Smart Dumb Man

One of my college math teachers once wrote the formula for Happiness on the board. I still use it to this day.

We’re Webby Honorees! 🌋 For the second year in a row, Claynos have been recognized by @TheWebbyAwards - the top international awards for excellence on the internet. We picked up honors for: Kids & Family Short Form Content + Concept Trailer

Combined z-score of wallets + txns + stable supply is the best when looking for a leading L1 price indicator. ETH Example: The 6/18 weekly timeframe usually leads by a few weeks. Worst case, it follows price, but onchain activity clearly maps to price. Caveats: DATs + Unlocks + ETF's + Low floats can screw with the metric. SOL's correlation for example broke down last summer when all the DAT's popped up along with the ETF's.

@smyyguy 💯 whats the best way to measure actual onchain activity? combination of fees(revenue?)/developer activity/tx's above X value or how would you do it?

One day we will stop using this metric to point to any reasonable conclusion, but apparently that day is not today! Fun fact: 51% of daily active addresses during the July ATH were from a single memecoin spoofing bot “Insane growth”

Selling all the pennies I have left in crypto. See you all in a few years when the bear ends.

Weekly crypto z-scores update: Patience. - $BTC (composite) long terms still in downtrend. - $ETH looks like a bottom is beginning to form. - $SOL still wonky and low leading correlation to price. - $NEAR interesting activity with AI. Still watching.

@santiagoroel Ignoring PA for a second...your mental model is off. Altcoins for apps can be treated as proxy stocks and P/E's can be used. L1's however are just currencies. This is like comparing AAPL to the JPYUSD.

Exhibit A:

I started looking at Western Union because I thought stablecoins would kill it. Then I realized WU is better positioned than almost anyone to leverage them. Brand, distribution, 200+ countries, $923M in EBITDA. The key risk was management. They had been skeptical of stablecoins. I placed the bet in November. Since then WU has not only outperformed Solana but the broader market: WU +2.14% / SPX -6.76% / Nasdaq -11.66% / SOL -56.15% WU is a $2.8B market cap business trading at 6x earnings with a 10% dividend yield. Remitly trades at 50x on a 2.3% operating margin. Wise at 23x. The discount exists because WU revenue is declining 3.8% while both are growing 25%+. I am not fighting that. But at 6x earnings you are paying for zero recovery, zero tech adoption, zero optionality. That is the margin of safety. I was at the @blockworksDAS this week. The WU CEO was on the same stage. Very different energy from the one I had been following. Clear on the stablecoin strategy, talking about flipping negative float into positive float. They have since announced USDPT, their own stablecoin on Solana. For a 175-year-old company to go from skepticism to launching on Solana in under a year is a meaningful shift. Of course, there is plenty of execution risk. The bear case was always that they would not act. They are acting - and that alone warrants a repricing. The math I ran back in November when I placed the bet was: lose ~20-30%, cushioned by $500M in net income and a 10% dividend. Re-rate to Wise multiples and it is 4 to 5x. I am not betting on convergence. I am betting the market prices zero probability of it, and I will get paid for getting a free option. WU is part of a broader thesis that led me to start @inversion_cap: acquiring businesses with distribution at attractive prices. There is a lot of embedded optionality in those businesses. Not all will act in time. Some will die. But the ones that do will meaningfully outperform, and those gains will more than outweigh the losses. You reduce that risk meaningfully when you control that business. The greatest beneficiaries of cost-reducing technology like AI and crypto are not the startups building it. They are the incumbents with distribution that adopt it. WU is one of many. Full piece on Substack: open.substack.com/pub/obviously/… @HadickM double or nothing? Market settles November 1, 2026. DISCL: Long WU. Long SOL. NFA.

Interesting how the oil shock is kind of playing out like COVID with markets. "The virus is only affecting China (the East). It won't affect the West." "The oil shock is only affecting the East. It won't affect the West."

Still going.

I've been a holder since day 1, but it's getting pretty hard to keep supporting everything. 1) The Wallet is still buggy for me and the issues I've submitted rarely get resolved. The most annoying one is my NFT tab is still littered with burnt orca/radium pool NFT's that should NOT be visible. I have to scroll through the sea of burnt LP NFT's to find anything. 2) The Exchange....well I am still geo-blocked, so can't use that. 3) Mad Lads...by killing VIP, you get rid of the last utility for Mad Lads. Yes I know, it's supposed to be all about the art, but the truth is there has always been some indirect utility at every stage. That's gone now and there's little reason for future holders to buy. By killing all utility, you reduce the value to "art + community". Art is still one of the best, but on the community side, there's little value now. There's no coordinated events or anything to bring the community together. The mods have a "my way or the highway" attitude. Vincent especially is a super bull and anything negative he just ignores. If you complain too much, you get timed out. When he holds town halls, he references most things as "you have to ask Armani that", meaning he's rarely in the know and has no knowledge of what's really going on. He then argues with anyone that questions anything. So one product buggy, one product unusable, and the last product has minimal value.

On FUD. FUD is an opportunity to either address misunderstandings or to identify mistakes and simply fix them. With every TGE, emotions run hot, as people focus on a single number, the token price, determining one’s feelings. It’s human nature, and because Backpack has such a large community around the world, spanning from advanced traders in Asia, to wallet users on every network, Mad Lad holders around the world, and everyone in between, the TGE is a time where people vocalize their views. I would like to address several different topics I’ve seen floating around over the past few days to set the record straight and offer my perspective. - OTC. I can’t believe I have to say this, no, we aren’t OTCing our own tokens to cash out. See the tokenomics. Fake news. End of story. What is true: buyers reached out to me and asked for OTC. I am happy to help buyers find more tokens. Unfortunately, due to the bad history of other crypto projects using OTC to cash out, folks assumed the worst when they saw me post about OTC in discord. - Mad Lads. All existing Mad Lad holders pre-TGE retain their Backpack VIP status. New holders do not. Some like this, some hate this. I understand both perspectives. My perspective is that Mad Lads has always been an evolution alongside Backpack. We went from the whitelist games inside Backpack => pre-reveal inside Backpack => reveal boss inside Backpack => xNFT inside Backpack => airdrops inside Backpack => VIP points inside Backpack => the BP token. Each one of these stages created a clear path for Mad Lads to get to the next stage, always focusing on long term holders over people that come and go. There are people that follow the path, and people that do not. There are people that evolve with us and people that do not. Our approach from the day Mad Lads was born has always been to focus people on the Backpack product. Naturally, new people came into Mad Lads with their own pre-conceived notion of what it was or what it should be. This creates tension. But we have always had a strong vision and we will always stick to it. The people that use the product always get to the next stage, where every stage answers a single question: how do we push Backpack forward. When designing token utility, it’s a question of economics, and it would be a disservice to BP to not align incentives around it. There’s an additional nuance worth pointing out: Backpack is different from basically every other product that dropped a mined token because we KYC users and are selective about the regions we open up. Those users have been out of the game, so to speak, not because I want to do that–nothing upsets me more than not being able to serve users in a particular region (what founder would want that?)--but it’s because we have chosen the path of building a crypto native financial institution. That path is long and hard. For these users, we have maintained the path to get to the next stage and have communicated that. When we open up regions, these regions will get their drops, and we will be running new campaigns to get more drops just by using the product, and that brings everyone up to speed with the same VIP benefits of the original pre-TGE seasons. For the long term holders, nothing has changed. The key issue is with respect to new NFT holders. Some people will hate this. Some will think it’s sound economics. I understand both perspectives. We are doing what we think is best. - Sybills. Our goal was to protect retail users competing for points against sophisticated players splitting accounts and giving themselves an unfair advantage over those that don’t. The mistake we made: our process was too black and white. From the team’s point of view, we had a line and we stuck to it. From the community’s point of view, the line is nuanced. We did not sufficiently take that into consideration. - Price/FDV. With every token comes the human nature to think about the price at all times. There are good ways to think about price and there are clearly illegal ways to think about price. Our position is simple, we are building over a long period of time, and we are not making short term decisions. 24h post-TGE FDV is not a meaningful metric. Even 1 week post-TGE FDV is not a meaningful metric. If you ask anyone that’s ever built anything, they’ll tell you the same. Many people will take issue with that statement, and that’s ok. Ultimately, you have to look at our incentives and decide for yourself. The fact of the matter is that the team and I are incentivized to make Backpack a success with arguably the most extreme tokenomics ever created. What happens if the token goes to zero and stays there? Our company fails, and we get nothing. Some people might rebut saying that we get rich from the company revenue. No. That is simply not how companies work. We don’t get rich from a bad token price. We are punished in the most extreme possible way. And we are rewarded in the most extreme way only if we achieve all of our hopes and dreams. The way it should be. This is by design. Beyond this post you won’t see me talk about price or FDV. You will see me talking about building and creating long term value. And it’s only by doing that, can BP become a success. Every project goes through trials and tribulations. This is certainly a moment for us. We are nothing without our community, and we will serve it in the best way we know how. I have complete conviction, I am all in, and the team is all in. Don’t trust us, look at the tokenomics to decide for yourself. Thank you for reading this. Thank you especially to those that have supported us this week. It means a lot. We will continue to review the above, particularly the cases around sybils, and get back to building.

1/ I've been quiet/taking the high rd while those pushing permissioned networks FUD permissionless networks (esp @solana) *everywhere*. I actually knew this was coming immediately after my panel @blockworksDAS & tackled it w/o naming names on stage. But I'll now be direct . . .

lol

Assuming SpaceX IPO's, we'll get to see first hand how accurate pre-IPO stocks on Solana are. Currently sitting at 1.79T mcap.

Introducing Constellation: a multiple concurrent proposers protocol for Solana. With proposers operating on a 50ms cycle, Constellation gives Solana the fastest protocol enforced economic tick rate of any blockchain.🧵

First catch of the year for Interceptor 006 in Rio las Vacas, Guatemala 🇬🇹

"It is universally agreed that trading in public markets - commodities, equities, fx, etc - is a game of skill." Nah, you got this backwards. It's a game of Luck. The "skill" part is defined by how you control your process in that game.

It is important to delineate between games of skill and games of chance It is universally agreed that trading in public markets - commodities, equities, fx, etc - is a game of skill. Many firms have structural alpha. You can play the game in an EV positive way It is also universally recognized that pulling the lever on a slot machine, craps, blackjack, etc is not a game of skill. It is strictly a game of chance, and it is known to be EV negative Wagering on sports is far more like trading public markets than gambling at the casino. There is immense and heterogenous publicly available data that can be analyzed and used to develop systematic trading strategies Wagering on sports is a game of skill, not a game of chance

@theseoguy_ Your friend might want to watch Molly's Game.

i have no idea if this is legal so don't come at me but my friend runs a casino night in utah and it might be the coolest business i have seen in a while you pay $20 at the door and he hands you a stack of monopoly money real dealers on site running blackjack, texas hold'em, roulette, and craps all night whoever accumulates the most monopoly money by the end of the night wins a prize last week he gave away a brand new moped he is getting hundreds of people through the door at $20 a head and his next move is raising the price and taking it on the road as a pop-up casino night across the state i don't know what his margins look like but i know a packed room of hundreds of people at $20 a head adds up fast the creativity alone deserves respect

@mookah_f @ParallelTCG - Banking card need more of designated area or super highlighted. Very close to gameplay field. - When scrolling through deck or discard pile, have the left/right arrows scroll 4/5 cards at a time instead of individually.

After some time getting to use it, how do we all feel about the new @ParallelTCG play field? Specifically looking for any UI/UX issues when playing because of the new layout.

Ended up closing everything out today. Gonna chill in cash for a bit.

My portfolio super green today despite the blood bath. Decided to add some shorts and an $LNG long five minutes before closing.

@lBattleRhino Props to ya...sitting on your hands is a skill. I chopped my ass to pieces, half from boredom.

Honestly quite happy with the way I’ve played things since late September all things considered, left easy money period behind at the optimal time and settled for only very free trades and limited activity going forward Could’ve been more aggressive but we had plenty of that

Market is basically looking for any reason to be bullish at this point if one Trump post about peace talks can move the #SP500 +4%. Is basically saying it doesn't give an F about supply chain and inflation ramifications at this point. Time to countertrade myself.