I’m still risk on, but the macro is hard to ignore. It’s time to consider lowering LTV, curbing discretionary spending, establishing a new conservative “baseline” and patiently brace for impact. Order shift incoming. The least you can do is actively prepare.

Not a good look for those exchanges lol

I’m glad the $140k tiny home comes with a dining area

Cracker Barrel outperforming crypto bros was not on my bingo card this year

Everything is fine.

I’ve seen a lot of discourse around using the Mac Mini for AI/local infra setups, but not nearly as much around Unix/Linux-based mini PCs. Curious what setups people are actually using right now—especially for both technical and non-technical builders. What’s worked well (or hasn’t)? For context: I’m leaning toward a thin client setup (MacBook Air → SSH into VPS mini PC), but exploring alternatives.

Just got back from @consensus2026 Miami. Some unfiltered thoughts on the vibes: The industry has clearly grown up. The degens are gone, the allocators are wearing suits, and your @Uniswap booth has been replaced by a JP Morgan activation with 50 year old boomers. Cautiously optimistic with a distinctly institutional aftertaste. This was not a bull market conference. Key takeaways: 1) CLARITY Act has serious momentum. Everyone at the conference basically agrees it's getting done before summer. The urgency is real, people are done waiting. And the regulatory window feels genuinely unprecedented: CLARITY Act, GENIUS Act, a CFTC chair actively engaging with the industry, this combination has never existed simultaneously before. The institutional urgency you're seeing everywhere is directly correlated to this window feeling time-limited. Miss it and you're explaining to your board why you sat on your hands during the most favorable crypto regulatory environment in history. 2) Institutions are not dabbling anymore. They are ALL IN on tokenization and terrified of missing it. No one is debating whether blockchain rails are useful. The debate is now who gets the mandate. And quietly @coinbase , @krakenfx , @RobinhoodApp and @Bullish and others are being seen more as competitors than potential partners by a lot of these TradFi players. 3) TradFi M&A is going to keep ripping. @krakenfx just grabbed Reap for $600M. Visa, Mastercard, Swift etc they can't miss the train and they're willing to overpay for the ticket. 4) Crypto VC is consolidating fast. @a16z and @katie_haun just announced $2.2B and $1B funds respectively. Meanwhile the boutique VCs are either pivoting to AI or quietly closing shop. Same playbook is happenign as traditional VC, the big platforms eat everything and the small guys scramble. Seed and pre-seed is basically a ghost town right now. Late stage and pre-IPO is where the action is. 5) Investment themes were aggressively consensus (no pun intended): Stablecoins, tokenization, vertically integrated neo-banks, regulated or permissioned DeFi. Literally everyone is trying to be a tokenization platform. Issuance, management, settlement, curation, pick your lane, slap tokenization on it, try to raise money. 6) Building in crypto is genuinely hard now. Your competition isn't some scrappy new L1 or GMX, it's @tether , @Anchorage , and @Securitize. there are now many crypto businesses running 200M annual Rev with serious management teams and deep pockets. The barbarians are now the establishment. New entrants are going to have a very bad time. 7) Pure token-only plays have become extremely contrarian. Controversial take but I think the biggest returns will come from a handful of tokens that can credibly signal in a compliant way that the token remains the only value accruing asset going forward. 8) A lot of teams are in a genuinely weird spot on the token/equity dynamics. Decent products, decent teams, but a complete stakeholder clusterf*** that nobody can untangle. Many of these will simply not survive. 9) The agentic finance and agentic commerce crowd was loud. The actual substance was not. A lot of big claims, very little to show for it. Feels very early and mostly vibes. Color me skeptical for now. 10) @Bullish acquiring Equinity for $4.2B was the boldest move of the conference. @ThomasFarley and @BonannoDavid now have a full-stack RWA proposition: issuance, transfer agency, tokenization, exchange and settlement under one roof. Massive move. Very positive for the industry regardless of whether you think the price or the move were right. 11) @BitMNR and @fundstrat are apparently tired of winning and has decided to let your grandma keep her ETH... for now. The pace of accumulation is slowing. Tom, we await your next allocation with bated breath. 12) DeFi apps are moving up the stack and getting smarter about it. They don't want to be the commodity infrastructure layer getting squeezed by exchanges that own distribution. Some genuinely interesting announcements, @buffalu__ at @jito_sol launching JTX being the highlight. 13) Nobody at the conference was talking about retail coming back. The entire conversation was institutional. That's either a sign of maturity or a sign that the industry has quietly given up on mainstream consumer adoption for now and is betting the next cycle gets pulled by institutional flows rather than retail FOMO. Probably both. 14) The L1 debate is officially dead. Nobody and I mean nobody was arguing SOL vs ETH or pitching their shiny new L1. The crowd that used to religiously defend their chain of choice has either grown up, cashed out, or both. Institutions don't care about your consensus mechanism. They care about settlement finality, compliance rails and liquidity. The L1 wars were fun while they lasted. RIP. 15) DATs are a mess. Had some genuinely productive conversations with a few of them but let's be honest most are an absolute clusterf*** operationally and very few are running anything resembling a legitimate business. The structure is a disaster at the stakeholder level and the governance makes your average startup cap table look clean. That said, the permanent capital vehicle concept is still genuinely compelling and I think a handful of these will turn out to be absolute home runs. The model isn't broken, most of the teams just are. Bottom line: Consensus 2026 felt like the moment crypto stopped being a movement and started being an industry. Whether that's exciting or depressing probably depends on when you got in.

The State of RWAFi Q1 2026 Report is here. Developed in collaboration with @DefiLlama, this report breaks down tokenised commodities, equities, real estate & alternative finance. Same macro trend, yet evolving differently under unique constraints. assets.dlnews.com/dlresearch…

We’re moving into a world where: You don’t need to be an engineer You don’t need to source parts manually You don’t need a full team You just need intent iteration.

I like blockchain tech quite a bit because it extends open source to open source state, a genuine/exciting innovation in computing paradigms. I'm just sad and struggle to get over it coming packaged with so much braindead bs (get rich quick pumps/dumps/scams/spams/memes etc.). Ew

Considering the Kelp fiasco, will this cause assets to flee defi protocols?

Distribution is the bottleneck right now. Over the last ~11 months I built pipeline from scratch; outbound, discovery, closing, and drove ~$250K in revenue with zero inbound. First time running full-cycle sales end-to-end. One thing that became clear: → great product/research isn’t enough → distribution positioning is everything Especially in this environment. Spending more time now thinking about how to build scalable GTM systems vs just executing within them. If anyone is working on interesting growth / GTM challenges, would love to connect.

"So You Want to be a VC" Im enjoying this week in Boston visiting students promoting my new book - Runnin Down a Dream. Not surprisingly, many ask me about trying to break into venture capital. I wrote a letter answering this question 15 years ago. I would send it out when people inquired. I'm making it public for the first time - with zero modifications. 1) I think it holds up well 2) make sure and read my new book also 3) I probably can't help with followups (as suggested in the letter) Hope you find it useful. Good luck!

Anthropic out here single handedly draining every bug bounty program dry. The rest are just fighting for scraps.

As DeFi matures, investors deserve accurate, public information about protocols, and protocols need a better way to communicate with investors. We’re proud to partner with @sparkdotfi to launch the first DefiLlama investor relations portal. This goes deeper than DefiLlama’s normal dashboard, incorporating additional metrics and granularity, along with a place for Spark to provide context for its analytics. This is a one-stop shop for everything that Spark users need to stay informed: * Comprehensive analytics about Spark financials and usage * Quarterly reports * Recent announcements from Spark

if you’re asking me a question about how to improve opsec you should def check out SEAL Frameworks frameworks.securityalliance.… literally all of this was written by real people in this space, for real people on this space.

Up to 3 years? Excuse me what

This new DeFi paper out of Cambridge University's Centre for Alternative Finance uses DefiLlama as its primary data source. The llama has entered the literature.