Nathan Van Snyder

“Original imitation” is a preferred way of Marrakech luxury knock-off merchants to describe their wares. There, one can find anything from Tiffany x Wilson basketball to a Millionaire Speedy to the Chanel 25. Most of it looks original; it is also unmistakably an imitation. 1/5

@Andercot @0xNN2 And yet it appears that without an embodied self there is a limit to the emergent coordinated action of intelligence.

Intelligence is a system level description of emergent coordinated action in response to the environment, and it does not require any 'embodied self'

Asset issuance does not end at the spot market. Steer’s Issuance Studio is expanding from liquidity infrastructure into options-powered structured products through Panoptic. Healthier markets. Better hedging. More deliberate onchain product design. steer.finance/blog/steer-x-p…

Introducing USVC - a single basket of high-growth venture capital, for everyone. No accreditation required, SEC-registered, and a very low $500 minimum. Includes OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Sierra, Crusoe, Legora, and Vercel. As USVC adds more companies, investors will own a piece of that too. Liquidity typically comes when companies exit, but we’re aiming to let investors redeem up to 5% of the fund every quarter. This isn’t guaranteed, but if we can make it work, you won’t be locked up like in a traditional venture fund. It runs on AngelList, which already supports $125 billion of investor capital. And I’ve joined USVC as the Chairman of its Investment Committee. — Go back to the 1500s, you set sail for the new world to find tons of gold - that was adventure capital. Early-stage technology is the modern version. It says we are going to create something new, and it’s risky. It’s daring. But ordinary people can’t invest until it’s old, until it’s no longer interesting, until everybody has access to it. By the time a stock IPOs, most of the alpha is gone. The adventure is gone. Public market investors are literally last in line. This problem has become farcical in the last decade. Startups are reaching trillion dollar valuations in the private markets while ordinary investors have their noses up to the glass, wondering when they’ll be let in. Investing in private markets isn’t easy. You need feet on the ground. You need judgment built over years. Most people don’t have the patience to wait ten or twenty years for an investment to come to fruition. But there is no more productive, harder-working way to deploy a dollar than in true venture capital. USVC enables you to invest in venture capital in a broad, accessible, professionally-managed way, through a single basket of innovation, focused on high-growth startups, at all stages. It is how you bet on the future of tech: the smartest young people in the world, working insane hours, leveraged to the max, with code, hardware, capital, media, and community. Your dollar doesn’t work harder anywhere. There is an old line - in the future, either you are telling a computer what to do, or a computer is telling you what to do. You don’t want to be on the wrong side of that transaction. USVC lets you buy the future, but you buy it now. Then you wait, and if you are right, you get paid. Get access here: usvc.com

Over the past few years i've tried very hard to bring options markets which are viable within onchain strategies live within our platform. Simply put, the tech wasn't there. We needed atomic settlement. No RFQs. We also needed the ability to stand up options for ANY market. No if, ands, or buts. There are very few protocols who can offer this and drives the main the reason we are proud to partner with a team like @Panoptic_xyz to bring one of the most important primary instruments in finance to life onchain.

We're excited to announce our strategic partnership with @steerprotocol. Together, we are building the infrastructure for onchain structured yield. The next phase of DeFi isn’t access, it’s infrastructure. And it's being built right now.

This is just the beginning. Read the full article below. 👇 panoptic.xyz/blog/panoptic-…

It's time for the industry to have a BIG unlock. Options shouldn't be stuck behind private market makers. The broader industry deserves more than just spot and lending markets. Steer Protocol × @Panoptic_xyz is about changing that. We are excited to bring options into Steer's Issuance Studio - expanding what issuers can launch and what investors can access onchain. Together, we’re building toward a permissionless system where spot, lending, vaults, strategies, and options can work together inside one broader issuance framework. More tools for issuers. Better structured products for investors. A bigger design space for onchain markets. steer.finance/blog/steer-x-p…

Cloistered Carmelite monks in Wyoming are carving a Gothic cathedral with robotic arms. They tend cattle on horseback and use CNC stone-cutting machines. In today's article from Arena 007, @keegan_mcnamara argues that this monastery is not anachronistic but the inheritors of a deep tradition of putting technology in service of the transcendent. Read his essay in print or online at @arenamagdotcom

@austincampbell Here's our contribution to a "solution". matador.steer.finance

Some gross misrepresentations of my views in here. On purpose for drama, or on accident because nuance is lost? Either way, let's be as clear as possible: 1 - Securities have to have a record where ownership is known. 2 - They also need to have controls so that they can be frozen, clawed back, re-allocated, etc. to comply with current securities law without creating massive liability that makes putting them onchain non-viable either from an economic perspective (the concern at the root of SAB-121, malformed and broken as it was) or a legal one. 3 - Under current risk frameworks post D-F, you also cannot have a single point of failure for these things across systems, a point the OCC is more up to speed on than the current SEC, though the SEC is rapidly climbing the curve. What does this mean? I agree you can definitely record securities onchain on a public permissonless network! That part is not surprising to anyone. People do that right now. There are multiple licensed transfer agents (e.g. @Securitize, @SuperstateInc, etc.) all doing this right now. That's not the hard part from the public permissionless chain perspective. The question is doing anything with them after that. Right now, the answer is mostly, you can't. One way sends? Easy. Putting securities inside an AMM pool or borrow lend protocol? Net settlement and margining architecture? This is what I have been repeatedly saying does not work (and, in fact, the USD stablecoins inside these things in current DeFi are a ticking time bomb). Why? If you have a fully permissionless, undifferentiated pool, or you have 24/7 real-time trading of these assets, this means it's a matter of time until one of the following things happens: 1 - You have an OFAC issue, hack, or fraud problem causing you to have to freeze entire asset pools, including commingled funds (see: Tornado Cash). 2 - You have a fast enough hack that you don't react before the funds are gone, meaning that whichever regulated entity was the custodian or caretaker is now liable to users for the whole thing (catastrophic if large enough, and why SAB-121 required 100% capital for all exposures). 3 - You have funds transmitted in error that need to be reversed moving through some of these complex implementations. 4 - You have an issuer themselves get hacked, such that all the powers they have to control these things are now in the hands of the bad guys. You cannot rely solely on an issuer of a token to fix those problems. If you let securities or rwa tokens into the current version of DeFi, it's going to eventually be a death sentence for both the protocols tokens are in and the issuer (who will hold the bag on liability). The regulators seem to agree with me on this: look at what the SEC and OCC are not, in fact, allowing their registered entities to do. There's no easy fix here if you want to remain truly permissionless. Either you are going to need third parties deputized to have vast powers over a chain to halt these kinds of issues and remediate them, or you should probably not be combining RWA with smart contracts / complex implementations. At a bare minimum, DeFi needs a complete ground up redesign just to comply with basic things like being able to uniquely segregate funds if they don't want entire protocols nuked by a freeze order. Note that this doesn't mean you have to violate the immutable ledger properties: you can reverse transactions by force sending them back in a subsequent transaction, you can reverse hacks with targeted transactions to send flows back the other way, and so on. The ledger is immutable, but that doesn't mean you can't later send things back. However, the current chains take decentralization to the extreme, so when a thing like Drift happens, nobody acts. That won't be the case for long, with the new rules being implemented for Genius. People are going to have to start acting in ways that blow up the current system, or worse, breaks are going to happen so severe the entire edifice collapses. Disagree? Here's a thought experiment: what if North Korea gets ahold of Tether or Circle's smart contract keys? What happens to DeFi on Eth?

until the policy vacuum is fixed, I firmly believe we will not see a flourishing of onchain agents MPC wallets are only part of the solution.

219% returns from gamma scalping. This is what LPs are leaving on the table. Backtested with @BlockScholes ↓

And here goes the next onchain entity restructuring case: reviewing @Balancer's shutdown of its corporate entity The restructuring was triggered by the November 2025 exploit that led to roughly $128M in losses. The move is primarily focused on liability as the exploit created ongoing legal exposure tied to the corporate entity. The protocol itself continues through the DAO, foundation, and service provider structure, with the removal of the corporate layer simply stripping away overhead and legacy obligations. More broadly, this reflects the pattern we at @areta_io see across DeFi where protocols move into leaner, more resilient forms built to operate without excess structure (in this case) or to enable institutional sales (like in the recent @AcrossProtocol restructuring). At a product level, Balancer is still active. It continues to have liquidity in pools and generates protocol fees. The issue was not that the system stopped working entirely, but that the surrounding model became difficult to sustain. Token emissions, cost structure, and the cumulative effect of past security incidents all contributed to that. The restructuring plan also seems to reflect a shift in approach. BAL emissions are expected to be discontinued, the veBAL governance model wound down, and protocol fees are redirected to the DAO treasury. There is also a proposal to introduce a buyback mechanism aimed at providing exit liquidity for token holders. We explore this topic in more detail in our recent Token-Equity M&A Playbook. Access the full report here: docs.areta.io/v/token-equity…

'Heart Sutra Beatbox Remix' went viral around the world. May this phenomenon heal the world. 般若心経ビートボックスRemixは世界に拡がり続けているようです。この現象が人々の心を癒やす一助となりますように。 youtu.be/nvIGCMhjkvw #heartsutra #beatbox #loopstation #RC505 #般若心経

Assembly Theory says complexity doesn't emerge from genius — it emerges from combining simple things in new ways. Minecraft proves it: 6 block types → infinite worlds. Web3 proves it: a few money legos → an entire financial system. The next breakthrough in public goods funding won't be one brilliant mechanism. It'll be someone combining QF + conviction voting + retroPGF in a way nobody tried yet. Stop designing cathedrals. Start playing Minecraft. 🔬 gitcoin.co/research/assem…

When @jakelynch told me about this i thought maybe they'd get to market by end of june, MAYBE. It's not a small app. So I thought it would be the World Cup for their first event Somehow they shipped this full app for March Madness And the app is highly detailed. It even has a module that will predict brackets for you and the AI even suggests some refinement to it's strategy based on your preferences Full checkout for crypto, apple pay, anything of course They have over 50 sign ups right now, let's get them to 100, brackets need to be in by Thursday 11am est March 19

Got a lot of messages from VC and fund manager friends and clients after yesterday's thread on the paradigm shifting SEC guidance (thank you). The #1 question: what does this actually mean for my portfolio and my next deal? Wrote a deep dive on that. Key points in this thread, full piece linked below.

Great summary from a top crypto lawyer who does the necessary thing of actually *reading the footnotes* (which are especially interesting and insightful in the SEC’s and CFTC’s latest crypto guidance)