92 Photos and videos
How to do hiring for startups:
- your first hires are the most important
- founders should always be involved
- hire slowly, fire quickly
- if it doesn't feel right, it probably isn't
- hiring is often an instinct
- the more successful you are, the bigger your talent pool
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After 10 years in startups, these are my biggest lessons as a multi-cycle founder
- everything takes 10x longer than you think
- you need to be really, really good at managing your time
- your energy is a resource: use it wisely
- founder life ebbs and flows, know when to go hard and when to slow down
- if you're always sleeping in the office i don't trust your judgement
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Xtina retweeted
Jun 8
Just counting my transactions for last month ✨
Wow, another ATH already??
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Why are we still here?
because we still believe that ultimately crypto means freedom for financial markets
crypto is going everywhere and Squid is going to be at the heart of it
My name is Christina.
After 10 years in crypto, I still believe.
This is why.
It was around 2013 when I got pulled into imagining a new economic model.
Central banks and monetary policy had failed us. The financial crisis had pulled economics out of the specialist drawer it used to sit in, and the assumptions that came apart in 2008 stayed apart for a generation who were now wondering what else was possible.
Studying business had given me dissatisfying answers. Studying philosophy had given me an instinct for better questions. Now I was asking them.
Bitcoin started as a passing mention, but within a few years it was most of what I wanted to think about. Crypto was the best playing field I had ever found for the things I cared about: how societies get governed, how organisations really make decisions, what economics does when you speed-run things in months instead of decades.
But the road was hard.
What came next was not the straight line of progress. Through painful corrections and black swans I watched my industry cycle through manias and crashes, through long stretches where the loudest version of crypto was a casino engineered to make people feel clever while it relieved them of their money.
Through collapses and calamities something endured: the provocation underneath. That there was a new finance threatening to emerge that looked different. At first crypto seemed to just survive each wave like a disruptive cockroach, but slowly something substantial has begun to change.
It is proof that the original vision of crypto has started to arrive: now the counterparties are stablecoin issuers and the institutions that spent a decade dismissing all of it.
The tone has turned serious because the stakes are finally global, and the question I walked in with is getting answered at a scale it never had when it was just a toy.
Crypto has product market fit. It has a place in world finance. And if crypto keeps succeeding, it keeps multiplying.
New chains arrive whenever someone needs something the existing ones cannot give, more scale, more speed, a different security model, and each answer becomes its own island. A pile of islands is not an ecosystem, and that gap is the opportunity for us.
@squidrouter is the unglamorous, necessary version of the thing I had been chasing since I was nineteen: the theoretical question of how value ought to move between people and systems, turned into the operational one that is now the whole job, which is to move it, across all of it, for whoever shows up.
I believe crypto is going everywhere and you need something to hold the pieces together, which is most of why I am here.
The job’s not done.
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My name is Christina.
After 10 years in crypto, I still believe.
This is why.
It was around 2013 when I got pulled into imagining a new economic model.
Central banks and monetary policy had failed us. The financial crisis had pulled economics out of the specialist drawer it used to sit in, and the assumptions that came apart in 2008 stayed apart for a generation who were now wondering what else was possible.
Studying business had given me dissatisfying answers. Studying philosophy had given me an instinct for better questions. Now I was asking them.
Bitcoin started as a passing mention, but within a few years it was most of what I wanted to think about. Crypto was the best playing field I had ever found for the things I cared about: how societies get governed, how organisations really make decisions, what economics does when you speed-run things in months instead of decades.
But the road was hard.
What came next was not the straight line of progress. Through painful corrections and black swans I watched my industry cycle through manias and crashes, through long stretches where the loudest version of crypto was a casino engineered to make people feel clever while it relieved them of their money.
Through collapses and calamities something endured: the provocation underneath. That there was a new finance threatening to emerge that looked different. At first crypto seemed to just survive each wave like a disruptive cockroach, but slowly something substantial has begun to change.
It is proof that the original vision of crypto has started to arrive: now the counterparties are stablecoin issuers and the institutions that spent a decade dismissing all of it.
The tone has turned serious because the stakes are finally global, and the question I walked in with is getting answered at a scale it never had when it was just a toy.
Crypto has product market fit. It has a place in world finance. And if crypto keeps succeeding, it keeps multiplying.
New chains arrive whenever someone needs something the existing ones cannot give, more scale, more speed, a different security model, and each answer becomes its own island. A pile of islands is not an ecosystem, and that gap is the opportunity for us.
@squidrouter is the unglamorous, necessary version of the thing I had been chasing since I was nineteen: the theoretical question of how value ought to move between people and systems, turned into the operational one that is now the whole job, which is to move it, across all of it, for whoever shows up.
I believe crypto is going everywhere and you need something to hold the pieces together, which is most of why I am here.
The job’s not done.
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Let’s talk about revenue.
for a long time crypto was more concerned with ideas than hard numbers.
but we’ve grown up. we’re at the point in our evolution where revenue needs to come first.
at Squid we are lucky to have built out revenue from multiple sources. our frontend fees, our cross-chain onboarding, bespoke builds for institutional and blockchain partners. it is revenue with strong projections, and diverse inputs.
can we normalize this?
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“I love your brand”
every time I speak to people in the wider crypto industry people say the same two things to me, without fail:
“I love your brand” and “Squid just works”.
building a unique and meaningful brand and aesthetic has been really important to us from day 0. But without a product that is reliable and secure it’s meaningless.
style *and* substance is the goal.
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Xtina retweeted
May 28
// tldr //
@squidrouter is a non-custodial, full-stack infra layer that facilitates the movement of digital assets across multiple networks (100 )
if you think squid is merely a “a bridge app," you're kinda wrong
squid isn't a single product or narrow tool. it is a vertically integrated platform that owns the full stack: from its own intent-based settlement protocol and routing engine, all the way to developer tooling and consumer interfaces
under the hood, squid combines multiple layers that ultimately help you move anything and everything onchain
full breakdown in the article below 👇
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The State of Squid today...
we’re on the edge of a major new era in crypto, a sea-change.
the institutions are coming to bring their own assets onchain, not to buy our bags.
i'm proud of where we are today... Squid is uniquely positioned at the interface of consumer finance and institutional capital influx.
no one else has the breadth of connectivity, expertise, and reliability that we do.
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Xtina retweeted
May 26
Just called it on a day of shooting with the Squid team. Big fan of everything these guys are going for directionally and the strategy they’ve laid out to get there.
Got a bunch of stuff coming out soon. The job is easy when you get to do it with good people.
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Xtina retweeted
May 25
This incident is unrelated to Squid’s core protocol and contracts. All Squid users and integrators are unaffected and no action is needed.
A third-party Gnosis Safe module was exploited today across Base and Ethereum, resulting in approximately $3.2M in losses. The vulnerable contract is verified on Basescan under the name “SquidRouterModule” but this contract was not built, deployed, or operated by Squid. It is a third-party smart-wallet product that chose to integrate with Squid, among other protocols, but has not been in contact with us.
The exploit worked because the third-party module accepted a caller-supplied constant string as proof that a message was secure. If you pass in this string (which is publicly available in the verified contract’s code), then you can execute an array of arbitrary calldata, stealing funds at will. The victims’ Safes had added this faulty contract as a trusted Safe Module, which gives the contract the ability to spend any tokens in the Safe without signatures. Squid’s own router (0xce16F69375520ab01377ce7B88f5BA8C48F8D666) is architecturally different and was not touched. Squid user funds, approvals, and integrations are fully secure.
Early public reporting may reference “SquidRouter” due to the contract’s verified name on Basescan. The accurate framing is: a third-party SquidRouterModule was exploited, not Squid’s Router contract. The contract shares our name but is not our code. We are monitoring the situation and will share updates if anything changes materially.
May 25
🚨 Blockaid detected an ongoing exploit targeting the SquidRouterModule on Ethereum and Base.
86 Gnosis Safes drained for ~$3M in ~2 hours.
All stolen tokens swapped to DAI via attacker-controlled Uniswap V3 pools.
More details in 🧵
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Xtina retweeted
May 23
Thank you for believing in Squid ✨
This is just the beginning.
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Proud of today’s announcement. The bar for capital raise in crypto has never been higher.
Smart people are still deploying in crypto today, but the thresholds are rightly stricter than they have ever been.
We’re really excited to show you what we’ve been building.
May 22
We are proud to announce that Squid has raised $6M in funding round led by North Island Ventures and backed by strategic investors!
Our new chapter has begun, with more news coming soon. Today we celebrate and say thank you. CHEERS 💫
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