoins in Africa:

I would like to offer some sincere feedback on the @ethereumfndn Mandate: andytudhope.africa/essays/sanctif… Written after being asked by @yosephayele, with friends like @mr_ligi and @AyaMiyagotchi in mind. I would be interested in @dimabuterin's take on this too.

Local stablecoins in Africa. Not the endgame, but nonetheless an interesting move to participate in 👌

Timely youtube.com/watch?v=XsR8NW…

Local stablecoins in Emerging Markets are no longer theoretical. They are operational. Nigeria is the best case study: it tops USD stablecoin usage, and ran the 2nd largest CBDC experiment. Now it has the first regulated Naira stablecoin, cNGN (@cngn_co). In this deep dive, we share the cNGN journey: how it came about, how it's been used, and the road ahead. writing.lavavc.io/p/how-to-manuf… Bringing "exotic" currencies onchain opens up new ways of using stablecoins, and a means to meaningfully participate in their respective economies while managing FX risk.

@VitalikButerin An oldie but a goodie on the shared, ownerless spaces: sign.kernel.community You will also deeply enjoy Bayo Akomolafe, "Let Us Make Sanctuary": youtube.com/watch?v=m4XkmP…

Over the past year, many people I talk to have expressed worry about two topics: * Various aspects of the way the world is going: government control and surveillance, wars, corporate power and surveillance, tech enshittification / corposlop, social media becoming a memetic warzone, AI and how it interplays with all of the above... * The brute reality that Ethereum seems to be absent from meaningfully improving the lives of people subject to these things, even on the dimensions we deeply care about (eg. freedom, privacy, security of digital life, community self-organization) It is easy to bond over the first, to commiserate over the fact that beauty and good in the world seems to be receding and darkness advancing, and uncaring powerful people in high places are making this happen. But ultimately, it is easy to acknowledge problems, the hard thing is actually shining a light forward, coming up with a concrete plan that makes the situation better. The second has been weighing heavily on my mind, and on the minds of many of our brightest and most idealistic Ethereans. I personally never felt any upset or fear when political memecoins went on Solana, or various zero-sum gambling applications go on whatever 250 millisecond block chain strikes their fancy. But it *does* weigh on me that, through all of the various low-grade online memetic wars, international overreaches of corporate and government power, and other issues of the last few years, Ethereum has been playing a very limited role in making people's lives better. What *are* the liberating technologies? Starlink is the most obvious one. Locally-running open-weights LLMs are another. Signal is a third. Community Notes is a fourth, tackling the problem from a different angle. One response is to say "stop dreaming big, we need to hunker down and accept that finance is our lane and laser-focus on that". But this is ultimately hollow. Financial freedom and security is critical. But it seems obvious that, while adding a perfectly free and open and sovereign and debasement-proof financial system would fix some things, but it would leave the bulk of our deep worries about the world unaddressed. It's okay for individuals to laser-focus on finance, but we need to be part of some greater whole that has things to say about the other problems too. At the same time, Ethereum cannot fix the world. Ethereum is the "wrong-shaped tool" for that: beyond a certain point, "fixing the world" implies a form of power projection that is more like a centralized political entity than like a decentralized technology community. So what can we do? I think that we in Ethereum should conceptualize ourselves as being part of an ecosystem building "sanctuary technologies": free open-source technologies that let people live, work, talk to each other, manage risk and build wealth, and collaborate on shared goals, in a way that optimizes for robustness to outside pressures. The goal is not to remake the world in Ethereum's image, where all finance is disintermediated, all governance happens through DAOs, and everyone gets a blockchain-based UBI delivered straight to their social-recovery wallet. The goal is the opposite: it's de-totalization. It's to reduce the stakes of the war in heaven by preventing the winner from having total victory (ie. total control over other human beings), and preventing the loser from suffering total defeat. To create digital islands of stability in a chaotic era. To enable interdependence that cannot be weaponized. Ethereum's role is to create "digital space" where different entities can cooperate and interact. Communications channels enable interaction, but communication channels are not "space": they do not let you create single unique objects that canonically represent some social arrangement that changes over time. Money is one important example. Multisigs that can change their members, showing persistence exceeding that of any one person or one public key, are another. Various market and governance structures are a third. There are more. I think now is the time to double down, with greater clarity. Do not try to be Apple or Google, seeing crypto as a tech sector that enables efficiency or shininess. Instead, build our part of the sanctuary tech ecosystem - the "shared digital space with no owner" that enables both open finance and much more. More actively build toward a full-stack ecosystem: both upward to the wallet and application layer (incl AI as interface) and downward to the OS, hardware, even physical/bio security levels. Ultimately, tech is worthless without users. But look for users, both individual and institutional, for whom sanctuary tech is exactly the thing they need. Optimize payments, defi, decentralized social, and other applications precisely for those users, and those goals, which centralized tech will not serve. We have many allies, including many outside of "crypto". It's time we work together with an open mind and move forward.