fab31.eth

Why ETH is the store of value for what's coming We are almost certainly heading into a period of high inflation and extreme economic and social volatility. As inflation and risk erode the purchasing power of nation-state money and many other assets, it will matter more than ever to hold assets that keep or grow their value. Gold and BTC are high-powered money and excellent stores of value. ETH goes further. Not debt-based. Like gold and BTC, ETH is not debt-based or credit-based money. Censorship resistant. Like BTC, or gold and silver held physically, ETH transactions on Ethereum L1 can't be censored. That's true for simple payments and for complex smart contract programs like DeFi, and those programs are guaranteed to execute. Cheap to hold. Like BTC, ETH is relatively cheap to hold and store securely. Cheap to use at any scale. Ethereum is cheap and easy to use whether a transaction moves $1 or billions. Any well-formed transaction is guaranteed to execute. Sound, and getting sounder. ETH is disinflationary and becomes ultrasound, meaning deflationary, during periods of high network activity. Broadly useful. ETH has many uses across the Ethereum economy, and that economy will grow by orders of magnitude as finance, and eventually every industry, moves onchain. Global adoption of the Web protocols in the '90s and '00s transformed the world economy. Ethereum is the foundation of Web3, the user-centric, decentralized web. Collateral money. ETH works as collateral, and collateral that grows in value over time is a powerful thing. Home of stablecoins. Ethereum hosts the bulk of stablecoin activity. Stablecoins serve as payment money and as unit-of-account money. Despot-proof. Like BTC, ETH can't be used by a despot to financially exploit or repress citizens. Over time that should have positive geopolitical effects. Programmable. ETH is programmable money. You can attach arbitrary logic to transactions and build an entire economy on smart-contract-based agreements and business processes (see shodai.network). Transparent or private, and auditable either way. Money and financial instruments on Ethereum can be public or private, and in both cases selectively disclosable and auditable. Privacy tools for retail and institutional users include VPNs, mix networks, shielded and privacy pools, Railgun, stealth addresses, Kohaku, and zero-knowledge proofs in many forms, including on L2s and on private permissioned EVM networks linked through bridgeless synchronous composability. Future-proof. By the end of 2027, or partway through 2028 at the latest, ETH will be quantum-safe and AI-safe money. ETH is the base money of an exponentially growing ecosystem that should keep growing for decades. Its monetary premium will keep rising, because retail, corporate, and government users will all need to hold some. Part of today's premium is speculative: Ethereum dominates smart contract blockchains, but it hasn't fully hit its stride or gone mainstream yet. Machine intelligence will supercharge every scientific and technological pursuit and grow global GDP bigger and faster than any of us can imagine. Ethereum L1 and modular Ethereum L2s will undergird most of the high-value agreements, transactions, payment flows, and complex business processes behind the coming hybrid human-machine decentralized economy.

Marc Andreessen explains why AI might be the end of James Burnham's "managerial society" In his book The Managerial Revolution, Burnham divided capitalism into two phases. The first phase was what he called "bourgeois capitalism" "Think of this as name on the door -- it's Ford Motor Company because Henry Ford runs the company. It's a dictatorial model and Henry Ford just tells everyone what to do. He said the problem with bourgeois capitalism is it doesn't scale because Henry Ford can only tell so many people to do so many things." The second phase was what Burnham called "managerial capitalism", which was Marc describes as, "the creation of a professional class of managers that are trained -- not to be car experts or experts in any particular field but to be experts in management. And then that led to business schools and management consultant firms and all these things." Marc continues: "You look at every big company today and most executives at most of the Fortune 500 companies are not domain experts in whatever the company does. And they're certainly not the founders of those companies. They're professional managers. And in fact, over the course of their careers, they'll probably manage many different kinds of businesses. They might work in healthcare for a while and then work in financial services and then go work in something else." "What Burnham said was that transition was absolutely required because the problem with bourgeois capitalism is it doesn't scale... So if you're going to run capitalist enterprises that are going to have millions to billions of customers, they're going to be operating at a level of scale and complexity that will require this professional management class." Burnham acknowledged that this professional management class has its downsides -- they're not as inventive and not going to come up with the next breakthrough. But whether you think that's good or bad, that's what's going to be required. And basically that's what happened. Marc continues: "Managerialism basically took over everything. What I'm describing is basically how all big companies run and how all governments run and how our large-scale non-profits run." Marc believes venture capital is a protest movement to that -- backing founders under the Henry Ford model, and trying to find the next Elon Musk or Steve Jobs who can out-innovate the incumbents. "I've always viewed my entire life as: we're raging against the dying of the light. We're constantly trying to fight off managerialism from swamping everything and everything getting boring, gray, dumb, and old." But AI may now offer a third model. Marc explains: "Maybe the new Henry Ford, Elon Musk, or Steve Jobs + AI is the best of both because it's the spark of genius of the name on the door model but gives that person AI superpowers to do all the managerial stuff... What's the thing these bots are really good at? They're really good at doing paperwork, writing reports, and doing all the managerial work." "The challenge is going to be for the innovators to figure out how to leverage AI to actually do this." "The other challenge is going to be for the incumbents that are managerial to figure out: what does that mean? Because now they're going to be facing a different kind of insurgent competitor that has a different set of capabilities than they're used to." "I think this is going to force a lot of big companies to figure out innovation - figure out innovation or die trying." Ben Horowitz elaborates on this point further in his article Databricks & the Future Firm below. Video: @latentspacepod (Apr 2026)

Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead. You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement. I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible. But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier. Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want. Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well. So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it. If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.

With our new proposal, the SEC is taking the most historic step yet to modernize federal securities regulations for crypto assets. As the Crypto Capital of the World, the U.S. must and will lead. Regulation Crypto Assets will ensure that we do. 🇺🇸

Tether just released its quarterly USDT attestation for Q2 2026. Tether had a great second quarter of 2026, with ~1.5B in net operating profit, despite highly volatile global markets. USDT user base continued to grow, reaching the new all-time-high of 650M+, with the widest surge across all emerging markets, fueled by the continued period of geopolitical uncertainty. Without a doubt, Tether continues to deliver financial inclusion in the developing world like no other company or organization ever has in the history of humanity; we're all incredibly proud of this achievement. Most of the financial industry today is so excited for overly-inflated AI stock valuations, like moths to a flame. But at Tether we keep dreaming of a stable Society that drives both financial and intelligence inclusion for the 4 billion people left behind. Highlights as of 30 June 2026: * ~1.5B in net operating profits for Q2 2026. * ~184.6B total issued USDT, end of Q2 2026. * ~4.1B excess reserves, on top of the 100% reserves in liquid assets that back all issued tokens, end of Q2 2026. These results show that Tether has the liquidity, discipline and scale to remain resilient across market cycles while continuing to serve hundreds of millions of users around the world. Thank you very much for the continued support ❤️

On Kimi K3 pricing being higher than DeepSeek etc at $15/m tokens: 1. It is optimised so it has very high cache hit rates (90% lower cost) 2. It is not optimised for large RAM (B300 etc) node clusters as @Kimi_Moonshot doesn't have access to them! Cost per token lower there

We are so going to see KYP (Know Your Prompter) and ATL (Anti Token Laundering) regulations. Professional licenses to use frontier models etc, play the whole regulated finance playbook