"The winning infrastructure may no longer be the chain with the most visible activity. It may be the one enabling activity everywhere else." Just published pt. 2 in the reintroducing @NEARProtocol series, with the aim of showing how a clear vision, pursued consistently over time, can compound into lasting impact for all.

After my time at Messari came to a close, I found myself wondering what was next. Fortunately, a few incredible opportunities found their way to me. Each offered a unique path, and I genuinely did not know which one was right. After countless conversations, I realized I was asking the wrong question. Instead of asking “what job do I want?” I needed to ask: “what problem do I want to spend my time on?” For me, that problem is this: How do we ensure humanity preserves its values in a world increasingly shaped by AI? We are in the fastest technology expansion in modern history. Companies like Palantir, Snowflake, and Databricks spent more than a decade building category-defining software businesses with thousands of employees and billions in revenue. Today, AI companies are reaching similar scale in a fraction of the time. Anthropic reportedly added the equivalent of their combined ARR in roughly a month. Cursor became one of the fastest-growing software companies ever, and SpaceX is tracking toward one of the largest private-company outcomes in history. That acceleration is exciting, but it also raises an important question: who controls the infrastructure shaping the next phase of humanity? Most of today’s AI systems are being built as closed platforms. As these models become more powerful and integrated into daily life, the stakes around transparency, ownership, and privacy grow dramatically. We have all consumed enough sci-fi to understand how quickly things can move in the wrong direction when technology is concentrated in too few hands, and we’ve already lived through enough financial blowups and abuses of personal data to understand the risks that come from centralization and opaque corporate interests. The more I thought about where the world is heading, the more convinced I became that open infrastructure will be one of the defining challenges of the next decade. That’s why I’ve decided to join @NEARProtocol. In my view, NEAR is one of the first big players deeply focused on building the open infrastructure layer for the AI-powered world. Infrastructure designed to give users more ownership, privacy, and control. I’m excited to help tell that story. The first piece of that puzzle is Authorship. More below :)

Absolute must read from the @colossusmag team: colossus.com/article/beyond-… $HYPE

Rome wasn't built in a day. It was built overnight, by @claudeai prompt: "Make no mistakes."

After a quick skim, here is my take on these changes & effects @NEARProtocol aims to have: First-Order Impacts: - Lower sell pressure from validators/stakers as emissions are cut in half (will this 50% cut lead to an exodus of validators/stakers or will the other incentive mechanism through governance keep them?) - Direct $NEAR demand created by Intents fee denomination (partners and frontends are paid in $NEAR, so they need to acquire or hold it) - Token buyback program started - Intents' $13B in settled volume is now a revenue-generating asset rather than just a growth metric Second Order Impacts: - If the deflationary flywheel kicks in, $NEAR supply dynamics start resembling a commodity with usage-driven scarcity rather than a typical inflationary L1 - Revenue-sharing in $NEAR incentivizes wallets, dApps, and distribution partners to actively promote Intents usage (they get paid more if volume grows), creating a self-reinforcing distribution network - NEAR AI pricing compute and agent transactions in $NEAR ties a potentially massive agentic economy to token demand (will agents choose to use NEAR or stables as their default payment method?) - The stablecoin transport play (STP being built on Intents) could make NEAR the settlement rail for institutional stablecoin flows (if that scales toward the projected $2T stablecoin market, fee generation could dwarf current Intents revenue. I need to dive deeper on this tho to see who else is involved) Overall, these should be net bullish changes in the long run as the transitions to an agent-focused world continue.

So what I’m hearing is that the tech works. Lighter, Hyperliquid, & Ostium are passing with flying colors in this nosedive of a week

1/ A Valuation of Lighter (LIT) Key insights from my latest Messari report Under our base case, $LIT currently trades at a 33% discount, but with favorable tailwinds, it could rerate to a $26 billion FDV. Let’s break it down 🧵

We are excited to introduce Fidelity Digital Dollar (FIDD), a new stablecoin issued by Fidelity Digital Assets, NA and pegged 1:1 to the U.S. dollar. Learn more and get started with FIDD: go.fidelity.com/6qip11

10 max....

State of DePIN 2025 is out now. No fluff this year - we dig into what’s working, what clearly isn’t, and why DePIN is not dead but just getting started. Full report is free and frankly you can’t skip out on this one if you care about the future of crypto let alone DePIN.

"Most people didn’t want to change the world. They just wanted a chance to experience it."

"The reward for conformity is that everyone likes you except yourself." -- Rita Mae Brown