lawyer by day & nature enjoyer. Speculating.
Earth
Joined March 2023
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V retweeted
a good exercise is to imagine 4 diff scenarios where u are forced to make:
(i) 1 trade per day
(ii) 1 trade per week
(iii) 1 trade per month
(iv) 1 trade per year
most (not all) would perform best in (iv) yet ppl spend all day here opining on the hourly chart of 1k diff assets
V retweeted
The memory trade became so consensus even the Holy Father knows the base case.
Intelligence must draw on memory. The mind must not simply compile data — as an algorithm now does more quickly than we can — but recall lived experiences, which contain depths of meaning that only the human soul can recognize, and connect more deeply with the goodness of these experiences. Everything that is good begins “with the Spirit” and thus possesses a breath, a dynamism and a sense of communion that, once experienced, are engraved upon the heart. vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/e…
V retweeted
Today I call upon the blockchain industry to calmly begin planning for "bunker mode". My personal recommendation is to set in motion a controlled mass migration of assets to fresh addresses, i.e. addresses whose pubkeys remain hidden behind a hash.
Holders, starting with large and sophisticated ones, should consider moving the bulk of their funds to addresses that have never signed a transaction. And when they do sign one, they should also move remaining funds to a new address (possibly generated from the same seed phrase).
Don't rush. While I believe there is cause for action a rushed migration would do more harm than good. Don't panic either. Moving assets to protected addresses is a simple, preventative step which does not require new cryptography or new wallets.
IMO it is now reasonable to brace for the possibility that ECDSA breaks before qday, in the worst case in months not years. By "break" I mean fast private key recovery (e.g. in one week) on available hardware (e.g. a large GPU cluster).
Recent days have been humbling for human mathematical intuition. Long-held, unquestioned hypotheses have fallen. This includes the n log(n) bound for integer multiplication and the 3SUM conjecture. In hindsight, May's unexpected disproof of the Erdős unit distance conjecture was our warning shot.
Yesterday's OpenAI drop made it clear that mathematical superintelligence is upon us. They say there are weeks where decades happen. We are about to live through weeks where centuries of mathematical progress happen. Could our magic 64-byte ECDSA signatures be too good to be true? Was it just security through obscurity all this time?
Elliptic curves feel especially vulnerable to superintelligence. Curves carry rich structure, with room for fancy tricks like Schoof, Frobenius, pairings. (By contrast, hashes are designed to minimise algebraic structure.)
Separately, as Ewin Tang can attest, an efficient quantum algorithm sometimes foreshadows an efficient classical one. We should be open to the possibility of a classical counterpart to Shor that breaks elliptic curves and RSA at once.
Also noteworthy is the striking under-representation of cryptographic breakthroughs among the 722 mathematical results OpenAI published. I've witnessed first-hand the US government censoring academic quantum cryptanalysis results. Backroom interventionism is my base case.
I urge large, sophisticated actors to lead by example. Project11's "risq list" (bitcoin-risq-list.projecteleven[.]com) is a great tracker of exposed BTC pubkeys. Binance, Bitbank, Robinhood, Bitfinex, and Tether have an opportunity to harden their cold storage. Next month I'll address institutions in London in a live Q&A (forum.ethereuminstitutional[.]org/london-2026).
Again, please do not rush. Wallets holding under 50 BTC enjoy partial cover from "Satoshi's shield", i.e. his 20K exposed addresses that hold 50 BTC each. Load-bearing signers like oracles and L2 security councils should consider rotating ECDSA pubkeys with every signed message and/or multi-signing with a hash-based schemes like SPHINCS.
Exiting bunker mode safely will require post-AI cryptography. My inclination is to go all-in on hash-based cryptography and avoid structured mathematical assumptions entirely, whether from curves, lattices, or isogenies. A single battle-tested hash (e.g. from the SHA or BLAKE families) yields plausible post-AI security.
The Ethereum roadmap on strawmap[.]org fully embraces hash-based cryptography with end-to-end formal verification as a response to the quantum threat. Those timelines must now be revisited and accelerated in light of mathematical superintelligence. I'll be pushing for maximum defensive acceleration.
V retweeted
This is like that scene from the big short where that dancer is talking about her 5 overleveraged homes in Miami
Crucible Capital founder @Melt_Dem reveals how she financed her own GPU cluster with stablecoin debt and personal credit risk because she refused to sit out the AI boom:
"We're a no-name operator. They're like, who are these two women building compute? Their perception's like, who's this crypto lady?"
"We got debt from USDAI, which is a protocol that crowdsources capital through stablecoins, and the GPUs back the loans. We also took on some personal credit risk. I think being levered to the tits is a great way to live."
"In the greatest build-out of infrastructure in human history, are you really just gonna sit on the sidelines and tweet? I'm gonna ship some bangers, and I'm gonna take some risks, and if I die, I die."
"I'm not gonna sit there and tell my children, during the AI boom I sat back and I tweeted."
@CrucibleCap
V retweeted
Our latest research paper explores the growing connection between AI and digital assets and explains why broad AI adoption may drive new demand, utility and applications across the digital asset economy. blackrock.com/us/individual/…
V retweeted
Numbers do look good
And as protocol revenues scale, I would assume a higher portion can be used to buyback $EDGE
Onchain has cooled off a bit recently, but as the bull is just getting started, these numbers are poised to make higher highs
Awesome product + team = winning
pretty curious that @DefinitiveFi has the same 30D revenue as Virtuals according to DefiLlama.
• one is $400M+ MC while the other is <$20M MC
• one does buybacks and distributes token holder value while the other does not
base:0x0b3e328455c4059eeb9e3f84b5543f74e24e7e1b ethereum:0xb0076de78dc50581770bba1d211ddc0ad4f2a241
fun to think about :D
V retweeted
I don't think the tokenization story is well understood - so let's break it down
Basically - the US Government is in vast, unprecedented amount of debt. And its long term debt is selling off a lot (40%+ over 5 years) - while Gold is up 140%. Gold has crossed US treasuries as the #1 asset held by other Central Banks.
The buyers for US debt - China, Japan and Europe are stepping away for different reasons. Geopolitical conflict. Currency related. Political difference.
The government is afraid of running out of buyers for its debt. And it's worried about the liquidity of markets. Historically, this concern is much worse when the Fed is hiking and there's high inflation. As typically the response to unstable debt markets is easing (buying debt).
Therefore, the US government is very incentivized to allow Stablecoins. Stablecoins hoover up US debt. Tether has different balance sheet behavior than banks and works closely with the US government.
Stablecoins used to be assumed to be criminal operations and were prosecuted by the USG. Now they're welcomed to Washington DC.
When you are worried about your reserve currency status, you also want to ensure the dollar is accepted in many places. So stablecoins not only serve as a buyer of US debt, but a promoter of the US dollar globally.
Enter CBDCs. Europeans see the US government promoting US dollar stablecoins as a matter of foreign policy. Visa and Mastercard going heavy in the space. And see Tether freezing Balances along with the DOJ and say, "We cannot have this. We don't want Trump to be able to use the US dollar in negotiations with us. Therefore we have to digitize our currency"
Europe and the UK also have fiscal and political problems. So the perverse incentive to digitize their currencies is not just to ensure 'monetary sovereignty' but also to potentially implement wealth taxes, or balance based transaction taxes. This is also the flip side of wide adoption of US dollar stables. We don't call it a CDBC, but its basically an extension of the government. Balances are frequently frozen. Other policies could be implemented under the left.
So rising global debt -> US support of stables -> pressure on Europe to do CBDCs to respond.
The US is then incentivized to grow the stablecoin market as fast as possible. Stablecoin's usage is primarily driven by speculation. Holding it as collateral for perpetual swaps. Keeping it on exchanges.
The problem: crypto doesn't have lots of good assets to trade. Bitcoin has been very volatile. Most altcoins collapsed. This slowed the growth of the Stablecoin market, which has basically flatlined year to date. Scott Bessent wanted us to be going at 40-50% CAGR not 0.
The question then, is how to create appealing speculative markets. The answer: on chain stocks, and prediction markets.
Big picture, if you want a lot of stablecoin balances. You need to have good things to trade. Over the past 6 months the 2x leveraged Micron ETF traded more than Bitcoin in dollar terms. Trade XYZ launched commodities, and stocks and commands a large % of volume on hyperliquid. Prediction markets are growing fast.
The losses incurred by retail investors in these markets are substantial. They are allowed for the same reason Casinos are allowed on Native American reservations. Necessary evil due to funding pressure and the geopolitical factors I described above.
This is, at a high level, why we are talking about crypto in the middle of a war with Iran. And why its' consuming the executive department's attention. The US Dollar is ultimately a matter of national security.
This is true regardless of whether Democrats or Republicans are in power. Both have debt and spending addictions. Both are reliant on the US Dollar.
But now zoom out: what do you have? You have a bunch of governments adopting digital ledger technology in the middle of a war. Freezing peoples balances. People don't want their balances frozen. They don't want it to be subjected to a wealth tax.
Enter Z Cash. Over the past 5 years, ZK technology has improved substantially allowing fast, private transactions. Orchard and Halo since 2022 evolved from something Niche to something usable. The EU tried to ban Monero. Exchanges delisted it. Its price increased.
Z Cash is open source. Vitalik is also prioritizing adoption of ZK technology on ETH. You can move ETH relatively privately on Railgun already - but real private transactions are on the roadmap.
ZK proofs can be accelerated by GPUs. Due to the AI boom, the number of people with access to GPUs and agents capable of accelerating proofs has skyrocketed. Not only can this technology facilitate private transactions but also proofs of reserves that allow trustless accounting for portfolios. This tech is commonly used at crypto exchanges to prove reserves, and algo stables such as Ethena.
Thus - it's not just that we are set to own a bunch of shielded Z cash, as a base asset. It's that you can swap anything on ETH privately. Including stables. Relatively soon. And you can do so for provable reserves.
Privacy is incredibly important for large institutions doing financial transactions. They're not concerned with the tax authorities, but rather front running. Slippage. And people hunting their positions or slow moving exits.
Many big institutions own multiple days of volume in equities that could drop the price 30%+ if the market sniffed out they were selling. And intervene in FX markets, routinely interacting with banks fined billions of dollars for illicitly trading ahead of their flows.
So a meaningful increase in tokenized trading volume inherently will require privacy. As real institutional counterparties require it. Retail is a great market and is less privacy sensitive, allowing initial growth. But for the big players to enter -- you need that.
It's not just trading desks that care about privacy. You cannot run corporate treasury functions publicly. People could sniff out that you're doing M&A, or figure out what you're doing -- giving up competitive positioning unnecessarily. At the same time blockchains can offer corporations major cost savings for finance functions. It's estimated - for example, that a properly implemented CBDC could save companies in Germany billions of dollars a year in corporate finance banking fees.
There are three basic approaches to Privacy. Z cash style. Private, permissionless neutral chain. Canton style: basically segregated databases that interact with each other on chain as little as possible with a permissioned validator set. And private blockchains - which simply deal with the issue by not having a public ledger or bolted on cryptocurrency people are tracking
The argument for a permissionless neutral chain (aka a cryptocurrency) winning is that
1. there's no real reason to trust a banking consortium (i.e. what Canton does)
2. governments hate each other and are only doing CBDCs out of geopolitical pressure in a realpolitik environment. we wouldn't be here if Trump wasn't antagonizing Europe and Canada wasn't talking about joining the EU
3. the tech exists, so why would you want a counterparty in between things if you don't have to
The world in which crypto loses would be that governments come to an accord about how to do this. China and the US maybe resolve differences. Nationalism subsides. And people say, "You know what, the externalities of all this gambling and absurd crypto shit are not really worth it - we should just have a consortium of nations and corporations for a global CBDC"
There is another world where crypto loses. The debt problems go away bc we enter an age of productivity and abundance. In my opinion, the reason AI people hate crypto so much natively is that crypto is a bet AGI isn't the economic Hail Mary it's marketed as.
regardless, we are in neither of those worlds right now. But crypto hasn't done great either. Why?
The big problem with crypto, from a valuation standpoint, is that it has never been clear how you pay for all the validators or miners without a block subsidy. And the only coherent way that happens is that on-chain volume, swaps, and trading 5-10xes.
The way that you get there is that high quality assets get tokenized and traded. But probably less understood is that an entire swathe of new assets hit the blockchain, and defi functions like borrowing and looping create carry trade and FX trading opportunities. So rather than pendle looping Ethena, you have looping with RWAs. This already exists to some extent in niche markets like Brazilian credit card debt (looped 28%+ APY) but is relatively tiny.
Just on this example, you might immediately say "that has huge FX risk", and you'd be right. Which brings a natural demand for FX hedging. Which will hit after you get internationalized RWAs on chain. Which will occur naturally after corporate finance functions hit CBDCs.
So you have a sort of promethean progression:
0. bitmex and native perp yield
1. weird crypto yield / credit risk [low quality pre FTX era]
2. ethena (systematized perp yield)
3. defi/aave/ pendle etc (levered yield)
4. on-chain stocks
5. on-chain perps
6. leveraged stock vs perp yield
< we are here >
7. private stock trading
8. institutional lending
9. direct corporate bond or equity issuance (USD)
10. CBDC facilitated corporate finance (EUR, GBP, NOK)
11. permissionless private fx swaps
<the promethean explosion>
12. looped international corporate fixed income
Note that the entire time I've talked so far, AI hasn't really been mentioned. AI makes all of this easier. The most concrete example is that the Norgesbank is vibe coding their CBDC with Claude. But more profoundly - eventually agents will be able to trade assets directly on chain.
investment management is becoming increasingly agentic already, with every major lab launching finance products. And banks rapidly adopting AI across workflows.
By the time you get to step 9 on the table above, there will likely be investable AI agents. Perhaps in gated jurisdiction. But there will be a new primitive of an agent with a verified balance, and business model that you can buy. The same way you'd buy a stock or subscribe to a vault, or hedge fund.
I think Step 9 (companies choosing to issue straight on chain) is therefore the most important thing to monitor given the sh1t show with Robinhood's CEO and AMC. Tokenized representations of stocks have major legal risk, and ADRs (American Depository Receipts) as an asset class have quite an ugly history of being banned or depegging (most recently YNDX just straight up went to 0 when Russia went into Ukraine). For you to get really clean on chain stocks, and fixed income that can be effectively looped for yield, you need the credit risk of the actual underlying legal structure to be very low.
You'll also want to see a proliferation of privacy and ZK accounting products take hold that interact with OTC trades, portfolio swaps, and FX as CBDCs come online. That's the boring bridge to the eventual wild future everyone was envisioning in 2023 where we have a bunch of Accelerando esque corporations existing entirely on chain, compounding capital and investing in their own training
The Track to Financial RSI is paved with Fomo, hyperliquid, gambling on Robinhood and seemingly irresponsible regulatory actions. At least, it seems mad until you consider the alternative. Illiquidity. And currency failure.
You can complain about Trump's ethics. You can stop Clarity. But the crazy train has already left the station. All aboard! It's not like you have a choice.
V retweeted
yes - through token buybacks
- we have been buying back $quotient with profits from our internal trading
- we have been buying back $quotient with our api revenue need to check the exact numbers, but ~$1,250 bought back over the last week
- signals app pricing tiers will be updated, and certain tiers will require fiat payment, a percentage of which will go into token buybacks
some buybacks are burned (literally, or de facto by sending to the account of the relevant company or athlete via @bankrbot, as they are unlikely to claim it)
other buybacks are sent to our treasury for planned community incentive campaigns that will contribute to our proprietary data edge (see Numerai)
V retweeted
We waited 8 months since our pivot and about nearly 1.5 years since our initial launch to release our utility token $quotient for @QuotientHQ
Makes a world of difference tbh
Made us way more product and user value focused on the long build out phase
@QuotientHQ - forecasting intelligence for prediction markets and perps
- Dev previously built risk analytics products for financial institutions and government agencies
- 5.5% more accurate than Polymarket for geopolitics / global elections markets over the last 60 days
- Fine-tuned models for forecasting different market types
V retweeted
I am long $VVV via spot, perps and 25 strike calls otc
- this was a shot heard round the world for private inference and AI, Venice seems like the best liquid asset in the world for that thesis
- it's a similar circ market cap to when ZEC was $50 before starting the fuck you privacy candle
think I only lose on a crypto nuke but lets see
V retweeted
If you asked Claude to design a small RHC project specifically to intersect with Vlad Tenev’s stated product interests re prediction markets, it would struggle to make one much more aligned than @QuotientHQ.