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.

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.

We’re thrilled to back @iKEOrizu and be part of the Jamit journey at @lavavc_ Finding such great talent and a compelling vision is the best part of running a fund 🌋 Here is why we joined and what is most compelling about Ike’s vision: writing.lavavc.io/p/great-storie…

We're all apparently living in the golden age of narratives. A bit strange then, that the tools for telling them haven't changed much since GarageBand. Here's why we backed @iKEOrizu and @jamitHQ

It's great to see the world coming around to the core thesis we built LAVA on: trust infrastructure

Great love to you today ❤️

"Everybody has a song which is no song at all: it is a process of singing, and when you sing, you are where you are. All I know about method is that when I am not working I sometimes think I know something, but when I am working, it is quite clear that I know nothing." John Cage

I vibe with the work of @AmandaAskell on Claude's constitution enough to write an essay myself, unassisted by any model. I really hope this stirs further thinking around address and LLMs, and would love to hear your response 🙏 andytudhope.africa/essays/languag…

"Don't trust, verify" We took a hack at @artemis stablecoin payments report because we rely on this stuff too. So we replicated the analysis and went one step further by labelling the biggest wallets driving the flow.  writing.lavavc.io/p/whos-really-…

Worth reading the whole thread in detail. Resilience and credible Neutrality are not just fancy ideas for X: they actually matter in the places where crypto has the most meaningful impact.

In 1993, Wired launched with Marshall McLuhan on their masthead. Silicon Valley loved “the medium is the message.” McLuhan was famously faith-driven, a converted Catholic. He (alongside Ivan Illich) have served inspiration for @left_pad. Best known as a steward of the pivotal open-source JavaScript compiler Babel, Henry (KB4) has spent much of his life creating open source tools – a social annotation layer for the web, a receipt printer, a faith-inflected OSS podcast. Throughout, he remains keenly aware of the effects of his “electric engineering.” “Electric information environments being utterly ethereal fosters the illusion of the world as spiritual substance,” McLuhan wrote. “It is now a reasonable facsimile of the mystical body, a blatant manifestation of the Anti-Christ. After all, the Prince of this World is a very great electric engineer.” Those searing words anchor @left_pad’s (KB4) nascent Bible App. “When God creates everything, he says that he creates humans in his image,” Henry told Kernel. “What that means is that we are meant to create.” His feed-based Bible App is a new message in a familiar medium. It’s a tool built to subvert TikTok “brain rot,” and to create precedent for technology that provides more signal and less noise. Cursory McCluhan readers may be surprised that he had more to say on his most known quote. "In Jesus Christ, there is no distance or separation between the medium and the message,” he wrote in the 1974 essay, Liturgy and the Microphone. “It is the one case where we can say that the medium and the message are fully one and the same." Henry tells his story of where the medium & message intertwine, and along the way, encourages each of us to create our own.

"those will succeed for whom the present becomes a time-free origin, a perpetual plenitude and source of life and spirit from which all decisive constellations and formations are completed." - Jean Gebser themarginalian.org/2022/04/29/jea…

The lighthouse that cannot be hidden: themarginalian.org/2024/11/06/tra…

Founders know founders

Founders know founders

That which is permission, can be made permissionless. If you like, accept some HON and help make money even weirder than it already is.

Culture matters more than debating the exact weight we should give to resilience, efficiency, and convenience. Culture changes slowest. Programming intentionally the direction those changes occur along is our super power. HON is a cultural statement. Money can be made free.

My last professional act of 2025 was to upgrade Honour (or HON). The most important thing about HON is that it is a cultural project. While it has interesting financial & technical parts, it's raison d'être is to be a durable cultural statement about programmable money.