I’m back and excited to share Maximum Frequency Ventures inaugural $50m fund with the world. MFV was built as an evolution to venture capital in crypto. CT is quick to dunk on VCs, often rightfully so, but venture capital remains still one of the strongest forces for good in this industry. @moshaikh @alextang @jerome_ and I built MFV as a vehicle designed to support founders to build generational companies while we remain in the trenches with them. Supporting builders was the best part of working at Aptos - seeing hungry founders grind and win. We cultivated 200+ projects with a collective $150m raised across them. Those experiences taught us what great founders need and where VC often falls short. That realization led us here. We’re a VC that spends more time building than investing. Rolling up our sleeves is the foundation for this venture. Our team came together naturally as we saw ~90% of the collective business outcomes at Aptos. From the biggest partnerships to ecosystem-defining deals, we’ve lived the highs and lows of scaling in real time and we’ll bring that same experience to every company we invest in. The timing couldn’t be better. The next wave of crypto demands builders who can execute with precision, resilience, and speed. We’re ready to match that energy. It’s time for VCs to build. MFV will be in the trenches. See you there.

Tokenization still remains confusing to some and would be adopted more widely if not for the dark cloud left by crypto scams and rug pulls. It may take some extra time but it is inevitable that capital markets will be rebuilt from the ground up starting with tokenization. @CathieDWood sees it clearly

i was having dinner with someone recently who asked why i spend so much time reading & posting on x. she had a pretty negative perception of the platform mostly shaped by the mainstream narrative around it. my answer was simple. x is where the future gets beta tested. you basically get to watch ppl build things, talk through ideas, show off stuff, & argue about where everything is going, way way before it reaches anyone else. there really isn’t another surface on the internet quite like it.

I keep coming back to whether compute markets are an investable category or mostly riding temporary excitement around AI. The Blackrock article got me thinking... The bear case is that compute should get much cheaper over time. Early rail travel was expensive because the infrastructure was scarce and expensive to build out. Over time, more railways were built and transportation became much cheaper. Compute may follow a similar path: GPUs are expensive today because demand has grown faster than supply, while power, data centers, networking and chips remain constrained. But hardware keeps improving, models keep getting more efficient and more capacity is being built. That should make a given amount of intelligence much cheaper. Tasks that required an expensive frontier model a few years ago can increasingly be handled by smaller models at a fraction of the cost. If that continues, generic compute starts to look more like a commodity. That creates a pretty credible bear case for many compute markets: - scarcity premiums shrink as supply catches up - GPU hours become easier to source and harder to differentiate - more inference moves onto phones, laptops, cars and other local devices - large cloud providers continue building their own capacity If a marketplace works mainly because someone desperately needs an H100 this week and cannot find one elsewhere, I would be skeptical of the long-term economics. That feels more like monetizing a shortage than owning something durable. The part I am less sure about is whether cheaper compute actually leads to less spending on compute (the reverse should be true via Jevons paradox). Historically, lower computing costs tend to create much more usage. Storage became cheaper and we started saving everything. Bandwidth became cheaper and the internet moved from basic text pages to people streaming video for hours every day. AI could follow the same pattern...if the cost of running an agent falls 90%, a company will probably deploy far more agents and have each one do much more work. This gets especially interesting because software can consume compute at a rate humans cannot. A person might make a few dozen requests to an AI product in a day. An agent could make thousands of model calls while completing a single job, continuously checking information, testing different outcomes and retrying work without anyone sitting there prompting it. So you can have compute getting much cheaper while total demand keeps growing. The price of a unit of compute can fall dramatically while the number of units consumed rises even faster. If that happens, compute markets do not necessarily disappear. The stronger businesses may be the ones solving harder problems around compute: finding large blocks of capacity when they are needed, matching different workloads to the right machines, keeping hardware highly utilized or giving customers reliable performance across different providers. There is also a chance the bottleneck just moves. Today everyone talks about GPU shortages. A few years from now, GPUs could be much easier to get while power becomes the scarce input (h/t Ribbit). Then the valuable asset may be a data center with a large grid connection. Compute has much less obvious limits because cheaper intelligence can create entirely new uses. If compute becomes 100x cheaper, companies can afford simulations that make no economic sense today. Agents can work continuously instead of being used occasionally. Software can make decisions and transact far more frequently than people do. There are still plenty of ways this thesis can be wrong: - better algorithms may reduce compute needs faster than new demand appears - small local models may take a large amount of work away from centralized data centers - some tasks may reach a point where more intelligence has very little economic value - large cloud providers may also capture most of the market themselves. If cheaper compute leads to far more volume and the marketplace has something harder to replicate than access to GPUs, it might be a much more durable business. Until I see that, I remain skeptical. DMs remain open if you want to prove me wrong!

The World is Changing: AI For Creativity By Jeffrey Katzenberg A few months ago, I sat in my office in Silicon Valley and watched as a tech founder showed me something extraordinary. On the screen was a fully realized, beautifully lit, well-composed animated scene. It was stunning and it made me feel exactly what I felt in 1986 watching Luxo Jr. That was the first time I watched a computer-animated 3D character take a breath and seem, against all reason, to have life. It left me in awe. Later that day, I received a text from an artist I've known for thirty years, 350 miles to the south, in the city where I spent most of my career. After seeing a similar video, she texted: "Is this the end of us?" My answer was, "Certainly not.” I have spent the better part of the last decade in Silicon Valley, but the heart of my career has been in Hollywood. Being deeply connected to both worlds means I have deep loyalties to each and a responsibility to speak honestly to both. In 2023, I said that these new AI tools would cut the time and cost of producing world-class animation by as much as ninety percent within three years. Some colleagues were alarmed, many were furious. There is growing fear and resistance surrounding AI within the creative community. I deeply understand it, because I've spent countless hours walking through animation studios watching gifted artists bent over their desks, rebuilding a single second of film for the tenth time because the ninth version wasn't quite right. I've sat in screening rooms where four years of people's labor played out in minutes, and I knew the name of every person that had spent countless hours bringing those images to life. The creative process is a calling, there's really no other way to describe it. From the outside some see resistance. From the inside, it is love. People do not fight this hard for things they don't care about. The pushback coming out of Hollywood represents the collective effort of people who are deeply passionate about their craft. Is History Repeating Itself? The history here is more complicated than either side may realize. In 1906, the most famous composer in America, John Philip Sousa, published an essay titled “The Menace of Mechanical Music." He warned that the phonograph would become "a substitute for human skill, intelligence and soul." Sousa's fight was not really about the machine, it was about money. The machines were playing his compositions, and the men who built them weren't paying him a cent. His campaign helped create the Copyright Act of 1909. He did not stop the technology. He changed the terms under which it could use his work. A hundred years ago, sound came to the movies. We remember it now as a miracle, and it was. What we forget is who paid for it. Before sound, tens of thousands of musicians made their living in the orchestra pits of movie houses, scoring every film live, every night, in towns all over the world. When the soundtrack arrived, the work of one composer and one orchestra was recorded for a film that went into thousands of theaters. The union fought back with everything it had, taking out newspaper ads across the country warning against the menace of "canned music," one of them showing a mechanical man tearing the strings out of a harp while an angel wept. They were not fools, and they were not Luddites. They were right. Those pit jobs did not come back. And yet (this is the part we have to be brave enough to admit), sound gave us the movie musical, the modern score, sfx, sound design, audio engineering, and an art form vastly larger than the one it disrupted. And it helped keep Hollywood in the forefront of world entertainment for the rest of the century and into the next. The loss was real. And yet the art form expanded. This is a story that has been told over and over again. To resist technology is to risk irrelevance. Just look at Kodak or Blockbuster. To embrace technology is to open doors of new possibility. Just consider Apple and Netflix. What I Learned From Walt Disney In the mid-1980s, I was tapped to lead Disney's animation division at a moment when the studio was at an inflection point. Animation wasn't just another business unit. It was the soul of the company, a medium revered because of Walt's genius and his passion. But the production system was cumbersome and unforgiving. A single movie was 125,000 individual hand-drawn and painted cels, photographed one frame at a time. Every revision carried a cost measured in months. These degrees of difficulty shaped the kinds of stories we could tell. We found our way forward in an unexpected place: Walt himself. The Disney archives held astonishing recordings of Walt explaining his creative process. His own writings. His notes and storyboards. Work product captured at every stage of his process. This was truly a gift. Listening, reading, sitting with the work itself, we heard him talk about character, about emotion, about how an audience feels when a character truly comes alive. He talked about making bold choices and refining a scene until it genuinely moved people. We didn't hear a word about pencils or paintbrushes. In fact, Walt was famous for being a technologist, forever hunting for state-of-the-art tools, often inventing them himself to achieve the images he saw in his head. But he never defined animation by the tools. He defined it by whether the audience believed the character. His principles were timeless. The tools were not. That realization changed everything. We co-developed the Computer Animation Production System (CAPS) with a young Northern California company called Pixar, replacing hand-painted cels with CGI. In The Little Mermaid, the final scene shimmered with a dimensionality and light that the old process simply couldn't achieve. In Beauty and the Beast, the ballroom sequence moved with a cinematic sweep that placed the audience inside the emotion of the moment. In Aladdin, the Cave of Wonders felt vast and alive, and the Magic Carpet became an intricate, compelling character all its own. In The Lion King, the stampede carried a scale and intensity that raised the emotional stakes beyond anything we'd done before. Technology didn't diminish the craft, it expanded the canvas. It gave artists more room to create. A decade later, the canvas expanded again. When Disney released Pixar's Toy Story, it wasn't simply a technical milestone. It was proof that a fully computer-animated film could carry real emotional weight, that it could make audiences laugh, cry, and believe. At DreamWorks, we made the difficult decision to sunset hand-drawn animation and become a fully computer-animated studio. It was the right thing to do, but it was not without pain. It cost talented people their place in an industry where they had worked their whole lives. Some made the leap to the new tools and did the finest work of their careers. Some never did. Tools are never the point. The instruments change with every generation. What endures is taste and imagination. The magical ability to make an audience feel. One of the greatest storytellers of our generation, George Lucas, succinctly captured the eternal essence of this issue: “It’s not the how, it’s the why.” A Distinction With a Difference I asked one of the leading AI models a question that has been challenging me for months. What is the difference between reasoning and creating? Its answer changed how I think about almost everything happening in this industry. It said . . . Reasoning and creating are two distinct cognitive modes, though they also work together. Reasoning is fundamentally evaluative and analytical. It operates on what already exists: facts, premises, evidence. It moves toward a conclusion that was in a sense already implied by the input. Reasoning is constrained by logic and truth. Its goal is to arrive somewhere correct, not to invent somewhere new. Creating is fundamentally generative. It produces something that didn't exist before. And crucially, there's no single right answer waiting to be found. A blank page has infinite valid responses. Creation involves choices that can't be fully justified by logic alone. Taste, intuition and vision fill the gap where deduction runs out. Reasoning is what Silicon Valley has been perfecting. Creating is what Hollywood has been practicing for more than a century. AI today operates almost entirely on the reasoning side of the line. It can deduce, evaluate, optimize, and pattern-match brilliantly. And while it can create, there is a real distinction to being creative. What it doesn’t yet have is those things that make us human: empathy, devotion, serendipity, the kind of creativity that comes from a person trying to say something only they could say. When the bot generates a piece of art, it is not trying to communicate anything. It is statistics, not soul; it is emulating things that have been done. By contrast, human creativity isn’t about repeating patterns of zeros and ones; it is about doing something new. One day, AI may close this gap. Three years ago, the leaders building AI would have called what they are achieving today, improbable, if not impossible. Impossible is no longer improbable. Today, the line between reasoning and creating is real. Even the leading technologists acknowledge we are not there yet. There is no scientific path to crossing this divide that anyone in the field can articulate today. Understanding that gap is where we will find common ground. A Path Forward In 2016, I closed one chapter in Hollywood with the sale of DreamWorks and opened another in Northern California, co-founding WndrCo. We’ve backed more than 50 founders building the next generation of technology and watched how breakthroughs in Silicon Valley emerge, first as experiments, then as platforms, and finally as infrastructure that reshapes entire industries. It's worth remembering that the last great revolution in animation also came from the north. Pixar was a Northern California company, forged not in the conventions of the Hollywood studio system, but in the technological breakthroughs of Silicon Valley. I've spent years on both sides of this bridge. For sure, I don’t have all the answers (take Quibi, for one!). But, from my past and present vantage points of my long career, here is what I see . . . Brilliant people in Northern California building this technology have made something extraordinary. They have earned the right for the rest of us to be, if not believers, at least optimistic that what comes next will be remarkable. But they have not made an artist. The tools are powerful, but they are not what makes a story matter. That knowledge lives 350 miles to the south, inside people whose life's work has informed the very models you are building. The right path forward includes them by design, with credit, with consent, and with compensation. Build this with the storytellers. Not on top of them. Taste is not something that can be synthesized, it is uniquely human. At the same time, Hollywood needs to accept that AI is not going away. The energy they are spending trying to make it disappear is energy they are not spending deciding the terms on which it will exist. And the terms are everything. The north needs something from it that they cannot build and cannot buy: creativity. The kind that takes a blank page and conjures a single right answer where there was none and has held audiences for a century. Without it, the most powerful reasoning engine ever invented will still be missing the only thing that makes a story worth telling. The artists who learn to wield these new instruments will do things the engineers never dreamed of. They always have. Edison invented the motion picture but made terrible movies. It took Chaplin, Lloyd, Keaton and so many others to make movies emotional. Now, the canvas is about to expand yet again. We should decide now that we intend to paint on it. There are so many valuable lessons in history. This has happened many times before, and it was never settled by the technology. It was settled by the terms. Sousa did not stop the phonograph; he helped write the law that made sure composers got paid. And two years ago, when the writers and the actors walked out, they were fighting for the very things Sousa was fighting for in 1906. Consent, compensation, the basic recognition that human creative work has a price that must be paid. The terms of that fight are still being negotiated, but the principle is older than any of us. The tools-versus-no-tools argument is a trap. First, we must all agree that there should be terms. Then we can have the crucial debate about what fairness requires. What I Learned From Steve Jobs Years ago, Steve Jobs said, "It's in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough. It's technology married with the liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing." He was describing a device. But he could just as easily have been describing this tale of two cities. What I See Coming Soon As the barriers and the costs come down, more films will get made, not fewer. Studios will get to take more risks. There will be more seats at the table, and very soon entirely new forms of storytelling. In the 1980s, animation was dismissed as a niche corner of the business. Today it is one of the most beloved and profitable forms of storytelling in the world. In live action, filmmakers like Steven Spielberg, James Cameron and Peter Jackson embraced new visual tools not as shortcuts, but as instruments, and expanded cinema in the process. Every time storytelling has met a genuine technological shift, from synchronized sound to color to computer animation, it has redefined the boundaries of the medium and grown larger in the process. Assuredly, I don’t have all the answers, but I am confident that the creative opportunities will expand yet again. How we come through this is a choice. The north has the new tools. The south has the creative soul. The best future will draw on the best of both worlds.

People are missing the big picture on tokenization. Here's what Selig means and where this eventually leads: tl;dr: tokenization pushes the financial system to be rewritten on chain, making assets more efficient to move and use, which will unlock more financial activity. The progression is as follows (and already underway): 1. Money on chain - already there with stablecoins 2. Safe assets on chain - already there with treasuries, money-market funds 3. Risk assets go on chain - happening now with equities, ETFs, private securities, commodities 4. Collateral goes on chain - all of the above assets can be pledged, margined, or substituted programmatically 5. Trading + settlement converge - instead of trade, clearing, reconciliation, settlement over 1–2 days, you can increasingly have near-instant settlement 6. Finance becomes composable on chain - the same tokenized asset can sit in a wallet, earn yield, secure a loan, satisfy margin requirements, or be exchanged for another asset without moving through several separate databases What this means: the same dollar of collateral can move faster, and support more financial activity with less trapped capital. even small improvements in collateral efficiency can translate into hundreds of billions of dollars of new economic activity.

The Internet Needs Crypto to Survive AI: piped.video/watch?v=TKVY4hVA… One of the most exciting, and underrated, developments in crypto atm revolves around this @Bankless conversation with @eastdakota of @Cloudflare. ~20% of all websites are routed through Cloudflare, and in this conversation Matthew tells us that the business model of the Web is under attack. To put it simply, agentic traffic is exploding, and agents don't click on ads, but ads underpin much of the "free" stuff we get online. The infrastructure is creaking under agent load. Matthew's assertion is that microtransactions, at a scale not previously seen, will be needed to pay for access to content, as the advertising model of the Web falls apart with agents. Crypto people have talked about microtransactions forever, but it was for people, which never worked, whereas we're now contemplating it for agents. He says Cloudflare handles ~500M requests per second, and that 1-10% of those requests may be suitable for this microtransaction model. A blockchain environment is the only payment network that could theoretically handle this scale, and it would need to hit 5-50M TPS. 5-50M TPS in prod dwarfs anything yet attempted in crypto, and is far beyond anything TradFi can handle. There are very few blockchain environments that could conceivably provide this throughput. Just as important as the scale, is the model and trust assumptions. While Cloudflare may roll this out as a solution for its customers first, what's implicit here is the potential for an entirely new business model for the Web. If Cloudflare walks this path, I hope that what they build has permissionless validation, allowing for anyone to audit the network. Cloudflare has been a torch bearer for the open Internet, and so it only follows that if they're to pioneer a new business model for the Web, that the architecture be an open network. Doing so will engender the most trust, goodwill, and adoption in the long run. Web 3.0 is dead, long live Web 3.0.

News like this used to move markets but now it's just a standard Tuesday update in crypto The industry has begun maturing, slowly then all at once

Great to see the CFTC and SEC provide *clarity* for the digital assets industry to continue driving innovation forward. I expect the handful of M&A deals that have been sitting on the sidelines to be pushed forward now. Hard to put the genie back in the bottle.

A few of the more talked about assets on CT have peaked...there are too many PNLs and charts being posted *ducks*

A friend of mine left his corporate job and with Claude was able to - incorporate a new logistics company - create fresh and unique branding - build an app end to end (w/ no technical experience) - launch, acquire customers and generate revenue with profitable days All-in cost for him was $5-10k for incorporating, legal, Claude tokens. No VC needed to get to this point – pre-seed and seed funding will consolidate further from here

While CLARITY did not pass, digital assets is still top of mind for regulators, institutions, retail and everyone in between. My takeaway here is that conviction in the industry has only grown the last few years and shows no signs of slowing down.

10 reasons to pass Clarity: 1. It ends regulation by enforcement. The SEC and CFTC get written rules instead of suing companies years after the fact. 2. It puts a federal floor under every exchange. Right now your consumer protections depend on which state you live in. 3. More activity moves onto licensed, US-regulated platforms with full BSA/AML and sanctions obligations. That is a national security win. 4. FinCEN, OFAC, and DOJ keep every enforcement tool they have today. 5. The CFTC gets clear jurisdiction over digital commodities. 6. The SEC keeps its authority over securities offerings. Investor protections for security-like tokens stay intact. 7. Consumers get real disclosures before they buy: how a token is structured and how their assets are held. 8. Builders get a rulebook to build here. Every year without one, the jobs and tax revenue go offshore. 9. It protects your right to hold your own keys. Self-custody gets federal legal protection for the first time. 10. Two years of bipartisan work in the House and Senate. Actual compromise.

Had this convo with @neilhar about 10 months ago. Just call people on the phone and/or pick up when someone's calling you. 100% more efficient than gmeets, scheduling apps, etc.

Great to see @AskVenice and base:0xacfe6019ed1a7dc6f7b508c02d1b04ec88cc21bf having a lot of success today in the market. Fundamentally important to every person who values individual liberty and technological accelerationism.

Great visit to the @Equinix data center in Tokyo today

24 hour travel day to Japan and I’ve been in back to back meetings since landing… seems like companies are moving quickly here and are steadfast on adopting crypto

I'm heading to Tokyo next week - if you're in town and want to chat crypto markets, trading or venture, reach out!

Even if you are skeptical about crypto, you can't deny our industry's innovations have already made real change in traditional markets: - NYSE going 23x5 - will eventually be 24x7 - Perps - simply better futures - stablecoins - simply better payments - tokenized loans - e.g. Figure - faster, more liquid, safer There are a million more innovations, and many of them will be standard practice in a decade. You can't hate crypto. It's awesome.