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Dreaming big in 2026.

Yesterday, some commentary landed on the tokenization of securities and freely trading in DeFi. By free, it means apparently without a whitelist or KYC. I find this quite interesting and a positive step from the SEC, though I also suspect some of the claims in the article are probably a bit... out of context, because it's going to be very hard to freely trade stocks in DeFi without issuer permissions and without KYC. I say that as a former Wall Street trader and practitioner in this space. Why? One: dividends. When we think about the prospect of securities trading onchain, we also have to port to the chain all of the actions that come along with the security and the rules around those. In the case of dividends, specifically, that requires payment (on a specific date and time) of dividends to the holders of those securities, which means you need to know where the security was located at the time and who was holding it, how much of it they owned, and where to pay them. So on the surface, that seems easy on a blockchain, right? You know the wallet of the owner, and the history of the chain will tell you exactly who owned it. In addition to an ex-div date, you probably need an exact time and block, but that's a solvable enough problem. Except, you don't know WHO the owner is. This creates two problems. The first is tax. Who is doing the withholding here? How do they do that? It's going to be hard to do this properly without knowing who the holders are... The second, though, is even more severe: OFAC. Without knowing who the holders are, especially given the known actions of sanctioned entities onchain (IRGC, North Korea, etc.), there's probably no way to pay a dividend without knowing you have committed an OFAC violation, and unlike the arguments around diffusion and immateriality for paying a quarter of a tenth of a fifth of a cent on Solana, here, uh... yeah, no, that could be super material. So what will happen? Do you just not pay the onchain people? Do you put them in a container that will require them to come KYC to get the dividend? How do you do that? It's not obvious to me how this would work. This also generalizes to any coupon payments, prepayments, etc. for fixed income. Second: Control rights and voting. If you study some of the nonsense around insider pools, around corporate "mergers" (where one side controls a voting share of the other side), and more, there's going to be a lot of issues with voting where you don't know the holder of the stock. I might go one step further and say that under some of the aggressive interpretations of law, it creates fiduciary problems because a board will have no way to know if a shareholder vote is legitimate or not. But suffice to say, I think the complication here is exceptionally real. So where does this lead me? Could you get some sort of price index onchain, through a perpetual or something? Almost certainly, though now we are into derivative and security based swap questions instead. Could you get literal voting rights and dividends onchain? I think it's very possible, yes. Can you do the latter on in DeFi and without having to know who the holders of wallets are? There I have some very big questions. I think you have to be quite careful here. Could an ADR type situation work, where you strip voting rights and dividends? Yes, in theory. Would that fragment markets and maybe trade at a discount to stocks? Also yes. Is that good? YMMV. Can you do any of this without issuer permission? Well, in theory, probably, but how is that going to work when either the issuer or a bank refuses to pay a dividend citing OFAC concerns and then makes (at their own expense) holders come identify themselves and provide tax info to be able to do this? How will it work when they simply refuse votes from tokenized shares for fiduciary soundness reasons as they can't know things like the shares aren't held by nation-state enemies or insiders at competitors? It will be a mess. In short: this is a super complicated issue and I don't envy the SEC dealing with trying to maximize distribution while staying within the bounds, and I think there are likely to be compromises that we all have to live with.

If you thought the Genius-yield fight was ugly, I anticipate this one to be even more so.

Im as libertarian and pro tech and pro business as they come but Im really starting to dislike OpenAI and Anthropic They use all the knowledge humanity produced (most of it for free) to train their models just to sell it back to people packaged in a chatbox They sow fear as a marketing strategy - about AI disrupting jobs, hacking us, creating bioweapons, telling everyone society needs to figure out how to deal with the risks and negative externalities While they pocket lot of the upside and gaining asymmetric power from the ability to gate the access We really need as many open alternatives with access to compute and models as possible We need to commoditise AI to a point these guys are able to capture only marginal value while competing in a red ocean

.@zooko: "Bitcoin is not a payment system that can empower individuals the way Zcashers and Hal Finney would have wanted."

Open source , organic , Farm to table Blockchain

One of the nice parts of being a professor is that I don't have to answer to a corporate overlord, so I can say what I actually believe at crypto conferences on stage, in public. Some things I said: One, crypto was founded on the cypherpunk values of freeing people from being abused by nation-state actors and financial intermediaries, and the main use case for crypto is now somehow nation-state actors stealing money from people. "Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing the right thing." - Isaac Asimov, from the Foundation novels We're going to need to do something to fix this. Two, public blockchain data is better, not worse, for fighting financial crime. We need to improve our skills and understand this is not a blockchain only problem (in fact, the blockchain is a small part of it), and that the right approach will be multi-data-source multi-method, AI-enabled, and aware of the richness of the current data landscape. Banks don't do this. Crypto people don't do this either. How do I know? Here's an easter egg: a treasure trove of legal documents in the most important stablecoin-related case of the year dropped onchain last night, and nobody on @X or in media has found or reported on them yet. Have fun!

I mean, I am pretty sure there are other choices available, but I know how much communism sucks and I hold ZEC and this is powerful narrative to be pushing

Dear every website: instead of blocking bots, please just request $0.01 x402 payment Thanks

Happy international workers day to all except the idlers, the parasites, the crooked bureaucrats, and those environmental PowerPoint pushers, the total losers who produce NOTHING, zero economic value, yet live like fat-cat capitalists off your labor, doing everything they can to destroy our economic surplus but are failing badly.

I understand that the petite socialists, these petty-bourgeois opportunists who infest the state apparatus, the unions, the academies and the so-called workers’ organizations, want to preserve their bureaucratic sinecures, their parasitic privileges and their stranglehold over the proletariat. I get it. I understand that they are not concerned about the massive productivity improvements this technology will bring to the toiling masses, improvements that would sweep away layers of useless middle managers and armies of idlers living off the surplus labor of the workers. I get it. I understand that they don’t worry about empowering the individual worker with AI tools that smash the gatekeeping of academic certificates and credentialed elitism, tools that place the skills of production directly in the hands of the proletariat. I get it. But what I don’t understand is how anyone can ignore when the world’s leading engineers and scientists tell us that, as AI becomes more advanced, it could vastly multiply the productive forces of society, operating to create abundance and liberate humanity from drudgery — with possible revolutionary results for the working class. Given that these petite socialists, like all of us, have families and live on planet Earth, I can’t understand how they continue to recklessly obstruct and demand the regulation of an artificial intelligence they don’t even understand, all to protect the artificial shortages on which their power rests. Lust for control and parasitic privilege is one thing. Laying the framework for hindering the development of the productive forces, perpetuating scarcity and dooming the proletariat to continued misery is another. It is the true path of counter-revolution!

Solana is now a megaeth L2 via the wormhole eigenlayer. I don’t make the rules.

The highest-value human work in the AI era will be in domains with sparse reward signals. Internalize this, or watch your value erode over the next decade. Math, programming, rote memorization, data science, all fucked. The classic “smart nerd” jobs are exactly where AI is strongest, because the feedback loops are dense. You can check the answer. You can run the test. That means AI can improve quickly, and humans will rapidly fall behind. Your advantage as a human is in messy domains. Taste. Judgment. Negotiation. Risk-taking. Politics. Sales. Science at the frontier. Anything you can only really learn by doing. Cross-disciplinary stuff. The valuable domains will be the ones guarded by secrets, tacit knowledge, weak labels, long feedback cycles, and ambiguous outcomes. Places where the training data is scarce, the ground truth is disputed, and it's impossible to explain why something is good. AI will still enter these domains. But we will be slower to trust it unsupervised there, because it will be harder to tell when it is right, harder to prove when it is wrong, and difficult to construct secure sandboxes. The stakes will be too high to YOLO it. I find myself saying this over and over again to young people today: the future does not belong to people who are able to get good grades on tests. It belongs to people who can operate under uncertainty, in domains where correctness is hard to define. Those domains will become the thin waist of the economy: as productivity everywhere else accelerates, the humans who excel there will become our economic Strait of Hormuz. The best humans in these domains will demand an enormous cut of the growing economic pie. Your imperative going forward is to make sure you're one of these people. (Or become an electrician. That probably works too.)

☑️ @hosseeb: “It’s like calling something democratic — ‘If you want to vote, you can apply, and then we’ll decide whether you get to vote.’” Best line of the debate.

x402 broke a million transactions in the last two weeks alone, as endpoints keep going live across the ecosystem. Yet, a number of them appear to be unauthorized wrappers of services whose terms EXPLICITLY prohibit reselling. Right now there's no way to tell which is which. Three cases to consider: - Wolfram Alpha prohibits "resellers and aggregators," bans scraping, and bars sublicensing without permission. Yet, there's a third-party endpoint available for accessing it via x402 - Amadeus, a travel service, requires formal certification for any third-party connection, documented in a Service Order. You can access via Stabletravel. Whether the endpoint meets that standard isn't visible from the outside - A third-party wrapper was sourcing Google Flights data via SerpApi — a company Google is actively suing for scraping Search results and reselling access. Endpoint was recently removed from the Agentic Market storefront To be clear — the accountability here does NOT sit with x402. It's an open protocol, same as HTTP. It sits with those packaging unauthorized endpoints and collecting fees. With these current dynamics, providers bear the server load and see NONE of the revenue. A cleaner model already exists. MPP marks first-party integrations directly on each service card. Exa announced native x402 support, going first-party and citing the Linux Foundation's governance as the reason for choosing it. If there's no accountability here, it poisons the well. Potential native integrators become adversaries rather than participants. That revenue belongs to the providers. Native integration is how they claim it, and how x402 earns the legitimacy it needs to grow.

- takes out massive Aave loan against his CRV bags - uses it to buy luxury real estate - CRV dumps, Aave gets into bad debt - industry rallies to bailout Aave - later on another Aave bad debt, industry rallies again - schools everyone on what should be done - is asked for financial contribution - "nah, I'd need to sell a kidney"

1) Help everyone -> build more stuff 2) Help the poor at the expense of everyone -> give only the poor money 3) Hurt everyone -> give money to everyone Why does 3 hurt everyone? Because to do 1, you need capital at risk. No capital at risk, nothing new gets built. Everyone gets more $ but the amount of stuff is the same -> prices go up.

Today is my last day at Consensys, where I've been building MetaMask for over ten years. I'm burned out and need to spend time with my family. Wishing the team the best — they have an amazing road ahead of them.

I really feel for the @aave team here because even though they own responsibility in what’s ultimately affecting their users having onboarded rsETH, it all starts with L0 (and Kelp). L0 is a major infra provider, like an electric utility company for DeFi. I have empathy too for the difficult high stakes role they have played in DeFi. But when a forest fire burns everything down and starts due to sparks from failed electric grid equipment, we hold that company responsible. Aave doesn’t have the luxury of waiting on L0 to step up because so many of its citizens’ homes are at threat of burning down and those affected are demanding resolution, future protection, and answers. I can appreciate they have to act quickly to stop the fire from spreading. And it means they are likely to step up with emergency funds to make the situation better than to just let the fires play out. We don’t see lawsuits often in DeFi but L0 could be drowning in them due to this debacle unless they step up. DeFi is a game of confidence and if L0 doesn’t step up here to cover any losses after all this, how can you ever trust this team? I’d never trust L0-anything again after this. And investors/protocols will punish them—by selling ZRO, not integrating with L0, and Christ have mercy if I would ever touch a new L1 by this team. Good luck getting Aave on Zero. Note: Kelp is good as dead after all this. Won’t even waste my time thinking about it. I’ll just focus all my annoyance on L0 who is much more entrenched across DeFi.

🔥HASEEB: AAVE HAS ENOUGH EQUITY AFTER KELPDAO EXPLOIT Dragonfly’s Haseeb Qureshi says Aave may take some debt from the $292M Kelp DAO rsETH exploit but has the equity to pay it off. He adds DeFi has survived shocks like the 2020 liquidation failures, Terra collapse, and the 2022 stETH depeg and keeps getting stronger.