Chris Ries

Excited to announce that I have joined @circle to lead privacy and mev products on @arc. Privacy is largely understood design space. Cryptography has been around for thousands of years (used in Ancient Mesopotamia to hide trade secrets) and is what secures your crypto assets today. In the context of embedding privacy functionality (encrypted transaction details, balances, etc.) on layer one blockchains, it's a largely under explored area. In more ways than not, MEV is complimentary to privacy. If implemented correctly it mitigates value destroyed (via bad mev) and helps ensure a healthy ecosystem (via good mev). Tackling these 0 to 1 products will be a challenging but very rewarding experience. I've worked with Circle in various capacities over the years, so it feels like a coming home moment for me. Shout out to all of the incredible people that I get to work with every day @0xrachelita @sterlingba @blockjain @AdiSeredinschi

@julianweisser congrats!

The Solo Founders Program turns one today. Many say you need a co-founder to get started. They're wrong. The best founders have never waited around for a co-founder. Will you?

@pythianism the p/e on these SaaS companies is still pretty crazy tho (expected them to be way lower)

Crypto and SaaS decorrelating makes sense to me BTC and ETH are not traditional business models and not able to be replaced by models+compute, as long as they can withstand quantum, they are going to be more interesting as a result Stablecoins (Tether, Sky) and Derivatives (Hype) also are not able to be displaced by AI, as these are liquidity and network effects businesses. Public fintech names have held up well for the same reasons. SaaS is under attack from many directions. Maybe its not as bad as it seems, but you still cannot put a GAAP P/E on these businesses that isn't negative/infinity

@pitdesi this whole playbook has already been run at scale with a massive botnet orchestrated by two Russian cyber gangs pushing at 50-60% of all spam email (at one point) on the Internet for cheap knockoff prescription drugs @briankrebs spoiler alert: it didn't end well

How are we feeling about this bet I have with the founder of Medvi?

@sjdedic bullish on vcs that "rip themselves apart for their portfolio companies"

A take on VCs, from a VC: Most crypto VCs will not survive the next 3 years. And honestly, good riddance. This industry has matured more in the last 12 months than in the previous decade. Real regulation. Real institutional adoption. Real revenue-generating products. Real founders building real businesses. And yet most VCs in this space still operate like it's 2021. Only invest when they get ridiculous discounts, slap a logo on an announcement tweet, ghost the founder, wait for TGE and unlocks, dump on retail, repeat. Zero conviction and zero value add. Many such cases. Good thing is that this playbook is dying as we speak. And the age of AI is about to bury it even faster. When any founder with a laptop and a Claude subscription can ship in weeks what used to take a team of 20 and $5M in funding, what exactly are you offering as a VC? Just passive capital? Founders need less of it than ever, and less and less will they care about your brand name or access to your network. The VCs that will survive have three things in common: 1) They rip themselves apart for their portfolio companies. Not metaphorically, but actually in the trenches, investing their time to co-build and strategize with founders to accelerate their growth. They pick up the phone at 2am when shit hits the fan. And most importantly, they treat a portfolio company like it's their own. 2) They were here before the hype and stayed through every bear market. They have conviction that goes beyond a TGE because they actually think in years, not in weeks. 3) Perhaps most importantly in an age where AI makes it trivially easy to build, they help you get seen. When every founder can ship a great product in weeks, attention and distribution become the scarcest and most valuable assets of all. The VCs who can't help you compete for it become increasingly worthless. All VCs that can't offer this will die, and we're already seeing it happen in real time. What used to be a landscape of hundreds of funds will consolidate until there are only 20-30 left that are actually serious about this industry and the longevity of it. Sounds bullish to me.

@shengkun_ye @hthieblot @FeiyouG @fdotinc congrats. you'll learn a lot and grow from the experience

got this from @hthieblot right after the call. we’re in, founders inc!

@andyyy if done correctly, it eliminates a lot of the opsec threat surface for protocols and users

Privacy is the most important thing for this industry to get right since the inception of smart contracts in 2016.

I wish this was live when we founded @sphereone_ five years ago. It would have made our lives building cross chain payment intents a whole lot easier. It's never been easier to build value in crypto. Don't worry about the venture and market conditions, just go and build.

@segall_max @bankrbot @paysponge @atxp_ai @Nevermined_ai this is why we started using privy

More than 30% of Privy signups are teams building agent-managed wallets Today's agent CLI launch is for them. This is a MASSIVE design space opening up fast Pumped AF to be experimenting alongside the greats like @bankrbot @paysponge @atxp_ai @Nevermined_ai and many others 😤

@NWischoff couldn't agree more

Your success or failure at fundraising for anything is 50% market timing and 50% strength of storytelling. Might even be 60/40.

@adriannalakatos @hthieblot Couldn’t agree more with this. See you in the cold dm trenches

@neuralunlock great advice

VCs may hound you for a meeting, but DO NOT meet with them until you are ready. The worst mistake you can make is have a subpar first meeting with a lackluster pitch. Meet on your own terms from a position of strength. The time to break things fast and iterate is with your product and early customers, not on your pitch. I see founders make this mistake too often.

@neuralunlock can confirm this, but I'm biased

The smartest talent in crypto is working on privacy and ZK. Arguably the most technically rewarding problems to work on, made up of the most talented cryptographers, researchers, and engineers. If I wanted to recruit the best from the AI world, I would talk about crypto’s work here.

big milestone just dropped many teams asked if they can run their own Arc Node — now this is possible thanks to the hard work of the Arc core team

@KyleSamani bummer

Sad to say that Don's team has decided to cancel our debate, which was originally scheduled to take place tomorrow I am still game for the debate

@alexisohanian psa 10 right there

Unmatched aura

@mert @zodl_co great ux

added basic logic to buy zec directly on zcash using sol as funding layer and near intents as the cross-chain swap layer get zec directly on zcash chain with just a passkey. note that it's not shielded, so you should withdraw to @zodl_co after

@_TomHoward capital coordination

What’s happening?

@vladtenev free the yield

unleash the yield

@_robyn_smith the tough conundrum of monetizing your passion

If you get good at social media, lots of opportunities arise, which makes you not want to spend time on social media, but if you stop spending time on social media the opportunities will dry up

@fdotinc it's like the lamp from the pixar intro but better!

when Aaron first came through our lab he said something that stood out: “no one is making robots that i actually want in my home” everything he’s build with Lume has been centered around that philosophy, make robotics seamlessly integrated in your life in a beautiful way