"You're announcing an end to the war tonight right?"

Let the man cook Compliance is the least flashy part of any tech stack, but there's an argument it's the most critical Can't wait to see the @brookwellapp launch

A detailed and brutal look at the tactics of buzzy AI compliance startup Delve "Delve built a machine designed to make clients complicit without their knowledge, to manufacture plausible deniability while producing exactly the opposite." substack.com/home/post/p-191…

Perfect bifurcation of mostly privatized industry v ones where public administrators are constantly tinkering with The government has zero incentive to innovate or create efficiencies. It's easy to spend someone else's money

An average importer / exporter maintains 4 bank accounts. These accounts started as a workaround, but ended up introducing new issues around fragmented liquidity and operational overhead. Introducing Specie (@SpecieFinance), a single account for global trade businesses.

Never enough

Have a feeling this will be one of those policies that looks great on the surface and will be touted as a win by many and then in 18 months we’re seeing some downstream consequences. Need to read more into the EO

Totally agree with the core thesis here, and I think it gets even more important once you look at how crypto is actually evolving in practice High performance is becoming table stakes. Every new chain shows up with the same pitch: faster blocks, cheaper fees, better throughput. But blockspace is basically a commodity now. If the main differentiator is “performance,” you are competing in a race where the long term equilibrium is fees trending toward zero and users behaving like mercenaries Capital shows up for the incentive, farms the airdrop, then leaves the moment a better deal appears somewhere else. Bridges and messaging protocols make that even easier. The result is that a general purpose chain without a strong ecosystem, a killer app, or a distribution advantage has a hard time creating sticky demand Privacy changes the game because it creates a moat that does not migrate cleanly People say “tokens are portable” and that is true. Bridging assets is getting easier. But bridging secrets is not the same problem. Secrets are not just balances. They are behavior, relationships, business logic, counterparties, trade intent, payroll flows, treasury movements, and the metadata that surrounds all of it Once users and apps start depending on privacy for normal operation, moving between chains is no longer a low risk click. The moment you cross boundaries, you create leakage and the under appreciated part is exactly what you described: privacy is not only about hiding the data on chain. The real danger is the boundary and the metadata. Timing patterns, transaction sizes, correlated transfers, on and off ramp fingerprints, mempool observation, network level traffic. Even if you have a private zone, transitioning into a public chain or even into a different private environment can reveal who you are or what you are doing That risk alone makes users and institutions stickier once they commit to a privacy environment. It is not because they are trapped technically, it is because migrating increases exposure. That is what a real moat looks like So when people ask “why would anyone choose chain A over chain B if fees are low everywhere,” privacy is one of the only answers that still holds up. On public chains, it often does not matter where you are, because you can interact across chains and your activity is already fully visible anyway On a privacy chain, the choice matters a lot more. Once you are inside a privacy environment, switching carries a cost that is not measured in gas, it is measured in information leakage This is exactly why I am bullish on Seismic Seismic is not trying to win the tired game of “we are 5 times faster.” It is aiming at the actual blocker for real finance moving onchain: privacy that is native and usable, without treating it like an afterthought Most chains tried to add privacy as a layer later, and it usually breaks compatibility with the stack. Ramps and card providers want compliance clarity. Wallets and token standards assume transparent balances. DeFi protocols assume public state. When you bolt privacy on, you end up fighting your own integrations Seismic’s wedge is that it starts from the premise that privacy is foundational. That matters because the winners will not be the chains that simply have a privacy feature, it will be the chains that make privacy composable enough for real products to ship The chains that can support stablecoins, payments, treasury operations, and real businesses without forcing them to expose everything to the entire internet. If privacy is the prerequisite for institutional and mainstream adoption, then the chains that do privacy well are not a niche category, they are the final destination for the flows that actually matter And that is where the winner take most dynamic comes from. Not because privacy chains will be “cool,” but because privacy is essential for most real world use cases, and the moment people build and operate inside a private environment, leaving becomes a risk decision, not a convenience decision Performance can be copied. Liquidity can be rented. Incentives expire. But privacy, once it becomes part of how users and companies operate, creates lasting gravity That is why this thesis resonates, and that is why Seismic stands out to me

Huge thank you to @car_gar_fortu from @FortuneMagazine for covering our fundraise!

Everyone and their grandmother understands the need for privacy Come build with us @SeismicSys

Great talk here from @_weidai, as with the Blockchain trilemma, Privacy-based chains and protocols will have to determine how to strike a practical balance.

Have you ever tried using stablecoins to pay for expenses like rent, phone bills, or student loans? You can't. Your stablecoins today don't interface well with legacy systems. So we got to work. Introducing Brookwell (@brookwellapp):

Fintechs.

Onchain privacy hasn't reached product-market fit because the product wasn't right, not because the market is not there. The product (past onchain privacy solutions) wasn't right primarily due to: 1. Lack of zero-compromise privacy. Privacy cannot come at the cost of access to liquidity, low tx fees, and UX. Past solutions had problematic trade-offs. Users, most of the time, care about being able to do the transaction (paying, getting paid, buying an asset, etc.) at all before they care about the privacy of doing it. 2. Lack of threat-resistant privacy. When a major onchain hack happens right now (like the Bybit hack), the status quo is that hacked funds are mostly traceable and can be frozen at any later point at any financial intermediaries like exchanges and off-ramps. This status quo needs to be supported by privacy protocols unless we gain regulatory certainty that such guarantees are not required. Fortunately, we see projects (such as @0xMiden, @inconetwork, and @SeismicSys) solving both issues head-on with pragmatic privacy approaches, relying on a combination of technologies like TEEs, MPC, as well as plain-old security councils.

Companies want to launch EVM L1s. But it's hard because there's no OS consensus client that plugs into the EVM. @circle even bought an entire [cracked] team to solve this problem for themselves. We built Summit to solve it for everyone. Audits are starting soon, so the next 10 L1s can get up and running quickly.

If you're a dev who has innovative ideas for apps that you couldn't build on transparent chains, @SeismicSys offers you encryption at the base layer of the tech stack Come talk with our team directly in our Developer Telegram chat, send me a DM for an invite

Just shy of $5B in crypto VC funding in Q1. Love to see there's a sustained appetite for supporting builders given the current macro environment: coinbase.com/bytes/archive/i…

Type of energy we need