this week ethereum blob usage hit an all-time high: 3 day moving avg of 5.9 blobs/block & 6.7 daily avg!! but the ambition to keep scaling requires funding to client teams, which is increasingly scarce this is solvable - a $300b mcap chain should not have these problems

Excited to share what we've been working on for a while in stealth with our new neobank mobile experience built on Ethena's existing product set. This is one of the few product categories that have emerged in the last couple of years that I think has a genuine chance of breaking out of the crypto native user set to hundreds of millions of people. While some of the existing neobanking products today are impressive, and I personally use a few of them daily, we think the addressable market here is the hundreds of millions of users not already operating onchain which haven't been served yet. Rebuilding the mobile banking product experience on stablecoin and blockchain rails simply produces a better product experience for users with near instant and zero cost transfers and settlements, higher savings rates leveraging DeFi financial primitives and importantly these products can be global by default almost immediately. Ethena sits in a unique position as the first scaled dollar issuer vertically integrated with the consumer application experience. If you don't own the yield engine and stablecoin issuance, you are at a structural disadvantage from a revenue perspective to provide the most competitive offering across the entire product suite. For Ethena, being able to build the direction relationship with end users for our existing savings products, rather than just via exchange and fintech integrations, let's us control the destiny of our distribution channels in a better way than we have to date. We think the neobanking app form factor is the best way to achieve this. 90% of financial services for most normal people is just send, save and spend. We hope Ethena Pay will be the best place for you to do this.

Introducing the Metropolis global hackathon Six weeks to build the next generation of startups on Monad. 4 tracks. Over $250K in prizes for builders. Submissions end October 13th. monad.xyz/metropolis

Today we're releasing abliterated-model-large-v2. Based on GLM-5.3, which is #3 on Terminal-Bench 4.0 (behind only Opus 5 and Fable), with 2× the cyber exploitation of 5.2. We abliterated and hosted it so it does the offensive cyber, red teaming, and agent testing work other models refuse to do. - US-hosted - FP8 - 1 million context window - Zero input/output prompt retention Live now. 🧵

My conversation with @HadickM. As General Partner at Dragonfly, Rob has one of the clearest views on how blockchain is evolving from speculative crypto into the actual infrastructure of global capital markets. In this episode we dig into why finance, payments, asset issuance, and markets are the only parts of crypto that are truly scaling and how the industry is quietly becoming TradFi’s onchain upgrade. We spend a lot of time mapping traditional capital markets primitives directly onto blockchain rails and examining where value is actually going to accrue as tokenization, stablecoins, and onchain trading mature. At the center of the conversation is the belief that blockchain is no longer building a parallel financial system it is becoming the settlement, issuance, and trading layer for the existing one, while crypto itself settles into a more mature “capital markets +” phase focused on real assets, institutional flows, and sustainable business models. We discuss: - The current state of crypto as capital markets infrastructure and the decline of pure speculative narratives - Why finance, payments, and tokenization are winning while most other crypto applications struggle - The architectural parallel between traditional capital markets and on-chain systems - Tokenized assets = Securities - Stablecoins = Cash / settlement - DEXs & on-chain venues = Exchanges - Prediction markets = Information markets - Why institutions are moving on-chain and what they actually want (control, privacy, segregated markets) - Token vs equity: where value accrues in a non-Clarity Act world - The mass extinction event in crypto VC and why Dragonfly is doubling down on financial infrastructure - Stablecoins, RWAs, and the real path to “tokenization of everything” - Prediction markets (and why Polymarket matters) as the next interface layer - Sustainable business models and where value will ultimately capture Timestamps: 0:00 – Introduction & State of Crypto as Capital Markets 2:00 – Why Speculative Narratives Are Fading 7:00 – Finance, Payments & Tokenization as the Only Scaling Verticals 12:00 – Institutional Adoption & What Wall Street Actually Wants 18:00 – Token vs Equity Value Accrual 25:00 – Blockchain as the New Settlement & Issuance Layer 35:00 – Prediction Markets, Information & the Next Interface 45:00 – Crypto VC Consolidation & Dragonfly’s Thesis 55:00 – Real-World Assets, Stablecoins & On-Chain Markets 1:05:00 – Closing Thoughts: Where Value Accrues Next Enjoy!