My parents are growing older.

When you’re young, you don’t think about this much.

You think your parents are invincible. You think they will live forever.

But on a family holiday recently, I looked at my mum, and I looked at my dad, and it really hit me.

Maybe we don’t have forever.

The shape of their face has started to change; their hair looks different, their eyes are different.

They’re entering that phase of life where things start to break.

Put down your phone for a second and look at your parents.

And I mean really, truly look. You’ll start to see it too.

They’ll walk when they previously might have run. They’ll complain about their knees, they’ll fall asleep after dinner and take the elevator in place of the stairs.

They’ll get embarrassed when a stranger offers them a seat on the train.

They’ll act as if everything is the same, but you’ll see that it’s not.

This is a natural part of life. It sucks, but almost every adult human who has ever lived has watched their parents grow old.

It is the slow motion, inevitable decline of the human machine.

But what if it doesn’t have to be this way?

The Ticking Clock

People are used to thinking in terms of decades. But I don’t think decades are the right measure anymore.

Massive, societal-level change is happening and it’s starting right now.

And almost no one in the real world is even remotely aware of it.

But the experts have been shouting about it for quite a while.

Shane Legg (co-founder of DeepMind) predicting AGI by 2028

It’s not just Shane Legg though, all of the major AI founders are telling us AGI will be here incredibly soon.

Demis Hassabis: “I wouldn’t be surprised if we approached AGI in the next few years... It’s going to be 10 times bigger than the Industrial Revolution—and 10 times faster.”

Dario Amodei: “I’m more confident than I’ve ever been... we may be two to three years away from AI systems being better than humans.”

Elon Musk: “I think we’ll hit AGI in ‘26... By 2030, AI will probably be smarter than the sum of all humans.”

Even if you are super sceptical, look back to ONE year ago.

Look at the improvements in language, maths, and video.

The trend is clear.

Very soon we will have artificial intelligences that are equal to the smartest humans on the planet.

And from there… well, who knows?

Do we enter a rapid takeoff scenario and before we know it we’re living with another form of intelligence many orders of magnitude smarter than Einstein was?

Do we cure all of life’s diseases? End all human suffering? Solve all of science? Learn the secrets of the universe? Build simulations? Expand out to other galaxies and live among the stars?

Or do we all get turned into paperclips?

The Parabola is about to go parabolic, and we’re about to live through it.

Survival:

We’re very rapidly approaching the problem period

I hope more than anything that the parabola ends with us living in a utopia. I think this is the likely outcome. But the journey will not be smooth.

There will be winners. There will be losers. There will be a lifetime of change compressed into just a few football seasons. It will be here before you can blink.

Mass unemployment, social unrest, wealth taxes, asset seizures, removal of privacy and political tyranny, wars and human suffering are all things that might happen if we get this even remotely wrong.

Heck, these are things that might happen anyway even if we get this very right.

In the clip below you see Elon predicting both universal high income AND social unrest.

Elon predicting both universal high income and social unrest

It will likely be the most turbulent time in all of human history and it’s of critical importance that we figure out how to get ourselves and our families through safely to the other side.

HOW DO WE SURVIVE?

1. Biological Survival

If we believe that by 2035 all known diseases will be cured, and ageing can become reversible then you want to maximise your chances of remaining physically alive until then.

There needs to be a radical focus on preventative health.

If I die of a heart attack in 2032 because I’ve been eating McDonald’s every day, and three years later we get ASI and live forever I will have brought shame to my entire bloodline.

If you died in a stupid way 100 years ago it didn’t really matter. You were destined to die at some point anyway. If you die in a stupid way now, well that’s extra stupid because there’s a chance humans from our generation might not ever need to die.

My plan isn’t really rocket science.

It’s trying to eat healthy foods. It’s going to the gym. It’s looking both ways before I cross the road. It’s getting regular medical check ups. It’s staying away from tall ladders and angry people with weapons.

And most importantly it’s encouraging my loved ones to do the same.

2. Structural Survival

People with better mental health than me will often say Macro isn’t a thing worth worrying about because you can’t influence it.

And to that I say.. WRONG.

Anyone can radically change the future. Many individuals have done it, many times over.

But even if you can’t change the world, you can absolutely change your world.

You can do it by honestly reflecting on the environment around you, seeing things as they are, not what you wish them to be and making a plan.

Of course you can’t predict every black swan, but you can put yourself in a position to not be destroyed by one.

When I was on holiday recently I saw a DOUBLE black swan.

Step one: Secure your financial survival:

The nature of work is changing.

The economy is going to shift at the fastest pace in human history.

Companies that are slow to adapt will see themselves replaced.

Careers seen as high status today will come under severe pressure tomorrow as general intelligences start to perform at higher standards.

Your job is to ensure you financially survive during this turbulent period.

Luckily this is a pretty good time to change your financial situation, even if your career path gets rapidly displaced.

I fundamentally believe:

AI and Crypto gives anyone with an internet connection a chance to jump economic classes helping you transition into a post-AGI world.

There has never been a better time to build something than right now.

The barrier to creating a global brand or business is approaching zero.

You can just do things. You can build, you can write, you can learn anything.

You can accumulate resources, you can invest, you can bet on the future.

You must start to build wealth to you can sustain your family when the “traditional” economy starts to crumble around you.

You must be proactive, not reactive.

Step Two: Geography

Can you survive if your country does not?

Have a plan before the riots begin.

This means looking at your country’s stability. Does your government have a plan for AGI? Are they going to be in a financial position to issue UBI? Or are they going to double down on the status quo while people are setting fire to things in the streets?

Does your nation have tons of natural resources that can power the robots? Are they one of the nations building them? If not, are they friends with the nations that are? Do you have an escape plan if it all goes wrong? A second passport? Assets and family overseas?

These are all things to think deeply about now before the chaos arrives.

And this doesn’t mean sitting there catastrophising. It just means taking an honest look at the world, reviewing your options and considering sensible steps for hedging against a worst case outcome.

For example: someone living in the UK might say oh, we’ll probably be fine because we have the DeepMind team here building Gemini.

But we don’t have many natural resources, our energy prices are amongst the highest in the world and we keep on annoying all of our allies.

Therefore at some point we might run into trouble.

How can I hedge against this?

Well, you can look to Australia which has an abundance of raw materials and huge amounts of sun for solar energy generation. It’s also fairly straightforward and very quick to get a second passport there.

The same is true for Canada, minus the sun.

America is a bit harder but still possible.

Or if you’re turbo paranoid then you can move to New Zealand, build a bunker and live underground like some kind of secluded Hobbit.

If you’re not physically capable of moving then figure out how you can hold assets that are borderless and easier to move with you. If your local government decides it’s their job to “redistribute” everyones wealth because the robots took the jobs, you need an exit.

Bitcoin, physical gold, privacy coins and Stablecoins are all tools you can add to your armoury to make you more resilient to localised problems.

The Final Inning

It’s a weird place to be in – right now.

We’re standing on the precipice of the biggest change humanity has ever gone through. We are speedrunning evolution, condensing centuries into years.

The pace of change is going to blow your mind.

We will experience the highs and lows of humanity. Mass prosperity and mass suffering.

But for those that make it through, I really do believe we will look back on 2026 as one of the final moments where humans were still humans. Before we genetically altered our bodies to live forever. Before we discovered the secrets of the universe. Before we uploaded our brains to computers and zoomed off to live in a simulation somewhere.

Think about your bloodline. For millions of years, your ancestors survived the unthinkable. They ran away from Lions and slept in caves. They discovered fire and survived the Plague. They marched through world wars and famines.

But they lived. All of them did.

And because they lived, you get to witness this.

All of humanity has been leading up to this point.

We are entering the final battle.

Make it through this, and we could be the first humans to stop the clock, becoming the first children who don’t have to watch their parents grow old.

You are an inch from the finish line.

Survive until 2035.

I was your typical hyper-ambitious, but pretty stupid new graduate. I’d be the first in and the last to leave. I’d spend my evenings and lunch breaks on spreadsheets, PowerPoints, and emails.

If I wasn’t doing “real” work, I’d be trying out every influencer-promoted side hustle known to man. Amazon dropshipping, bank account switching, stoozing, sportsbook arbitrage, or getting scammed importing fake memory sticks from China.

I was obsessed with “making it” and being as successful as possible.

In the huge open-plan office of MegaCorp, across the desk from me sat this old guy.

I say old, but he was probably about 50 — which, tbh, now I’m older, doesn’t feel remotely old at all.

His name was Peter.

Peter had a reputation for being hard to talk to, hard to get hold of, and even harder to work with.

But he was exceptionally talented at what he did. He could manipulate numbers and spreadsheets like no one I’ve ever seen, and his forecasting skills were super-nerd magician-level accurate.

He could literally see the future through the numbers.

For the first three months, he barely said a word to me. I’d maybe get a grunt in my general direction when I said good morning.

I think if he’d been born 30 years later, he would have been one of us.

Time went by, and things were going well. I’d caught the attention of my boss’s boss and was doing some project work for him on the side, on top of my day job.

Others in the department caught wind that I was pretty good at Excel and began asking if I could do work for them too. Eager to impress, of course, I said yes.

Peter, who had slowly started to warm to me, didn’t share the same enthusiasm for side projects. At first, I thought he was lazy, but as the constant stream of extra requests piled up and none of it seemed to have any tangible output — I started to understand why.

One particularly stressful day, after I’d spent all weekend modelling every possible scenario under the sun and prepping hundreds of backup slides, I had a slight emotional outburst. The agenda had been changed the week before, and I, being the lowest rung on the corporate ladder, wasn’t informed.

Peter saw this and, for the first time ever, began to open up to me. He leaned over the desk and said, “Buy your freedom first.”

He didn’t elaborate further.

I didn’t fully grasp what he meant at the time. But the further I went in my career, the more I began to realise it.

In megacorps, there are many lost souls floating around. They’re everywhere — in every department and every team.

I’d always been a bit perplexed by why they seemed so jaded, so burnt out, so miserable.

When you’re new, you just think they’re just grumpy old people. But they’re not. They were just like you once too. They joined with a fire burning deep within them. They wanted to change the world. They wanted to be the best they possibly could be. But that flame was slowly extinguished by bureaucracy, politics, and the hidden realisation that the work they were doing wasn’t truly meaningful.

You can only lie to yourself about this for so long.

They’re trapped in golden handcuffs, earning just enough to have an above-average life, but never enough to buy their way out.

It’s a comfortable kind of misery, the hardest kind to escape

Starting fresh anywhere else, or pursuing a career they might actually enjoy, feels like a huge risk — and almost always means a large pay cut.

So they stay. Trapped. Counting down the years until retirement or heart attack, as the light inside their soul slowly fades.

One Monday, Peter didn’t show up for work.

The next Monday, he wasn’t there either.

The Monday after that, we found out he’d fallen into a coma.

And the Monday after that, he was gone.

Things were sad for a bit. We attended his funeral, did a fundraiser for his wife and family, and installed some benches at the local park in his memory.

But the work continued. The interviews began, and two months later someone new was sitting in that seat across the desk from me — as if Peter had never even existed.

Buy your freedom first.

He was right.

It’s only really now, a decade plus later, that I’m starting to understand what that actually means.

So many people pour their life and soul into their work. But their work doesn’t pour its soul back into them. For the majority, you are just a number on a screen, a salary in a budget, an email on a list.

Buying your freedom isn’t about making millions of dollars.

It’s about buying agency and authority over your own life.

You don’t need millions for this. You just need a big enough buffer to comfortably take more risks — an emergency fund, a few years’ salary in investments, etc.

And I don’t mean taking risks like trading on 50x leverage.

I mean if you despise your job, it’s taking the risk of finding a new one, or starting a business, or just taking some time off to explore what you truly enjoy — and working extremely hard to turn that into a career.

It’s having a financial buffer so that, if need be, you can take a few months or even years off to explore the things in life that really, genuinely matter.

Because one day you’ll have kids, and you’ll want to be there to take them to the park, to see their first steps, to attend sports days.

Your parents will grow old and sick, and you’ll want to be there to care for them in their final years.

Old friends will reach out asking to reconnect, and you’ll want the time and energy to maintain those connections.

And whilst the vast majority of people on this planet go through these beautiful or heartbreaking experiences whilst also working full-time jobs, if you buy your freedom first, you have the ability to consciously design your life around either maximising the joy of these moments or reducing the likelihood of pain or regret.

So if you’ve done well recently gambling on magical internet money, or you’ve received a massive airdrop…

Please, please, please don’t just gamble it all away on perps, memecoins or take it to the casino.

You’ve been handed a lifeline that you probably don’t appreciate just yet — but you will in the future.

Buy your freedom first. You are luckier than you think you are.

*Names and storyline has been adapted slightly to protect the memory of those mentioned.

I grew up in a country where it is practically impossible to walk down any high street in any major town or city without passing at least two or three betting shops.

You cannot watch a sports match, go on a plane, or scroll social media without being bombarded with gambling adverts.

It’s on our radios, it’s on our TVs, it’s on our phones, it’s on our streets, and it’s embedded deep within our government.

Gambling is so incentivised here that it’s literally tax-free.

Yet despite all this, I find myself HEAVILY restricted from every betting site that I can legally access.

screenshot from one of my betting accounts - max bet is HEAVILY capped and on football I’m banned entirely

And that’s why it’s always been extremely clear to me that Polymarket matters deeply, and why it will continue to scale exponentially.

Gamblers never prosper, but now the serious ones do?

Gambling is for fun. It’s you vs the house.

The house pretends to be your friend. it invites you in, plasters you with free drinks, and hands you free bets.

It’s all fun and games.

At least until you actually have an edge and start to win a little bit.

Then, before you know it, your account is frozen, your funds locked behind ever-increasing KYC requests, your bet size is limited, or the house refuses to honour the terms because of a “pricing error.”

But the slot machines, though, they’ll still let you use them.

often betting sites would intentionally make it as hard as possible to withdraw. They would wait for you to have a win and then request proof of identity documents notarised by a lawyer. Often they would do this if winnings were $100, so the cost made it simply not worth it. They’d then close your account and keep the money.

Traditional betting is mostly a lose-lose.

You lose, you lose because you’re poor now;

you win, you lose because you have to jump through a trillion hoops to keep your money.

Prediction markets, however, are both for fun and for serious people.

It’s you vs the world, not you vs the house.

You can become an expert in some tiny micro niche thing and actually have a real advantage. The platform itself will not ban you for winning. If anything they’ll thank you for bringing liquidity to the platform.

And you can continue winning freely until the skill gap lessens or the world catches up to you.

Ultimately things like sports betting are just another form of market. It’s just been held hostage under regulatory capture for such a long time that we’ve all kind of collectively forgotten that.

And this is why I am truly rooting for Polymarket to succeed.

Your access to markets should not be limited by some boomer risk department in a betting company that spends 90% of its energy figuring out how to trick people into getting addicted to staring at the bright, flashing lights of a slot machine.

I want to live in a world where anyone, anywhere, can bet freely against each other on anything.

I want markets to be global and not geographically restricted.

I want “predictions” to be open-sourced to the world and backed by real skin in the game, not just narratives pushed by news organisations or lobby groups.

I want us, the users, the people, the basement-dwelling statisticians, to actually have a chance to win for once and show everyone their skill.

I want Polymarket to win because it’s a better outcome for us all.

I want the house to finally lose.

NONE OF THIS IS FINANCIAL ADVICE. IF YOU READ THIS AND DECIDE TO BET YOUR LIFE SAVINGS ON THE GENDER OF RIHANNA’S BABY YOU ARE AN IDIOT. NO ONE READING MY POSTS HAS ANY EDGE. YOU SHOULD PROBABLY LEARN PLUMBING OR SOMETHING SO YOU CAN RETAIN A JOB A BIT LONGER WHEN THE AIS TAKE OVER INSTEAD OF TRYING TO TURBO GAMBLE YOUR WAY OUT OF ETERNAL POVERTY. GAMBLING IS BAD AND ADDICTIVE.

Do you remember life before autosave existed?

That presentation you worked so hard on. Lost because the computer crashed.

That job application you’d spent hours perfectly crafting. Gone because your power went out.

The spreadsheet your boss is demanding to see in twenty minutes. Gone because of a STUPID WINDOWS UPDATE YOU COULDN’T EVEN TURN OFF.

Your entire life savings and financial future…….. Gone because….

It’s funny, we’ve probably all suffered from the low-stakes examples of not saving our work.

We always think it won’t happen to us.

We’re caught up in the moment, engrossed in our jobs, then boom! At the most inconvenient time, the tech fails and you’re thrust into a pit of misery as you curse your past self for being a moron and not hitting save.

Thankfully, this is much less of an issue than it used to be. Most things just save automatically now.

But for those of us who work in crypto, we’re still living in the pre-autosave era.

If you make a mistake here, there is no turning back. No reboot function. If you sign a dodgy contract, or paste the wrong address, or fall in love with an attractive woman who is actually a North Korean male, you can’t just reboot the app and start again. No. Everything you’ve worked for is gone.

In a bull market, the risk of this happening is even greater.

All logic flies out the window.

You see your friends making life-changing wealth copy trading someone called “Bonk Guy.”

Strangers on the internet you have a parasocial relationship with are posting screenshots of wallets with millions of dollars in them.

Stuff is going up. Dumb stuff is going up more. Your Uber driver tells you this is his last day on the job because XRP is going to $100.

Everyone around you is taking risk. Maybe you should take more risk too?

Then, before you know it, your life savings are stored in 20x leveraged perps positions and Moonbirds. Your pension has been converted into a Cardano treasury company and you’ve quit your job to doomscroll Twitter and argue with your other unemployed friends on Telegram.

Of course, these are massively exaggerated examples, but the trend is often very real. If you’ve existed in crypto for any prolonged period of time, it’s likely happened to you. You’ve woken up one day and realised, what the hell am I doing? Why do I have my annual salary in Zerobro?

Ultimately, we are still just monkeys wearing clothes. We act on emotion and badly optimised instincts. We are designed to live in the woods and to climb trees and stuff - not to trade complex derivative products we don’t understand on rectangular boxes of doom.

But the good thing about humans is that we do have part of our brain that's rational. Part of our brain that can plan. Part of our brain that is capable, sometimes, of taking a step back from the dopamine machine gun and thinking more than three seconds into the future.

Image from the amazing Tim Urban on his post about procrastination

We just have to actively make a choice to put down Twitter, breathe for a few seconds, and switch the rational decision-maker part of the brain on.

On the rare occasion I accomplish this, I like to use this brief period of clarity to figure out where my respawn point is.

What's a respawn point?

In gaming, a respawn point - or a checkpoint, as it’s often called, is the place you start again from after you have died.

The reason games have these is because it would be incredibly frustrating to spend six hours playing, only to be defeated by a difficult boss near the end and then be forced to restart the entire thing from the beginning.

But often, in finance and investing, we find ourselves doing just that. Continuing along, playing the game, never once taking a second to think about where we’d end up if something bad happened.

As readers of this blog will know, in crypto, bad stuff happens all the time.

Just as we start to feel safe, something insane happens. We’re used to black swans. We’ve lived through FTX. We’ve had bank accounts closed. We’ve seen our friends get hacked. We’ve seen projects we believed in go to zero. We’ve seen Coinbase gift wrap and hand-deliver our personal data to crooks.

So if you haven’t already, it might be a useful exercise to sit down at your computer, open a spreadsheet, and calculate where you’d financially respawn if something tragic happened.

Imagine one day Satoshi awoke from the dead like some kind of angry Bitcoin Jesus, FSH’d all his coins whilst screaming THIS WAS NOT MY VISION!!

Ask yourself the following:

• What would happen to my portfolio?

• How long would it take me to get back to where I am now?

• Would my life be entirely ruined?

• Would my wife leave me?

• Am I okay with this?

Even if you’ve been here a while and think you know what you’re doing - all it takes is one misstep, one wrong click, one black swan, one quantum computing innovation, one war, and it’ll happen to you too.

From Taleb - Turkeys have a great life, until one day, it's suddenly all over

Where should my respawn point be?

I guess this is where someone who wears a suit to work would tell you that this is all extremely obvious and you should just have a balanced portfolio instead of your entire net worth in Fartcoin.

But if you’ve somehow stumbled upon my Twitter page, it’s highly unlikely you’re the kind of person who would be capable of following this advice.

Your respawn point should be highly personal to you.

Don’t listen to internet strangers, influencers, people in suits, and especially not me.

• Maybe your respawn point is having some of your wealth in global all-world index funds?

• Maybe it’s moving Bitcoin out of your hot wallet, setting up multisigs, and putting some into IBIT?

• Maybe it’s getting a better job, a promotion, or starting a business with multiple streams of income?

• Maybe it’s having six months' expenses in cash in the bank, paying off your mortgage, and getting a second residency or passport?

• Maybe it’s investing in the casino, rather than continually gambling in them?

• Maybe it’s prepping a bug-out bag, hoarding tins of tuna, antibiotics, lighters, and tradable objects so you can survive a full-blown civil war?

• Maybe you actually have the opposite problem — your respawn point is already too high, and you’re not actually taking enough risk?!

Essentially, what it boils down to is your personal level of risk tolerance, how anxious you are, and how much you trust in your abilities to make it all back from zero if the worst happened.

Part of why I'm writing this post is because I've been reconsidering my own respawn point.

For the past four or five years, crypto has provided bailout after bailout opportunity, so more risk-taking has arguably been the optimal strategy.

Bitcoin has gone to zero and back many times.

Projects have airdropped billions of dollars. Random speculative manias have taken place in all areas of the industry. Anyone with basic pattern recognition skills and some discipline could have used terrible risk practices, gone to zero, and made most of it back many times over.

But sadly, I think this is no longer the case. We are no longer early.

I doubt you’ll get the chance to buy Bitcoin again at a 90% discount.

Now that ICOs are seemingly legal, are teams going to continue handing you free money? Or are they going to sell you stuff instead?

If crypto is a legitimate industry, it should — in theory — become more efficient. And if it is more efficient, it may become harder for bedroom-dwelling keyboard warriors like me to find and maintain an edge.

So my plan is to hedge against my own stupidity and move my respawn point a little bit closer to where I sit right now.

Because the worst part of losing it all isn’t actually losing it all. It’s realising that you could have survived it.

SORRY FOR BEING A DOOMER BUT AS USUAL DO NOT LISTEN TO ME I DONT THINK I EVEN OWN A SUIT ANYMORE MAYBE BITCOIN GOES UP MAYBE IT GOES DOWN MAYBE EARTH GETS HIT BY A METEOR AND ALL THIS INTERNET MONEY STUFF IS STUPID AND ALL THAT REALLY MATTERS IS HOW MUCH OUR FRIENDS AND FAMILIES LOVE US AND BY WORRYING ABOUT WEALTH WE'RE LETTING THE YEARS PASS US BY AND YOU WILL LOOK BACK ON THIS MOMENT ON YOUR DEATH BED AND CURSE THE DAY YOU SPENT READING BLOGS BY A HOMELESS DOG ON THE INTERNET WHEN YOU COULD HAVE BEEN ASKING YOUR WIFE HOW HER DAY WAS AND THEN MAYBE SHE WOULDNT HAVE LEFT YOU FOR JERRY FROM THE TENNIS CLUB.

I regularly write blog posts telling people to keep an open mind and to try absolutely everything.

So you can imagine how embarrassing it feels to have skipped the one thing in crypto that was actually worth trying.

Hyperliquid.

Why?

Well, I can lie to myself all I want and say it was because I was concerned about the tax treatment.

Or that I'd farmed perp DEXs before and always lost money.

Or because it was "on Arbitrum" and they'd already airdropped, so it was more capital-efficient to focus on new chains.

Me replying with the dumbest thing I have ever said

But the honest truth is, I skipped it because:

I was being lazy and egotistical.

I thought that I knew better than the market. My past successes in crypto had gone to my head.

I knew about Hyperliquid incredibly early. I first heard about it during the Friend Tech era, but skipped it because I'd taken my funds off Arbitrum.

So a few months later, when I saw Jez, and Shoku, and countless others that I deeply respect on the timeline posting borderline hysterically about how impressive Hyperliquid was, I told myself it was too late. I had missed it. I convinced myself that I don't trade perps anyway and I should move on. Like an ostrich with a degenerative brain disease, I stuck my head in the sand and closed my eyes and ears.

I didn't even bother to take a deeper look.

The funny thing is I've made this mistake countless times before. I bet many of us have.

Bored Apes, NFTs, memecoins, AI stocks, etc. - all are things I've been super early to, sold for a decent profit, and then hate watched the chart as it went up without me, too annoyed at my past self to think clearly about the next leg of the trade.

However, something about Hyperliquid felt different.

Usually, after a TGE, the bull posters slip away, dump their airdrop, and move on to the "next big thing."

But this time... this time... they just didn't.

A few days after the airdrop happened, I faced a decision - do I let my ego rule me, or give into it and try the bloody thing and see for myself if people are just posting about their bags, or if this really is the real deal?

So I tried it. I was impressed. So I tried it some more.

And then, suddenly, it all made sense.

For once I was using an app that just worked.

It didn't make me want to hurl my laptop across the room in anger because my wallet had logged me out for the 20th time. I didn't have to wade through 27 versions of USDC to figure out which one was real. I didn't have to approve spending or click seven times whenever I wanted to do anything.

It just worked, and it worked well, every single time.

So I read more about it. I learned about UNIT and their ambitions. I studied builder codes and HIP-3. I spoke to my friends who had been there all along and asked questions.

I killed my ego.

Not going to lie, I did spend a few days hating myself for being an absolute idiot and missing probably the easiest trade I will ever get, but alas, ruminating forever on our dumbest moments is not helpful, and we must try hard to forgive ourselves to move forward.

What I realised though, as I went, was that the airdrop was simply just part one of the trade.

Yes, I had missed it. But so did tons of other people. And many of those that did market sold it at $3 and coped as they watched it go up without them, and now all they see is the price their bag would have been, rather than what Hyperliquid is - probably the greatest project we've seen in crypto in the past decade. Part two of the trade, however, started after the airdrop had taken place. This part, thank god, is one I did not miss, and full disclosure: my Hyperliquid position has now grown to be my second largest crypto holding.

There are a million posts on why Hyperliquid is so great, and chances are if you're reading this, you already know why, so I'll spare you the essay.

But I'll summarise by saying it's probably the one project that can truly change the way crypto, and maybe even all of finance works, forever.

Hyperbolic. Maybe. I often am.

But this week’s Phantom integration was a glimpse into the future. A future where you don't need to fight against Hyperliquid - you simply build on top of it and share in the upside together as it scales alongside you.

I suspect this is just the start.

But anyway, the point of this post is not to shill Hyperliquid - there are already hundreds of people doing that far better than me on Twitter.

The point of this post is to remind myself that you cannot let your ego rule you.

Chances are, if you're like me, then you're pretty stupid. Your first opinion of something isn't always right. The past does not matter, all that counts is the present moment and the trade you see in front of you. Changing your mind is not a weakness - it's a strength all the best traders have. When others you respect speak, you should listen, but take the time to validate what they are saying yourself and make your own decisions.

My ego kept me from being early.

But my curiosity stopped me from being late.

Hyperliquid.

NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE HYPERLIQUID HAS BEEN UP ONLY, WRITING THIS IS PROBABLY THE TOP, MY TOP SIGNAL IRL FRIEND ASKED ME ABOUT IT YESTERDAY AAAAAAAAAA. I AM INCREDIBLY STUPID, THIS MIGHT EVEN BE ME PRETENDING THAT IT'S CURIOSITY WHEN IN REALITY IT IS FOMO. DON'T FOLLOW ME. MAKE YOUR OWN DECISIONS OR YOU WILL DIE ALONE POOR AND HUNGRY AND SAD.

I’ve never really had to worry about anything, apart from my own made-up problems that sometimes run rampant in my brain.

I’ve never experienced war, never lived under dictatorship, and the only times I've ever gone hungry are because I’ve decided to do it to myself by experimenting with fasting.

Growing up, I always had a roof over my head, access to clean drinking water, a decent education, and parents that cared about me deeply.

As I grew older, I opened a bank account, got a job, bought a car, started (and failed) a few businesses, learned about the stock market, invested in American companies like Apple and Tesla, discovered Bitcoin, and eventually became a boomer and moved most of my wealth into index funds and property.

I had freedom. Freedom to experiment. Freedom to fail.

My opportunity for success was only really limited by my own work ethic and intelligence.

But for a large proportion of the world, this simply is not their reality.

They are trying to swim with one hand tied behind their back and weights placed on their legs.

But now, more than ever, I am starting to truly believe that crypto is might actually change things.

I often hear my friends ask, “Why would people want access to stablecoins if the dollar is going to zero and they don’t pay any yield?”

And to that, I present this map showing various inflation rates across the globe.

Yes, you might miss out on 4% annual yield by holding USDT, but that’s far better than watching your purchasing power get cut in half just for saving in your local currency.

What's the point of bringing stocks on-chain? Why not just hold them in your brokerage account?

Well, the problem with that is not everyone has access to basic financial services like bank accounts, let alone a brokerage account, and very often, even those that do get absolutely giga rinsed on currency exchange and trading fees.

Recently, I experienced a micro version of financial exclusion. UK residents were blocked from participating in the Plasma ICO because of insanely stupid government regulations. We also are still not able to invest in a Bitcoin ETF.

And whilst these two individual items will not make a huge difference to my overall financial stability, the feeling of having opportunity slip through my fingers solely because some decrepit old government employee has deemed it too risky makes me irrationally angry, and very, very, very close to taking my family and relocating elsewhere on the globe.

Now imagine that kind of exclusion, but for everything. No access to index funds. No dollar bank accounts. No stable savings.

And that’s why when I watched the Robinhood event yesterday and saw Vlad unveil stock tokens, I felt genuinely pretty excited. For a long time, you had to squint to see a future where all of the world’s assets ended up on-chain. Now it’s literally on the roadmap for one of the biggest fintech companies on the planet.

And whilst it’s easy for us to sit there in our safe and secure, sometimes air-conditioned offices and whine and moan that this is not Satoshi’s original vision, I counter by saying that it’s a bloody good outcome, and we are infinitely better off in this reality than the one where Bitcoin fizzled out at $30 and CBDCs became the de facto financial layer of the world.

And even if you hate the idea of centralised stablecoins, or the custodial risk of tokenised stocks, Hyperliquid will soon offer a crypto-native alternative, Bitcoin is looking healthier than ever, Ethereum, the last I checked, is still very decentralised, and we have teams like Plasma, Monad and MegaETH working hard to push the limits of high-throughput chains.

Plasma will help bring stability to the masses by offering the ability to

And ultimately, for all the stupid stuff that goes on in crypto, the things that makes me sad and question why I'm still here, the scams, the drama, the hacks. It is a drop in the ocean compared to the collective good that this industry will bring when anyone with an internet connection has unfettered access to the best financial products on earth.

Crypto won’t stop war, end hunger, or bring Samantha back.

But maybe, just maybe -- it’ll help billions grow up with the same opportunity that I had.

*Stock tokens and tokenised equities might be super risky to start with, we probs see some Luna style ponzi appear where you don't actually own the underlying, just some hyperleveraged piece of meaningless paper that goes to tens of billions and back to zero. Do a ton of research before buying. Eventually I think this stuff will be super cool and bring financial inclusion, but in the early days people will experiment and some of those experiments will be scams. Be safe friends.

You have short periods of mania, followed by long, slow, boring stretches where nothing ever happens.

In the mania phase, every waking moment is an opportunity. Memecoin launches, NFT mints, new projects emerging from stealth, angel deals to review, etc.

Everything is up only. People are euphoric. Your dumbest friends are contemplating buying a Porsche because a three-day-old coin that is vaguely associated with someone who made eye contact with Sam Altman in a restaurant four years ago is, for some reason, worth $1 billion dollars.

In the mania phase, glancing away from the screen even for a brief moment can be the difference between making it and making burgers for a living.

I know this feeling well. Being a Europoor, I was asleep when my friends shared the BOME presale details. I was asleep when Trump launched his memecoin. I was asleep when Ai16z did their Daos Fun raise.

I don’t think human brains are really built to wake up one day and watch their peers make reasonably sized house money overnight — and you missed out solely because you went to sleep at 3 a.m. instead of 3:44 a.m.

Operating in crypto during bull markets definitely takes its toll on you mentally.

I wasn’t shocked to find out that many of my internet friends have sought out therapy.

Even if you are in the top 1% of performers globally, the market, and Twitter in particular can always make you feel terrible.

There’s always someone who has made more than you. You always could have sold higher. You always could have got in earlier. Yes, every time you leave the house you will miss something, and every time you stay in, nothing will happen.

So you lock in more. You spend more time on Twitter. You stop going outside. You sleep less. You work out less. You drop all your other hobbies because nothing on earth can come close to the dopamine that a bull market can give you.

And just as you feel comfortable enough to size up or hold for longer, the market turns, and you beat yourself up for not doing the opposite.

The perfect recipe for addiction and mental torture.

And to be quite honest, that mental torture is a necessary evil if you’re good at this stuff.

Crypto, in bull markets, has been the best place on the planet to build wealth in insanely quick timeframes.

Many of my friends have completely changed their lives in a number of years by truly locking in and focusing, but a similar number of friends (including myself) have had their brains broken in the process.

The habits that allow you to win in a bull market end up destroying your life if they are not reined in once the mania has ended.

And that's kind of where I find myself now. When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I do is check Twitter, then Discord chats, then Telegram. Before I go to bed, I do the same thing. When I go for a walk, I check. When I'm in the gym, I check. When I’m doing literally anything else, I find myself wanting to check. It’s hugely disruptive and limits my productivity massively.

And all the while, nothing ever happens. Because the time where it was worth it to check ended months ago.

And despite all the success I've experienced in crypto, oftentimes it doesn’t really feel that real. Because the success story is the internet me. The homeless dog character.

The real me tells everyone I'm a consultant and quickly changes the topic because I don’t really fancy getting kidnapped and robbed, or spending the next hour in the pub arguing with some uninformed lunatic about why crypto isn’t just for money laundering.

And now I’m writing all of this down. It sounds kind of insane. A huge first-world problem.

But it is a real problem for a lot of us.

And I've come to the conclusion that I’m acting because of an internet addiction, rather than first principles or strategic thinking, and I kind of want to fix things.

So I'm going to attempt to write more again. The whole point of having a pseudo-anon account is to allow me to post honestly, so I'm going to post honestly. If that makes me less money, or is embarrassing, then so be it.

I'm going to have phone free time slots, where I focus on being outside, and reading long form content and books.

I'm re-focusing on the gym, going for daily walks, and trying actively to be more present in the moment with friends and family.

I'm going to purposefully put myself in the position to do things that scare and challenge me - and go after opportunities that aren't solely focused on short term return on investment.

And for the first time in like five years since I stopped working normal human jobs, I started using the calendar app to schedule my day.

But anyway, if you’ve got a broken brain too and want to chat, you can always DM me and whilst I probably cannot help you, at least you’ll know that you’re not the only one.

I'd wander round looking at the items on display, see something that looked interesting and search the recently sold prices on eBay.

If the price online was a multiple of what the old lady was selling her kids unwanted birthday presents for, then I'd buy it, list it online and arbitrage the price differential.

I think I made like 3k in total over two months and thought I was a genius because I could now afford a barely working car without having to work in some soul destroying retail job interacting with unnecessarily angry customers.

It's funny because at the time i thought i'd found some cheat code to life. It felt pretty easy compared to the jobs I'd experienced before. But in reality it was quite a lot of work.

I had to wake up early, which as a teenager is harder than it sounds. random fields often have basically zero phone signal so searching for prices online was rough. People would sell fake stuff. Customers would say the goods were damaged and demand refunds and eventually eBay and Paypal froze my account for literally zero reason.

But it was still way better than interacting with members of the general public.

So when I logged on today and prepared to write a pretty negative post about the trend of CT and what Kaito had done to it I paused for a moment and thought about my old life.

If I had the opportunity to earn this level of money for simply posting some words to strangers on the internet I would have printed off a picture of 0x_ultra and placed him in a frame on my wall.

18 year old me wouldn’t have had the privilege to spend time pontificating about the wider ethics of an industry that has existed since the dawn of modern civilisation (Marketing). I just simply needed to buy a car so I could get a girl to talk to me.

If I knew that one day something like stayloudio offered the chance to make potentially five figures for three days "work" and I had spent my time COMPLAINING about it, I'd have been so ashamed of my future self for wasting such a good opportunity.

Our brains, and my brain in particular has been so warped by the free and fast money crypto has to offer that maybe sometimes I need to take a step back and realise that ultimately democratising access to opportunities is the main benefit of crypto.

Trying to stop them because I "disagree with the idea" is really no different to the people that told me Bitcoin should be illegal a decade ago.

And worrying about the wider impact of incentive mechanisms and long term effects is intellectually interesting but also kind of like that old man shouting at clouds meme from the Simpsons.

By disincentivising it am I literally pulling the ladder up on former versions of myself.

Because incentives will always exist, and humans will always be humans. Teams will look to use them to their advantage and others will look to find the loopholes.

So I hope everyone does whatever they want with this. If you want to participate in Loud go for it. If you want to debate the industry ethics do it. If you want to mute everyone talking about it do that too.

People in crypto are literally here to gamble. It’s unlikely Loudio will onboard your Nan and she’ll put her pension fund into this. It’ll be the people losing it all on leverage trading, or burning money on memecoins, or simply people that just enjoy having fun with their disposable income that are subsiding this experiment.

At this point crypto has been around long enough that basically everyone knows the game, being overly paternalistic about it is kind of antithetical to the entire point of Crypto.

People should be free to determine where they spend their money. Even if you think that thing is stupid.

But at the end of the day this will result in a thousand or so people making a few grand and that’s infinitely better than the money going to sniper bots, the Trump family or the LA vape cabal.

And to be blunt. These opportunities will not last forever. Crypto is getting more efficient. Make the most of it whilst it lasts and accept that it simply is what it is.

And yes - full disclosure, maybe this post will result in me making some money too. Great. Don't buy it. It will probably go to zero.

Loudio.

If I told them I pretend to be a homeless crying dog who writes words on the internet and invests in make-believe money, they would think I’m insane.

But sometimes, my relationship with crypto slips out.

In the majority of cases this leads to an open-minded conversation where I can explain a bit about the space and dispel some of the myths.

But on one particular occasion, someone who has clearly been infected with a mind virus hears about what I do and launches a tirade about how crypto is worthless, and it’s going to zero and I should leave before it's too late.

"You closed-minded idiot, crypto is good, learn to think for yourself”

Is what I wanted to say.

But because the person saying it was my girlfriend's best friend's husband, I had to be tactful, so I didn’t end up actually homeless and alone in real life too.

So what I really said was:

“Well, outside of Bitcoin, there is an entire industry that is making life better for people around the world who don’t have stable banking infrastructure, who have volatile currencies, an unstable rule of law, or maybe are experiencing hyperinflation.

That industry is stablecoins.

And in many first-world countries with our luxury banking apps, our stable currencies and our forgotten memories of all the tyranny that took place in our great grandparents' generation, we have truly forgotten that life can be extremely hard, and self sovereignty and having the ability to store value in times of uncertainty is exceptionally important.”

building with blocks of worthless notes during hyperinflation

At the time it was just me searching for a good-sounding reason to stop the conversation moving on to FTX, or Bitcoin destroying the planet, or NFT traders murdering all the dolphins or something.

But the more I think about it, the more evident it becomes that alongside Bitcoin, stablecoins are one of the most important innovations in all of financial history.

Even if you live in a developed country with democratic elections and where the legal system is only slightly corrupt, there’s a reasonable chance you’ve been screwed over in some way by the banking industry.

Cypriots, for example, who lost up to 94% of their euro savings when their banks got into financial trouble.

Or maybe you’re a British person being stopped from withdrawing cash from your bank account without sufficient evidence for where the money is being spent.

Or an American Coinbase user who has had their account frozen for months as they bang their head against a wall talking to customer support.

Or you simply work for an international company and have to make seventeen phone calls each week to determine if the money you sent via traditional rails has arrived or not.

Stablecoins, whilst not perfect, and with their own unique set of risks, do offer, in many circumstances, huge benefits over traditional payment and banking methods.

And tbh it's testament to their pmf that they’ve managed to survive in a political climate where Boomer government employees who get paid six figures to give 12-minute talks at banks were trying to get them shut down.

But thankfully, the people in command, at least in America anyway, are starting to realise, hold on a minute, these stablecoin things are actually pretty important.

And being able to export the US dollar globally in a far more efficient way probs increases the likelihood of retaining the privilege of being the world's reserve currency.

Tether is already the seventh largest buyer of US treasuries, and buys more than the great nation of Canada, home of outdoor survival expert Adam Cochran.

So we’re in this weird situation, where we have this miracle tool (stablecoins) that allow anyone on earth to keep assets safe from a tyrannical government, hold wealth in a stable asset stored in their brain whilst also massively reducing cost and complexity for business AND bringing instantaneous payment settlements to the world, whilst simultaneously solving a major problem for the US government.

They’re a pretty big deal.

Now I know decentralisation maxis and Bitcoin purists will attack me for this and say WTF IS WRONG WITH YOU, you can get basically all of those benefits just from holding Bitcoin, where you also get a truly censorship resistant asset? Why are you entrusting your savings with a centralised stablecoin that can freeze your assets just as easily as a bank account can?

I have a lot of sympathy for this take. But I think at least for now it’s overwhelmingly unlikely that Bitcoin ends up actually being used as a payment asset. People hold Bitcoin because they want to save it, they want to hedge against inflation, they specifically do not want to spend it. Merchants don’t want to accept it because it’s volatile. And rightly or wrongly, people all over the world really really value the US Dollar.

This is why you don’t see 400 million people across the world paying for stuff in Bitcoin, but you do have 400 million people using USDT.

So my mental model for this is, as a non-US person without FDIC banking protections, living in a country where at some point wealth confiscation may happen, or a banking bailout is likely, I would like to store my wealth in a few buckets.

BTC for long-term savings, US stock market exposure, stablecoins for day-to-day payments or to buy dips & the minimum viable amount of local currency needed to survive in an emergency fund.

This way you can have a mix of decentralised and centralised assets spread across a range of issuers so in the majority of terrible scenarios you are sufficiently horcrux'd and don’t end up entirely destitute.

Too far in either direction imo is very silly and more dangerous than good.

(this is of course super simplified, I’m not a financial advisor and literally am very dumb, pls don’t listen to me)

And when I talk about this method, it’s not like I’m explaining how I'd operate in a third-world country with a dictator in control on the brink of civil war. I’d also have this same mental model if I lived in Europe.

Anyway, as usual I’m getting distracted and not talking about the entire point of this post, which is - what happens when we have a chain purpose-built for stablecoins?

Today, the majority of the stablecoin supply exists on Ethereum, which is far too expensive and slow to be used as a payment network, whilst Tron has somehow found itself positioned as the main settlement layer, despite being HIGHLY centralised and also extremely expensive ($3+ for a send)

So, we have this revolutionary tech, that people have been trying to kill since forever, operating on very old and outdated blockchains, not optimised for stablecoin transactions whatsoever, and we still have nearly $250 billion dollars issued.

How high would the number get if we had chains that were purpose-built specifically for stablecoins?

David Sacks saying Trillions are possible

Trillions…?

Which leads me to Plasma chain.

Plasma is a new chain that is purpose-built for stablecoins.

Now usually when teams invent these kinds of slogans, they’re really vague, and buzz wordy, and lack a lot of substance.

But Plasma is a bit different.

They are custom building the chain with unique stablecoin-specific features, including the core one - zero fee USDT transfers.

What this essentially means is that the cost to transact in USDT falls to zero, or very close to zero.

The user experience dramatically improves as you don’t need to have some random gas token on multiple chains in order to spend the assets. (e.g. solana, Tron, or having ETH on any one of 137 L2s) You can just use the USDT you were sent to pay the gas fee.

And at the same time Plasma is trying to figure out how to have confidential transactions on-chain. Which tbh is by far THE BIGGEST PROBLEM with stablecoins and crypto in general.

It kind of sucks if every time you try to buy some bread from the shop the dude selling it to you can paste your address into debank and see how much money you have, or that you’ve been cheating on him with a rival bakery. Not great.

On top of this, despite being EVM-compatible, Plasma is built as a Bitcoin sidechain and integrates a native bridge, whilst periodically committing state differences to Bitcoin itself.

So yeah, pretty cool imo.

Now angry people will read this and tell me that Tether is a scam and I am stupid and shout - why would anyone use this when PayPal or Fidelity or the State of Wyoming are launching their own coins.

Or why wouldn’t stablecoins mostly just run on the rails of the new super-fast general purpose chains like Solana?

But I think this argument misses the bigger picture. Simply having a stablecoin, or a fast chain, is not enough. You need the track record. You need the adoption and willingness to have the asset accepted by merchants and by consumers. You need the network effects. You need the integrations with retailers and wholesalers and commodity markets.

Plasma targets this specifically by focusing on the two most widely known and accepted crypto assets, Bitcoin and USDT, and their roadmap focuses on adding stablecoin-specific features to make the user experience as good as possible.

I’m not sure web 2 teams, archaic banks or government institutions are best placed to capture this market, especially as the main use case is for international-trade, focused mainly outside of America.

There's a reason PayPal USD, despite having brand recognition and offering lots of incentives, still doesn’t have a billion dollars issued, and sits with only 0.6% of Tether's supply. A “trusted” brand name only goes so far.

Chart and article explaining this is linked below.

https://protos.com/paypal-and-ripple-stablecoins-still-sub-1-despite-stablecoin-gold-rush/

So yeah, this post is now WAY too long and I am currently very sick, so I will wrap it up here, despite having a Trillion more things to say.

DM me if you want to talk more about stablecoins, or think I've missed something obvious.

In summary,

• Stablecoins are probably about to go nuts.

• America has finally realised they are critical to the long-term economic interests of the country.

• Imo it probably ends up in a winner-takes-most scenario.

• Despite centralisation concerns the world is far better off with stablecoins than without them, but would also hold a variety of assets as a hedge.

• A bold prediction is USD denominated stablecoins will be the main method of transacting in Europe within a decade, not the Euro.

• Plasma is an interesting design choice, I like that it focuses on the core aspects of stablecoins whilst also embracing Bitcoin.

• Privacy focus is crucial to the long-term sustainable adoption of stablecoins

• Trillions is not just a meme

• I pray for Plasma ICO

Remember, I am very dumb, do not listen to me, this is not financial advice, self custody is risky, stablecoins are risky, banks are risky, crossing the road is risky, cars are very risky, planes sometimes crash, bad things can happen, stay inside, never leave your computer, and enjoy your weekend.

We have talks of a Bitcoin strategic reserve, a Digital asset stockpile, Multiple members of government personally hold Bitcoin, in size. Chokepoint 2.0 has ended. Debanking will likely stop. Stablecoins will be promoted to ensure US dollar dominance around the globe and Banks will start to offer custody services and Crypto products.

Gary Gensler is no longer perched on the roof with a sniper rifle, taking out good honest projects at random, sending shockwaves of fear through the industry.

Crypto, quite possibly, is about to enter into a golden age.

The trouble is, the future doesn’t manifest itself on the one minute chart.

The future is the future, it takes a while to arrive.

So partly, I think that explains the misery on the timeline. The future seems incredible, amazing, maybe we will all make it.

But the present is not so great. In the present, people are down 90% because they invested their life savings into pump fun coins and are staring at the one minute chart praying they go back up.

Any market participant that’s been around long enough has likely experienced this. I’ve experienced it multiple times. Huge swings in net worth. Timeline destruction. Hopes and dreams temporarily put on hold. Regrets, fomo, self loathing etc.

The urge to make it all back right now is so strong, and sadly that is where a lot of the destruction lies.

Patience, and to look to the future is what is often needed.

It’s moments like this that test you, both as a person and as a Trader. Do you really believe in Crypto? Are you actually passionate about the tech? Are you just here because it's the easiest place on the planet to make money? Or because your friend, or an internet celebrity told you XRP was good?

Any of the answers are fine, it’s just helpful if you think about it for a while and get to know the answer.

A look to the future

If we take a step back. And spend some time away from the charts. And try to suppress our emotions. And really really think.

I think the conclusion you will come to is that Crypto has survived the final boss. It’s beaten, and bloodied, and mentally tortured from the battle it went through. But it has won.

Operation chokepoint, bank account closures, Wells notices, everything being a security, companies being too afraid to interact with Crypto.

All of that is now over.

Which means Crypto can start its new life. A new life where it is not illegal drug money. A new life where it can flow freely through the world, showing everyone how much efficiency can be had when you use blockchain rails. How smart contracts can revolutionise finance. How powerful a tool self custody is. How Stablecoins are the best form of money ever invented.

We have the power to show everyone why we’ve stuck around here for years and years whilst the entire world looked down upon us.

So if you asked yourself that question and the answer was that you believed, don’t give up now.

Because we're about to become the future of finance. This time for real.

Bitcoin is at 100k; we have a crypto-friendly president, and everyone is angry.

The Overton window has firmly shifted. This time, it actually is different.

But not like we expected.

The Trump presidency presents this weird conundrum—a thousand thoughts have entered my mind about what this could mean for my internet coins. On one hand, we have the most powerful man in the world bull-posting our coins. But on the other hand, he's using his power and influence to launch dilutive meme coins, enrich his family, and generally maximally extract capital from this space.

The truth is stranger than fiction.

When Bitcoiners first mapped out their game theory plans for how it would take over the world, many predicted that governments would first fight us, and then we would win. And at first glance, it feels like that might actually have been correct.

Bitcoin has won. It's gone from being evil people's money used to fund bad people's things to freedom money, embraced and promoted by the most powerful institutions, individuals, and even nations on Earth.

Larry Fink, Donald Trump, Stanley Druckenmiller, Ray Dalio, Elon Musk—all at some point have spoken happy-sounding words about Bitcoin. This is a far cry from where we were a decade ago when the only use case was buying a pizza or having environmental protesters glue themselves to your driveway because you personally were murdering the planet.

But for those of us who spend 16 hours a day staring at the computer, talking to our weirdo internet friends, and wildly gambling on make-believe money:

Well, I think things are about to get weirder, and probably a lot harder.

For all of crypto history, we've been able to wildly speculate on what the "future" of these things might bring. "The world will come on-chain," "everyone will transact in stablecoins," "NFTs will replace physical art," "DeFi will replace the banking system."

But historically, none of this stuff has ever really been possible. The tech wasn't there yet, and the governments hated us. It would be easier for them if we didn't really exist, so they bullied us in every way they knew how.

As a result, teams spent all of their mental energy trying to design products that kept them out of jail while still maximally pumping the price.

Actual good user experience was at the bottom of the priority list for the longest time.

In some ways, this worked out very well for us internet nerds. One of the main tactics teams used to pump the price and stay out of jail was literally handing a bunch of us tens of thousands of dollars in the form of airdrops.

CoinGecko tells me the top 50 biggest airdrops amount to $26 billion in 'free money.'

And because of this weird dynamic where it was basically impossible to create anything actually good, we instead imagined that all these things had already achieved their goals and priced them accordingly.

We've seen Layer 1s without users being valued higher than most tech companies, ponzi stablecoins valued higher than nation-states' GDPs, and monkey pictures trading for more than houses.

I guess what I'm trying to get at in my badly worded way is that this entire industry has been designed based on a broken incentive structure.

It has been just as easy to get rich by talking about building something as it is to actually build something. And while a lot of us criticise this, we also have directly benefited from it.

And I think this might all be about to change.

Pro-crypto governments and regulations mean that finally we can start to build serious things for serious people.

And while this is WILDLY bullish for the overall industry, I have absolutely no idea what it means for us idiots.

In a world where legal clarity enables real innovation, do the innovators continue to give us free money?

Where there is legal clarity, do the professionals come on-chain and dampen the degen spirit that exists today?

If crypto projects have innovated and have "actual users," what happens to all the apps that still have no users?

If governments now embrace us rather than hate us, do we walk blindfolded into using chains that are far more centralised?

When there is zero barrier to entry to creating a token, do all tokens get diluted?

With better quality apps, do we see humongous inflows from actual users rushing to spend their money in the on-chain economy? Does this money stay here or get extracted back out?

Do we end up with a Web 2.0-like scenario where seven companies make ALL of the money, and everything else is pretty worthless in comparison?

Do your lineage's futures depend on you buying those seven coins, and if you miss them, you spend all of eternity impoverished because you held onto Ethereum for too long?

Does Michael Saylor FSH all his Bitcoins because he is a madman, and that would be quite funny, and we all become poor anyway?

Does the Ethereum Foundation self-combust, and we watch as Vitalik goes on a rampage and creates a new blockchain with his new Milady spirit?

What if Trump decides that actually he wants a USA chain, and airdrops tokens to every citizen and heavily taxes all other chains and tokens?

Does all this mean number go up or number go down?

All I know is that everything is going to change, and crypto will not look remotely similar in four years' time.

So what am I doing about it?

Because I am very dumb and have gotten extremely lucky over the past few years, I'm taking some chips off the table.

No longer can I tolerate having 95% of my net worth in make-believe money that goes down 95% every few years.

I'm far too afraid of my girlfriend to tell her that I bet our entire future on an orange man keeping his campaign promises after I'd already bet everything and won on him winning the election.

I think I'll actually perform better in the future if my brain knows that if I mess up, I won't have to sleep under a bridge because some of my assets are in 'real things' now.

I'm also fairly terrified of how sophisticated scams and phishing attempts will get later this year. Now we have AI that can write better than basically any human. I don't think it'll be long until these bots are specifically designed to trick you into giving them your keys.

I want to hedge against this outcome too. Having multiple devices, multiple wallets, multiple chains—a Horcrux approach and hardware wallets are more important than ever before.

I'm holding all of my Bitcoin. It's still the only asset in this space I really, truly believe in and think has many multiples left in it over the rest of this decade.

And my plan is to just take it as it comes. The future is going to be wild. Innovation is going to happen. Crypto as a space is going to grow tremendously, and there will be tons and tons and tons of opportunity.

I want to be nimble. I want to have stablecoins available for all of the new exciting stuff that gets built. All the experiments, all the dumb stuff, all the memes.

I don't want to take any of this too seriously. I want to have fun, make money, and enjoy myself.

So that is the plan. Take some profits. Secure my life. HODL my Bitcoin and try to make it all back again on whatever happens next.

The future is going to be weird. At least make sure you enjoy it.

DO NOT LISTEN TO THIS POST IT IS NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE I AM INCREDIBLY STUPID. IF YOU SELL YOUR COINS THEY WILL GO TO A TRILLION AND IF YOU HOLD THEM THEY WILL GO TO ZERO. CLOSE THIS PAGE. STOP READING. DO NOT FOLLOW ME. I AM DUMB.

However, when I reflected on my previous predictions, last year, and the year before and all years in fact, I realised I'm more often than not spectacularly wrong.

For example, when I first discovered Bitcoin, I remember telling people, "This is the future. It's incredible tech. It's going to be worth a fortune and make a LOT of people very rich." And then it plummeted like 90%, and I felt like an idiot. It took a decade for that prediction to become correct and for BTC to 100x.

In the world of stocks, I remember reading the Tesla master plan in 2014 and being blown away by Elon's vision. I instantly put one month's paycheck into Tesla shares, expecting to make a ton of money as surely the world would also see what I saw? But it took me SIX years to break even on that purchase, before swiftly doing a 20x.

All this to say, I absolutely suck at short-term predictions. I get carried away. I say things like "Friend tech is the future," or "Worldcoin will solve proof of personhood," or "The AI bots aren't just memecoins." And I'm pretty much always wrong.

But I'm also sometimes right. Just usually many, many years after making these statements that make me a laughing stock to normal, well-adjusted people.

So this year, for my predictions, I'm going to ignore 2025 entirely and focus on what I think will happen over the remainder of this decade.

Maybe this is a cop-out, maybe not, but it's way more fun to dream, write, and get excited about the literal world-changing, life-altering, paradigm shift that humanity is about to go through than it is to predict if BTC will hit $130k in Q1 or Q3.

So what do I think is going to happen?

I think the world is going to change more than we can possibly imagine.

The present

I think so many of us are still drastically underestimating the rapid pace of change that has happened since ChatGPT first burst onto the scene.

So many of my friends still say to me that AI barely works, or hallucinates a ton, or gets things wrong, or can't do hands, and they were right.

They were right six months ago.

But for those who have been playing with this stuff every day, it's clear to see that it's just no longer the case.

Already, AI can perform in so many areas better than the majority of human beings on the planet. It can do artwork better than me; it knows infinitely more about science than me; it can write better than me; it can research better than me; it's kinder and more empathetic than me; it doesn't get tired; it doesn't sleep, and it's available 24 hours a day.

At Christmas this year, some family members were looking at this old cookbook from decades ago. It was stained and ripped, barely legible, covered in handwritten notes, and the recipe was written in old English.

They were trying to figure out how to convert the recipe for a small gammon into one suitable for a much larger piece of meat.

I walked over, took a picture of the page, and loaded it into the FREE TO USE basic ChatGPT model, and within three seconds it had responded to me with step-by-step instructions, the conversions switched from pounds to grams, and the recipe timings upscaled to sufficiently cook the meal.

Everyone was blown away.

What I am getting at is this is not the same AI we all stumbled upon two years ago. It is an order of magnitude better, and it's already better than most of us at most things.

And this is the free-to-use basic model. It's not the paid version. Or the new, scary, impressive, smarter-than-99.9%-of-all-humans-to-ever-live O3 models. It's literally the worst version you can use.

Most people have yet to update their mental models about what AI is and what it is capable of, and despite people calling it a bubble right now, it really doesn't feel like one.

The future

I've posted the above image from Tim Urban a few times, but to me, it is the best depiction of what is about to happen.

Sam Altman said that he expects AGI to be with us within five years, and the Anthropic CEO predicts we'll be there in 2026 or 2027.

And after watching the OpenAI video explaining the benchmarks of the new O3 model, I'm pretty sold on the fact that AGI will be here very, very soon, and the resulting innovations from this will change the world more than we've seen in all of human history.

Without wanting to sound too much like a madman, I think there's a very high chance that, in the long arc of human history, people will look back on the pre-2025 era with the same disbelief we feel about the past. When people died from tooth infections, childbirth was a leading cause of death, or diseases like smallpox devastated entire populations. They'll laugh at how we lived through pandemics, poverty, and untreated mental health issues when solutions were within reach, wondering how we tolerated so much preventable suffering.

Eventually, after a very turbulent period which I'll touch upon later, I think some variation of this utopian future is likely inevitable. Many people, of course, will take the opposing view and extrapolate out some doomed future where we're replaced by robots who enslave us, or become paperclip maximisers, or put those of us who survive into zoo-like structures where future civilisations wander by and point and laugh at how basic and stupid we are.

Sidenote weird thought* what if we're already in a zoo right now and the rest of the universe is watching us in some weird reality TV show - NO STOP DON'T GET DISTRACTED TRY TO STICK TO THE POINT OF THIS POST YOU IDIOT.

Being a doomer is easy, but it's not very nice. So I'm just going to ignore all the things that could go wrong and focus on the positive options. Because if they go wrong, then I'll be dead anyway, and what's the point in being sad if you're about to be eaten by our own AGI creation? You may as well go out smiling.

Back to the future - again

Okay, I thought this post was supposed to be about predictions; so far, you've just rambled and given zero predictions. Where are they!!!!!

1. Actually good healthcare

I live in a fairly wealthy country, one that has free healthcare. And it's great; if you have an emergency, you can generally get seen pretty quickly, and most people are very well taken care of.

But I think in a decade we will look back on the level of treatment we receive today, and it will look like the scenes from movies where they tie a rope around someone's leg and cut it off without anaesthetic using a rusty saw to stop the infection in their little toe from spreading around their body because antibiotics haven't been invented yet.

As good as current doctors are, they still make mistakes. They get tired, they work long shifts, they deal with difficult, angry, and shouty patients. Things do go wrong.

Specialists are in short supply, and cure is almost always the focus rather than prevention, meaning things take far too long to be caught, and we are operating from a reactionary standpoint rather than a proactive one.

With AI, I think this all changes.

Assuming some future model can perform to a higher standard than the very best doctors in the world, in all fields, then as the cost of compute comes down and Moore's law works its magic, eventually, everyone, everywhere will have access to the world's best medical advice for literally 0.01% of the cost we pay today.

Today it can take up to 8 weeks to receive the results for your MRI scan back. I think in the future this will be the equivalent of sending letters by carrier pigeon. When AI can perform and diagnose the scan itself, you'll likely receive your results instantly, with far higher accuracy than you get from even the very best of doctors.

This adds so much efficiency, cuts costs, and ultimately will save SO many lives by having far earlier diagnosis.

My one wish for 2025 is that governments around the world STOP TRYING TO BAN THIS STUFF, and instead expend the same amount of energy figuring out ways to stop the bottlenecks and figure out how to embed these processes in our decaying healthcare systems because it is bordering on negligence already to not have AI at least giving a second opinion almost every step of the way.

2. The race to AGI starts a space race, but for energy development

The last decade has been this weird period of time where countries have purposefully decided to saw off their own body parts for no real reason other than to virtue signal to other countries that they are saving the planet.

Major nations have decommissioned nuclear power stations, heavily taxed fossil fuels, made cars less reliable, and psyops an entire generation that you're better off with everyone being equal and living together in mud huts without electricity and heating than you are with one person having slightly more wealth than others, but all of humanity living in abundance.

I think this trend shifts as governments realise not having advanced AI in their country is a HUGE geopolitical risk.

Each time an AI model makes an improvement, the value of their output increases, which means the business case for increasing the inputs (energy and compute power) starts to look far more attractive.

Everyone will require orders of magnitude more power to bootstrap these supercomputers.

This means the amount of investment into energy and related technology likely goes up only, coupled with tech improvements helping along the way, and you likely get a flywheel effect where total energy generation goes up only and the cost for each marginal energy unit goes drastically down.

This is super important because it means basically everything gets more efficient. Businesses become cheaper to run. Homes become cheaper to heat. Experiments become less costly. Electric cars cost close to zero to power.

And these are just the benefits that I in my privileged bubble get to enjoy. The outcome is so much more beneficial for those of us living in energy-poor nations. Clean water, for example, can become accessible through affordable desalination and purification techniques, only possible with access to more power.

3. Education

I was an idiot when I was a kid.

Well, maybe that's a bit harsh, but I certainly wasted a lot of opportunity because of this random anxiety I had, and probably still have, around asking for help.

Many of you who read the stuff I write will probably be a bit confused when I say I was rejected from all the good universities because I failed to score high enough on my high school math exams.

It's odd because I absolutely love math. I play with spreadsheets all the time. If you knew how much of my brain power went into thinking about compound interest, you'd put me in a mental institution. But yet, my school grades for math were shockingly bad.

And I'm not going to blame the teachers for this; it was entirely my own fault.

I think I missed some basic principles in early math lessons and then spent the next five years at school being too afraid to ask for help and basically blagged my way through it using a mishmash of techniques I'd made up in my head to try and close the gap.

Of course, this doesn't really work when you're graded based on showing your workings, and of course, my workings made zero sense to any rational mind.

But anyway, this boring story is just here to illustrate how detrimental it is if you miss some basic thing in education. Often through no fault of your own, maybe you're sick and miss a lot of school. Maybe a pandemic comes along and you're homeschooled for a year by alcoholic parents who never learned to read. Maybe you have a difficult home life, and focusing in class is the least of your worries when you're thinking about where your next meal will come from.

It's very hard to catch up. Teachers are busy. There are like 30 kids in the class and one adult. Despite their best efforts, there is no way of them knowing truthfully what every child really needs to prosper.

And this is where I think AI will help tremendously. You essentially give every child access to an infinitely patient teacher who can explain concepts as simply as needed, in as many different variations as needed to help anyone understand basically any topic.

How many brains out there are wasted because they learn in a slightly different way from how the textbooks are written? How many people never really achieve their potential or realise a love for a subject because they miss out on some basic piece of information and decide it's too hard for them?

I know a lot of people will initially be very skeptical of giving children access to these AIs, but I do think long term it will have HUGE benefits. They'll be able to pick up on minute language changes that humans might miss and notify teachers about potential mental health or safeguarding risks.

And it doesn't stop with just school-age learning. Adults anywhere can relearn, retrain, or simply just explore topics they never had a chance to learn about with a personalised tutor helping them every step of the way.

4. Replacing mundane tasks

Sadly, a lot of humans spend the vast majority of their waking hours working on incredibly mundane tasks.

Working in call centers, typing on spreadsheets, sitting in traffic or driving a truck, filling in forms, dealing with solicitors or estate agents when selling a house, booking a flight, or trying to talk to a human to cancel a phone contract you've been trapped in BECAUSE THEY MAKE IT PURPOSEFULLY IMPOSSIBLE TO LEAVE.

The cumulative number of hours humans across the globe put into dealing with these archaic, inefficient systems is mind-boggling.

But thankfully, AI will help here too. In a few years, I imagine you'll be able to just ask your personal AI agent to cancel your contract for you, or update your portfolio tracking spreadsheet.

Instead of being stuck in traffic, your car will drive for you. When I mentioned this to some of my car-loving friends, they got very mad at me. No way. People love driving. It is the most important thing to Americans after owning guns and being overweight, they said.

But globally, over a million people a year die in traffic accidents. These are deaths that in the future will be entirely avoided as cars become infinitely safer than they are now. I even think that it's inevitable that at some point, years from now, human driving will be viewed in the same way as drunk driving is now. It will likely be socially and maybe even legally unacceptable.

When you think about it, it's kind of insane really that in the UK you can spend a few weeks practicing and they'll give you a license to drive a two-ton machine capable of inflicting mass death if you're not paying attention, but they don't trust you enough to invest in a Bitcoin ETF, or so much as glance at the pump fun website without putting you in jail.

I could go on with these predictions forever, but then this post would be a book and you'd all have died of old age waiting for me to write it, so I'll try to summarise here.

The cool thing about these developments is they all benefit each other; they add rocket fuel to the flywheel. If we have better education, people get smarter; if we have better healthcare, people spend less time being sick; if we have more energy, people spend less time worrying about food prices and heating their homes. If the majority of human energy is no longer spent completing mundane, soul-destroying tasks, then people can spend less time angrily shouting at things and spend more time on things they love and enjoy.

It's kind of like how 1,000 years ago the difference between the wealthiest person on earth and the average person was huge. The wealthiest built themselves temples and solid gold chairs, whilst the masses faced starvation. Only rich people could read and write; upward mobility was an impossible dream; meritocracy did not exist.

Today, yeah, maybe some rich people buy huge houses, but the average person also has a house, heating, and food.

I think AI makes this gap even smaller. Most things that only the super wealthy can enjoy today like personalised healthcare, therapists, drivers, private tutors etc., will all be democratised and made available for all.

We just need to make it through the problem period first.

(I promise this stupid post will eventually make sense and be related to crypto, please bear with me, or block me on Twitter for wasting your New Year's Eve reading this dumb rant)

The problem period

The problem period I predict will appear at some point within the next five years.

As AI continues to improve, companies with a fiduciary responsibility to maximise shareholder value will naturally begin replacing human workers with machines.

And this will not just be in basic areas. It will be everywhere. Knowledge workers, accountants, data scientists, software developers' jobs will all certainly be at risk. In fact, the vast majority of career paths available today will likely be completed better by a machine than a human this decade.

Why pay someone tens of thousands of dollars annually when an AI can perform the same tasks more efficiently, at minimal cost, without sick days, with fewer mistakes?

It feels truly inevitable that there will be huge, temporary disruption across basically every industry as companies race to cut costs in order to compete with newer, AI-driven startups.

Now doomers will say it's over and we'll be poor forever and live life in misery, but human history doesn't really support that. Humans are remarkably adaptable; we've gone through huge shifts before. From being hunter-gatherers, to working on farms, to the industrial revolution, to the advent of the internet etc. The way we work shifts constantly throughout time. Stuff never really stays the same. We will be fine.

But it is true that the speed of this particular change is different. There will be a problem period. Governments and businesses will not be fast enough to react, and people will fall through the cracks.

It's likely that the variance of your outcomes and the volatility of life dramatically increases over the coming years as we all collectively try to figure out how to harness the power of something so much smarter than us.

Which is why my main focus for 2025 is building myself a bridge over the problem period.

And that bridge starts with Crypto.

Crypto for me, and for many of you too, is one of the only industries on earth that provides us with the raw materials we need to build ourselves a bridge over the problem period.

It's one of the few places you can go from zero to wealthy in very little time, with very little experience, just based solely on hard work and intellect.

Take some of the recent AI agent innovations for example; these were available for anyone to invest into at a very low price, for a very long time, and now trade at multibillion-dollar market caps.

Man I fumbled this one so bad aaaaaaa

Access to good quality deals is finally re-emerging again. MegaETH, for example, raised via a community sale, providing the opportunity for skin in the game to anyone who wanted it.

Nillion, a project focused on allowing us to safely share our most private data with AIs, did the same thing, raising via a public sale on Coinlist - again, basically anyone who was paying attention could participate.

And this is before we even think about airdrops; Hyperliquid gave its power users hundreds of thousands of dollars, and everyone else an opportunity for a liquid 10x trade. Countless other projects gave users significant sums of money too.

And crypto is one of the few industries that is hyper-aligned with AI. Yesnoerror, for example, is using a combination of crypto and AI to fact-check every scientific paper ever written. This would have been impossible without the merging of both industries.

Simply existing in crypto and paying attention keeps you more up to date than just about any other industry outside of AI itself. You have to keep up, or you get left behind.

This space changes so many lives, and I am forever grateful that I found it when I did.

This is why for me, 2025 is the most important year of my life. It might be the final year ever where we live in a pre-AGI world. For many, it might be the last realistic shot we have of generating enough wealth to comfortably transition through the most disruptive period in all of human history.

I'm not talking about CTs crazy expectations of wealth either. You don't need tens of millions. I do think though, you need enough to cover all your bills, your food, your mortgage etc., for a multi-year period. Because there is a very, very good chance we trudge our way through mass unemployment whilst governments scramble to figure out how to help people and probably mess up A LOT along the way.

At the depths of the problem period though, I think things start to change. Think about how much money was printed during Covid, a period of time where large swaths of the economy couldn't operate because of a virus being spread. Imagine how much will be churned out when significantly more workers are displaced. Governments will be doing all they can to prevent civil unrest, and in smaller, poorer nations who don't have the ability to mass print money, I suspect we see full-on government collapse.

I think the resulting mania from this though will make 2021 look insignificant on a chart. At some point in the next few years, we probably get the biggest bubble of all time, and it's another reason why securing your wealth now is so important. You absolutely want to go into that time period with as much capital as possible to maximise your opportunity. Because once AGI is here individual humans likely will have far far more competition than we do now.

The good news though is even if you manage to mess this whole thing up and leave 2025 completely broke, I’d wager that by the end of the decade, life for the average person is still far far better than it is today, even if your job at McDonalds gets taken by a robot.

Happy new year and see you all in 2025 :)

NOTHING IN THIS POST IS FINANCIAL ADVICE I AM AN IDIOT I KNOW NOTHING ABOUT ROBOTS AND AI OR CRYPTO OR MONEY I AM SAD CRYING DOG ON THE INTERNET PLEASE READ STUFF FROM SOMEONE ELSE OR BE POOR FOREVER

Maybe I was just tired from years of Crypto being paraded around as this place for criminals and drug dealers, money launderers, and stupid people.

Mentally drained from seeing projects I loved sued by government agencies, watching as bank accounts got closed, and mortgage brokers told me not to bother even trying to use money that has ever touched Crypto.

Exhausted from watching politicians gaslight us all into thinking this space is so risky that we must be protected from ourselves.

Weary from watching as every reaction to new tech became "how do we ban this" instead of "wow, cool, how do we maximise the potential here."

Recently, though, I've seen a ray of light. The past few weeks, something in the air has changed. I can see it in everyone around me.

People are positive again. Crazy ideas are being discussed. Dreams and wild ambitions are being shared in public. A collective hope that maybe tomorrow can be better than today.

Even my European friends are getting riled up, pushing back against their governments for years of de-growth and failed policy.

The fear is leaving. Speech is widening. There is hope.

And I feel it too. Deep within me.

I've become more convinced than ever that the future is filled with abundance.

Crypto is going to change the world. Everyone will one day move on chain. Rent-seeking, extractive, monopolistic incumbent financial players will be disrupted. Finance will become equitable.

Money will truly be able to move around the globe at the speed of light. Uncensorable and unstoppable.

The power will be stripped from governments who use financial rails as a hidden weapon against industries that go against the interests of their lobbyists.

AI will change everything. You give the power of the most creative, most abundant resource on earth to every human being on the planet and allow anyone, anywhere to flourish.

Disease will be cured. I'll probably get an extra 10 years with my parents. Wars will move from human vs. human to drone on drone. We will look back at this time as the dark ages of modern humanity. Life before the new stuff.

The future is meritocratic. No longer will you be held back by where you're from, how much money your parents had, or what colour your passport is.

And with all this change, we will all get many more shots to make it.

This is not your last chance. It's just one chance of many more to come.

We might all just make it after all.

I am my own harshest critic.

I’m one of those people who works on something for a year, hits the goal, thinks great for two seconds, and then instantly moves on to the next thing.

I imagine a lot of us are like this.

But today was the first time in my life I took a moment to reflect back over the past decade and feel proud of myself.

Of course, I still managed to do everything wrong. But I did manage to get this crypto part at least somewhat right.

I first wrote about Bitcoin in 2014, in a note to my university economics professor, arguing that there was some small percentage chance that Bitcoin could bring competitive pressure to the banking industry, thus making life better for consumers.

On that day, the price of Bitcoin was $388.

Unfortunately, I was a broke university student at that point, living off beans on toast and using old takeaway boxes as plates.

But at least I prioritised Bitcoin. At least a little bit.

Enough to buy one. Just that one. I still own that one.

Thank God I didn’t mess that part up.

But the funny thing is, since then, the whole world mostly thought I was insane.

The newspapers called it money for criminals.
The politicians called it a Ponzi scheme.
The banks warned us it was a scam.
Warren Buffet called it rat poison.
The ECB called it irrelevant.
I barely passed my economics class.

And then, finally, 10 years later, Bill Gates decided to change his position on it to neutral.

Nice one, guys.

But not just that.

Not only did the whole world think you were an idiot, or a drug dealer, or a mentally ill person for enjoying Bitcoin...

You had to run through an avalanche of falling rocks just to not die while holding it.

Basically, every exchange on the planet got hacked while we developed paranoia.

It was trivially easy to get scammed or lose your keys.

You could have lost conviction and spent it on any one of the thousands of coins over the years that went straight to zero.

So yeah, today, for me at least, is a day of celebration. I made it. We all made it.

So here’s to us internet weirdos, the societal outcasts, the people who think differently and don’t give in to social pressures.

Thank you to each and every one of you for helping me stay on this journey. For not allowing me to lose faith. I owe you more than you will ever know.

It’s been a long, long road and a long, long fight, and we had a lot of luck along the way.

But we did it.

Bitcoin is at 100k.

But the job’s not done.

See you all at a million. Maybe we can reflect on this again then.

I woke up at 3 a.m. on the night of the election, checked my phone, and decided not to go back to sleep.

Trump was firmly in the lead, a landslide was imminent, and in that moment, I was euphoric.

For the past decade or so that I’ve been interested in crypto, it’s been this weird, niche, outcast society of internet weirdos spending time together talking about their funny internet coins.

But deep beneath the weirdness, the ponzis, and the giant flashing casino, is a truly groundbreaking, revolutionary technology.

From the moment Satoshi solved the Byzantine Generals' problem, those that took the time to ignore the rhetoric and think deeply about it saw the potential:

Global, borderless money, immutable and uncensorable.

A ticket out of despotic dictatorships or failing regimes.

The first time in recent history you had a chance to separate money from the state, empowering individuals in a way that has never before been possible.

And it is for this reason I was euphoric on November 6th.

For as long as I can remember, politicians have attacked crypto.

They’ve called us criminals and con artists.

They called our internet tokens rat poison.

They said it was all a giant ponzi.

And despite the fact that they are mostly right, they continually missed the point.

This is a technology that can and will change the world. This is a technology that can make life better for a billion people across the globe. This is a technology that can keep central bankers in check. This is a technology that allows anyone, anywhere, to experience economic upward mobility, based purely on the merit of their actions.

And finally, now, after many, many years, the crypto industry can stop being a pariah.

I can finally stop being embarrassed to tell people I work here.

Talented developers are now free to come and work in crypto without having to be afraid of going to jail or being sued by rogue government agencies.

Of course, the majority of the industry will remain a casino; there will be many, many scams, people will get hacked or lose their keys.

But these downsides will be massively outweighed by the overwhelming positive force of global, immutable, uncensorable money.

And now that the career risk for developers to enter crypto is minimised, we are about to see a flurry of funding, new talent, and new innovation appear in our industry.

With a powerful whirlwind at our backs and a growing legion of passionate crypto advocates by our side, we can finally set out to change the minds of the masses.

Crypto is here to stay, and I couldn’t be more excited.

I have an ancestor who made it into the local newspaper for climbing a mountain and then falling down it.

And then climbing it again.

And falling down a second time.

It reminds me a bit of my journey in crypto, lmao.

But it got me thinking. This person from a few generations back had a whole life, decades' worth of thoughts, learnings, feelings, emotions, and experiences.

And all I know about her is that she wasn’t very good at climbing mountains.

I’d imagine every family has someone like this in their history—the oddball that they only know about because their story was weird enough to be told at family gatherings, and that soundbite got passed down through the generations.

But what about all the family members who had more normal lives?

There is a huge amount of wisdom and experience hidden within even the most mundane-looking life.

Most people who have existed have experienced some kind of heartbreak, immense joy, true love, the feeling you get when you see your child walk for the first time. The stresses of work and relationship troubles, and, sadly, of dealing with the death of someone they love.

I think there would be some comfort in reading about your ancestors' most important moments.

Even if the achievements aren’t big enough to make the local news.

Wouldn’t it be interesting to ask your great-great-grandad how he felt when he learned the war had ended?

Like, I know he was in a war, but I have no idea how he felt during or after it.

Wouldn’t it be great to learn from their mistakes?

I remember seeing a video of my grandfather holding me as a baby. He died when I was five, so I don’t really have any real memory of him. But it made me immensely sad that I didn’t know more about his life.

And then when I had a child of my own, I saw my dad doing the same thing with my baby. You see the pure joy in his face as he holds this tiny human in his arms.

And then it hit me that maybe my daughter, when she’s my age, won’t know much about her grandfather either.

And then I got really sad.

So, in some weird, possibly creepy, maybe dystopian way, this is why I try to write stuff down on the internet.

So one day, maybe for a brief moment, someone will get that weird feeling of regret that they don’t know me very well.

But because there will be this random history of articles I've written on the internet, they can still get to know the real me, even long after I’m gone.

I mean, they’d probably get three paragraphs in and get distracted by TikTok or something, but still, they might briefly take some comfort in it for a few moments.

But anyway, I guess I’m writing this as a call to action for myself, but also for others.

If you’re lucky enough to still have your parents in your life, encourage them to write. Take photos. Record videos. Ask them questions, even about the most mundane things, and record them somewhere.

The days are long, but the years are short.

One day, you may have a question, but you cannot get the answer.

But due to some IRL commitments, the part of my week that I usually set aside for thinking deeply about “stuff” has been set on fire and thrown off a tall building.

So, I'm going to try a different approach and just bash the keyboard until all the random ideas that are in my head fall out in a jumbled, unstructured, poorly formatted mess that no one will ever read.

RANT ONE: ZOOM OUT PLEASE

The future is probably going to be amazing.

Stop being a doomer.

We’re on the precipice of immense world-altering breakthroughs. You can already, right now, throw words into a computer, and it will compose songs, videos, and amazing artwork that a decade ago would have required a team of skilled people to achieve.

This is all available for literally free.

Anyone in the world can access it.

It is literally like you’ve gained access to a personal assistant that happens to be a wizard and also is good at singing, but also science, and checking your grammar, and they never get tired, or hate you, or leave and go and work for a different company because you tap your leg on the table in an annoying way or something.

You just need the motivation and attention span to sit still for a few minutes and play with it.

And whilst the current applications are fun and quirky and can be used to make people laugh, I try to imagine a future where this level of tech is applied to more “serious” problems.

Like healthcare. Or energy. Or physics.

Imagine a world where it doesn’t take six months of pain and suffering to get diagnosed and hopefully treated for an illness you’ve developed.

Imagine that instead, you just plug in your info to a machine on your phone, and it instantly tells you what's wrong and proposes the fix.

Imagine that it costs literally nothing to do this, and it's 10x as accurate as the average doctor.

Imagine that breakthroughs in how we generate and store energy take place as we race towards AGI.

Imagine that as the marginal cost of energy trends towards zero, the price of all consumer goods quickly follows, allowing the quality of life to improve for billions of people on earth.

Imagine that we have simultaneous scientific breakthroughs that compound on top of one another, allowing us to solve basically all of “life's problems.”

We will, of course, just invent new ones, but maybe the old ones go away for a bit.

Imagine that crypto nerds finally manage to get ZK tech to work at scale, and the new fast blockchains actually work, and maybe some people actually develop an app people want to use.

^ This is probably still the hardest thing to imagine lol.

But anyway, the point is good stuff that will make us happy if we try hard to appreciate it is literally right in front of us BUT:

WE ARE ALL TOO ZOOMED IN ON THE ONE MINUTE CHART OF LIFE TO NOTICE ANY OF THIS.

We are all so busy arguing about something we won’t even remember in two days' time that it’s really, really hard to zoom out and see all the INCREDIBLE progress that has taken place historically and is standing right in front of us, getting ready to punch us in the face.

There’s a cool "Wait But Why" chart about parabolas and what it feels like to stand in front of one of them. I was going to try to paraphrase it, but I am an idiot and will butcher it, so I will just paste it here below.

But it is entirely true. Today feels no more remarkable than the last.

But each day we move forward on the parabolic curve that has taken humanity from stumbling around in caves, trying to light fires with twigs, to literally blowing up dead dinosaurs in rocket boosters and firing ourselves 400,000 km into the sky and landing a metal tin with people in it on the moon.

And that literally happened FIFTY-FIVE YEARS AGO.

Since then, we’ve developed the internet, the iPhone became a thing, the bankers blew up the financial system, Satoshi invented Bitcoin, social media brought distant friends closer together, and suddenly you could video call anyone, at any time, for essentially free. Your surface area for friendships expanded from people at your school and your workplace to anyone with a shared interest in anything, anywhere on the planet.

Oh, and then people started using voice notes and undid all this progress and sent us back to the dark ages. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.

But day to day, life doesn’t feel that different. Because we as humans just adapt to “whatever”.

We compare our lives to others around us, not the lives others had before us. So when people say, life is so bad now, or everything is terrible, or Europe is falling...

It’s probably not.

Life is probably exceptionally good.

Most of us are lucky enough to not be at war, dying in a ditch with trench foot and shrapnel stuck in our arm.

Most of us no longer have to have 10 children because the odds were that 5 of them would die during childbirth, and you needed the rest of them to work on the farm to feed the other four.

Most of us have the luxury of a choice. Of being able to work on things we find interesting, not stuck in a factory 18 hours a day, risking having our arms chopped off during the industrial revolution.

And maybe in 55 years, we will look back on today, and the things we do now will feel just as insane and outlandish as the things I wrote above feel now.

I hope so anyway, because if that turns out to be true, then the future we have in front of us will feel like magic.

I just hope that when I get there, I’m able to appreciate it.

Respect the parabola.

Thanks for reading this rant; I have many more planned.

The truth is my free time has reduced this year by about 90%, but I love writing, and I don't want to put out 90% fewer articles.

So maybe a happy compromise is articles that are 70% of the quality, but with higher frequency.

Also - it would really help if those of you brain-damaged enough to read my ranting could let me know what type of things you’d like to read about.

Below are some topic ideas :)

• How to design better airdrops

• Monad vs MegaETH vs Bera vs Blast

• The magic of compound interest

• Playing long-term games

• Every big mistake I’ve ever made

• How to have conviction

• Why SocialFi will still be a thing

• Why prediction markets won’t die after the election

• How to survive the job disruption AI will bring

• Why social media ID is a death sentence for creativity

Or literally anything else you want me to write about. Please just DM me, message me in Monad Discord, shout at me on a call, or rent a plane and write me a giant message in the sky.

Thanks for reading, and remember, parabolic to respect the parabola.

“Profiting from prediction markets will likely be my number one focus between now and November.”

I am a massive nerd who loves prediction markets.

If you’ve been following me on Twitter for any length of time, then you probably already know this because I shout loudly about them about once a week.

But because I’m incapable of condensing complicated things down into short form format, I’ve never really explained why outside of just blindly shouting, “AAAAA PREDICTION MARKETS YES AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.”

It’s unlikely I'll do much better in this essay because literally midway through writing this sentence, I got distracted to tweet angrily about the industry failing to attract normal human beings.

But anyway, the focus of this post is to explain why I love prediction markets and why they will likely be my number one focus for the remainder of the year.

1. The Betting market is ripe for disruption

Betting globally has been super fragmented.

Each country has different rules, regulations, markets, and interests. As a result, liquidity on betting sites has typically been very poor, and odds for the international markets have been very bad.

2. Traditional companies take crazy fees

Betfair, for example, bans half the world from using them but still has a market cap of 31 billion euros, probably because they offer poor odds on their Sportsbook, lure people into their casino, and take INSANE fees (between 5-10%) on their peer-to-peer exchange.

3. Betting sites aren’t nice to you if you’re good

If you are even a remotely profitable gambler or bet on events that have a chance of being positive EV, you will very, very quickly find your account “gubbed”—your bet size will be limited, all promotions will be stopped, and you may even have your account banned entirely.

This is an example of one of my betting accounts: I’m limited to £6.25 on horse racing and exactly £0 on the Premier League. If I had historically been a loss-making customer for them, they would let me bet far, far higher.

Funnily enough, though, on their p2p exchange where you bet against other customers, I can bet whatever amount I want. Here, they don’t care because they simply take a 5% fee from every bet.

Prediction markets have an opportunity to change all this

As you can probably tell, I’m not a big fan of the incumbent betting industry, and I would love nothing more than to see them displaced by new, innovative, fairer, more inclusive ways for us to lose all of our money betting on dumb stuff.

And I do honestly think some kind of permissionless, crypto-based, prediction market type solution will be the thing that does it.

The arena is ripe for innovation. You can bring down fees massively, you can finally have global markets, and liquidity can go up only because of the myriad of benefits permissionless markets bring.

It's a far better solution than lining the pockets of the industry titans that have bankrupted and contributed to the life-ruining gambling addictions that so many face.

It is an inherently fairer way of running markets.

AND the TAM is so big, today, despite having super fragmented, localised betting markets, many companies have reached huge multi-billion dollar valuations.

So when I start to imagine a world where a global competitor, offering fairly priced markets anywhere in the world emerges, my conviction that this category of products will onboard a huge wave of users and be immensely valuable increases.

So will it be Polymarket? Maybe? I’m not sure.

But the coming months will likely present us with a whole host of opportunities, and this is why it’ll be my main area of focus between now and the election.

Why do you think there will be opportunities in prediction market land?

I mentioned this in my "How to be less dumb" talk recently, but often in Crypto, there is an incorrect but strongly held perception that a large, vocal majority believe.

They parrot this perception wherever they go, which increases the number of people that think it, creating this weird death spiral of bad information.

Often, spending a few minutes questioning this narrative and looking at some data is all you need to disprove it.

In the case of Polymarket, this phenomenon rears its head once again.

Perception = Polymarket is super successful, so they must be making tons of money; therefore, they don’t need a token.

Reality = Polymarket is super successful, but they aren’t actually making money. They charge zero fees and pay LP incentives in USDC to the tune of around $6 million per year.

Now, of course, this is only one data point, and it’s not enough to base all your hopes and dreams on them doing a token just because they are currently not making a profit.

But it is an important data point when considering how over or under farmed an opportunity is. Generally, if no one believes a project will issue a token, then they won't bother spending five minutes looking at it or using it, so if you take the opposite side of that bet, your upside is typically far higher.

The sweet spot is finding projects that have higher mindshare with normal humans than airdrop farmers and focusing your efforts here. E.G. in the case of Polymarket I’ve seen more news sites post about Polymarkets impact in the world than i have seen threadooors talking about farming it.

SOME NUMBERS BACKING UP MY RANDOM BRAIN THOUGHTS

Polymarket peaked at around 45,000 monthly active traders, up massively since earlier this year.

Whilst this sounds like a lot of users, it’s significantly less than Layer Zero, which was a hyper-farmed project where everyone knew a token was coming.

As a result, you end up with 5 million total wallets vs. 100k or so for Polymarket.

This tells me that there are 50x fewer farmers using Polymarket than L0.

And if we look at google search trends, we can see that Polymarket is clearly gaining a lot of mindshare in the world. Normal humans are searching for it. The same is not true of the most farmed project in the history of farmed projects - Layer Zero, where all of the attention around it was focused solely on the airdrop, not the product.

On top of this, Polymarket is far harder to “farm” than most other projects. This is because, to do volume, you must take some element of risk. You can’t just deposit some ETH in a contract on 25 wallets and wait three months; you have to BET on an outcome. Whilst you could, of course, just cover all sides to reduce your risk, unsophisticated users will drain their balance slowly here via the spread or become impatient and gamble anyway.

As a result, if there is even a slim chance Polymarket does a token, and you can find an edge on a particular market, it’s one of the biggest opportunities I’ve seen in years.

PLEASE GOD LET ME BE RIGHT I AM PRAYING PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE 🙏

Okay, so what if Polymarket never does a token? Isn’t this all just a waste of time?

Definitely not; the potential market size for the winning prediction market platform is insanely big and I’m certain there will be opportunities to do well along the way.

Polymarket has such a ginormous lead. Similar to Opensea in 2021. Nothing else comes close in terms of volume or mindshare. But because of this, they have a giant target on their back, and we’re starting to see good quality teams raising funds and starting to enter this market.

To be honest my internal odds for Polymarket doing a token are around 25% so please don’t get too carried away with my euphoria for the topic - I do just generally love this genre of product but I am not convinced they will actually do a token. 

The competitive landscape

• Polymarket currently has zero fees.

• Polymarket currently pays LPs in USDC from its $70 million+ warchest.

Therefore, competitors can’t undercut fees, and it’s unlikely they can match the USDC incentives because Polymarket has far greater funding.

Therefore, competitors will have to play catch-up to compete on two remaining factors: product or token incentives.

So if we assume these new competitors will emerge and will likely try to compete by incentivising betting in some way, then those that are experienced using Polymarket can benefit in a number of ways.

1. Teams may copy the NFT playbook and vampire attack, dropping tokens to Polymarket power users.

2. Users that are experienced on Polymarket can seek out inefficiencies in new competitors.

3. Increased competition and fragmented liquidity means arb opportunities may appear.

4. Professional tooling infrastructure is non-existent - the most profitable user on Polymarket’s leaderboard said in a podcast that he manually manages his trades. This means you are likely competing in an inefficient market, and where there is inefficiency, there is opportunity.

5. Chains themselves are heavily encouraging and incentivizing prediction markets to be built on them. It is likely that they will also look to incentivise users here too.

   

If you have spent time playing with prediction markets such as Polymarket, you will be well-placed to notice when a competitor is legitimately good, unique, and novel or offers far superior user experience and product. This will help you decide which competitors to focus your efforts on.

So overall, even if Polymarket opts to go the Opensea route and plans to IPO and I never receive any token incentives for using them, that’s fine. The experience and hopefully the profit made along the way by focusing on the inefficiencies, should make it more than worth my time.

And if the best-case scenario comes true, then I am putting in a few months’ work to ensure I am well-placed in the most hyped, yet oddly least farmed project of the year, and very well positioned to maximise the opportunity of all the competitors that spring up in the coming months.

Have a great week and remember, I am very dumb and always wrong and you shouldn’t listen to me.

NOT FINANCIAL OR GAMBLING ADVICE - IF YOU USE POLYMARKET, YOU WILL FIND YOURSELF STAYING UP UNTIL 6 AM CHEERING ON HILLARY CLINTON TO SAY THE WORD POKEMON IN A SPEECH AT AN EVENT YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF BEFORE. YOUR WIFE WILL LEAVE YOU, AND YOU WILL HAVE TO JOIN THE OTHER ALCOHOLIC GAMBLERS WHO SPEND THEIR DAYS STANDING OUTSIDE OF THE LOCAL WILLIAM HILL BETTING SHOP ANNOYING PASSERS-BY ON THE STREET HOLDING AN 8% STRENGTH CAN OF HORRIBLE TASTING CIDER.

I love that you can be a doctor from California who trades memes during your lunch break.

I love that you can be a graphic designer from Vietnam who finds their calling creating memes on Telegram.

I love that you can be an accountant from Australia finding success tweeting absolute schizo content from a corporate-branded Twitter account.

I love that I can log into Discord on a random Wednesday evening and engage with the digital manifestations of these brilliant minds, discussing a huge variety of topics without ever needing to show them who “I” really am in the real world, and never needing to know who “they” are either.

Because the “I” and the “they” you get to know via their crying animal profile picture is likely a far more real representation of who they want to be than the “I” or the “they” you would typically meet at after-work drinks at your consulting firm in Birmingham.

This authenticity is part of what makes crypto culture so much fun. It's a chance for everyone, regardless of their background, to participate in something bigger than themselves. It's about innovation, opportunity, and a future where anyone can be anything they want to be.

Of course, this was first enabled by the internet. You could be an investment banker secretly writing Harry Potter fan fiction in your spare time, or a lawyer who was actually a furry.

But what crypto enables that the internet doesn’t is the monetisation of a much broader range of skill sets and the ability for people, no matter where they live, to get paid based on the quality of their work, not some geographical lottery that determines the outcome of their family’s finances.

As someone who is typically quite introverted and gets anxious fairly frequently, being able to interact in this way is incredibly liberating. It frustrates me sometimes when politicians try to pass blame to anonymous internet accounts as the sole cause of the downfall of modern society.

I think that giving each individual the ability to create, write, publish, and grow an audience based on the merit of their work, not their background, gender, level of wealth, or education, is something that should be celebrated and not scorned.

But anyway, this week, I decided to leave the house—AAAAAAAAAAAAA—and go to a crypto event. It was the first time in a long time that the digital me and the “real” me combined.

Typically, when people ask me what I do in the real world, I make stuff up. I tell them I’m a consultant or I work in finance. Because that's way easier to explain than telling them I pretend to be a crying Vietnamese man’s dog on the internet, write posts about the nuances of made-up internet money, and sometimes get paid because I’m okay at predicting which animal JPEG someone will think is valuable.

So naturally, I’m not really accustomed to talking about crypto in the real world. Usually, I completely shy away from it as I don’t want to be interrupted mid-sentence by a dreadlocked vegan accusing me of boiling the oceans or ripping down all the trees in the Amazon to profit from monkey pictures.

Or have some person with more nefarious intent overhear me speak and assume I'm an easy target for a wrench attack.

But at the Monad event, surrounded by others who understand how this feels, I felt a sense of calm.

I could talk freely about crypto without judgment.

I didn’t have to endure the constant draining feeling of having to invent some easier-to-explain version of reality whenever the topic turned to work. I felt welcomed and, in many cases, celebrated for the words I’ve written here and the friends I’ve made along the way.

It was nice to feel some real physical, tangible output from all the work I’ve put in this past year.

I left the event feeling energised and positive. More hopeful about the future of the industry. The timeline recently has been pretty brutal. Lots of you are likely disillusioned or on the brink of giving up hope. I’ve felt that way too at times.

But meeting people in the real world jogged my memory a bit, took me away from the doom and gloom of Twitter, and reminded me that there are people out there that truly do care about this space and are working to ensure that the future is bright once more.

I learned that maybe my digital identity and my real identity don’t need to be so separate after all. And maybe the “me” that I love being on the internet I can be more of in real life, whilst still retaining the original, more private version of “me” for times I need a break from all the craziness.

Have a great Sunday and please pray England win the Euros tonight.

AS ALWAYS NOTHING WRITTEN HERE IS FINANCIAL ADIVCE I AM STUPID AND DUMB AND IF YOU ARE READING IT YOU PROBABLY ARE TOO AND YOU SHOULD REFRAIN FROM BUYING STUFF.

HERE IT IS. PLEASE LEAVE ME ALONE NOW.

My laziness has temporarily reduced, my headspace has become clearer, my random bouts of anxiety-induced panic attacks have stopped, and here I am, once again, ready to begin writing mostly meaningless words on the internet to the three of you who feel obliged to read them.

Anyway, pleasantries over, today’s topic is about the new METAGAME.

In competitive gaming, the metagame often refers to the most popular strategy - the one that might not be the most fun but the one that most likely results in you winning.

In Crypto, the metagame shifts quite often, and those that are early to recognise this are able to be maximally efficient (and hopefully very profitable) as they are now competing against the laggards who have yet to realise their old strategy is no longer working as intended.

As time goes by, more and more players become aware of the new meta and adjust their strategy accordingly until there is no edge remaining.

Cobie has a way better article on this than I could ever write, so if you want to learn more, instantly close this page, google Cobie Substack, and spend the next hours of your life learning from someone way smarter than me.

The Game is shifting.

For the past year or two, a very profitable, reasonably low risk strategy has been airdrop farming.

During the bear market, when very few others believed, those that remained, researched, supported, and used good quality projects found themselves very heavily rewarded for their actions.

Blur, Wormhole, Jito, Tensor, ZK Era, Friend Tech, Eigen Layer, Celestia, to name just a few, have all been, or likely will be, between 5 and 6 figure airdrops.

But

I do think the tides are starting to shift.

1) We’re not in a bear market anymore.

People actually believe prices might go up. Celebrities are here. Donald Trump is literally on TV saying he wants to be the Crypto President!

It’s not as early as it once was.

Search trends globally for the word "Airdrop" are back to 2021 levels and reaching all-time highs.

It’s clear now that “airdrop farming” is not a niche strategy. Basically, everyone I speak to online is doing it.

Today you are competing against significantly more users for a shrinking pie, because the number of token launches each month is also increasing, whilst inflows to alts stagnates.

With each airdrop, the players get smarter, and the industrial Sybil farms get harder and harder to spot, meaning the average user gets more and more diluted.

This doesn’t mean airdrops are dead; it just means the skill level required to make exceptional money has increased from literally clicking two buttons and waiting a bit, to actually having to do some research, formulate a plan, invest more time, energy, and effort while also getting far luckier.

In summary, it's gone from difficulty level 2/10 to 6/10.

2) The political winds are shifting

Airdrops have been somewhat of a happy accident, really. When every legal team is advising every new project that the most regulatory secure way of launching is to give away your tokens for free to the community, then that is simply what every team will do, regardless if this makes good business sense or not.

However, with Trump leading heavily in the polls and even the Democrats hinting at shifting their stance towards Crypto, it’s likely we see a friendlier reception within political circles.

Now some of you will be shouting with joy at this, and it is welcomed. However, there are downsides too.

With actual clear regulations and rules around how to issue tokens, is it more or less likely that airdrops continue in the same fashion as today?

I think it’s less likely.

If teams are no longer terrified of having their windows broken and being dragged out onto the streets in shame by Gary Gensler and his gang of vague, angry, legal workers, will they continue rewarding user 7,733, who has spent $3 with them but spent four months shouting at them on Twitter and complaining in their Discord that they haven’t been given free money yet?

Probably not.

While political shifts won’t stop airdrops, I think a lot of the edge we have now as users will reduce when there are clearer guidelines around this stuff.

Teams will get far better at ensuring there is a clear business motivation to issuing an airdrop and want to see returns from that spend - many may even become more predatory and extractive from the average user. (just like how many businesses on earth operate today)

Longer term I suspect will look more like the $10 voucher you get when you sign up to Uber - not a $10,000 token you can immediately market dump and walk away from.

I’ve lived through this once before when matched betting was a thing - betting sites were giving away free money because everyone they thought it would lead to customer retention. Then they all kind of realised that maybe this was dumb and the users were actually just pocketing the money and not remaining loyal - then low and behold they all stopped and now its incredibly tough to make money within that niche.

3) Viable alternatives are cropping up.

The past few months we’ve started to see subtle hints that things are starting to change with new projects being launched in novel ways and teams experimenting with innovative ways of doing sales.

Sanctum is launching their token with an open sale on Jupiter, a separate discounted sale with vesting, AND an airdrop.

Nillion is hosting a community round at the same valuation as the angels and VCs got through Coinlist.

And of course, Cobie has launched Echo.

If you read between the lines too on a lot of the VC-oriented podcasts that I, for some reason, find myself listening to on my runs, the sentiment towards airdrops is gloomy. They speak with sadness about the current meta and make vague but positive-sounding statements around token sales and ICOs coming back into vogue.

FYI - I AM NOT ENDORSING ANY OF THESE SALES OR APPS OR PROJECTS - I’m just pointing out that their mere existence hints at the start of a trend change.

4) Many Airdrop farmers are entitled idiots.

Airdrop recipients don’t really do themselves any favours. I frequently see people receiving tens of thousands of dollars for doing not really much at all whining incessantly because whales got a bit more than them.

I’ve even seen multiple, pretty normal and nice people start to berate devs in group chats I’m in because the website for claiming was too slow and they wanted to dump ASAP! These same people didn’t even realise they were getting this free money until a day or two earlier!?

Then on top of all this, you have the Sybil army, bot swarms, slave labor Twitter accounts parroting misinformation, threatening devs online, harassing founders, and generally being toxic and abusive in an attempt to try and bully their way into getting higher allocation.

I’m pretty certain the final group of people are sophisticated companies with strategy meetings and highly planned, coordinated campaigns.

It’s pretty easy to make a compelling case as a team that you should explore alternative options when no matter how you design the airdrop, you get torrents of abuse.

Hope is not lost

I could rant about this topic for many more pages, as there are a ton of other reasons why I think we are currently at peak airdrop. But I’m lazy and tired and distracted by other things I now want to write about because my attention span is that of a baby goldfish.

So - to summarise:

The difficulty level of obtaining airdrops has increased significantly - due to more users being aware of them - more teams being willing to exploit users with long, drawn out, vague points campaigns - sybils industrialising and becoming more sophisticated and valuations for alts in general declining.

Teams now have a range of other options they can explore as regulations begin to change and the overton window around sales begins to shift more in their favour.

The elephant in the room is getting bigger and bigger as VCs and podcast hosts ask founders - where is the return on that airdrop you did? Did it really drive loyalty?

AAAAAAAAAAA DOES THIS MEAN I’M DESTINED TO STAY POOR AND ALONE FOREVER?

No.

Well, maybe the alone part.

I’m sad too that airdrops are unlikely to remain as easy and lucrative as they have been the past few years. It’s truly been a golden era and I am forever grateful I’ve been able to participate in probably the biggest wealth generation events an average normal, unskilled person like me could have ever experienced.

Never before have so many dumb people made so much money doing so little.

But as one Meta starts to close, a new one opens.

Teams still need to build communities. They still need people to use their products. They still need to market themselves and their business and the best way to do this is still number go up technology. (rather than the number go down technology we’ve seen with most airdrops recently)

so I think what we’ll see is teams begin to shift to a hybrid approach - strictly Linear airdrops to appease the whales, hopefully with some kind of time based halving effect so early people can still win too, and then a secondary community based token sale - likely at a preferential price so it feels more attractive.

This of course makes things more risky for participants as rather than receiving only free money, they now must SPEND money to play - but at least from the teams perspective users are now more aligned with the project and have skin in the game too.

There are other benefits too - in many countries its far better from a tax perspective to buy a token and sell it at a profit than it is to receive an airdrop. (income)

As always, alpha decays the longer the meta goes on, so in the early days it will likely be easy to participate in these sales - maybe they are gated on coinlist and you need to take a discord test to get in? Or maybe teams will handpick people from their communities.

Teams will likely design them in such a way they are designed to go up only to get the marketing benefits early on & the competition will likely be quite slim.

Until, every one truly believes this is the best way to make money now and every new project finds themselves flooded with people trying to sybil and bribe their way into a whitelist position and teams stop giving preferential prices because they don’t have to - and secondary market buyers stop buying because they can just wait for the next one to launch. (like we saw with NFTs)

But this is likely some time off. What we will see next is airdrop farmers becoming angrier and angrier on twitter, most likely missing out on what is likely to be the next high powered Meta.

But for those of us who see things as they are, not what we wish them to be, we can start preparing for this now, because as always, the ones that win are the ones that put in the work.

Maybe I’ll write a post about how I’m preparing next. Or maybe I’ll get distracted again and come back in two months and talk about something else.

(Remember though - buying stuff is never risk free, early stage investing is NOT EASY, it’s not a free money cheat code - you can lose everything - don’t be a moron, use your brain.)

Have a great weekend!

AS ALWAYS NONE OF THIS IS FINANCIAL ADVICE, IF YOU ARE BUYING A PRESALE TOKEN OR SOMETHING BECAUSE OF THIS POST YOU ARE AN IDIOT AND SHOULD HAVE YOUR ACCESS TO THE INTERNET REMOVED AND YOUR BANK ACCOUNTS GIVEN TO A RESPONSIBLE ADULT.