CRYPTO’S BIGGEST THREAT HAS NEVER BEEN REGULATORS. IT’S US. People ask me sometimes: “Why do you spend so much time critiquing projects instead of hyping the ones you like?” Usually the question is worded with a lot less patience, but I get it. Here’s the truth. I wholeheartedly believe the scams, lies, hacks, and nonstop misinformation are destroying one of the greatest opportunities of our lifetime. Maybe permanently. Think about that for a second. This isn’t exaggeration. Look around. Freedom and self-sovereignty are shrinking everywhere. Twenty years ago, when I read 1984, I thought it was clever fiction. Today it feels like a warning label we ignored. And then came Satoshi Nakamoto. Bitcoin gave us a shot at rewriting the script, a chance to push back against a future of surveillance and control. But greed is threatening to ruin that chance. That’s why I don’t shut up about it. Imagine where Web3 could be if we didn’t have FTX, Luna, Celsius, BitConnect, or the graveyard of rug pulls. Each one didn’t just fail. They dragged the entire space down with them. Two steps forward. Two steps back. And let's be real. People warned us. Every single time. We just didn't care. Five percent yield on Bitcoin sounded too good to pass up. "Number go up" was the only narrative we cared about. So what did it cost? Half the world now thinks crypto is a scam. Can you blame them? I don't. Billions stolen in just the past five years. Probably double that if you count what never gets reported. And for every victim, a dozen friends and family hear about it. That's how you poison the reputation of an entire industry. And it isn't just the cartoon villains like SBF or Do Kwon. It's the culture we let form around them. Because here's the thing. Scams are obvious in hindsight. The manipulation is harder to see, but just as deadly. Paid shills masquerading as thought leaders. Big media hyping garbage tokens because clicks matter more than truth. Whales staging pumps with carefully timed rumors just to dump on retail. Words like "decentralized" and "community-owned" tossed around as marketing slogans while the entire system is centralized in practice. It's not bad luck. It's not isolated. It's by design. And the worst part? The very foundation is cracked. Most people don’t realize how much of the risk comes baked into the architecture itself. Ethereum’s ERC token model is fundamentally insecure. Approvals give infinite access. Wallets turn into ticking time bombs. Reentrancy attacks, approvals gone wrong, bridge exploits; it’s the same flaws on repeat. Over seventy percent of hacks in crypto history tie directly back to these design issues. Bridges? They’re not innovation, they’re duct tape. Wrapped tokens are IOUs pretending to be assets, and every time one gets hacked, users lose everything. Billions gone because the system never fixed its core flaws. So even if the scammers disappeared tomorrow, users would still be at risk simply by interacting with the infrastructure. That’s how broken it is. Stay with me here, because this is where it gets worse. Let’s talk memecoins. They’re painted as harmless fun. Inside jokes, goofy mascots, and the thrill of a lottery ticket. But peel it back. Ninety-nine percent of holders lose money. They suck capital away from builders who are actually innovating. They train new users to see Web3 as a casino, not a revolution. Think about that. Our biggest onramps today aren’t self-sovereign wallets or groundbreaking apps. They’re joke tokens. That’s the first impression most people get. Not digital freedom. Not ownership. Just gambling. And once that perception sticks, good luck shaking it. Ask anyone outside crypto what comes to mind. Nine times out of ten, it’s Doge, Pepe, or whatever animal coin is trending this week. Not infrastructure. Not empowerment. Memes. Losses. Noise. Memecoins aren’t culture. They’re corrosion. So when I critique projects, when I call out scams, it isn’t because I enjoy being negative. It’s because I actually care about where this goes. Web3 could change everything. But if greed, lies, and broken foundations keep running the show, that future never arrives. Do you see the cost now? More importantly... do you care?

Visa and Mastercard are coming for Circle They control the distribution Circle never built and Circle’s stock dropped on some recent news Tether sits at $186 billion Circle at $76 billion And together they control 85% of the $310 billion stablecoin market and are 100% centralized But neither has merchant networks, bank distribution deals, or household brand recognition They solved the engineering problem but distribution is still a major gap A gap that Visa and Mastercard have spent 60 years building around And their intention is clear as Stripe paid $1.1 billion for Bridge and Mastercard outbid Coinbase at $1.8 billion for BVNK Visa's stablecoin settlement volume hit $7 billion annually, up 50% in one quarter Live on 9 blockchains running 130 card programs across 50 countries While Mastercard just activated 6 regulated stablecoins on 8 chains. And the possible kill shot for Circle? The GENIUS Act standardizes reserve and redemption rules So once regulation becomes the baseline, being early and compliant stops being the game changer Any qualified issuer can mint a functionally identical dollar token and who is retail more likely to trust? Because most of us don't have stablecoin loyalty. We just hold whatever our app defaults to unfortunately. Considering how we default to centralized options that can be frozen or revoked at anytime, this is not debatable So the game will become all about who controls the most merchant terminals and bank onramps? Circle doesn't have terminals in millions of stores. Visa does. Circle doesn't have banking relationships in 200 countries. Mastercard does. So will the current stablecoin monopoly last, or will we just trade one centralized issuer for another that controls distribution?

The future of AI just changed drastically

No, you don't get it. He does not have $1 trillion sitting in cash, it is 99% stock in his companies. To make that wealth liquid would mean selling all that stock which would swiftly destroy *both* the companies (Tesla, SpaceX, others) and the wealth. If he sold it all, he'd end up with maybe $100b max, several hundred thousand people would be out of work, the companies ruined and many of their suppliers also ruined. Okay, but now Elon has $100b in cash, and can "solve the world's problems". $100b divided by the world's 8 billion people is $12 If you were in charge, several of the most innovative industrial companies in the world would be destroyed, hundreds of thousands out of work, and space would again close to human civilization for another generation. But everyone on earth could have one nice meal and you could revel in your altruism.

“I said to YOU, never sell your Bitcoin. I never said that the COMPANY would never sell its Bitcoin.” JFC this guy

xMoney just beat every bank on Earth to a Mastercard milestone A crypto-native company is the first in the world to ship Mastercard Payment Passkey! Introducing biometric authentication for online payments built on FIDO standards Fingerprint or face scan No passwords No SMS codes No redirects So your biometric data stays encrypted on your device and is never shared with Mastercard, xMoney, or the merchant 🔥 The numbers are what make this so huge though: 🔸Passkeys cut checkout abandonment by 50% 🔸Authentication is 4x faster 🔸Fraud drops 2.5x vs one-time passcodes Card-not-present fraud costs $15B annually and Mastercard wants passwords gone by 2030 And the first company to ship the replacement? A crypto payment processor from the MultiversX and SUI ecosystem Not Chase Not Barclays Not HSBC @xMoney_com They already have Click to Pay live and are scheduled to launch 3 MiCA-compliant stablecoins this month: EURXM USDXM RONXM Fully audited and fiat-backed and completely integrated into their payment gateway and card So this is truly huge! A year ago, crypto companies were begging for bank partnerships Now one just shipped a Mastercard authentication product before every bank on the planet!

Someone just pulled 388,000 ZEC from a pool that can't prove its own supply 1% of the entire shielded pool just six days after Zcash disclosed a 4-year counterfeiting bug Hayes dumped everything and ZEC is down 40% Privacy means you can't verify if those coins were real 💀

A global first for xMoney 🚀 We are proud to become the first @Mastercard issuer in the world to launch Mastercard Payment Passkey, the next-generation authentication solution for tokenized online payments. Combined with Click to Pay, already available through xMoney, we're helping set a new standard for secure, seamless online checkout. ✅ Biometric authentication ✅ Faster payment confirmation ✅ Reduced fraud risk ✅ Less friction at checkout A huge thank you to Mastercard for partnering with us on this milestone.

The number moved. 173,000 total commits. #6 in the entire blockchain industry by raw output. New data from @chainspect_app. ─── We out-ship Solana by 1.9x. Aptos by 3.3x. Bitcoin by 1.4x. On commits per developer, the metric that strips out headcount, we are #3. Output per engineer. ─── Where most of those commits went is not features, but full focus on security. Every frontier AI model release is now a security event. The pipeline pauses. The team redirects to one thing. Close every finding that model just made possible. We have built since 2017. Hundreds of thousands of lines across consensus, sharding, the VM and networking. Re-examined against last week's baseline, not last quarter's. 200 fixes folded into mainnet first. Then carried into Supernova, so it ships above parity, not at parity. This is the work that does not make headlines or move price. Right now it is the only work that matters. ─── The result: Supernova full developed and scheduled. Sub-second finality on a fully sharded chain. ~80ms in testing. 656,000 TPS under load. Proven through Battle of Nodes, where the community broke it on real hardware and we shipped stronger. ─── Pause the pipeline. Close the findings. Harden the system. Then ship. This is the plan for MultiversX and $EGLD.

Every DeFi founder better be maxing out multiple Claude plans with Fable this week Everyone else: get your money out of DeFi

A May '25 tweet claims @IOHK_Charles sold ~1.5B ADA in the '21 hype cycle, plus 10x 20M payments to @gavofyork. Rather than take its word, i wanted to check the chain. Tracing funds is hard, but those x10 20M payments are a solid place to start: 🧵👇 adagenesistransparency.com

Was the @Humanityprot hack staged? ZachXBT seems to think so and the project is littered with red flags So get this… 266 million tokens are set to unlock in 2 weeks conveniently after $36 million vanishes today But the details are even more sketchy and here is a little history ⬇️ Starting with a hilariously scammy launch The projects primary objective is to help ‘prove you are real’ with their Proof Of Humanity but 88% of their 9 million ‘Human IDs’ were bots This was confirmed in a leaked conversation with their founder Kwok in June 2025 Less than 1m were actual humans for a protocol that claims to be able to prove users are real people 😂 Token dumped 60% after the conversation was leaked too You can’t make this shit up Now fast forward to today and the team claims one laptop was compromised allowing for over $32M to be drained along with minting of over 100M $H tokens Token crashed 90% to under $.09 but has since rebounded to $.23 Giving this project a market cap of $420M and a fully diluted value of over $2.3 BILLION Do I really have to say it? 🤦‍♂️ So the timeline goes: > launch with fake user metrics > dump the token > offer investors a 70% reduced allocation for early liquidity in April (that’s for another post) > then a "hack" conveniently wipes $36 million right before the biggest token release of the year How can anyone take this industry seriously anymore?

Rebounded to $2b FDV with a $350M market cap This is why we can’t have nice things

A blockchain you've never heard of or used just got drained for $20M Down 90% in 24 hours Still has a $1B FDV This industry is broken 😏

Asked Opus 4.8 to write a detailed report analyzing my websites SEO and optimization The MF’er wrote me a 7,700 word novel! Now I gotta use AI to summarize the AI report…

No team ships faster than @SuiNetwork

AI has turned Web3 hacks into a daily reality and no protocol is truly safe I don't care how battle-tested the code is DeFi is fundamentally unsafe right now and not worth the risk This includes NFT lending and all forms of DeFi Thankfully we have good actors and whitehats in the space willing to do the right thing But they are the minority and it doesn't change the risk profile Doesn't matter if it's Aave, Curve, Jupiter or some 3rd tier DeFi protocol No potential yield or return is worth the risk that AI is causing and will likely continue to cause Self custody your tokens in a cold wallet and wait out the storm This is financial advice

My 4 year old just got obsessed with Pokémon out of nowhere. I know nothing about it but have always been interested. Where should I start?

I’ve see many discussions last week that formal verification is the only thing needed… but hear me out: Formal verification is extremely valuable, but not a panacea. have seen this first-hand in my Silicon Valley career, including at Facebook, where some systems had extremely serious engineering talent behind them and, in some cases, heavy formal verification efforts. And still, things could be missed. Not because people were careless, but quite the opposite. Some of the best engineers and researchers in the world were involved. The issue is deeper: someone still has to define the rules: formal methods can prove that software satisfies a specification. They CANNOT magically prove that the specification captured every real-world requirement, every adversarial behavior, every edge case, every dependency, every environmental assumption, and every way humans will compose the system with other systems. Note that many vulnerabilities do not necessarily come from code failing to follow the spec. They come from the spec being incomplete. You can prove that a smart contract preserves an accounting invariant, but miss that the oracle price can be manipulated. You can prove that a protocol transition is valid, but miss that the bridge dependency can be compromised. You can prove that a cryptographic implementation matches an algorithm, but miss that the randomness source is biased or reused. You can prove memory safety, but miss a side-channel leak. You can prove that a wallet signs only valid transactions, but miss that the UI tricks users into approving the wrong intent. You can prove that a consensus rule is implemented correctly, but miss an economic attack around incentives, MEV, or validator behavior. You can prove that your code is correct, but still depend on an unverified compiler, library, VM, OS, hardware wallet, cloud service, API, or package maintainer. Nobody modeled that weird input. Nobody considered that timing assumption. Nobody captured that economic incentive. Nobody thought about that upgrade path. Nobody formalized that interaction with an external component. Nobody audited the entire dependency tree. Nobody asked whether an upstream dependency could be compromised and silently invalidate the whole security story. So yes, formally verified software can absolutely still have vulnerabilities. In short, “formally verified” does not mean “secure” It means: secure with respect to the properties someone remembered, understood, and precisely defined, under the assumptions they made about everything around it. Pease please… do not replace threat modeling, adversarial review, dependency auditing, supply-chain security, fuzzing, continuous audits, testing, economic analysis, and engineering humility with a certificate that says “ah it’s verified”, bulls**t The hardest part is often not proving that the code is correct. It is defining what “correct” truly means and what the code is allowed to trust. What you need is a top notch engineering and red hat teams, whoever doesn’t have them at L1, bridge, or wallet layer they are mathematically dead ☠️. And I highlight that finding the top talents in cybersecurity is hard and expensive ;)