I can’t believe I happen to be in New York when the knicks win the championship - it makes me both miss the energy of this city and also want to run away from the chaos

Truly S tier tokenomics

Never thought I'd be that person walking around talking to myself all day into Wispr into Telegram to communicate with my Hermes agent that I set up through a VPS

Venice by Voorhees is the clearest AI growth play A few broad strokes I want to point out 1/ Fundamentals wise Venice has 3 million users and Yan is estimating a 12 month forward ARR of ~$260M. This means VVV trades at 2.5x forward revenue (Circulating market cap). This is rare in Crypto especially at a time when stakeholders want real revenue. 2/ Thesis wise people desire private inference while accessing open source models without sending their data to China. This is hard to do (China APIs, or intermediaries that route anywhere). Venice is private and hosts some models on private data centers and some in an E2E TEE Fashion for extreme privacy. Yan covers all of the tiers. Venice solves the market for those who want private inference but can't setup hardware at home and dont want to send data to China. I've talked about this a lot that its very hard to find a subscription service, that is private, lets you access leading open source models with zero data retention. Enterprise wise @YanLiberman is right the enterprise no data retention plans are solid from AI Labs, but they are API based and get very expensive. With Venice you can get similar guarantees on a $68/mo subscription, if you graduate from a user to enterprise API plan for work privacy guarantees your bill goes up 10-20x (this happened to us!). Net I think more enterprises/businesses use venice than we are assuming to save money vs graduating to enteprise AI tiers for similar privacy guarantees. 3/ Founder wise Erik is the guy who took down SBF live on a podcast. He's the guy who got the entire conference going at Permissionless on AI. When Erik eventually goes up against trillion dollar centralized AI founders to share the vision of private/open source AI he will inspire folks and bring them into Venice. The best storyteller is king. 4/ Future wise I think the biggest jump is autonomous agents holding VVV/DIEM, accessing models, earning capital and buying more VVV/DIEM for more usage. Then Agents build out their entire AI economy. Disclosure I am Long $VVV. H/T @ErikVoorhees

$750M gone from defi in 2026. drift, kelp, now litecoin… litecoin’s MWEB was added years after launch as a privacy extension, and the exploit hit the seam between the base chain and the extension. privacy shouldn’t be an afterthought when you're dealing with this much capital

Not your keys, not your data…

We’re about to see a massive shakeup in winners / losers, and who can pivot quickly. Projects are already falling off left and right - this is just going to further the gap.

Really highlights the difference in blind trust we're able to put into tradfi vs. defi still - hardcoded oracles - delay during an emergency caused by multisig ops - basic mint mechanisms

This week has made me miss living in New York 😭 - Spontaneous karaoke nights - Overdosing on wine with the crypto girlies - Late night trauma sharing - All around gud vibes

Popped into NYC for #theaptosexperience. Find me this weeeek @Aptos @poymeetsworld @BoysClubWorld

Ty for inviting me to be part of the Economic Summit today 🫶🏻 Always incredible to see @asianhustlentwk in action

bullish

Can't ignore facts - @plumenetwork is in the big leagues now

We need to talk about the relationship between projects and communities. Everyone loves to hate on projects. But no one talks about how toxic the average web3 community has become. Let me be clear: most communities today aren’t communities. They’re entitlement farms. The relationship should be mutual. Projects support the community, and the community supports the project. But what we have instead is purely transactional. People don't want to build with you. They want to extract from you. They’re not looking to contribute. They’re waiting to be paid. The only thing that matters is: what's in it for me, right now. Projects get called out for over-farming their users. Fair. But no one wants to admit the real acceleration happening right now is the normalization of this mindset that users deserve something. Just for showing up. That word ** deserve ** has rotted everything. Hyperliquid didn’t ruin the game, but it set the bar way too high. They did everything right: no VCs, so full control of token economics. Clear product-market fit from day one, with real revenue. A well-designed token flywheel that actually worked. Top users made life-changing money. And overnight, that became the new benchmark. Every new project is now judged against it. No matter the differences, the expectations got anchored there. Since then, nothing has been the same. Now every project has to do an airdrop. Not because it fits the product, or the narrative, or the timing - but because if they don’t, they won’t get attention. And if there’s no hype, there’s no distribution. And if there’s no distribution, the project dies before it even starts. But the moment the word “airdrop” enters the chat, the bots arrive. The Discord fills with people who joined three weeks ago and posted four times. The community becomes a theater. Everyone is acting like a loyal supporter while secretly running a multi-wallet setup. It’s sick. You can’t build anything sustainable on this kind of foundation. Yes, distribution is king. But we’ve built a system where loyalty gets diluted, hype becomes a requirement, and anyone with genuine intent is forced to compete against airdrop mercenaries. Most of the people claiming to be part of your community are gone the moment someone else offers more. And when they leave, they don't just walk away quietly, they turn around and ask why you didn’t give them more on the way out. I’ve lived this. We gave people the biggest airdrop of their lives. For many of them, it was free money on a scale they’d never seen before. Still, it wasn’t enough. No matter how much they got, they believed they deserved more. This isn’t a community. It’s a traveling circus. You build a product, a narrative, a token model, something that takes months. They judge it based on three tweets. You build a bridge - they want a trampoline. And when it works, no one says thank you. When it’s delayed or misses the mark, they flip on you instantly. Projects aren’t allowed to make mistakes. Communities can do whatever they want. Look at Berachain. Where’s the ooga booga timeline now? Did anything actually change post-TGE? Where are all the PoL fans? Monad, you're next. Good luck. And before someone throws “but RedStone had a bad airdrop” at me - yes, we made mistakes. We ran a big APAC campaign late in the cycle, and we didn’t include it in the final TGE criteria. People were right to be confused. We paid the price. But what we got in return was way beyond reason. People threw mud, spread lies, sent threats. Even the ones who won turned around and asked why they didn’t win more. No grace. No memory. No loyalty. And yet I still believe we did a great job rewarding the most committed people. The ones who were really there got paid. Not enough, apparently. Was it worth it? I’m not sure. Because the hardest hits come from people you actually spent time with. When a random bot FUDs you, it’s noise. When someone you trusted turns on you.. it cuts deep. I don’t know if there’s a fix. Maybe time. Maybe the free money runs out and the extractors leave. Maybe only real users will stay. But I’m done chasing it. This is probably one of the last things I’ll write about community. I don’t have the heart for it anymore. I’ll focus on what I can control, product and distribution. And let the circus move on without me.

Friyay

The GENIUS Act just passed the House. And it’s a huge win for crypto and real-world assets (RWAs). Why does it matter? Clear rules. Stronger protections. A green light for RWA innovation in the U.S. The GENIUS Act doesn’t just bring stablecoins into the financial system, it lights the fuse for the entire RWA sector. Tokenized real estate, credit, and securities are next. We’re talking trillions in traditional assets moving onto blockchain rails. At Plume, we’re proud to be building the infrastructure to support this movement, making RWA markets more accessible, transparent, and productive. The need for secure, productive onchain assets is urgent and undeniable. RWAs = Plume 🪶

Real World Ladies of Plume ✨ After braving the storms of mainnet and TGE together, it was a breath of fresh air to see the Plume fam IRL 🫶🏻

Happy Crypto Week~ Between BTC hitting a new ATH and Plume spearheading onchain RWAs, it's wild to think about how I stumbled into crypto back in 2020 because of my time at Coinbase. What an insane journey so far

The FDIC Finally Discovers Fire: A Crypto Awakening Three Years (or more) Too Late, by @sultanmeghji open.substack.com/pub/sultan…