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 The degens are gone, the allocators are wearing suits, and your @Uniswap booth has been replaced by a JP Morgan activation with 50 year old boomers.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.

EPISODE 151: The Myth of Michael Milken @JTLonsdale talks with Richard Sandler -- Michael Milken's long-time lawyer -- about his powerful new book: "Witness to a Prosecution: The Myth of Michael Milken" (00:00) Episode intro (01:35) Richard's career & Michael Milken's legacy (06:25) Why write this book?  (08:00) How Michael Milken transformed finance (14:00) Why did they go after Michael?  (19:30) Using RICO to bring down Drexel (22:30) Prosecutorial abuse & the power of government (26:30) Why did Michael agree to a plea deal? (33:25) Trump grants Michael a full pardon (35:00) Lessons on government power, media influence & Michael's resilience

New post w/ random thoughts on AI (thread) I will probably get a # wrong, but here we go :) 1/12 OpenAI & Anthropic now at 0.1% of US GDP *each* In a year, AI revenue likely to be 1-2% of US GDP What does AI mean for US GDP growth? Does productivity get lost mismeasured a la internet era?

EPISODE 149: The Small Business Succession Crisis & New Possibilities in the AI Age @JTLonsdale sits down with @BuySellSMB, Founder & CEO @OperateUSA. (00:00) Episode intro (01:25) Will’s entrepreneurial journey (04:15) The small business succession crisis (06:40) American Operator’s approach vs. private equity (08:35) "We're creating millionaires on Main Street" (11:55) Does AI mean boom or bust for small business (15:55) Forget law school? Buy a small business instead? (21:20) AI use cases for small business (23:00) Why many SMBs shut down instead of sell (26:00) How the operate-to-own model works (33:50) Optimism for Main Street America

I'm 19 and I just built an AI that does marketing for you. Like everyone else I was building apps easily but having a tough time getting users. I was split between tons of tools and couldn't figure out what was working. So I built an AI that connects those tools and learns about your business and generates insights from your business data about how to improve. It's an agent that connects to your data, thinks about your business, and executes, and I'm releasing it right now totally for free. polara.ai

Jake DeWitte called me with an idea that most people thought was crazy. He wanted to build small fission nuclear power plants. For more than 40 years, the mantra “no nukes” permeated the zeitgeist, and half the people protesting were protesting nuclear war. Jake said he could build a portable nuclear power plant. That could power a small city, be placed anywhere, and even transported. My nuclear physicist friend told me the timeline: "Five years to design. Five years for approval. Five more to build" 15 years. Minimum. I invested anyway. I had faith in Jake that if anyone could get a nuclear power plant built in the US, Jake could. Jake had the energy and drive to actually pull this off. Most entrepreneurs would've given up after hearing that timeline. He doubled down. Fast forward to today: Oklo became the first nuclear power company to get US approval in 40 years. Jake took the company public via SPAC. The Aurora reactor (their flagship model) is a 1.5-megawatt beast that runs for years without refueling. Uses spent nuclear fuel. Cuts waste and environmental impact. Perfect for remote areas and small grids. Oklo today is worth more than $10 billion. Nuclear energy can reduce the carbon emissions damaging Earth. Oklo will be the company that makes it happen.

This is wild. theaustralian.com.au/busines…