The intelligence revolution will be decentralised.

Right now, SOTA models are all from AI labs. But suddenly all that investment in eg Mistral doesn’t look all that wasted, and for a non-US company it now looks strategic to be their customer (or a customer if any other non-US vendor) Needless to say huge advertisement for open models

And just like that we collectively saw the future of inequality

With respect to Noah and the a16z team, who are usually quite sharp, this description is categorically wrong. The features that they describe as non-negotiable, like finality, do not and cannot exist on permissioned infrastructure. That’s because whoever controls the permissioning also controls the state. They can demand to halt the chain, fork it, break atomicity etc, then depermission validators who disagree. Every permissioned network has a button, and control over it determines liveness and finality. The cryptography and consensus cannot stop them. It’s mostly performative. The counterargument is that whoever controls the button risks legal, reputational, and regulatory issues if they misuse that power. That’s fine, but it’s not a crypto thing. It’s a “trust me bro” mentality, not a “can’t be evil” one. Ironically, the institutions least likely to trust this kind of database are the very firms it’s designed to attract. They know even better than anyone what it means to surrender your clients and assets to infrastructure that can abuse them. You’ll see.

if I'm Dario, the reasoning for an IPO is to get flush with liquidity and then pay for the most insane lobbying effort the US has ever seen i'm calling it now, come back to this in 6 months

If you've adopted AI at your company but haven't seen any tangible results, read this 1990 article: "The Dynamo and the Computer" by Paul David. When electricity first arrived, factories that "adopted" it barely got faster. They just swapped the steam engine for an electric one and ran everything else exactly as before: same machine layout, same workflow, same management. Electricity in, no real gains out. The most common mistake with any new technology is to drop it into the old organization and then declare the transformation done. The real leap came decades later, when each machine got its own small motor. Suddenly machines no longer had to be lined up around one central drive shaft. They could be rearranged around the actual flow of work. The productivity gains didn't come from electricity. They came from REDESIGNING THE ENTIRE FACTORY around it. AI is the same. Bolting it onto your existing process gets you a faster steam engine. The payoff comes when you redesign the work itself. (link to paper in comments)

We hear a lot on Cardano how Hydra can help go really, really, really fast. That's cool but quite honestly, for most apps even, you'd rarely see the kind of user volume needed to fill the potential speed. A separate, unexplored and not much discussed benefit of Hydra is that it runs a small, local ledger that operates exactly like the Cardano L1 (this is what an isomorphic state channel means at a high level). However, you can tweak the protocol parameters to meet your needs (no minUTxO, no fees, etc). Where I think this has real, unexplored value is for Plutus Smart Contracts, specifically expensive or heavy ones (ZK, etc). If a contract would be too operationally heavy to operate on the L1 due to tax fees or CPU or RAM requirements, users could bridge in to the Hydra head, complete the ZK circuit or other smart contract conditions to create their new UTxO state, and then bridge back whatever value or state needed to the L1. Thoughts? @BeRewt @ItsDave_ADA @eryxcoop

Our statement on the UK government’s demand that all content on all devices sold or used in the country be scanned, on the presumption of nudity, using a dystopian combination of age verification and content scanning. This proposal will not safeguard children. It endangers us all. signal.org/blog/pdfs/2026-06…

REPOST but to Cardano: Dear @Cardano, we have been in deep discussion with @IOHK_Charles and how recent price declines will impact their budgeting needs / ability to deliver on IO proposals. Combine that with my sincere belief that we do require more structured leadership (in conjunction with constructive community involvement); @emurgo_io will shift to a "Yes" vote for IOR. We are at an existential moment for @Cardano where actions we take now will reverberate through our ecosystem. Also make no mistake, that every chain, is facing the same decision. EMURGO believes the following: 1. Leadership: At this time, I believe need an executive function that is led by Charles @IOHK_Charles, Fred @F_Gregaard and myself @phillip_pon alongside Jack @JBriggsLondon at Intersect. The community will and must be involved. 2. Infrastructure: We need to fund infrastructure and @IOGroup and some specific protocols / projects remain best positioned to ensure core needs are met. @Cardano_CF also does work on these matters, alongside @IntersectMBO. @emurgo_io maintains libraries that are used by nearly all Cardano projects. 3. Commercial: Investments must also be prioritised but we must also accept that most will fail. It is the nature of early stage investment but we must try to create a thriving ecosystem that embraces a multi-chain future. Strike offers other chains too. @LayerZero_Core is essential to this strategy as are @circle, @PythNetwork , @DuneAnaIytics and @FireblocksHQ. 4. Marketing & Branding: Web3 is fighting for attention in the age of AI. @Cardano has a unique opportunity to rise above the fray alongside @MidnightNtwrk @F_ZK_Now. Having said that, I am not a proponent of parties, happy hours, or 'free drinks'. Marketing & Branding are serious efforts that need to be led by serious people. I was recently at a dinner with a VC, Regulator, Market Maker, and prominent project where more was done to advance Cardano's relevance than a glad handing party of the usual faces. @emurgo_io will support serious Marketing and Branding efforts. There is a lot more I want to say but I want to call upon all DRep to vote "Yes" to the IOR proposal and for those who have abstained or voted "No" to reconsider. Price has changed, therefore, the value & importance of the proposal has increased.

400M users worldwide have had their TVs and phones hijacked by a company selling the private bandwidth to corporate customers who want to appear as normal users on internet. You know, like being infected with a botnet, but this is "legal" because page 354 on your telly said so.

A guy calls his broker and asks about egg futures. Broker says they’re at 25 cents. Guy says, “Alright, buy me 100 contracts.” A week later he calls again. Broker says, “Good call. They’re at 35 cents now.” Guy gets excited and buys 1,000 more. Few days later, he calls again. Eggs are at 50 cents. Now he thinks he’s a genius, so he buys 100,000 contracts. Next day they’re at 65 cents. He buys a million. Then they’re at 95 cents. He buys another million. Then $1.25. He buys another million. Next day, eggs are trading at $1.75. He finally thinks, alright, this is probably enough. Time to take profit. So he tells his broker, “Sell 2 million contracts.” After a long silence, broker finally says: “Sell to who? You’re the egg guy.”

The incident aside, Zooko's post is a masterclass of crisis comm. All founders should take notes. Honesty and directness. Within the first 30 seconds of the read, he gave you the timeline. He talks about the actions that were taken and the direct, honest impact of the problem. His delivery was measured but raw. "Because of the privacy properties of Orchard, there is no way to cryptographically prove whether the vulnerability was exploited before it was remediated." Then, throughout the article, he mentions the significant impact continuously, many many times. He didn't shy away from it. He was direct and honest. In a crisis situation, directness and honesty are extremely critical. It reminds me of Ekram's article "Issue full disclosure," where he very sharply identified that letting all the facts out removes the suspense since there's no more to the story. People are no longer lingering on the issue, continuously anticipating more news. In some way, the full disclosure creates a bottom for the brand, a bottom from which the future can be built. You want one big bad news instead of a thread of smaller bad news compounding. From the response of the article and the broader community's reaction to it, it is clear the rebuilding has already started. On a side note, this is also a good exercise to filter out the tourists with the believers within the community. Double down with the brand. Zooko posted it from his personal account. He wrote in a personal tone. He is not hiding behind a faceless logo. It shows that he's taking responsibility; and he's also putting his reputation on the line. He's doubling down. Many corpo these days try to associate CEO image to bring more humanness to the brand; so today, it is more important to double down, to "go down with the brand". Not just during the good times because everyone else is doing it. The future but not too much of it. Zooko mentions the upcoming network upgrade to fully address the issue. He gave hope into the future, but he didn't dwell too much on the future. Most importantly, he doesn't use the future to sugarcoat or downplay the size and the impact, the negative of the current incident. Lastly, by not sharing too much, he creates distance between this negative incident and the positive proposal that will come from about the future. It is an unfortunate incident but Zooko handled it masterfully. Long Live Zcash.

There's little tech explanation on this Zcash vulnerability, very serious stuff A soundness bug in their zero-knowledge proof circuit sloppiness in their elliptic curve point handling code essentially allowed unlimited forged shielded transactions That's gotta spook vendors!

No real interface to the real world. No real access.

Evidence of exceptional ability and asking how they solved hard problems down to the brass tacks level is what matters. Those who actually deserve credit know the details of the solution, because it was so hard it got seared into their brain. The phonies and posers who falsely claim credit will flounder at the second or third level of detail.

> decentralised ecosystems should explicitly name growth as the game, define it as capital productivity, and make a few shared, visible numbers the common scoreboard - because that alignment, not more capital or more strategy, is what makes growth compound. really great article, every day i'm amazed by how powerful tokens are

THE REAL STORY of the Silvergate Bank “collapse” is finally starting to come out, due to the SEC lifting its “no-deny”/“no criticism” restriction on SEC settlements this week. @jaredkate, Silvergate’s then-COO, has started to talk👇 & more of Silvergate’s side of the story will come out, no doubt. As @nic_carter has reported, Silvergate didn’t actually collapse; rather, it was purposefully demolished as part of #OperationChokePoint2.0 — and it stands pretty much alone in banking history as a bank that paid out depositors amid a bank run without sticking the FDIC’s deposit insurance fund with losses. I’d already learned what happened from a different insider who was at the table back then: the insider witnessed the Fed ordering Silvergate to de facto liquidate by ceasing to service the crypto industry, the “voluntary” announcement of which started the bank run. The insider named names, and a senior Fed official later asked for that list of names (note: many of the people have since left the Fed or no longer in senior positions there). I can’t wait for the interviews of Silvergate executives who previously couldn’t talk but can now. I hope @MaxfieldOnBanks runs with this — he did a big analysis of the Silvergate story a few years ago and figured out that the mainstream narrative wasn’t correct. I look forward to hearing more from the execs, who successfully liquidated a bank under extreme bank run pressures. Are you ready to hear what they have to say???

Don’t bemoan the way things were. They will never be that way again. Pour your energy, every bit of it, into adapting to your new world, into learning the skills you need to prosper in it and into shaping it around you. Whereas the old land presented limited opportunity or none at all, the new land enables you to have a future whose rewards are worth all the risks.

Chamath has some terrible takes, but this one is undoubtedly correct. If I were still grinding out newsletters, a big one I'd want to write is about how big a signal it is that Anthropic & OpenAI have not gone on an acquisition spree for vertical-specific SaaS.