Grandma Crackers

Saw some people saying they want to play Minecraft, I can sort out a $Grandma server for all of the community. Who’s down?

AI makes intelligence digital. Crypto makes institutions digital. And if intelligence is becoming software, it’s going to need institutions that are software too. That intersection is where I’ve been spending most of my time, trying to understand, in the details, how these systems actually work: how consensus holds up, how markets are designed, how governance behaves under pressure, where privacy fits, and what tradeoffs all of it forces. But most conversation in the ecosystem stays at the level of narratives. The mechanism stays implicit. And if we’re serious about building institutions for digital intelligence, we can’t treat design like a black box. So I’m launching TheCoordinate, a long-form podcast with the researchers and builders pushing the frontier where blockchain and AI meet. Some have shaped major systems. Some wrote foundational papers. All of them are expanding what’s possible at the intersection of intelligence and institutions. The format is simple: each episode I pick a topic, do the homework (read the papers, study the systems), then sit down with the people doing the work and ask the real questions, especially the parts I’m genuinely confused about, until we can build a clear mental model. If you want rigorous conversations about how digital intelligence and digital institutions can co-evolve, subscribe to TheCoordinate. First episode tomorrow. 🎙️🔜

The Commission even gave an example of what it found so objectionable: a blue checkmark on a Donald Duck parody account. It called the practice “deceptive.” That’s right—the Commission fined X €45 million because its practices might lead users to believe that 1) this fictional duck had come to life, and 2) was a real X user.

Creator fees need change. When Dynamic Fees V1 was introduced a few months ago, the goal was to help create more success cases in our ecosystem by giving top project founders and teams a strong incentive to launch their token on pump fun and drive it to success. Only a week later, the potential of the mechanism showed: more and more creators - many of which have never touched a crypto app before - began organically launching coins and streaming on the platform. The Streaming meta created some of the best onchain conditions of 2025, doubling activity by more than 2x, as evidenced by the below chart showing pump fun bonding curve volumes (in USD). However, it wasn’t sustainable, and it exposed critical issues within the platform. While creator fees are a game changer for Project Tokens (those with well-defined active teams, rather than communities) they failed to meaningfully change the behavior of the average memecoin token deployer. Therefore, creator fees may have skewed the incentive for users to engage in low-risk activity (coin creation) instead of high-risk activity (trading), which is dangerous, because traders are the lifeblood of the platform. Pump fun’s mission is to create the best possible environment for coins to thrive, and successful tokens are much more likely to come about in an environment where traders are incentivized to participate in the market, provide liquidity, create volume, and take risk. Furthermore, Creator Fees on the platform have lacked utility. Many narratives could use Creator Fees to raise the ceiling for that project by, for example, sending the fees to a notable person that is related to the narrative and onboard them to the community e.g. White Whale, rainbowfish, etc. The platform so far fails at providing a good user experience here, oftentimes requiring users to CTO coins, trust other people to fulfill their promises, etc. So, to summarize our analysis: - Creator Fees are a great tool to incentivize high-quality Project Tokens. Perhaps they require tweaking, and perhaps other protocol adjustments are needed to create an optimal environment for Project Tokens to thrive, but Dynamic Fees V1 was undoubtedly a directionally correct step for these kinds of token projects - Creator Fees can be used in a variety of ways to significantly improve the token’s investability but require better UX - Many tokens, however, don’t need Creator Fees, and this results in a more uneven playing field, where memecoin creation was incentivized too much instead of memecoin trading. Major changes are coming. I can’t say too much yet, but as always, pump fun will take a market-based approach, and let traders decide whether a narrative truly deserves Creator Fees, and how those should be used. There will be more communications coming from me soon about what we’re building and the future of $PUMP I’m extremely excited for what 2026 holds.

btw i just discovered that all application emails are going to spam. if you applied and haven’t heard from me check your spam folder pls.