Mike Abundo

The Ethereum girl from the 2017 CryptoCurrency Girls project, animated.

Brian Armstrong says Coinbase started an internal venture bets program so great ideas—and great people—don’t walk out the door: “We have something internally called Next Bets. Twice a year, we have a panel where anybody in the company can come in and pitch and say, ‘I think we should be building this.’” “My fear was from reading things about Steve Wozniak at Hewlett-Packard. He famously went to HP and said, ‘I think we should build a personal computer.’ They said no, and he left to found Apple.” “The panel—there are different product group leaders who each have their own budget. They can decide to fund it out of their own budget.” “If you get any one of them to decide they want to fund it, you’re greenlit. It’s kind of like coming in and pitching an internal set of venture capitalists.” “The Next Bets are typically very small teams—like two or three people—with small amounts, but they’re really crazy, high-potential ideas where it’s okay if they don’t work, but the ones that do could be really massive.” “USDC came out of that. The Base blockchain came out of that. There’s a really cool one we’ll probably announce in a couple weeks.” @brian_armstrong with @ti_morse on @relentless

BREAKING: Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, and Bahrain are "privately urging" President Trump to continue the war against Iran, per the Washington Post. Details include: 1. Gulf countries argue Iran has "not been weakened enough" according to US, Gulf, and Israeli officials 2. Gulf countries were initially upset that they were not given adequate advance notice ahead of the war 3. They also reportedly do not want the war to end until there are significant changes in the Iranian leadership or a dramatic shift in Iranian behavior 4. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are "leading" the calls for increasing military pressure on Iran Day 32 of the Iran War has arrived.

Come with me… let’s break the seal together #NinjaGaiden #ニンジャガイデン4 #NG4

@AvgJoesCrypto AI ICOs. I dig it.

If I was heading up agentic commerce strategy at an L1 or L2, I’d be a lot less focused on payments and a lot more on fundraising/financing. Payments are already a low margin activity, and the only blockchain that has really been able to successfully monetize payments is Tron. Even then, Tether makes significantly more revenue from USDT on Tron than Tron makes. So, even if agentic payments really take off, I think most of the value generated won’t flow to the underlying blockchain, but to the stablecoin issuer and/or whoever controls distribution. As such, I think the real opportunity for blockchains is to cement yourself as the agentic commerce fundraising/financing layer. AI massively reduces labor costs, so the limiting factor for startups/ventures in our agentic economy becomes capital. Whichever blockchain becomes the go-to platform for agentic startups to raise capital will likely be able to create a much more durable revenue stream than any payments-focused blockchain will be able to.

I understand where the meme is coming from. Too many have claimed to “fix interop”. But EEZ will not be a new standard that only makes sense if many adopt it. EEZ will simply mean being compatible (aka synchronously composable) with the one standard everyone can agree on: ETH L1.

I don't think people understand what this actually means. Every application on earth can now build an agent that teaches ITSELF how to use the application through the UI. Not through API integrations. Not through documentation. Through the actual interface, the same way a human learns. Here's the loop: You define what success looks like (an eval). You point Claude at your application via Computer usage. Claude tries to complete the task through the UI. It fails. It writes what it learned to a skill file. It tries again. Recursively. Hundreds of times. This is Karpathy's auto-research method applied to software usage. Let me make this concrete. I built a company called CoinLedger — crypto tax software, ~1 million users. The product is powerful but complicated. Users have to import wallets, classify transactions, handle edge cases, and generate accurate tax reports. The learning curve is our single biggest challenge. With Claude computer use, I can hand it public wallet addresses and CSV files and say: use CoinLedger to produce an accurate capital gains report with no errors. Claude opens the app. Navigates the import flow. Hits an error. Documents the failure. Adjusts. Tries again. Each cycle produces better skill files. Each skill file captures how to properly use a specific part of the app. After enough iterations, Claude has built a complete agent harness — a set of instructions that lets it use CoinLedger as well as our best power user. Then I ship that agent to every user who struggles with the platform. The biggest friction in a million-user product, solved by an AI that grinded through the learning curve so humans don't have to. Now multiply this across every complex application. Every SaaS product with a steep onboarding curve. Every enterprise tool where 90% of users touch 10% of features. The first applications that build these recursive agent harnesses will compound in ways their competitors can't catch.

Just saw a new agentic platform that goes way beyond the others I've seen. Coming in two weeks. I have no idea how anyone keeps up without using AI now. Lesson I've taken away: everyone must be prepared to change as new things come. Have your AI analyze new things, compare them to what you are using, and be able to help you change to new thing. My developer changed from OpenClaw to Hermes in one night. But he's 22. They are so damn fast at changing. Me? I'll be honest. I'm struggling. Where I'm struggling I'm building AI to take over. And everyone is struggling to deal with change and it'll get worse. Part of it is spiritual. I'm dopamine addicted thanks to social media that addicted me. Getting me off the need for constant dopamine hits is gonna be something, but am working on it. Those inside the bubble have both a huge advantage because of this, but a huge disadvantage. As they build AI systems to help them deal with change they are getting busier. This is hitting all execs and founders. As Jensen Huang, founder of NVIDIA said at GTC: he's constantly in the critical path. That's fun, but also going to cause a lot to burn out if they don't have agentic systems to help make decisions faster (and do things on their own). I see a job boom coming for those who know how to setup agentic platforms fast and get to work on solving other people's struggles. I'm building something to help keep up with the AI world here on X, almost done. @blevlabs and I are meeting tonight to finish it off.

With all other risk (and unrisk) assets sliding during the Iran war, bitcoin remains largely unscathed, and despite giving up some recent gains it's still higher than when the bombs started

BREAKING: The U.S. Senate has confirmed an April markup for the CLARITY Act. Senate markup is confirmed for the second half of April. Final passage is targeted for May and Senator Moreno has warned that if the bill does not pass by then, digital asset legislation will not receive serious consideration again before 2027. The entire fight comes down to stablecoin yield. The current draft bans passive yield, users cannot earn by simply holding stablecoins. Activity based rewards for payments and transfers are still allowed. That distinction puts $1.35 billion of Coinbase's annual revenue directly at risk, nearly one fifth of everything the company earns. Coinbase has rejected the bill twice and is now coordinating a formal counterproposal with multiple major crypto firms to get the language changed before the draft hardens. Banks are pushing in the opposite direction. Jamie Dimon and Brian Armstrong have reportedly clashed directly over stablecoin economics. April is the window. Everything gets decided in the next four weeks.

JUST IN: 🇺🇸 US Department of Labor proposes rule to open $10 trillion 401k retirement plans to crypto and alternative investments.

もう一回 ✌️

There's a Japanese legend that says: "If you feel like you're losing everything, remember, trees lose their leaves every year, yet they still stand tall and wait for better days to come."

how does he do it?! it's like everything he touches

I’ll simply say this: Everyone I know working at a frontier AI model company is either suffering from extreme AI psychosis or genuinely believes we’re single digit months away from liftoff.

Hardworking Americans deserve more options, not less, when they retire.   @POTUS & I are committed to clearing regulatory burdens so workers have access to financial alternatives they can choose from for their 401(k)s. wsj.com/opinion/new-op…

"People briefed on intelligence assessments said Mr. Trump’s frustration reflected the inability of the current Iranian government to coordinate a response and make a decision about the American peace proposals."

"Roughly 52% of all stablecoins live on Ethereum (~$163 billion). If you exclude Tron, Ethereum’s stablecoin dominance jumps to 71%." Chart of total stablecoin market cap on Ethereum:

A lot of people, myself included, were incorrectly bullish on btc from 90k all the way down We’re down 30-40% from there but we didn’t get chopped Bulls with the wrong macro bias from 90k kept flip flopping and got chopped to 0 Dumb bulls always survive

AI won't just disrupt startups, but it will also disrupt the investors behind them. When founders can ship world class products with a fraction of the capital in much more compressed time windows, seed rounds and Series A slowly lose their purpose. What's left are going to be two extremes: Tiny, hands-on pre-seed funds that act like extended team members. And massive mega funds that can buy you what AI can't: distribution. But everything in between, those mid-sized funds just passively writing checks, are getting squeezed out. The barbell is coming, and 9 out of 10 VCs aren't on either end of it.