they listened !!

It’s okay to be chopped in SF

overheard in SF: “my friend and her bf looked at each other and pressed record on granola before breaking up”

A moment we will never forget. The Securitize team rings in the new era of tokenization on the floor of the @nyse.

Feels like there will be an opportunity for self-driving cars tailored to different activities. For example, a "work car" equipped with a workstation or a "get ready car" equipped with some sort of a vanity like structure.

The business model of the internet is changing

Every year we get our consortium style initiative around a stablecoin, we have seen this with Diem, Global dollar and now Open USD. While the set of players here is obviously potent, I remain highly skeptical any of these initiatives can hit scale. A few thoughts on OpenUSD: 1. Liquidity and the cold-start problem. USDC and USDT have massive network effects across exchanges, payment processors, and brokers. This is always repeated but it's true, there are no BTC/sofiUSD pairs to trade on any of these exchanges or markets. These are not stableocin market makers and participants are willing to hold in size, as you can’t really use them anywhere. The fair counter is that crypto markets will be far smaller than remittances or equities/bonds. Probably true, I suspect in the medium term, but those markets are still converging on the same stablecoins. Hyperliquid just struck a massive deal with USDC/Coinbase. Every tokenization initiative so far is built around the incumbents too. 2. A consortium of 500 rivals has no precedent for working. The pace of decision-making across 500 competitors is going to be glacial. Not everyone gets a board seat at Open Standard I imagine, so what happens when decisions cut against some of the players? Circle and Tether ship whatever they want, whenever they want, with zero commitment to anyone. 3. Regulatory and antitrust risk at scale. Circle and Tether are willing to absorb enormous pressure, they have being doing so for years. They hold hundreds of licenses they can use to arbitrage markets, Yes GENIUS act gave a lot of breathing room and clarity, but oversees, this is not the same story. The moment this gets hard under regulatory pressure, I think a lot of these partners just walk away. And a bloc of the largest banks and card networks jointly issuing money is an obvious antitrust target. 4. The "socialist" economics starve the issuer. Passing reserve revenue back to partners sounds great in practice, but what does Open Standard actually operate on? Little to no retained capital. People forget Circle doesn't just have marketplace/exchange partnerships; it funds a whole web of rebates across on/off ramps, stablecoin settlement, OTC desks, and more, with each deal being somewhat bespoke depending not he partner. Who funds that at Open Standard? Who decides which deals, on what terms, especially when the counterparty is a rival of an existing member? Circle GAAP Opex for 2025 were 900M USD, if you strip out one time cost and IPO related cost, its adjusted OPEX is closer to 500M annually. Let’s say open Standard gets 25 bips, which is what other consortium did, At 10B of supply, open standard is making 25M a year… You don’t fund much with that…. You need to become huge very quickly. 5. The announcement is basically a giant LOI. Read the quotes: BlackRock calls it "a constructive step," BNY "looks forward to exploring ways to support," others say it's "interesting." Meanwhile the partners are backing rivals: Stripe owns Bridge and has its own stack, Coinbase is wedded to USDC, banks are building their own deposit tokens, and the card networks support every token out there. They'll hedge across all of them. Distribution only matters if it's exclusive — and it clearly won't be. 6. The "mint/redeem fees are a problem" claim is wrong. In practice every large institution minting and redeeming through Circle and Tether already gets big rebates. The real cost of moving money is FX, not mint/redeem and there's no moat there, because anyone can just match free mint/redeem. All in all: one to monitor, but I'm deeply skeptical that an organization that looks like a DAO of 500 companies can move fast enough to matter long term. Who decides go-to-market? Capital allocation? Anything? Ultimately this reminds me of the DAO experiment. The pitch was identical: no single owner, "neutral" governance, aligned incentives, decisions made collectively for the good of the network. In practice DAOs almost universally failed at the thing that actually matters: shipping. Governance turned into endless forum debates and token-weighted voting where nothing decisive got done, capital sat idle because no one could agree how to deploy it, and the projects that won were the ones with a clear owner willing to move fast and take risk. "Owned by everyone" almost always means accountable to no one. Open Standard is a DAO of competitors that are not really committed to anything, and I'd bet on the two operators who can ship unilaterally over a committee that has to ask 500 rivals for permission.

thoughts on OUSD announcement cc @circle @coinbase @Paxos @tempo @tether

Our team is growing! Enara is fiercely creative and has a unique ability to pull stories out of people. Looking for someone to join her team. Reach out if that's you or someone you know!

What do you think will be some of the second-order effects of SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic all going public within the next year? I'll go first: - Explosion of first time fund managers - California housing gets even crazier - Charitable giving increases dramatically What else?

I was talking to a founder yesterday who was frustrated by how negative the timeline feels lately, especially among VCs. I’ve noticed the same thing. My takeaway is that it’s much easier to critique something than it is to stand for something. And as people increasingly outsource their thinking to machines, that dynamic only becomes more pronounced. Conviction will become more rare (& more valuable).

When we originally invested in Bluesky, part of the thesis was that users were increasingly gravitating toward smaller, more intimate communities: - Less posting on Instagram feeds, more private stories - Less broadcasting on Snap stories, more private DMs Bluesky gave users the ability to create these more intimate social experiences by curating their own feeds and communities. What we didn’t fully anticipate was the rise of AI tools. Now, anyone can build software, and we’re starting to see a new wave of AI-generated social apps designed specifically for small groups of friends and family. It’s been incredibly cool to watch this emerge across the Bluesky ecosystem, which now has hundreds of apps built on the platform. Excited to see the developer ecosystem continue to grow.

Applications for World Build 3 close in TWO days! Over five months, top builders move from hackathon to real users, from early traction to funding, from building to pitching in San Francisco. It’s not about launching, it’s about scaling, and that starts with the hack. *If you are already building on World, check the website to skip the hack and join us on Stage 2.

Excited to join the x402 Foundation and accelerate Open Agentic Commerce!

a peek under the hood on how we're using ai at bcap

Hosted a dinner w/ folks in + around crypto where we talked about what feels like a turning point in the industry + tech more broadly. I always love putting smart people in a room together and want to do more of it! DM me if you want an invite to the next one :)

Will there be a section 230 for AI companies?