At 21, I could barely afford to pay rent At 22, I scaled an agency to an 8-figure exit Now im 26 and ready to 10x everything I've built Here's my story: Growing up in Michigan, I'd watch my dad leave for his real estate job then come home and work his second job as a process server That work ethic was burned into me early. I knew I didn't want to work twice as hard for half the results. The lesson that stuck: outwork everyone, but work smarter, not just harder. I was a big athlete in high school with tons of offers from different schools, but I got realistic with myself and knew I wasn't making the NFL so I decided to get into business I started my first business at 18 and went on to fail 3-4 different ventures until I founded an event company and got into artist management While I was in college, I met Sean Kelly who owns one of the biggest business podcasts in the world We created an NFT marketing agency from scratch and scaled it to 8 figures in just 6 months I was running teams of 10+ people while still in college We eventually got acquired for an 8-figure exit but I decided to walk away and build M3TA Media But its not all rainbows and sunshines I was young, making my first big money and everything was going so well Until it didn't Back before the market crashed, I did what every naive person with a bunch of cash would do and threw it all into the market I remember investing in ETH and a bunch of coins right before it crashed I almost lost everything and had to start all over and move back in with my parents sleep Every morning at 6am, construction workers would start drilling concrete right outside my window. That sound became my daily reminder that I was broke and had to grind my way back That rock bottom moment taught me the most important lesson: Pressure creates diamonds, but only if you don't quit Months later, I landed a $1M client that changed everything I used this momentum to turn things around I thought to myself "This is my moment, I can't mess this up" We went on to work with big companies like OKX, McLaren and other brands I could have only imagined Now my goal is to 10x everything I've built over the next few years And I want to share everything I've learned along the way Most people build audiences to sell courses and extract money. I've already made mine through real businesses, so I can actually share everything without holding back The plan is simple: use attention as leverage to help more people win, while building something generational in the process If you're serious about Web3, business, marketing, or making money online, you're gonna want to stick around as I document my journey to scale and help others doing the same

BREAKING: KelpDAO is suing LayerZero and CEO Bryan Pellegrino over the $292 million rsETH bridge exploit. KelpDAO alleges that undisclosed risks and a 1-of-1 verifier setup allowed North Korea-linked hackers to drain 116,500 rsETH. LayerZero denies the allegations, with Pellegrino calling the claims “meritless” and saying the company will fight the case in Vancouver courts. KelpDAO says it is moving users to a safer bridge as the two sides take the dispute to court.

Coinbase is building post quantum protection for the roughly $250 billion in assets it custody for BlackRock and other institutions. Its Head of Cryptography, Yehuda Lindell, says the system is being designed to adapt to whichever post quantum signature scheme Bitcoin eventually adopts. The plan also includes a hardware fallback using programmable HSMs if Bitcoin goes with a scheme that doesn’t work with traditional MPC.

Trump says he’s creating an “AI Force” modeled after the Space Force and will appoint a new AI czar. He says the goal is to protect the industry without slowing its growth, while using existing criminal and civil laws to deal with harmful uses of AI. Trump also predicts AI could eventually account for as much as 25% of U.S. GDP.

BREAKING: Christine Lagarde reportedly intervened to block Binance from getting an EU-wide crypto license through Greece, according to the WSJ. Binance had reportedly prepared a “Major Milestone” announcement, with Richard Teng even planning to travel to Athens. The application was ultimately withdrawn after Greek regulators were told the license would not move forward. A pretty big setback for Binance’s European expansion.

Democrats’ CLARITY Act counteroffer was rejected by Republicans. The proposal included stricter ethics rules for officials and their families, forced divestment of major crypto holdings, disclosure requirements for paid crypto promoters, tighter enforcement standards and clearer protections for DeFi. The biggest sticking points remain unresolved as the Senate tries to move the bill forward.

Dario Amodei is telling the AI industry to slow down. The Anthropic CEO says a misaligned AI swarm could potentially take over the internet within 6 to 12 months and cause hundreds of billions in damage. His proposal is pretty serious: independent evaluators embedded at AI labs, coordinated development among democracies, and eventually an agreement with China. The wild part is that this is coming from one of the companies building these systems at the frontier.

Just launched this gorgeous new website for @alecweb3 ✨ The animated hero brings the modern brand to life beautifully. Really pleased with how this one turned out.

Hunter Biden’s LAPTOP memecoin went from $190 to under $4 in less than an hour. That’s a 98% collapse. On-chain data shows a wallet received 100M LAPTOP a week before launch, with millions later distributed to market makers and other addresses. The launch went from insane hype to a brutal wipeout almost instantly. medium.com/@phoenixveritasfo…

Robinhood taking a stake in Crypto.com is a pretty big deal. Robinhood has been steadily expanding beyond stocks, and now it’s getting even deeper into crypto through one of the biggest exchanges in the industry.

4,000 BTC moved after the Liquid Network hack. What makes this even crazier is the hacker is communicating on-chain, asking maintainers to patch the vulnerability first before the funds are returned. Crypto really is a different kind of internet.

Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev is doubling down on stock tokenization. “We stand behind stock tokens.” That’s a pretty clear signal that Robinhood sees tokenized equities as more than a side experiment. Wall Street is going onchain, whether it likes it or not.

After months of tension between Washington and Anthropic, the relationship appears to be turning around. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick says Anthropic is now “back on the right side” and that the Trump administration trusts the company again. That’s a pretty big development after the Pentagon had labeled Anthropic a supply chain risk earlier this year.

Ripple is already planning for the day quantum computers become a real threat to blockchain security. The XRP Ledger’s four-stage migration plan even includes an emergency path if quantum computing advances faster than expected. The interesting part is they’re preparing before the threat becomes urgent.

Coinbase and Better are making an interesting move here. You can use Bitcoin as collateral for the down payment instead of selling it, while keeping the BTC locked up until the mortgage is paid off. If this works at scale, it could change how people think about using Bitcoin to buy real-world assets.

Bitcoin just had its best week in over 3 years. Up 23% in a week.

Cramer said he was selling all his Bitcoin. Bitcoin responded by going from $62,300 to $79,500, adding $17,200 in less than two months. That’s a 27% move in the opposite direction. At this point, fading Cramer isn’t even a meme anymore. It’s becoming a market strategy.

OpenAI is taking a very different approach to AI safety and privacy. Its new Private Safety Processing is designed to monitor patterns across multiple conversations without retaining the underlying chats, while Anthropic’s policy allows certain “covered models” to retain sessions for 30 days for safety analysis. That distinction matters. Enterprise customers are putting increasingly sensitive data into AI systems. The question isn’t just which model is smarter anymore. It’s who can see your data, how long they keep it, and what happens when their safety systems flag you. Privacy is becoming part of the AI arms race.

This week is shaping up to be one of the biggest weeks for U.S. crypto policy this year. The White House is bringing crypto and prediction-market executives together on Wednesday, with SEC Chair Paul Atkins and CFTC Chair Michael Selig expected to attend. Then on Thursday, the CFTC’s new Innovation Advisory Committee holds its first meeting, with crypto regulation, AI in finance and prediction markets all on the agenda. Meanwhile, the CLARITY Act is stuck until September after the Senate failed to move it forward before recess. Congress is moving slowly. The regulators clearly aren’t waiting.

Your ChatGPT account can be hacked just like your email or social media. And most people probably wouldn’t notice until it’s too late. If you use ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity regularly, check your active sessions and kick out anything you don’t recognize. Turn on MFA where available, use a unique password and never reuse the same login across platforms. AI accounts are starting to hold sensitive conversations, work documents, personal information and even financial data. Treat them like your bank account. Because hackers already do.

SpaceX acquiring Cursor for $60B is insane. This isn’t just Elon buying another AI company. Cursor is one of the biggest bets on AI coding, while SpaceX is building out enormous amounts of compute to train and run AI models. Putting Cursor inside SpaceX gives Elon access to the software talent, coding infrastructure and developer tooling to push his AI ambitions even further. The fact that this would be the largest startup acquisition ever makes it even crazier. Elon is clearly trying to own more of the AI stack.