Friday marked my last day at Mantle. After three chaotic years building in crypto full-time, this is my love letter; and why it’s time to turn the page. --- the origins --- What began as a leap of faith became a rollercoaster with no brakes and no seatbelts, punctuated by brief, picturesque views at the peaks and valleys with the occasional gasp of fresh air. The exposure, the challenges, the velocity of it all, has been nothing short of humbling. We experimented relentlessly. Some exceeded expectations. While others fell flat. The vision that crypto itself could tokenise and democratise access to anything, meant that working in an ecosystem, you either move fast enough to be an expert in anything, or you learn quickly by surrounding yourself with those who could. And it’s obvious to the naked eye who could and who couldn’t. Over time, I learned as much from what to emulate as from what to avoid. There are many unsung heroes I’ve had the privilege to work with - people who made the chaos not just survivable, but meaningful; many of which have since left the organisation and moved on. I’m proud to say I’ve done it all. And it was with you guys. Being one of the last remaining from the original batch of Mantle (aka pre-mainnet), and one of the few who joined without referral, this gave me a rare vantage point to see through a handful of things. I entered with a background in trading the once-glorious NFT cycle. Which then shifted to understanding the mechanics of SocialFi, and to Consumer, followed quickly by AI and finally RWAs. Each heralded as the next frontier use case. Every sector had its strengths, its limitations and reasons to exist. Eventually, some proved more durable than others. Internally, things moved just as fast and at times I wasn’t sure what changed quicker - people that come and go, or the market narrative. Still, I had the opportunity to dive deep into incentive design, distribution playbooks, financial structures, and consumer psychology. Constantly evaluating how big a market could become and what potential lay ahead. Two steps forward. One step back. We inadvertently also found ourselves in war rooms, tight timelines and unprecedented challenges. And somehow, each time, we emerged stronger and tighter as one. --- what ecosystem growth really means --- Contrary to just BD, Ecosystem Growth & Strategy during my tenure meant wearing many hats at once: • Shaping vertical priorities • Onboarding and enabling projects • Managing key accounts • Hosting events and private dinners • Moderating panels • Speaking on global stages • Mentoring hackathon teams • Designing incentives • Aligning VCs and founders • Filtering signal from noise At its best, it meant front-row access to some of the most driven builders in the world. At its worst, it meant firefighting, babysitting, marriage counselling to mediate fractured partnerships between two or more projects that initially wanted to work together and eventually fell apart. Crypto compresses timelines. And sometimes maturity - in ways few industries do. This is also why I do not recommend fresh graduates to enter crypto as their first full-time foray. I’ve seen teams build with integrity and grit. Yet, I’ve also seen teams drift from their original path, disappear, or lose sight of why they started. Still, I’ve held onto the belief that this industry is filled with more boon than bane. What makes crypto extraordinary though is its diversity - culturally, geographically, temperamentally. Because of crypto, I’ve met some of the most talented, eccentric, value-extractive, brilliant, chaotic and occasionally difficult personalities across continents. Conferences often feel like an international high school on steroids - flamboyant, polarising, loud. Yet within that noise, you sometimes meet the rare few who see through the theatre, remain responsibly optimistic, and could build friendships without any commercial agenda. Those connections are real, and they matter. Because behind every token, every altcoin, every protocol, there are humans. Ambitious ones. Flawed ones. Visionary ones. Extractive ones. Crypto simply amplifies what already exists. --- what crypto is actually good at --- Zooming out, it often felt like us against the world - a shared belief in an open, permissionless economy and the idea that financial rails could be rebuilt from first principles. What crypto has consistently proven to be world-class at is capital formation; and capital formation only. It’s Kickstarter on steroids; eBay for ideas; layered with the anonymity and velocity of the internet. That low barrier to entry is powerful. It funds innovation at unprecedented speed. But it also funds noise, misaligned incentives, and sometimes wrong actors. The same openness that democratises access can dilute accountability. Where crypto still struggles is accountability and efficient capital attribution toward long-term aligned value. Speculation thrives in ambiguity but sustainable value requires clarity. Until tokens are structurally treated and understood closer to equity ownership rights with real accountability frameworks, long-term value capture will remain uneven. Disruption reshapes behaviour. But it rarely escapes gravity. New systems tend to converge toward familiar structures. Adoption also happens within very specific windows, and rarely in the way early evangelists imagine. As I always say; not everything needs to be on-chain. If all you have is a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail. --- where i stand now --- That said, I remain bullish on crypto as next-generation financial rails. Spend. Settle. Custody. Transfer. On-chain. That future feels inevitable. If crypto ultimately becomes finance and finance becomes crypto — that may be enough. And perhaps the winners will be the durable networks that earn regulatory trust, liquidity depth, and Lindy longevity. Alas, investment, adoption, and trading each have their own golden windows - and they rarely overlap. Understanding where we stand in that cycle has shaped how I approach opportunity: To observe where consensus runs, and be willing to think independently. So as far as possible; fray from the stray. Thrive on that. --- onwards --- Lastly, I’m grateful to share that I’ve been awarded sponsorship to pursue a Master’s in Artificial Intelligence. I’ll take some time to touch grass of course, perhaps build quietly in the background, and will be professionally transitioning out of crypto - at least for now. To everyone I’ve crossed paths with — internally and externally — thank you. Even for a brief moment, you were a teacher. Inevitably, this chapter closes; some might even call it a fever dream and trust me, I couldn’t be more excited to turn the page. Don’t be a stranger, feel free to keep in touch! Godspeed. Eliminate bias. Eliminate variance.

say it louder

the very notion of a large holder in a decentralised asset is itself a concentration risk materialised as centralisation definitely felt like shouting into an empty room when noone was doubting Saylor at all

My recent train of shower thought: Think Saylor is poisoning Bitcoin The value of Bitcoin is that it is an alternative digital sovereign SoV And for such thing I think that ownership distribution matters If there are thousands of mostly independent and equal entities holding and trading this asset, it all becomes a white noise and cancels itself out, but if there is one dominant entity, it becomes the thing you are inherently betting on If one man or one entity controls too much supply this late in its lifecycle, its just not good (for something thats supposed to be decentralized, leader-less sovereign SoV) Market needs to pay attention to that one entity more than to anything else In other words, buying Bitcoin becomes a bet on Saylors ability to execute his plan and not fuckup If he buys or sells, you want to frontrun him, you need to pay attention to him, this is a flywheel, first everyone rejoices as it works on the upside, but ultimately it cuts both ways - it just increases volatility and systemic risk So the path trajectory of Bitcoin becomes tied to what Saylor does and it ceases to be that independent neutral thing you'd want it to be - Bitcoin essentially becomes a "cornered, un-free" asset Saylor already holds around 5% and in ideal world he wants to keep accumulating and increasing his influence over it Economic reality of his scheme may force him to sell and moderate his exposure, but that's tbd

I had never considered this as a challenge for privacy coins... > exploit went unnoticed for years > could freely mint new zcash:native freely > could sell those tokens while masking where it came from (!) > no way of knowing if this already happened or not (!!)

🚨 BREAKING: Active supply chain attack across npm, PyPI, and Crates.​io. Socket detected TrapDoor, a crypto stealer campaign hitting 34 malicious packages and 384 versions and artifacts, with attackers repeatedly pushing new releases across ecosystems. TrapDoor targets #crypto, #DeFi, AI, and security developers, stealing wallets, SSH keys, cloud credentials, GitHub tokens, browser data, env vars, and API keys. Socket detected releases with a median detection time of 5 minutes, 27 seconds. The fastest detection occurred 58 seconds after publication.

ALERT: 🚨 Polymarket contract exploited Attackers are removing 5,000 $POL every 30 seconds – $600k stolen so far Pause all Polymarket activity for now

We are investigating unauthorized access to GitHub’s internal repositories. While we currently have no evidence of impact to customer information stored outside of GitHub’s internal repositories (such as our customers’ enterprises, organizations, and repositories), we are closely monitoring our infrastructure for follow-on activity.

imagine the smell of the permanent underclass trying to resell their way out of impending recession when they don't even know what's a tourbillon or the difference between a quartz and a mechanical top

Following the KelpDAO hack, we built an open analysis of DVN security configurations across every active OApp on LayerZero over the last 90 days. Of ~2,665 unique OApp contracts: 47% run a 1-of-1 DVN security floor, 45% run 2-of-2, and ~5% run 3-of-3 or higher. As we know, KelpDAO's rsETH sat in the first bucket. Open query, public methodology, feedback welcome: dune.com/dune/layerzero-dvn-…

I'm dropping a thread of all the protocols that had to freeze their interop because of LayerZero being compromised. Let's go:

so far it looks like crypto (on solana) is safe for websites exposed to vercel there is still a risk that frontends could get compromised through github or supply chain attacks best is to wait for updates

remaining layerzero 1 of 1 bridges theoriq (base), orderly network (arbitrum, base, bsc, orderly, solana), zentry (bsc), swell network (swell, zircuit), almanak (base, bsc), anyone protocol (base, peaq), lightlink (lightlink), over the reality (peaq), river (base, bob, bsc, sonic), lily's coin (solana), nifty island (solana), aethir (beam, solana, zksync), aegis (bsc), aori (megaeth, monad), chill house (solana), cryptocurrency coin (solana), cybro (blast), gonnamakeit (arbitrum, base), initia bridge (arbitrum, initia), kelp dao (arbitrum, avalanche, base, ink, mantle, scroll, swell, unichain, zircuit, zksync), metastreet (blast), relend network (swell), unstable coin (base), vana (base), wspn (tomo), xavier renegade angel (solana), 47 eagle (base)

Overworked AI - soon they'll be on strikes

it’s like dunning kruger effect just on estimating AI capabilities and not on oneself alas openclaw is nothing but a daemon agent powered by state of the art LLM that interfaces through messaging platforms i do also believe true unlock we’ll see in coming years is purpose built AI as opposed to general purpose AI

Someone recently suggested to me that the reason OpenClaw moment was so big is because it's the first time a large group of non-technical people (who otherwise only knew AI as synonymous with ChatGPT as a website) experienced the latest agentic models.

🚨JUST IN: Several protocols have now confirmed impact from the $285M Drift exploit. Here is the current list, along with reported exposure levels, actions taken, and official statements from each team.

A hacker group just compromised one of the most widely used security scanners in the world, and used it to steal half a million credentials from companies that trusted it to keep them safe. On March 19, a threat actor group called TeamPCP injected credential-stealing malware into Trivy, a popular open-source vulnerability scanner maintained by Aqua Security. Trivy is used by thousands of companies to scan their code and infrastructure for security flaws. The attackers compromised 75 GitHub Action tags, the Trivy Docker images, and related CI/CD pipelines, meaning every company running automated security scans through Trivy was unknowingly executing the attackers' code. The malware harvested SSH keys, cloud credentials, Kubernetes secrets, cryptocurrency wallets, and .env files from every environment it touched. The stolen data was encrypted and exfiltrated to attacker-controlled servers. But the attack didn't stop there. Using credentials stolen from Trivy's CI/CD pipeline, TeamPCP then backdoored LiteLLM, a widely used Python framework for managing AI model APIs. Two malicious versions (1.82.7 and 1.82.8) were pushed to PyPI, the main Python package repository. The second version was designed to execute automatically on every Python process startup in the environment, no user interaction required. From there, it deployed privileged pods across entire Kubernetes clusters and installed persistent backdoors on every node. The attackers also pushed compromised Docker images of Trivy (versions 0.69.4, 0.69.5, 0.69.6) to Docker Hub and compromised dozens of npm packages with a self-spreading worm called CanisterWorm. They even defaced 44 internal Aqua Security repositories in a scripted 2-minute burst, renaming them all with "TeamPCP Owns Aqua Security." According to the International Cyber Digest, which is in direct contact with the attackers, TeamPCP claims to have exfiltrated 300 GB of compressed credentials and is actively working through them. The LiteLLM compromise alone reportedly yielded half a million stolen credentials. The group says it is currently extorting several multi-billion-dollar companies. Each compromised environment yielded credentials that unlocked the next target. The pivot from CI/CD pipelines to production Python packages running in Kubernetes clusters was deliberate escalation. Security researchers say this campaign is "almost certainly not over." This is what a modern supply chain attack looks like. The tools companies trust to secure their infrastructure become the attack vector. The irony is brutal, the security scanner was the vulnerability.

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Anthropic just studied which jobs AI can theoretically replace vs. which ones it's actually automating right now. Computer & math: 94% exposed. Legal: ~90%. Management, architecture, arts & media: all 60% . Observed usage so far? A fraction of that. But the gap is closing fast. Every field where the blue line towers over the red is borrowed time. Grounds maintenance and construction are sitting at near-zero on both. Might be a good year to learn landscaping!

ANTHROPIC ANNOUNCES 10 AI PLUG-INS FOR INVESTMENT BANKING, HUMAN RESOURCES, DESIGN, AND OTHER TASKS