Shiv Shankar

Dutch auctions for compute and stuff.. wonder how he got that idea. 💡 🤔

The most revealing thing about this AI leadership paper is that it reads less like a vision for innovation and more like a glossy whitepaper for a 21st century East India Company. Every generation of incumbents discovers a new moral vocabulary for why they alone should control transformative technology. In the 90s it was cryptography. We were told strong encryption was too dangerous to spread because terrorists, rogue states, chaos, dual-use, etc. So the US crippled exports, weakened products, slowed adoption, and kneecapped parts of its own software industry. Right up until reality steamrolled the policy and we woke up to its stupidity and then eCommerce, secure communications, software signing, and the modern internet exploded and gave us tremendous benefits. Now the exact same priesthood has returned with AI. - “Dual-use.” - “Strategic advantage.” - “Model distillation.” - “National security.” - “Responsible access.” A few different nouns but mostly the same ones. Same instinct: Centralize control, gatekeep compute, fuse state and corporate power, and call it safety. The funniest part is that this strategy is almost perfectly designed to accelerate the thing they claim to fear. You do not stop a rival superpower (who happens to be the absolute best at scaling energy and manufacturing and who has a choke-hold on rare Earths refinement) from building domestic capability by permanently attempting to strangle them. You create the economic and political incentive for total self-sufficiency. We have already done that as Jensen warned. We went from 100% market to nearly 0%. Huawei is now manufacturing millions of chips. DeepSeek v4 trained on them. They have more energy than the rest of the world combined. Meanwhile, we have activists and anti-economic fools like AOC and Bernie pushing for data center moratoriums and we can't build a single bullet train in 20 years and folks fighting to not expand the energy grid here and new nuclear plants getting tied up in environmental regulation for a decade. The sanctions did the exact opposite of what the hawks wanted. They jumpstarted a moribund, dinosaur of a Chinese chips industry. We basically said to the people who happen control the most powerful manufacturing engine on the planet "we intend to squeeze you." They rightly saw it as an existential threat. The sanctions become the industrial policy. Huawei. SMIC. Domestic lithography. Packaging. Memory. Entire Chinese supply chains that did not exist at serious scale a decade ago now exist precisely because Washington convinced Beijing they had no choice. Brilliant work. So the endgame here is what exactly? 1) Push China into a Manhattan Project for chips and AI. 2) Increase the strategic value of Taiwan even further. 3) Once China reaches self sufficiency that can invade Taiwan and choke off our own super advanced chips where are made there exclusively (and no we don't have even close to enough TSMC factories in Arizona or anywhere else in the world). That's every NVIDIA chip. Every Google tensor chip. Every Apple chip. Every chip in you iPhone and Android phone. Every Amazon chip. The chips in your car and truck and hair dryer and washing machine. 4) Escalate a cold tech war into a permanent civilizational bloc conflict that is likely to turn into a shooting war at one point. 5) Fragment the global software ecosystem. 6) Create American AI aristocracies protected by regulation and compute licensing. And somehow call this “open innovation.” Meanwhile the actual history of software keeps screaming the opposite lesson: Knowledge diffuses, open ecosystems win, developers route around gatekeepers, and attempts to permanently contain computation usually fail. What really jumps off the page is the assumption that a tiny cluster of frontier labs should become quasi-sovereign actors, deciding who gets intelligence, who gets compute, who gets models, and which countries are permitted to participate in the future. Not elected governments. Not open markets. Not open-source communities. A handful of corporations sitting beside the national security state, insisting that concentration of power is necessary to protect democracy. You almost have to admire the audacity.

@emilianobonassi I can’t even fathom this as a problem.. 😵‍💫

answer: more datacenters

Did you know folks in TradFi don’t know what TradFi means? 😵‍💫 Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.. it’s still early days. As Uncle Jeff puts it: It’s still Day 1.

Surge is live - our first network-wide upgrade to Boundless. Up to 25% more proving capacity. Up to 50% lower costs across workloads. Multi-chain from day one with @taikoxyz and @base. When provers get faster and cheaper to run, the open marketplace passes those savings through to every requestor as lower proof prices. Higher performance proving, at a lower cost, for everyone. Huge credit to @emilianobonassi, who shepherded this end to end (his first major release at Boundless!) and to the engineering team that shipped it. We’re constantly working to push earnings up for provers and pull costs down for anyone who needs GPU compute. A lot more in motion.

Crypto is maturing. The next phase of this industry will not be won by hype alone. It will be won by projects building infrastructure institutions can actually use. Privacy, compliance, scalability and real utility. That’s exactly what boundless x @xrpl_commons is building.

AI makes programming accessible to anyone with an intent and an idea. Combining that with a permissionless proving network means you can go from idea to production at the speed of thought. One SDK call handles the full flow: any agent can parse the output directly. No signups, no gatekeeping. If you're building with Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor, you can be running verified proofs on mainnet in minutes. What we're most excited about is what this unlocks for people in industries that have never thought about ZK before. The barrier just dropped to nearly zero.

Singapore doing its flex!

It’s like they overheard my conversation from yday - niche but high value solution! @ArdentAI 🫡 I’m just overwhelmed by how many niche solutions are popping up for AI enabled development… including x.com/boundless_xyz/…

.@linear is probably the best positioned company for the code centric world. At @boundless_xyz we use it for managing technical projects, AI driven CRM, marketing.. company source of truth. There is some vertical integration work they can do to pretty much become the new workforce OS.

In 2026, to win you have blur the lines of the job descriptions and job roles, especially if you're working at a startup. At @boundless_xyz, this behaviour is something I laud, applaud, and reward. @brian_armstrong's latest letter to all Coinbase employees suggests the same. As a CEO, it's my job to enable employees to do their best work and run with ideas as a 1-person product team (powered by @claudeai) Someone in marketing playing around on the protocol. Someone in operations building tooling to better observe spend. A PM getting out there and building on top of your capabilities to see what has PMF. One-person initiatives everywhere, without one-person dependencies anywhere. The future belongs to teams with a critical mass of intelligent people working with AI - not 3-person billion-dollar infra companies where a sick day becomes a cascading failure.

@andyyy @hosseeb always has an interesting take.. I wonder if anyone has any real data on how crypto VC fund risk is actually managed. I’m sure it will be eye opening.. I have some knowledge of how large treasuries/tradVCs think, but crypto VCs are so active - it must be complex.

Dragonfly smashing market orders???

This is a good list. Compliance teams have Q too 1/ How does our auditor work with you/us? 2/ IT Certification? 3/ Who else do you work with - what is your compliance status? Then comes the CISO.. selling B2B means internalizing the old boy scout mantra - "always be prepared"

Most institutions don’t discover the transparency tax of being onchain until it's too late At Boundless, we are carving the path for entities to adopt stablecoins by building a team that has real experience in confidential, compliant solutions for onchain finance

I have not looked into this project in a while. Issue is that existing solutions cost too much or their SLA does not work + ICP does not offer GPUs as far as I can see - correct me if I am wrong. @boundless_xyz has achieved 80x cost efficiencies over AWS/Azure for zk proving for GPUs. When people talk about compute these days - they are talking about GPUs.. CPUs are pretty cheap and available for a reasonable prices on clouds.

@sshankar @boundless_xyz $ICP does decentralized programmable compute opencloud.org

Watch this space! 👨‍💻👨‍💻👨‍💻 @boundless_xyz already landed the primitives for this.

Great to see serious capital flowing back into the industry with @a16zcrypto's raise. The hope is that this round of deployment looks different from the last cycle. Less capital going to projects that generate narratives but no users. More going to the infrastructure that actually has to work when institutions show up - stablecoin settlement, agentic commerce, onchain finance, privacy and compliance. @boundless_xyz has spent the last year heads down building the primitives. Compute, compliance tooling, products for onchain finance that institutions can actually use. We're putting those together now into solutions that add real value to the ecosystem. The money is here. The question is whether it goes to things that last. Open to chatting with VCs who have more thoughts..

If you were affected by the Coinbase layoff I will gladly connect you with good people.

@katie_haun Amazing! It's a great time to double down.

tbh - I like @LalitKModi 's idea for Franchise Test Cricket. Batsmen win t20, Bowlers win Tests. It will force franchises to ask for tracks that suit home advantages..