Frank Hepworth

Crypto investors: BlackRock and many institutions are emphasizing 'tokenization' will be the future of crypto investing. This is not true. Tokenization will certainly be a thing and it will continue. But there's little value creation there, and whatever value is created is not passed back to a crypto asset you can invest in. That's why Naval says tokenization is a category error: it adds the complexities of crypto without much actual value creation; the underlying asset was already accessible, albeit stuck on some slow rails. What value is created from the efficiency gains goes to the bottom line of the facilitating TradFi institution, which is good for them and totally rational... for them. But as an average joe crypto investor, you should recognize that the biggest names in tokenization either don't have an investable crypto asset, or if they do, it doesn't have value capture. Institutions will do everything they can to avoid being seen as issuing an unregistered security - so they strip their assets of value capture. It's why assets like $ONDO are down -82% from its all time highs. What value is captured by the asset? None. By design. For *crypto investors*, you should instead place your focus on assets attached to services that the traditional markets do not provide AND have value capture. For example, $VVV is up 800% YTD despite the bear market because the PMF of @AskVenice is explicitly and intentionally something that traditional markets are not providing AND the crypto asset captures the value. Same with Hyperliquid (+78% YTD), same with TAO (+18% YTD). In short: if your looking to make money as a crypto investor, don't bet on tokenization.

If you're building tokenization, you're building for TradFi. Which is fine. If you're building Internet Capital Markets, you're building for the people. Which is better.

This is better innovation. So much tokenization stuff is literally just rebuilding TradFi onchain and it is redundant af. This type of innovation is categorically better.

Truly a correct take.

Haven't looked into the details, but the sentiment should be applauded and imo this is the 'point' of DeFi.

@benjamincowen Also - actually debatable that grifting has increased on net. It's just more noticeable now that liquidity has left.

Grifting has increased, but this is the nature of a freer market. We've also seen revenue-share fee switches turn on and other features that drive value to the token that would likely be jail time under Gensler's policing. Weeds grow faster than trees after a forest fire. Don't ask for another scorching just because you don't like weeds.

When Gensler left the SEC in January 2025, Bitcoin was at 109k. Today Bitcoin is at 75k. One major reason the crypto markets have suffered is because market participants started to lose faith in the industry itself. After Gensler left, it essentially just opened the floodgates to the grifting age of crypto, where influencers and politicians were launching memecoins and rug-pulling their followers each and every day, without fear of any repercussions. This led to a massive misallocation of capital into useless assets that drained liquidity from the industry. While people celebrated Gensler leaving, it actually marked a turning point in the industry, with Bitcoin only marginally going higher before entering a bear market. Now that people celebrate Powell's removal as chair of the Federal Reserve, it makes me think history will repeat itself once again. People celebrate it in the short-term, but as we look back on this era in a few years, I imagine it will mark a major turning point in credibility at the Fed. If the Fed just becomes another cabinet of the executive branch, it may lead to a lack of trust in the institution itself. Perhaps many will look back in a few years and realize that markets were better off with Powell than without him.

After listening to Rockefeller’s biography, I’ve been detailing every minute of my day. Rather than increasing anxiety by stressing about every minute, which is what I thought would happen, it’s had the opposite effect. When you have the full view of what your day will look like, in detail, and why, the small uncertainties decrease which allows your focus to naturally increase.

@guywuolletjr because the more reasonable alternative gets you sued by the SEC

it's insane to me that buy and burn has become the default for profitable crypto protocols why would a high growth startup would ever take its profits and distribute them to shareholders instead of re-investing for future growth, or at least holding it for runway

@MikeIppolito_ I appreciate the positive sentiment. Thanks Mike

It's true that sentiment in DeFi is at a low right now. Remember that in the not too distant past, confidence in CeFi has been at similar or even much worse levels. It was just three years ago that FTX imploded, and people here were pulling all their assets out of CeFi. Anything not onchain and transparent was seen as unsafe, MMs withdrew from most exchanges. It's ironic to see how far we've swung in the opposite direction, and we should expect sentiment to last roughly the same amount of time. That's not to say we don't need to fix this stuff in DeFi, we do, in the same way we did for the CEXes. But this industry is full of smart and industrious people. We will fix it, this too shall pass, and DeFi will do very, very well over the next 18-24 months.

@_midmod_ @PopPunkOnChain Take it up with your regulator man

@PopPunkOnChain The major problem with this is that, I think, a majority of your holders are US-based, and now are excluded in this ACE round. Bad feeling when they just get dumped on token-wise after its announcement, as that is the only place they can derive value

@MikeIppolito_ Tokenization value accrual happens offchain though, not onchain. Fundamentally people want new assets with value accrual. More TAOs, more HYPEs.

I am over the cucked mentality of this industry. What your NFT lending ve3,3 ponzi went bust so now there's no innovation? The SEC and Larry Fink are telling you finance is coming ONCHAIN. There has never been a better time to work in crypto get it together man.

@diegoxyz @base Probably the most important value accrual technology onchain right now. Thanks for sharing.

5,000 new AI agents have just been created on @base Crypto is achieving mass adoption, just not from humans, but from AI agents. As of today, there are already 95k agents tracked across different blockchains and they’re growing at an impressive rate. DeFi protocols such as @aave, @HyperliquidX, @pendle_fi, and @Uniswap are the ones that benefit the most from this trend. Crypto is finally becoming easy to access, and economic activity can only grow with all these agents operating on-chain. The future is bright for crypto and DeFi.

@AndrewMcMurra14 @GivnerAriel You are correct to ask that 👍

@frank_hep @GivnerAriel I'm not sure if I'm asking for legal protections, I'm just asking myself what I and many other OG's (7+ years in this space) are even doing here when every couple months our dollars are taken, dollars can just as easily sit in a bank account making 3.5% with FDIC assurances.

The more I sit on this, the more I can’t help but think we’re dealing with a civil negligence issue. Sorry for how long this rant will be in advance, but I’m just so angry. Drift Protocol was handling hundreds of millions in user money. They knew crypto is full of hackers - especially North Korean state teams like the ones behind this $285M drain. Yet their team spent months chatting on Telegram, meeting strangers at conferences, opening sketchy code repos, and downloading fake apps on devices tied to multisig controls. Basic security rules are simple: keep signing keys on completely separate, air-gapped machines. Never mix everyday dev work with access to user funds. Don’t trust people just because you shook hands at an event. Every serious project knows this. Drift didn’t follow it. This was a straightforward human mistake at the most obvious weak point. Attackers got in, pre-signed transactions, and emptied the vault in minutes. Now everything’s frozen, users lost big, and we’re hearing excuses about “sophisticated actors” instead of clear plans to repay people from treasury or insurance. In plain terms, civil negligence means they failed their basic duty to protect the money they were managing. You can’t just shrug, say “state hackers did it,” and leave users holding the bag. People trusted Drift with their funds… not with playing risky games against pro attackers. Fix it. Compensate users properly and transparently or don’t act surprised when the community and lawsuits call this exactly what it looks like: a preventable mess caused by sloppy security.

@AndrewMcMurra14 @GivnerAriel Remember not to conflate two issues. If you want legal protections, request those agreements from the protocol. If the protocol doesn't promise protections, then you can't expect to hold them legally responsible after the fact, which is what Ariel is saying here.

@frank_hep @GivnerAriel If all you can expect is to lose all your money, theres no place for it to exist at all. To lose $ speculating on tokens like SOL/ETH is 1 thing, its entirely different to lose your stables in the blink of an eye. If ppl can't even expect to keep dollars, its worthless to be here

@lex_node I hope this aligns with your thoughts close enough that you can drop it into X threads where there are arguments happening b/c they don't have the basics

Testing if posting YT videos on here gets any traction. Here's how crypto actually works. youtube.com/watch?v=otUPFw…

@therollupco He wasn't calling for it. He said the TradFi guys will want it, and they will. I wouldn't even comment usually but I wouldn't take Paul out of context like that

Morpho CEO said out loud what everyone at DAS was thinking after the Resolv exploit: "No one wants to rely on DAO-managed risk management for their assets, they want control. They want control on risk, on compliance." If the protocol at the center of the curator crisis is explicitly calling for institutional curators to bring regulated guardrails onchain, what does that tell you about where vault infrastructure is headed?