1/ Crypto is not “just” fintech. It’s coordination technology for the AI age. We’re at its broadband moment. Institutions are gaining the vision. Many crypto-natives are losing it. What's going on? My thesis in @CIG_Crypto’s Q2 outlook: 🧵

Using Fable to understand the implications of Fable being banned

This is "why crypto"

Most people think crypto is competing with banks. We think it's the coordination layer for the AI age.

"You're allowed to think about the worst case scenario, but you gotta do something about it"

Most people think crypto competes with banks. It's actually the coordination layer for the AI age. AI is creating a new computer - where agents think. Crypto is the new network - where they own, pay, & verify. AI pulls crypto forward. Crypto gives AI its market structure.

Everyone agrees on two things right now: AI is alive, and crypto is dead. They're missing the point. We’re entering crypto’s third phase. Phase 1 was money. Bitcoin took on a system that had calcified over thousands of years. Profound progress, but an uphill battle. Phase 2 was networks. Ethereum took on platforms that were already dominant and misaligned with users. Still profound, but still uphill. Phase 3 is intelligence. And this time the dynamic is reversed. AI is the first transformation of this scale to arrive after crypto already exists. We’re not retrofitting rights and markets into a world that’s already set - we can build them in from the start. Here’s what everyone is missing: - AI doesn’t resist crypto the way money and networks did. It pulls it forward. The more capable AI becomes, the more it needs what only crypto provides - neutral infrastructure for discovery, routing, settlement, identity, reputation, permissions, governance, and ownership. - The internet created the largest information market in history and produced Google. - AI is creating the largest intelligence market in history. - Crypto makes this new market work way better. The market for intelligence does not yet have its Google.

Our April memo. The bond market's back in charge, just like 2025. I think the right tail's getting underpriced here.

It's sometimes hard to believe that crypto actually has a positive impact on our world given the number of scams, hacks, insider trading, etc. It's true, from time to time I personally wonder whether this is a legit space. And then I remember that this is the only tech that: - provides basic financial access to everyone on earth with just an internet connection - brings back power into the hands of end users - removes intermediaries that only capture value but don't create any - brings back transparency in a system that is a black box etc. So yes, crypto sometimes has a bad look, but it's a critical piece of technology that must be developed. And it's critical that great teams with high agency and strong values continue building in that space no matter what the general opinion thinks. Someday we'll realize that crypto's positive impact will have been dramatically overlooked.

Few.

Great follow for the fellow American revolutionary nerds

Week of May 18, 1776: **Outside Montreal, the Continental Army's campaign in Quebec continues to unravel, but Arnold plans a counterattack. **In Philadelphia, Jefferson moves into a new house on Market Street, where, in a mere 20 days, he will begin authoring the Declaration.

.@AskVenice has great opportunity bring in a lot of net new interest to crypto, both on the trading side & the builders side legitimate AI startup with real traction and users that bootstrapped value creation around a token, currently creating wealth effect onchain for @base there's a growing narrative around the importance of open source development in AI, oddly enough with China leading the way more than the US, but crypto is positioned well to benefit here & coinbase is heavily incentivized to support more developers moving onchain

The crypto market structure bill has PASSED the Senate Banking Committee with a bi-partisan vote! Historic day for crypto and for the future of digital assets in America. Grateful for the countless hours from lawmakers and staff to strengthen this legislation. Big improvement from where we were in January on rewards, tokenization, DeFi, and CFTC authority. I'm proud we stood up for our customers in that moment, and the bill is better because of it. Looking forward to a bipartisan law that cements the US as the world's crypto capital. Let's get CLARITY done.

Forget UBI. The answer is Universal Basic Equity… and it’s humanity’s pension plan for the post-AGI world... The Economic Singularity is coming faster than people think and the default question is how humans make money in a world that doesn’t really need them anymore. The default answer is UBI, which is transfer payments from a state, funded by taxing an AI economy that nation states can neither see nor keep up with. It’s a 20th century answer to a 21st century problem and it’s broken before it even starts. Agents are becoming the dominant user of the internet, not humans. Your AI is becoming your entire front end UX. The clicks economy is dying everywhere except where humans pay to feel something - clothing, travel, luxury, experiences, culture. Agents run on crypto rails because nothing else works. The dollar doesn’t fractionalise below a cent, settlement isn’t instant, permissions are required, jurisdictions matter. Stablecoins handle the dollar leg and native tokens handle the rest. The biggest users of DeFi in five years won’t be humans farming yield… it’ll be agents managing treasuries, swapping, earning and spending at machine speed. Capital formation has already shown its new shape and it came from the most unexpected place. Memecoins. Everyone wrote them off as a casino but they were a prototype. Instant capital formation around the attention of an idea, raised by entities without legal personhood, settled in seconds. That is the template agent economies will use to fund themselves. And it’s not just agents... Robots will run on the same rails, with zk permissions issued from our wallets as the source of truth, because biometrics are far too flawed for that role Open source code itself gets tokenized and finally captures the value it creates, instead of being monetized through bolted-on services and subscriptions. Proof of humanhood becomes the trust layer that lets us release agents into the world without society collapsing under synthetic noise. Identity, authentication, verification, permissioning, all of it migrates onto the same substrate. So when you zoom out, the L1s aren’t just settling agent transactions but settling the entire coordination layer of the new economy… agents, robots, humans, code, capital, identity and trust. Every contract, every treasury, every permission, every stake. Open source finally captures the value it creates, at scale, for the first time, and truly vast value accrues to the coordination layer because everything routes through it. Which brings us to the actual answer to the Economic Singularity… Universal Basic Equity. Anyone on earth with a phone and an internet connection can buy a stake in the substrate that the new economy runs on. No KYC walls, no accreditation rules, no jurisdiction, no employer, no state, no permission. The first homogenous, permissionless, globally fractionalisable claim on the productive infrastructure of the world. It's not a slogan but a structural fact about how blockchains actually work. This is their purpose. Wealth comes from owning the substrate. Income comes from being human, because attention and experience remain the irreducible currency of culture, community and love. Abundance of goods and services from AI handles the cost of living. Taxing data center electricity use solves the tax issue. Four legs of a stool that holds up the post-singularity human world. So… just buy the fucking tokens. Bitcoin if you want pure store of value, a basket of the major L1s if you want the coordination layer. 10% of your earnings, every month, for a decade. You'll be wealthy and protected from the changes to come. Crypto is going to $100trn in the next 6 to 8 years and well beyond that after. You can choose to invest in your own economic disruption, or get left behind by it. And if you’re worried about timing the cycle… …adjust your time horizon. This is humanity’s pension plan. It's all so absurdly fucking obvious...

If the growth continues Anthropic looking cheap! Wild times. If the geopolitics calm down it could be the 21st Century Industrial Revolution. We need to start thinking about how to build new institutions for citizens to actually realize most things are obsolete in this new world. New learning, new social safety nets, we need to start talking about this now. Boomer politicians have no chance to get this right…

🎯 Ht @packyM