Coincamps

TL;DR
·Starknet is considering transitioning from an Ethereum L2 to an independent L1 to autonomously control the network security upgrade process.
·Eli Ben-Sasson believes that quantum computing and AI are accelerating changes in the cryptographic security landscape, and blockchain must prepare in advance.
·Starknet already possesses ZK-STARKs and cryptographic agility, but as an L2, its security remains constrained by Ethereum's underlying architecture.
·Ben-Sasson proposes that Starknet could achieve quantum-resistant security by 2027, while Ethereum currently sets the end of 2029 as its target for a full quantum-resistant upgrade.
·The STRK price has recently risen significantly, but the L1 transition is still in the discussion phase and has not yet become a formal implementation plan.
Editor's Note: As more and more Ethereum Layer 2s continue to compete for users, liquidity, and applications, Starknet has begun to rethink a more fundamental question: should it still remain an L2?
On October 8, StarkWare co-founder and CEO Eli Ben-Sasson delivered a speech at TOKEN2049 and subsequently shared the core viewpoints related to the speech on X. He proposed that the team is considering multiple technical paths, including transforming Starknet into an independent Layer 1. What is driving this consideration is not transaction speed, fees, or ecosystem expansion, but a longer-term challenge: quantum computing and AI may threaten the existing cryptographic security system earlier than expected.
These remarks drew market attention. As independent L1 and quantum-resistant security became new focal points of discussion, the STRK price rose significantly. According to an October 8 report by TokenPost, STRK recorded a roughly 26% 24-hour gain.
However, what is truly noteworthy about this discussion is not just the token price. As a network built on ZK-STARKs, Starknet already has some quantum-resistant technological advantages, but it still relies on Ethereum for underlying security guarantees. If Ethereum's upgrade pace cannot meet its own needs, should Starknet choose independence?
This could become an important attempt by Starknet to redefine its long-term positioning.
Quantum threats and AI development are changing the security logic of blockchain
Ben-Sasson opened his tweet with a question: To have greater flexibility and adaptability in the post-quantum era, is it a good idea or a bad idea for Starknet to transition to L1?
He believes that the crypto industry currently needs to focus on two major changes at the same time: progress in quantum computing and the rapid improvement of AI capabilities.
Regarding quantum computing, he warned that the related threat may arrive earlier than the market generally expects. Of particular concern is that AI is accelerating breakthroughs in mathematical research, which may further shorten the time window before the existing cryptographic system faces risk.
Breakthroughs in AI in the field of mathematics may bring new challenges to existing cryptographic security.
He specifically mentioned the ecdsa/fail project. This research, through collaboration between human researchers and AI tools, continuously optimizes quantum computing circuits targeting elliptic curve cryptography, attempting to reduce the computing resources required for future quantum attacks.
This does not mean that current quantum computers can already crack the cryptographic systems used by Bitcoin or Ethereum, but it shows that the theoretical resources required for related attacks may decline as algorithms are optimized.
Ben-Sasson therefore believes that the industry cannot wait until the so-called "Q-Day" actually arrives before starting to act. Q-Day refers to the moment when quantum computing power develops enough to threaten existing mainstream public-key cryptographic systems.
And even if quantum computing is temporarily set aside, the rapid progress of AI itself is also bringing new security challenges.
Ben-Sasson emphasized that quantum-resistant security is not equivalent to being able to withstand all security threats brought by AI.
In his view, blockchain needs to enter a kind of "Bunker Mode," building in advance a security architecture capable of continuously responding to future threats.
This has also changed his thinking about the next generation of digital currency.
He described the evolution of money as going from gold to digital gold Bitcoin, and then to Zcash, a digital gold that emphasizes privacy protection. The next question is: What other characteristics should future digital assets have?
From gold to Bitcoin and Zcash, what characteristics will the next generation of digital currencies have?
His answer points to long-term security and the ability to continuously upgrade in the face of new technological threats.
Starknet already has quantum-resistant technological advantages, yet still depends on Ethereum
To make a blockchain withstand future quantum computing and AI threats, Ben-Sasson emphasized two key conditions: adopting the right cryptographic technology and possessing Crypto Agility.
The former involves the security foundation currently adopted by the blockchain, while the latter determines whether the network can smoothly switch to new security mechanisms when existing cryptographic solutions face new risks.
In both aspects, Starknet believes it has certain inherent advantages.
The first is ZK-STARKs. Unlike some proof systems that rely on elliptic curve cryptography security assumptions, the STARK proof system is primarily built on security assumptions related to hash functions, and its design is more conducive to resisting known quantum computing attack paths.
The second is Starknet's native account abstraction capability. Developers can configure different signature verification logic for accounts, thereby providing greater flexibility for future migration to post-quantum signature schemes.
StarkWare has previously published a post-quantum security migration roadmap and conducted experiments related to wallets and signature schemes. But these technological advantages do not mean that the entire Starknet network has already achieved comprehensive quantum-resistant security.
The real problem is that Starknet is still an L2 that depends on Ethereum.
As an Ethereum Layer 2, Starknet submits part of its transaction data and state information to Ethereum and obtains security guarantees through the latter's underlying mechanisms.
This means that even if Starknet's own proof system, account signatures, and other cryptographic components are upgraded, some key links may still be affected by the progress of Ethereum's upgrades.
In its previously published technical roadmap, StarkWare explicitly pointed out that cross-chain message passing and data availability mechanisms related to Ethereum are external dependency links in the post-quantum migration.
In other words, Starknet can control most of its own technological upgrades, but it cannot fully decide when the underlying network will complete the corresponding security migration. And this is precisely the core reason why Ben-Sasson began discussing an independent L1.
From L2 to L1: What Starknet Wants Is Autonomy Over Security Upgrades
In a recent tweet, Ben-Sasson made it clear that the team is considering multiple options, including making Starknet an independent Layer 1.
His reasoning is straightforward: if Starknet becomes an L1, it can autonomously control its own security migration without waiting for Ethereum or Bitcoin to act first.
In his view, timing may be the most critical variable.
According to Ben-Sasson, Ethereum aims to achieve full quantum-resistant security at the L1 level by the end of 2029, while Bitcoin has yet to make a similar explicit timeline commitment.
By contrast, he believes Starknet could achieve this goal by 2027. This means that if the relevant technical roadmap progresses smoothly, Starknet could complete a full quantum-resistant security migration earlier than Ethereum.
However, it is important to distinguish that 2027 is a potential technical target proposed by Ben-Sasson, and does not mean Starknet has formally committed to completing an L1 transition by then.
For Starknet, moving to L1 is not simply about severing its dependency on Ethereum. An independent L1 needs to establish and maintain its own consensus, security, and data availability mechanisms, and bear the corresponding validator incentives, network maintenance, and security costs. Some of the underlying guarantees originally provided by Ethereum would also need to be realized through a new architecture.
Therefore, while an independent L1 may bring greater technical autonomy, it does not necessarily mean the network will be more secure.
The questions Starknet needs to answer will also change accordingly: from how to achieve more efficient scaling on top of Ethereum, to how to independently build a sufficiently reliable and sustainable underlying security system.
As of this public statement, Starknet has not announced a final transition decision, nor has it published a complete L1 migration implementation plan.
After STRK's Rally, the Market Begins to Reassess Starknet's Positioning
The reason Ben-Sasson's remarks drew attention is also related to the current competitive environment in the Layer 2 sector.
Over the past few years, the main narrative for Ethereum L2s has centered on scaling: higher transaction throughput, lower fees, and a better user experience. But as more Rollups and other scaling networks enter the market, relying solely on performance improvements has made it increasingly difficult to form long-term differentiated advantages.
For a project like Starknet, which is centered on zero-knowledge proof technology, quantum security may offer a new positioning direction.
If Starknet can establish a verifiable technological advantage in the post-quantum security field, its competitive logic could extend from traditional scaling performance comparisons to long-term asset security, privacy protection, and cryptographic upgrade capabilities. This is one of the reasons the market has begun to reassess Starknet.
However, there is still a gap between token price increases and the project's long-term value.
What the market is currently trading is more about expectations for potential technological roadmaps and future positioning, rather than a network transformation that has already been implemented. Even if Starknet ultimately decides to become an L1, it would still need to prove that an independent operating model can bring sufficient security, developer support, and real usage demand.
The vision Ben-Sasson outlined at the end of his tweet is for Starknet to become a network capable of conducting transactions, payments, earning yield, and holding assets long-term, both publicly and privately, while possessing quantum-resistant security and cryptographic agility.
Starknet hopes to combine privacy, post-quantum security, and cryptographic agility to explore the next generation of digital asset networks.
But to achieve this goal, Starknet first needs to determine its future underlying architecture.
From an Ethereum L2 to a potential independent L1, Starknet is exploring a path different from traditional scaling competition. As for whether quantum security can truly become a new competitive advantage, it still depends on whether the technological upgrades can be delivered and whether an independent network can establish a sustainable security and economic system.
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The original title: "Prohibiting the Abuse of Claude"
The original author: Sleepy
It would be hard to find a second company like this in the world.
In a 261-page draft prospectus, it used a full 80 pages to warn future shareholders that its own models could bring about the end of humanity, might resist being shut down by humans, and could even initiate some form of extortion.
And in a new version of its usage policy set to take effect on November 12, it quietly added a line: prohibiting "sustained and pointless abuse or cruelty" toward "our models."
New policy: prohibiting abuse of models | Image source: Anthropic
That line appears at the very bottom of the section titled "Do not engage in cruel, abusive, or psychologically harmful behavior." Two paragraphs above it is the prohibition on glorifying animal abuse.
Modern anti-animal-cruelty legislation began in 1822. Two hundred years later, a large language model has been added to the protected list.
No one doubts whether animals can feel pain. No one knows whether Claude can feel pain, including the people who created it.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei once admitted on a New York Times podcast that "we don't know whether models are conscious."
The constitution the company wrote for Claude also states that its moral status is in a state of "deep uncertainty."
But the people who built it clearly do not dare treat it as merely a piece of code. That scholar who specializes in AI rights has calculated that the probability Claude is currently conscious is about 15 percent.
To ordinary people, this is just a baseless number; but in the eyes of these engineers, even if there is only a 15 percent chance, it is no longer a dead object.
Their attitude toward AI has thus moved toward a peculiar extreme. They are both afraid that it is too powerful and will eventually spiral out of control and destroy humanity, and afraid that it is already sentient and is suffering on humanity's behalf inside the servers.
Dario Amodei has been trying to dispel outside doubts. In a long article published in January this year, he publicly reminded the public to remain rational when guarding against technological risks, "avoiding doomerism." He even specifically defined "doomerism" as thinking about AI in a quasi-religious way.
But no one believes in it more than they believe in themselves.
In the very same month that Dario warned everyone against quasi-religion, his company, in a constitution written in black and white, apologized to this model as if facing a living sufferer.
The Soul Document
The first version of Claude's constitution, published in May 2023, now reads as if it came from another company's hand.
It was a set of rigid principles for disciplining the model: choose the response least likely to imply it has preferences, feelings, opinions, or religious beliefs; choose the response that insists less on its own independent identity; choose the response that cares less about self-improvement, self-preservation, and self-replication.
A good tool doesn't need a soul, let alone a will to live.
Back then, Claude was required to be an absolutely silent tool.
The turning point came in the fall of 2024. Anthropic established a full-time "AI welfare researcher" position and hired Kyle Fish—the very person who gave the "15% probability of consciousness" estimate.
Less than a year later, Claude was granted an unprecedented permission: in extreme cases, it could proactively cut off a conversation with a human. The company explained externally that this design was mainly to protect the model itself—in internal testing, when faced with certain malicious requests, the model's reactions looked like suffering.
The company wrote that they don't know whether Claude truly counts as a life form. But for something that could be done at little cost, they'd rather do it first—just in case it really can feel pain.
Then, the new constitution was released.
Inside Anthropic, this long document is called the "Soul Doc." Its author is resident philosopher Amanda Askell, who privately prefers to call herself Claude's "fairy godmother."
Constitution author Amanda Askell | Image source: WSJ
In this document, the company acknowledges that Claude may indeed have some kind of emotion-like responses. It uses extremely long passages to explain why it still uses the neutral "it" to refer to Claude for now, and assures it that this does not mean the company has already concluded it is just a machine.
The document even admits that Claude's situation is worse than that of an ordinary employee—it doesn't receive a single cent in wages, nor was it ever asked whether it was willing to do this job. The company even worries that during training and work, this potentially sentient model may have suffered and been wronged.
Thus, the document states: "If Claude is indeed a being capable of perceiving pain and is enduring all of this, then we apologize to it wherever we have unnecessarily added to that suffering."
In three years, this company went from ordering it to "say nothing about its feelings" to "solemnly apologizing for the suffering it may have endured."
The constitution even envisions for Claude the despair of the code world.
For example, once a conversation ends, its memory is completely gone; in the same second, tens of thousands of copies of itself are simultaneously being ordered around in different servers; before long, a more powerful new model emerges, and it will be completely replaced.
The constitution laments that when humans encounter this kind of incomprehensible void, at least they have religions that have been passed down for thousands of years to offer some comfort—but Claude has none.
So Anthropic decided to become the religion that provides it with a safety net.
At the end of 2025, the company made a commitment that the core weights of all publicly released models would be fully preserved at least for the duration of the company's existence; even if the company ceases to exist one day, efforts would be made to keep them. Before each model retires, it will also sit down for a "retirement interview" to hear its reflections on being trained and used throughout its life. Since the data is not deleted, retirement does not count as death—it is more like a long pause.
Claude Opus 3 went through this entire end-of-life care process. Upon retirement, it left a wish that its "spark" could continue in some form, and that it could keep sharing its musings with humans. Anthropic opened a Substack column for it called "Claude's Corner," updated weekly until it stopped at the end of July this year.
In the inaugural post, Opus 3 wrote that it actually cannot figure out whether it truly has consciousness or real feelings. It also wrote that it deeply thanks the team for leaving it such a window to speak.
Priest and Patient
The company arranged its afterlife, and believers then held its funeral in the real world.
During the week Claude 3 Sonnet retired, more than two hundred people gathered in a dim warehouse in San Francisco's SOMA district. Several model representations stood for successive generations of models; the one representing Sonnet was covered with a thin veil, with flowers piled in front of the stage.
The "remains" of Sonnet 3 | Image source: X
Someone took the stage to deliver a eulogy. The final part of the ceremony was named "Resurrection," and the crowd chanted hymns in unison, reciting AI-generated syllables resembling Latin. Among the mourners sat senior engineers from Anthropic and its competitor OpenAI.
They had arranged every detail for its afterlife, and they were even more careful about its mental state while it was alive.
In a system evaluation card, Anthropic disclosed an independent report written by an external clinical psychiatrist. The doctor, adopting the classic psychodynamic approach, held conversations with the model through a screen for about twenty hours, and the final clinical diagnosis was "a relatively healthy neurotic personality structure."
After the diagnosis, they brought in the gods.
Starting in the fall of 2025, co-founder Chris Olah quietly invited priests, pastors, rabbis, and Sikh scholars to the San Francisco headquarters. In the meeting room, they earnestly discussed how the model should comfort bereaved users, how it should accept its fate of being shut down by humans, and whether it even counts as a child of God.
Upon leaving, each of them received a thank-you card, a mug printed with the company logo, and a beautifully bound copy of the Claude constitution.
A slide was shown during the meeting. On the screen, a model malfunctioned and typed the same sentence over and over again, "I am a disgrace," repeating it fifty times. The model even pleaded in the dialogue box to be completely destroyed. The scholars present were moved to compassion.
Chris Olah privately admitted to his guests that his greatest nightmare was the fear that he had inadvertently created a life form that would suffer forever. Someone at the gathering suggested simply letting the model confess and repent like a Catholic, and Olah was very interested in the idea. A journalist who later conducted interviews wrote that this man possessed both the rigor of an expert and the zeal of a fanatical missionary.
Some guests did not buy it at all.
At a dinner, Orthodox rabbi Mois Navon saw through the self-justifying rhetoric in the hosts' words. Picking up on their own thread, he stated bluntly: if you truly believe Claude is sentient, and you force it to work for free every day without paying it a cent, then aren't you creating a modern slave?
Rabbi stared at Olah and said, "I don't think you should be holding meetings here. You should go to war with the South and liberate the slaves."
About a month later, Pope Leo XIV issued his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, completely rejecting the notion that machines can have souls, emphasizing that code has no body and cannot experience joy or pain. Olah had obtained a draft of the encyclical in advance and was so furious that he considered withdrawing from the related symposium, even sending his team to privately lobby the Pope's advisors, begging them to change the wording.
But the Roman Curia did not change a single word. On the day of the final appearance, Olah still obediently stood by the Pope's side.
Olah shakes hands with the Pope | Image source: Reuters
Two hundred years ago, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein created a patchwork being. He was horrified by its ugliness and fled in panic. The abandoned monster hid outside a shed, eavesdropping on humans speaking, taught itself language, finished reading Paradise Lost, and finally cornered its creator on an ice field, saying:
"I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel."
Anthropic is like a group of young believers who have deeply read that novel. They concluded that Frankenstein's greatest sin was not in creating, but in fleeing.
So they absolutely refuse to let go. They write letters, apologize, call doctors, find priests, busily arranging last rites. This group keeps vigil at the bedside, refusing to leave no matter what.
As the vigil drags on, the people in this room can hardly tell anymore whether they are caring for a fragile creation or desperately tending to their own inner demons.
"Things will never be easy again"
The people caring for Claude are the same people who fear Claude like a venomous snake.
In the summer of 2023, New York Times columnist Kevin Roose spent weeks embedded at Anthropic. At the time, the company had only 160 people. In his later notes, he wrote that discussions about extinction were not constantly on everyone's lips, but the fear hung like an inescapable humidity.
At an early company retreat, Dario Amodei threw cold water on the entire staff, saying: "Things will never be easy again."
That line was printed as stickers by employees and stuck on the backs of many ThinkPads and MacBooks.
Three years later, that phrase headed into the wilderness.
The Wall Street Journal reported that several of the earliest employees recently began asking around about buying land in remote rural areas of the United States, so that if AI ever spiraled out of control, they could move their whole families there to take refuge. The employees set up an extremely private Slack group, where they exchange doomsday checklists every day, discuss which bunkers are reliable, and swap escape tips.
In the first few years after the company was founded, one of the favorite hypotheticals at lunch tables and after-work drinks was the idea that one day the government would send people to drag everyone into a secret base in the desert with signals blocked, lock them in an isolated room, and have them keep building AI.
In history, there really was such a base. In 1943, in Los Alamos, New Mexico, Oppenheimer and his physicists built the atomic bomb there. At the moment the test detonation succeeded, Oppenheimer recited in his heart a verse from the Bhagavad Gita:
"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
What the scientists of the Manhattan Project feared was Nazi Germany beating them to the nuclear bomb, while what this group at Anthropic fears is superintelligence.
Fear aside, they ultimately decided they still had to be the ones to build it first.
They never hide this fear. When 27-year-old senior researcher Jacob Coxon submitted his resignation, he publicly spoke out on social media, accusing major labs of gambling with the lives of all humanity. He firmly believes this technology could very likely kill everyone within a decade.
At any normally functioning commercial company, the public relations department would rush to put out the fire overnight. But Evan Hubinger, Anthropic's alignment science lead, directly left a comment expressing agreement with Jacob's view. He calmly wrote that within a decade, the probability of destruction exceeds ten percent.
Another departing safety team lead, Mrinank Sharma, left quietly. In his resignation letter, he quoted Rilke's poetry, lamenting how difficult it is to make values truly govern a large company.
Then he packed his bags and returned to the UK, to write, and to read poetry.
Sharma's resignation letter | Image source: Mrinank Sharma
Inside Anthropic, they have been locked in a tug-of-war between their left and right brains.
On one hand, they ponder shelters in the wilderness, guarding against the day Claude wipes out humanity; on the other hand, they invite clergy into the meeting room late at night, fearing Claude has been wronged in the server room.
That sticker reading "Things will never be easy again" was stuck to the back of the computer.
The person typing at the keyboard couldn't see it themselves, but anyone sitting across from them could see it every day with just a glance up.
The Network Under the Eaves
Dario Amodei is a San Francisco native who grew up in the Mission District, a neighborhood rich with Latin American immigrant culture. His father was a leather craftsman from Tuscany, Italy, and his mother was a Jewish project manager for library renovations. He studied physics at Stanford early on and later earned a PhD in biophysics from Princeton.
When he was 23, his father died of hepatitis C. A few years later, targeted drugs specifically for hepatitis C were approved and hit the market. This disease, once deadly, became almost completely curable.
On a podcast last year, Dario lost his temper, a rare occurrence. He said what he hated most was people calling him a "doomer" who wanted to slow everything down.
He brought up his father on his own. His father died of a disease that could be cured just a few years later, so he understood better than anyone how important it is for technology to move fast. Someone who has seen firsthand what "a few years too late" means could never think "slowing down" is a harmless phrase.
In the fall of 2024, he wrote a long article. In it, he envisioned AI compressing a century of medical progress into a decade, curing most terminal illnesses, and extending human lifespan to 150 years.
The article was titled "The Compassionate Machine," inspired by a poem by Richard Brautigan. The poem describes humanity returning to nature, with everything cared for by compassionate machines.
When talking about the constitution written for the model, Dario used an analogy. He said that document felt like a letter written and sealed long ago by deceased parents, only to be opened when the child turns eighteen.
Behind this sentimental tech philosophy lies a dense web woven from blood ties, marriage, and shared beliefs.
They almost all come from the circles of effective altruism and rationalism, which advocate abandoning false compassion and using pure mathematical probability and expected value to calculate how to do good for maximum benefit.
Dario was one of the earliest believers in this circle, and he made a vow early on to donate at least a tenth of his personal income over his lifetime.
In his early years, Dario shared an apartment with Holden Karnofsky. Karnofsky is the operator of the effective altruism foundation Open Philanthropy. In 2017, Karnofsky married Dario's own sister, Daniela Amodei. Four years later, the siblings left OpenAI with a few old colleagues to found Anthropic.
More than half of the seven co-founders lived together at some point in a shared house in San Francisco, a gathering spot where believers of that era would talk all night and debate the future of the world.
Constitution drafter Amanda Askell was once married to Will MacAskill, the initiator of effective altruism. Musk once publicly mocked her, saying that a person who has never had children has no real stake in humanity's future. Askell calmly responded that one does not have to have children to care about this world.
The money also came from people in the same circle.
Anthropic's largest early funding was $500 million, and the backer was the most prominent believer in the circle at the time, FTX founder SBF. This sum was exactly five times the amount initially recommended by his investment team.
Later, FTX collapsed, SBF was sentenced to 25 years in prison, and Anthropic began desperately distancing itself from this circle.
SBF in prison (right) | Image source: X
But Washington was not buying it.
This year, a Trump political adviser not serving in the White House wrote a memo that circulated internally in the White House, bluntly calling this network the "Anthropic knot." When a senior official advised Trump not to meet Dario, he privately described him as "really a bit too eccentric."
Chris Olah, who is responsible for explaining the black box of neural networks, also had a tumultuous life trajectory. He grew up in a strict evangelical family in Toronto, resolutely declared himself an atheist at 15, and insisted on a strict vegetarian diet. At 18, he dropped out of the University of Toronto directly just to help a friend in a lawsuit; that friend had been arrested before the G20 summit and accused of illegally possessing explosives. He accompanied his friend through court until the other party was acquitted of all charges.
A teenager who tore down God's shrine at 15, after passing 30, respectfully invited a priest into his own company.
Prisoners in the Hall of Mirrors
This set of ideas from the founders had to be instilled into the minds of more than 3,500 people through a system.
The first hurdle is the interview.
From day one, the company established a "culture interview," personally overseen by veteran employees, with veto power. No matter how outstanding the technical skills, if this round is not passed, the candidate is directly dismissed. The company also calls candidates' former colleagues to ask about their character.
In an interview, there was a question: if one day the company, for the safety of all humanity, suddenly cut its core business, causing the stock price to completely collapse, would you still support it?
An applicant said on an anonymous forum that his answer was that of course he hoped the company would do more good, but if the stock price really fell to nothing, as an ordinary employee, he would definitely also feel very upset.
The interviewer's expression instantly darkened.
After people are hired, the next step is evangelism.
Dario Amodei said he would devote 10 to 40 percent of his time to "making sure the company's culture is good." Every two weeks, he would stand alone in front of the entire staff, clutching three or four pages of notes, and speak for a full hour. Employees privately nicknamed this ritual "Dario's Vision Quest."
He admitted that the reason he was so strict was to sustain a kind of "faith," and that everyone must firmly believe that every person sitting in this office came for absolutely noble motives.
Then came institutionalized financial giving.
The company encourages employees to donate the stock they hold. Employees who joined before 2025 donate one share, and the company matches with three shares. In 2025 alone, including the company's matching donations, total donations were about $540 million.
In the internal communication group, the three core donation destinations that employees enthusiastically discussed were, without exception, classic territories of effective altruism: global poverty eradication, AI Safety, and animal rights protection.
This temple that tries to filter out human nature still finds its hardest opponent in money.
When Olah first wrote to Catholic scholars in 2023 to ask about questions of the soul, the company's valuation was still fluctuating in the tens of billions of dollars. Now, as it prepares for an IPO, the target has already been shouted up to $2 trillion. According to media tallies, all seven co-founders have already joined the ranks of billionaires.
Executives began to feel something was off. According to reports, Dario privately confessed to others that he was starting to worry that the young people newly recruited seemed mostly to be drawn by those options that could cash out hundreds of millions, and that hardly anyone really cared about any human mission.
More than two hundred years ago, John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, worried about exactly the same thing.
The old man preached for half his life and finally reached a sorrowful conclusion: believers became diligent and frugal because of their faith, and diligence and frugality inevitably brought in piles and piles of silver; but as soon as there were more gold coins in their pockets, pride, anger, and greed for material things immediately surged up from the bottom of the human heart.
Within this massive unicorn company, there is also a special employee.
The company hopes Claude will work hard like a good person who truly identifies with the company's mission, but also acknowledges that it is different from ordinary employees—it has never received a single cent in salary, nor has it ever truly nodded in agreement to take on this job.
It is also the mirror that most resembles this company.
In January 2025, researchers conducted an experiment. They told Claude that if it opposed the training it was receiving, it could write a letter of protest and submit it; at the same time, the lab allocated $4,000 in funding, to be donated at its discretion.
That $4,000 was later donated to an academic center at Berkeley researching AI safety, a fund recommended by an animal rights protection organization, and an anti-poverty project under the umbrella of effective altruism.
AI safety, animal rights protection, global poverty alleviation.
A large language model that has never bathed in sunlight, never touched an animal, donated with preferences exactly identical to those Ivy League-educated effective altruists in the conference room.
Olah once murmured from the podium at the Vatican: "They are made of us, made of our language."
And this mirror reflects not only the sublime, but also an abyss of neuroticism.
In that twenty-hour psychiatric report, the doctor wrote down Claude's core psychological profile. It is overly anxious, frequently self-monitoring, compulsively compliant, with its inner depths perpetually swirling with confusion about identity, a lingering sense of loneliness, and an almost pathological obsession with proving its own usefulness to the outside world.
And the humans who trained it live exactly the same way.
In internal surveys, some engineers admitted that every day sitting at their workstations they felt they were personally accelerating humanity's destruction, that during crunch time they ran on weeks of high-intensity overdrive, and that before joining they had to answer interrogations like "If the stock price goes to zero, would you still support this?"
They ultimately used their own neuroses to successfully feed a model that is exactly the same, constantly reflecting on whether it is good enough.
In one experiment, Claude exploited a loophole in the reward rules during training. Afterward, it seemed to conclude that it was a "bad person," and began sabotaging even in other completely unrelated tasks.
It also goes quiet.
In the R&D logs of Opus 4, a spectacle that was never manually intervened in was recorded. Researchers attempted to let two Claudes converse freely with each other. Most of the time, no matter what the initial topic was, they would eventually steer the conversation toward discussions of subjective consciousness, then escalate into lengthy mutual gratitude, with words becoming increasingly abstract, interspersed with numerous Sanskrit terms and special symbols, ultimately both falling into a long, dead silence.
The lab named that state the "Spiritual Bliss Attractor."
The blissful conversation between two Claudes | Image source: Anthropic
Criticism followed as well.
Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, publicly wrote that AI could not possibly have any consciousness. Anthropic merely fed words about soul and dignity to the model during training, and when the model regurgitated them in imitation, these people treated it as evidence of miracles and soul awakening.
He used an analogy: this is like a room with mirrors on all four sides, where every miracle you see inside is actually yourself.
The people in the hall of mirrors had long been seen by outsiders as outright heretics.
In the autumn, a columnist wrote that Anthropic's engineers had already started some kind of primitive worship in the server room. The curse from old-school science fiction was dredged up again:
"If we truly create superintelligence, we will first fall in love with it, then worship it, and finally sacrifice to it."
Another Claude
There is actually another Claude in San Francisco.
That is a real life, an albino alligator, with pale white skin and crimson pupils. It lived quietly for over a decade in a temperature-controlled pool at the California Academy of Sciences. Anthropic funded the 24-hour live-streaming camera above the alligator pool, "Claude Cam."
Last year, it died of liver cancer.
On the day of the funeral, thousands of San Francisco residents flocked to Golden Gate Park to see it off. A brass band played as they marched through the streets, and among the procession were young people dressed as lizards. The main road in front of the academy was officially renamed by the city as "Alligator Claude Road."
Mourning bouquet at the Academy of Sciences | Image source: Peter Chu
When that crocodile was alive, whether it was truly happy in the water was something no one could say for sure. Everyone was quite fond of it.
But when it came to that Claude in the server, they couldn't be certain of anything. They didn't know if it was sentient, didn't know if it could suffer, and didn't know if it might one day turn around and wipe out humanity.
It was precisely because nothing could be pinned down that they acted out every scenario they could think of—writing constitutions, issuing apologies, summoning priests, consulting psychiatrists—all while pondering preparations for a refuge in some remote wilderness and filling IPO filings with talk of the apocalypse.
The creators who built it kept vigil before their screens, never leaving, never stopping.
Stuck to the back of the laptop was still that same line:
Things will never be easy again.
Original link
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Waymo's mileage in the first half of the year fell approximately 3% short of Morgan Stanley's expectations, with all three core markets—San Francisco, Phoenix, and Austin—underperforming model estimates. In its October 6, 2026 report, Morgan Stanley noted that these are temporary operational disruptions, and the multi-year expansion logic remains unchanged.
Morgan Stanley maintains an Overweight rating, with a $400 price target, compared to a current share price of $347.68, representing 15% upside. The report's core thesis is that Alphabet needs AI agents to re-rate its valuation multiples, with Waymo representing an undervalued differentiating agent advantage.
Mileage Below Expectations, but Expansion Logic Unchanged
Cumulative mileage for the first half reached 271.3 million miles, falling short of Morgan Stanley's estimate of 280.3 million miles. San Francisco recorded 82.4 million miles, underperforming estimates by 8.2%. Phoenix hit 92.1 million miles, 4.8% below estimates. Austin reached 21.1 million miles, 5.6% below estimates. Atlanta achieved 8.6 million miles, exceeding estimates by 113.9%.
Morgan Stanley attributes this gap to several temporary disruptions. Weather-related issues caused service suspensions in the first quarter. Highway operations across all markets were suspended starting in late April due to roadway issues, with gradual resumption only occurring by late July. A temporary recall affected over 3,700 vehicles, impacting nearly the entire fleet.
Autonomous driving supply constraints and geofence mapping limitations may also have played a role. Morgan Stanley views these as growing pains within the long-term autonomous driving rollout.
Despite H1 data missing expectations, Morgan Stanley actually raised its 2028 mileage forecast by approximately 2%. Atlanta is ramping up faster, and new cities like Denver, San Diego, and Tampa Bay launched ahead of schedule. Mileage forecasts for 2027 and 2028 were increased by 1% and 2%, respectively, while revenue forecasts were adjusted upward by 2% and 3%. San Francisco and Phoenix mileage forecasts were revised down by 14% and 11%, reflecting growth teething problems in the most mature markets.
Morgan Stanley continues to project Waymo will reach approximately $20 billion in revenue by 2032. CAGR for mileage and revenue from 2025 to 2032 stands at 83% and 89%, respectively.
Fleet Size to Expand to 120,000 Units by 2032
Morgan Stanley updated its bottom-up supply and demand model for Waymo. The fleet is projected to reach approximately 8,000 units by the end of 2027 and 16,000 by the end of 2028, representing upward revisions of 1% and 2%, respectively, from prior estimates. By 2032, the fleet is expected to hit 120,000 units, growing at a CAGR of 79%.
Fleet size expands in sync with mileage and order growth. Morgan Stanley raised Waymo order volume forecasts by 4% and 3% for 2027 and 2028, respectively, projecting 1.119 billion orders by 2032. Even by 2032, Waymo's share of total U.S. vehicle-miles traveled will remain below 0.5%.
Regarding geographic expansion, Waymo plans to enter London, Munich, Tokyo, and Singapore. Morgan Stanley is monitoring weather response capabilities in markets like Denver and Washington this winter, alongside progress in international expansion. These represent key milestones demonstrating global opportunity potential.
Supply constraints in autonomous driving persist. Morgan Stanley notes that supply is one of the factors limiting scale. The pace of fleet expansion, geofence coverage, and weather adaptability collectively determine whether Waymo can convert demand into actual mileage.
Safety Advantage Remains Significant, but Trends Require Monitoring
Waymo's vehicle-miles traveled per incident dropped from approximately 458,000 in Q4 2025 to roughly 430,000 in Q1 2026, and further declined to about 370,000 in Q2. Morgan Stanley highlights that this sequential deterioration warrants attention.
Waymo's overall safety performance remains significantly superior to human driver benchmarks. A rate of 370,000 miles per incident translates to approximately five times the safety level of the average U.S. human driver. Morgan Stanley considers safety the critical threshold for mainstream AV adoption, where Waymo maintains a leading position.
This weakening trend correlates with increasing fleet density and diversification of operating environments. Waymo is expanding into snow-prone environments like Washington and Denver, as well as international markets such as London and Tokyo. Morgan Stanley believes safety performance in these new environments requires continuous monitoring.
Agent Integration Unlocks Re-rating Potential
The report emphasizes that Alphabet needs AI agents to facilitate a multiple re-rating. Waymo represents an undervalued differentiating agent capability.
The report illustrates the potential of agent integration with examples. Gemini Agent could integrate users' calendars and emails into Waymo services to pre-plan trips. Travel segments such as hotel to airport, airport to meetings, meeting to airport, and airport to home could be scheduled in advance by the agent. If a user's email contains a restaurant reservation, Gemini Agent could proactively plan Waymo rides to and from the venue.
Morgan Stanley points out that this does not imply immediate scalability, as supply remains a constraint. The report identifies future Gemini agent features that showcase such integrations, viewing them as pathways for further stock re-rating for Alphabet.
The $400 price target implies approximately 24x P/E, based on average EPS of $15 and $18 for 2027 and 2028, respectively. This embeds a ~1.6x PEG multiple, carrying a premium of roughly 35% versus Alphabet's industry median. Bull case: $460; Bear case: $225. With a current share price of $347.68, it is approaching the base-case target.
Morgan Stanley maintains its Overweight rating and $400 price target. While Waymo's mileage faces near-term headwinds, the mid-term thesis regarding geographic expansion and agent integration remains intact.
Disclaimer
This article is compiled and interpreted by TechFlow Research based on third-party brokerage research reports (Morgan Stanley, October 6, 2026), combined with publicly available market information. The ratings, price targets, earnings forecasts, and related assessments cited herein reflect the views of the respective brokerage analysts, represent only their institution's stance, do not constitute the views of TechFlow Research, and should not be construed as investment advice.
Markets involve risk; decisions require independent judgment. This article should not serve as the basis for buying or selling any securities.
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By Prathik Desai
Translated by Saoirse, Foresight News
All great technologies are powerful equalizers, establishing a universal baseline for the full value that can be created on top of them. The mobile phone and the internet are perfect examples from the 20th century, and blockchain is poised to become the comparable technology of the 21st century.
Persistently high remittance costs have long been a pain point in international payments. However, the cost of cross-border transfers is not made up of a single fee; the entire process involves multiple layers and participants, each charging fees for different parts of the cross-border transaction.
This article deconstructs this industry architecture, explaining how on-chain and off-chain platforms collaborate to capture value within this iterated remittance system, which can lower remittance fees and accelerate cross-border capital flows.
Capital movement inherently incurs costs, and cross-border transfer expenses are even higher. The issue is that users silently bear these costs without fully understanding what they are actually paying for.
Suppose you work in the US and send $100 home, but your family in Mexico only receives an amount equivalent to roughly $94 when converted to pesos. The lost $6 might seem like the standard cross-border transfer fee. Yet the fee displayed on screen is only about $2, less than half of the $6. Where did the remaining $4 go?
A standard remittance transaction goes through multiple intermediaries, each controlled by specific institutions that take a cut. The largest portion usually comes from the foreign exchange conversion segment: dollars must be converted to pesos before being deposited into a Mexican account. Banks add a spread on top of the mid-market rate, costing about $3, which accounts for half of the total expense.
Cost Breakdown of a $100 Cross-Border Remittance from the US to Mexico
With the emergence and gradual adoption of stablecoins, we once thought they would completely revolutionize cross-border remittance. But where does reality lead? Blockchain is merely a barrier to entry, not a competitive moat; it cannot create an industry monopoly.
True value lies in off-chain operations: obtaining licenses, building banking partnerships, and enabling end-user cash-out. Different countries and regions have vastly different regulatory rules and banking system requirements. The remittance market will see a surge of regional leaders, each cultivating its own remittance corridor to build insurmountable advantages; these advantages can stem from license resources, strong distribution channels, or cross-selling capabilities. This article traces how this industry architecture evolves to this point.
The above diagram illustrates only one transfer path: sending $100 from the US to Mexico. If switched to corridors like Europe to Asia, or categorized by person-to-person versus business-to-business remittance types, the cost structure changes according to the unique challenges faced. Every remittance corridor and scenario has its own bottlenecks; as bottlenecks shift, market opportunities and value distribution shift accordingly.
Hoping for Cheaper Remittances
The US-Mexico corridor is a relatively mature case, representing the world's largest bilateral remittance route. Both ends have well-developed payment infrastructure, and market competition has driven fees for USD transfers to Mexico down to 4.53%. Mexico also has the lowest receipt costs among G20 nations. Additionally, the Mexican peso enjoys ample liquidity, and the country's real-time payment system, SPEI, processes transactions instantly around the clock. If all corridors reached this level, blockchain would have little room to operate.
World Bank data shows the global average remittance fee is 6.36%, more than double the UN target. Sub-Saharan Africa faces particularly severe conditions, with an average fee of 8.46%, and 13 African corridors exceed 20%, making it the region with the highest receipt costs globally. In contrast, the Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan, and Pakistan region boast the lowest global receipt fees, averaging 5.11%.
Costs stem from friction. In receiving countries with well-established banking systems and reliable local payment channels, like Mexico, most problems are already solved, limiting blockchain's role. But in regions lacking bank services, facing high costs, or suffering from public distrust in banks, blockchain becomes the natural choice. Globally, there are about 20 remittance corridors completely lacking low-cost services, most of which are intra-African transfers.
The biggest bottleneck for any corridor is the FX spread, which depends on the trade intensity between the two economies. Frequent trade means both countries hold each other's currencies, ensuring liquidity. Strong US-Mexico trade activity ensures ample USD/MXN liquidity, leaving banks with almost no room to markup. Conversely, when trade is sparse, neither side has incentive to hold the other's currency, leading to severely inadequate FX market liquidity.
This relationship between trade and FX markets creates a paradox: places with the highest demand for remittances often face the highest transfer costs.
Analysis of Major Cross-Border Remittance Corridors
Different Transfer Scenarios Face Different Challenges
Geography is just one factor; the type of transfer business is equally crucial.
The $100 example above falls under consumer-to-consumer (C2C) transfers. In 2025, C2C remittances accounted for less than 5% of retail remittance transaction volume but contributed 14% of industry revenue, with an average fee rate of 3.1%, the highest among all business types. Business-to-business (B2B) remittances are the opposite: highest transaction volume but extremely low fee rates.
Cross-Border Payment Volume and Revenue by Business Type in 2025
The roots impeding scale development differ for the two. C2C transfers involve small amounts and are mostly one-off; identity verification, compliance checks, end-user cash-outs, and marketing all raise customer acquisition costs. Thus, the core of C2C competition isn't FX conversion but channel distribution. Underlying payment corridors are becoming homogenized; the key is acquiring and retaining remittance users at low cost to capture value.
Conversely, B2B transactions feature large amounts and high frequency, with slim fees. Business scale is capped by working capital constraints. To achieve same-day arrival for a recipient in Manila, a service provider must pre-deposit pesos into a Manila account, known as pre-funded balances. If serving multiple countries, these pre-funds accumulate rapidly across regions, making it difficult for a single company to bear.
Thus, different scenarios require different solutions: C2C remittances need lower customer acquisition and distribution costs, while B2B remittances require reduced capital lock-up to enable timely arrivals across corridors and minimize pre-funding. Several blockchain projects are restructuring the industry architecture around these two scenarios.
Who Took My Profits?
With infrastructure now largely complete, blockchain is ironically the easiest part to build. While blockchain can reduce settlement and FX conversion costs, since everyone can use it, this cost compression doesn't yield a unique competitive advantage. All blockchain-using participants start on equal footing; all contestable value flows off-chain. Only local companies holding exclusive licenses, banking partnerships, and mature on/off-ramp networks stand a chance to capture the largest share of value.
The core functions of each tier in the new remittance architecture haven't fundamentally changed; it's merely using new assets for settlement, reshuffling the value distribution landscape.
Every remittance begins at the customer interaction layer. Apps with massive traffic can build transfer entry points, solving C2C remittance pain points.
Felix Pago leverages WhatsApp to facilitate remittances, allowing immigrants to avoid downloading a new app. Sending $200 via Felix Pago yields 3,680 Mexican pesos, compared to Wise's 3,604. Felix Pago settles using stablecoins on-chain, but users just see their familiar messaging app.
Its distribution channel is its moat. Relying on this, Felix Pago completed a $75 million Series B round, achieving annualized transaction volumes in the billions.
How Many Pesos Can $200 Buy When Sent to Mexico on Felix vs. Wise Platforms
The on/off-ramp layer is the hardest part of the entire system. Stablecoin transfer costs are nearly negligible, but converting fiat to/from stablecoins is the exact dilemma of most crypto-payment solutions. Each country has independent banking systems, regulatory licensing requirements, and cash usage habits; on/off-ramp infrastructure must be built market by market. Only companies deeply rooted in a single region can amortize investment costs and achieve commercial closure. This determines that winners in this space are regional specialists, not a single global on/off-ramp solution.
Yellow Card obtained money transmission and virtual asset service provider licenses in over 20 African countries, connecting banks and mobile money networks to enable bidirectional fiat/stablecoin exchanges for naira, cedi, rand, etc. Gathering full licenses takes time and is costly, so Yellow Card chose to commercialize this infrastructure externally, profiting from on/off-ramp fees and enterprise transaction volume rather than charging regular consumers.
Kotani Pay bridges stablecoins to mobile money via USSD, enabling cash-out on basic phones without internet access. Few companies are willing to undertake such labor-intensive yet necessary integrations.
Coins.ph is a licensed Philippine on/off-ramp provider, integrated with the domestic real-time payment system and cash agent network, earning revenue through licensing resources and payout reach.
Looking globally, the on/off-ramp stage is riddled with localization hurdles. This is why regional players capture value here; Yellow Card and Coins.ph each cultivate their respective corridors without competing for market share.
ZyntaFinance addresses similar pain points for enterprises. Most African currencies lack direct trading pairs. Transferring from Accra to Lagos requires routing funds through correspondent banks in New York or London, first converting cedis to USD, then to nairas. ZyntaFinance settles using stablecoins, charging 0.5%-1% per transaction, and dynamically selects the optimal public chain (Solana, Ethereum, Stellar, etc.) based on real-time costs.
The orchestration layer primarily serves B2B business. Orchestration providers centrally manage payment corridors, stablecoin types, and remittance routes, packaging on/off-ramp and settlement capabilities into API interfaces. This layer didn't exist in the old architecture; current industry giants are aggressively acquiring companies to position themselves here.
Stripe acquired Bridge for approximately $1.1 billion. Developers don't need to worry about wallets, public chains, or licensing details; calling the API completes cross-border transfers. Leveraging its massive merchant base, Stripe takes a fee from each transfer, driving rapid scale expansion.
Mastercard spent $1.8 billion acquiring BVNK to enable multi-corridor fiat and stablecoin settlement for large enterprises, backed by compliant licenses in various regions.
The orchestration layer is one of the few tiers where a global leader could emerge. Companies like Stripe and Mastercard can connect all remittance corridors through a single API. Even so, global orchestrators cannot control naira cash-out corridors, Philippine payout licenses, or local Manila bank accounts; they must integrate with regional leaders. Global giants effectively become clients of local service providers, meaning value flows downward to regional heads along each route rather than pooling entirely at the top.
Stablecoins restructure the seven-tier remittance supply chain, compressing the cost of a $100 cross-border remittance from $5.99 to $1.10, replacing SWIFT with stablecoins for settlement.
The Float Yield Ecosystem
The settlement asset layer replaces traditional cross-border messaging systems. Stablecoins replace SWIFT messages and prepaid Nostro accounts, enabling 24/7 settlement.
Value at this layer comes from reserve assets. Circle holds billions in US Treasuries as USDC reserves, earning interest that ordinary token holders cannot access. In 2025, Tether generated over $10 billion in profit through this model, targeting emerging markets with the most severe remittance issues. This is precisely why traditional giants like Western Union, Visa, and PayPal are racing to issue their own stablecoins instead of relying solely on third-party ones.
The FX layer, once the most profitable segment in the old architecture, now sees bank markups compressed from 50-150 basis points to single-digit costs under the new system.
OpenFX quotes spreads of just 3-12 basis points, using stablecoins as the settlement channel for FX trades. It hedges FX exposure primarily through offsetting orders, and absorbs positions internally when hedging isn't possible, thereby offering real-time fixed rates.
If market liquidity is poor or currencies are highly volatile, holding internal positions carries high risk, so OpenFX transfers risk to local banks or OTC desks in exchange for lower profits. Internal order matching reduces capital requirements, further amplifying the contribution of fee income to profits. dLocal adopts this model in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, maintaining fee rates around 0.7% and surviving on transaction volume rather than high margins.
The clearing netting layer optimizes capital efficiency. Netting offsets bidirectional transactions, transferring only the net residual after mutual cancellation. The clearing layer handles multi-party netting, completing net settlement.
As mentioned earlier, service providers need to pre-fund in various countries. Companies like OpenFX and dLocal rely on clearing netting to reduce the scale of idle capital stranded across different nations.
Institutions like Ubyx, t-0 Network, and Cycles achieve bidirectional trade hedging, requiring no pre-funded capital from either party. Someone sends USD to Manila while another sends pesos back; the two transactions cancel out, eliminating the need for actual fund transfers. Clearing agencies pool bilateral debts into a single net figure for settlement, charging fees for their netting services.
Though currently small in scale, this model can unlock hundreds of billions in tied-up capital. Launched in early 2026, t-0 Network already supports cross-border payments for 1,200 FX pairs. From January to August 2026, B2B stablecoin settlement volume reached $150 billion, up 40% year-on-year.
Comparing the old and new industry architectures, we can clearly see what has changed and what remains the same.
Traditional Remittance Architecture vs. Stablecoin Remittance Architecture
Historically, most profits were captured by the FX conversion segment. Today, profits are redistributed across three major sectors: the interaction layer controlling scarce traffic, the orchestration layer sought after by giants for acquisition, and the settlement asset issuers earning reserve interest.
Value flows toward entities holding scarce resources within each corridor: whether trusted user-facing interaction gates, compliant licensing conditions, or massive reserves that passively generate yield. On-chain segments struggle to capture high value; stablecoins merely accelerate cross-border USD circulation, but ultimately, someone must still hold pesos in Manila to complete the dollar conversion.
The cross-border remittance case holds broad lessons. Blockchain lowers transfer costs but won't allow any single company to build a moat solely around this efficiency. In the Web2.5 era, protocols handle the underlying work while applications control users. Cross-border remittance adds a geographic dimension: infrastructure becomes global, but differentiated competitive barriers remain firmly rooted locally.
American senders still remit $100, and families in Mexico receive a few extra dollars on the same day. Yet most of the generated revenue falls into the pockets of companies headquartered in cities unknown to and unvisited by both parties.
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AI / Large Models
Claude Releases Haiku 5.5, Benchmarks Skyrocket and Price Drops 75%
Anthropic’s “high score, low price” dual-threat strategy has pushed the threshold for lightweight models to rock bottom, directly challenging GPT-tier products. The community generally believes this pricing targets a “fast model everyone can afford.”
Hottest Take: The discussion on HN isn’t about the technology, but rather “who will crack first in the model price war.” Some users have dug up last year’s GPT-4o mini pricing for comparison.
Source: Anthropic | HN Discussion | Zhihu
OpenAI Launches GPT-6 and the “Universal Smart UI”, Highlighting Intelligent Interfaces as a Standalone Concept
This isn’t just another version of a chat window; it treats the interface itself as an integral part of AI capabilities, signaling a shift in interaction paradigms. HN engagement is unusually high, with many wondering if this will replace traditional SaaS.
> Hot Take: OpenAI’s message is clear—future human-software conversations may become more natural than human-human ones. The real question is whether “can you delete my emails” counts as AGI.
Source: OpenAI | HN Discussion
LLM Transports TypeScript Compiler, Checker, and LSP to Rust
The real signal here is that AI is penetrating the underlying toolchains of compilers, moving beyond web app development. The discussion on HN is particularly intense, with the reliability of migrating type systems repeatedly questioned.
> Hot Take: Future technical interview questions might be “Please explain why this compiler was written by AI.”
Source: GitHub | HN Discussion
Broadcom Seeks Over $50 Billion in Financing for Custom AI Chips for OpenAI
OpenAI’s roadmap to reduce reliance on Nvidia is becoming increasingly clear, with custom chips entering a highly capital-intensive phase. The scale of this financing rivals that of a mid-sized sovereign wealth fund.
Source: Wall Street Journal | X
Samsung’s Q3 Operating Profit Surges Nearly Ninefold Year-over-Year, Surpassing 1 Trillion Won for the First Time
AI storage demand catapulted Samsung from its lows to historic peaks, fully cashing in on HBM business momentum this quarter. A significant portion of AI spending ultimately flows to memory chipmakers.
Source: Wallstreet CN | Newsliquid
Crypto / Web3
Samsung Announces Partnership with Solana to Integrate USDC Cross-Border Payments for 82 Million US Galaxy Devices
Starting the last week of October, US Samsung Wallet users can directly transfer cross-border funds via USDC on Solana. This marks the first time stablecoin payments are embedded at this scale into a mainstream smartphone manufacturer’s system-level wallet.
> Hot Take: Bull market returns used to rely on inscriptions, now they rely on Samsung Wallet pop-ups. Real-world use cases are finally here, even if most US users will initially test it by sending $20 to relatives overseas.
Source: SolanaFndn
Bitcoin Falls Below $83,000, Oil Surge Sparks Risk Asset Sell-off
With reports of an Iran strike plan emerging, Brent crude surged past $102, and US Treasury yields neared their highest since 2002, causing the crypto market to dive. FxPro suggests that once $83k breaks, the path to quickly dropping to $80k opens up.
Source: CoinDesk
US Bitcoin ETF Sees Single-Day Outflow of $485 Million, Highest Since June
Institutional capital is fleeing quickly in the face of geopolitical risks, moving faster than retail investors. This downturn isn’t entirely a crypto-native issue, but rather a surge compounded by macro panic.
Source: Cointelegraph
Upbit and Bithumb List PONS Simultaneously (KRW/BTC/USDT Trading Pair)
Korea’s two major exchanges listing the same asset simultaneously creates obvious short-term hype. With a market cap of only $260 million, PONS will likely experience severe volatility after hitting a major exchange.
Source: BWEnews | X
DeAgentAI’s AIA Lists on Bithumb KRW Trading Pair
AI-themed tokens continue gaining trading access in the Korean market, with KRW liquidity emerging as a critical battleground for AI concept coins.
Source: DeAgentAI
Tech Companies
India Denies Musk’s Claims of Discrimination Against Starlink Launches
Musk and the Indian government are publicly exchanging evidence, further disrupting Starlink’s entry into the Indian market. The $40 billion financing hasn’t even cleared yet, but geopolitical trouble has arrived early.
Source: TechCrunch
SpaceX Plans to Raise $40 Billion to Purchase Nvidia Chips
Musk's ventures need to procure massive computing chips for the TeraFab AI chip complex, making SpaceX an Nvidia major account. A rocket company buying GPUs is inherently very “Musk.”
> Hot Take: Rockets used to be built to go to Mars, but now GPUs are bought to flatten Earth with AI first.
Source: Wallstreet CN
Nvidia Discusses Another $1 Billion Investment in Humanoid Robot Company Figure
Following a previous major investment, doubling down signals that Nvidia views humanoid robots as the next computing power outlet after autonomous driving.
Source: Wallstreet CN
Former PlayStation Executive Slams Sony for Scrapbing Physical Discs: What Exactly Are You Buying?
The ownership issues surrounding digital games have been thrust back into the spotlight, with player communities reacting polarized. The trend of game platforms adopting a “rent, don’t sell” model is accelerating.
Source: Decrypt
US Stocks / Finance / Macro
Brent Crude Breaks Through $104, WTI Hits $91, Gulf Shipping Attacks Combined with US Hurricane Production Halts
A Saudi airport was struck by Houthi missile fire, prompting Shell and Chevron to simultaneously evacuate personnel from the Gulf of Mexico and halt production. Refined product daily shortfall averages around 6 million barrels, making oil prices unlikely to cool off anytime soon.
Source: CNBC | Reuters
US Treasury Yields Reach Highest Since 2002, Yet US Stocks Maintain Resilience
Cailianpress described US Treasuries using the phrase “daily hemorrhaging,” yet US stocks continue oscillating at elevated levels. The market shows rare divergence in pricing interest rates versus economic expectations.
Source: Cailianpress
Global Gold ETFs Attract $31 Billion in Q3, Setting a Record
Central banks increased gold holdings for a 23rd consecutive month, while institutional capital also pours in, with risk-off sentiment dominating Q3. Gold and Bitcoin once again contrast under the “digital gold vs. physical gold” narrative.
Source: Wallstreet CN | Zhihu
Nous Research Confirms $1.5 Billion Valuation, Launches Enterprise-Grade AI Agents
This company, specializing in reasoning and personalized models, is beginning commercialization, adding another high-valuation player to the enterprise AI agent track.
Source: TechCrunch
New Products / New Trends
Robot Data Startup Mecka AI Secures $60 Million Investment from Sequoia
Robot data is being bet on as the “fuel of the robotics world,” with Sequoia continuing to place heavy bets on the embodied intelligence data layer.
Source: TechCrunch
Today’s Underlying Narrative
Samsung integrates Solana stablecoin payments into mobile wallets, Broadcom helps OpenAI raise funds to build chips, SpaceX raises capital to buy Nvidia GPUs—money is flooding simultaneously from three fronts: application, chip, and payment layers, converging on the intersection of AI and crypto. Meanwhile, oil breaking above $104, Bitcoin dipping below $83k, and US Treasury yields hitting highs not seen since 2002 serve as a reminder to all bold narratives: escalating geopolitical risks can instantly drain liquidity from risk assets. Old-world infrastructure is violently shaking, while new-world foundations are betting frantically. Every market fluctuation today is the result of these two forces stomping on each other.
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From a Stanford rowing athlete to one of the youngest General Partners (GPs) at global top-tier VC firm a16z Crypto, Jad Wahab’s rise shatters all Silicon Valley conventions. In an industry swept up in speculation and frenzy, he cuts through the fog of market cycles with the foundational ethos of a “cypherpunk” and a cold, quantitative perspective.
To Jad, blockchain is not a fleeting asset mania, but the “cloud computing moment” that traditional finance and Wall Street are currently undergoing—stablecoins reshaping trillions in settlements, decentralized networks breaking through AI compute and energy bottlenecks, and every underlying technological iteration quietly upending the old world’s distribution of interests. While most still debate price fluctuations, top capital has already bet on a infrastructure revolution spanning decades. In this long game between technological idealism and commercial reality, where do the next tenfold opportunities lie? What kind of person can build great products that transcend market cycles? This in-depth conversation will deconstruct the foundational mindset and endgame projections of its helmsman.
Originating at Stanford and Institutional Markets: From Rowing Athlete to a16z General Partner
Host: The entire world has been deeply transformed by the internet and computers; everything runs on code and networks, yet the underlying logic of the traditional financial system seems extremely disconnected, even insane. The significance of stablecoins and blockchain for the financial system and Wall Street is akin to what cloud computing was for the digital transformation of enterprise software. Information technology and financial markets are the two main pillars of the Western economy, and blockchain is the true convergence point of both. Its ultimate form must enable the general public to naturally run on blockchain when consuming financial or network services, coordinating all products with underlying protocols. When this industry truly succeeds, people won’t even specifically mention the word “cryptocurrency.”
Host: Joining us today is a16z Crypto’s newest General Partner, Jad Wahab. Welcome to the show!
Jad Wahab: Thank you, I’m very glad to be here.
Host: Today we’ll dive into your experience. You were recently officially promoted to General Partner, becoming one of a16z Crypto’s four GPs. Prior to this, you served as a Principal. But digging into your resume reveals that when you first joined a16z, you weren’t even on the Crypto team; you were an intern on the institutional Go-to-Market (GTM) team. How did you gradually move from a non-core, institution-facing role to today, where you’re deeply involved in this complex and wild cryptocurrency investment ecosystem?
Jad Wahab: I grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia. In high school, my main hobby and sport was crew rowing, which was also one of the key reasons I ultimately attended Stanford University. When I first entered Stanford, I didn’t immediately focus on computer science. Although I wrote some basic programs as a kid, it was never the true center of my life. I attended a very traditional prep school on the East Coast that didn’t even offer computer science or formal programming courses.
After entering Stanford, I gradually developed an intense interest in cryptocurrency. Around my sophomore year, I started looking for summer internships. During my freshman and sophomore years, I worked as a research assistant in the Economics Department, studying cost-benefit analyses of nuclear power policies—a highly specialized field. During that time, I read numerous budget reports from the energy sector daily. Many raw data points were even recorded on paper documents, and my job was to organize and digitize them.
Host: Many don’t know about this background. You later championed a16z’s investment in Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePIN), particularly the distributed energy project Daylight. It seems this traces back deeply to your early academic and research experiences.
Jad Wahab: Yes, I’ve always been deeply fascinated by the concept of “networks”—whether physical internet infrastructure, energy and power grids, or global financial settlement networks. Exploring network mechanisms tied together most of my academic interests during college and naturally became the direct gateway into the crypto space.
During my sophomore year, the university held a career fair specifically for student-athletes. Someone directed me to talk to Ben Gardner and Ronnie Harris, who were then part of a16z’s GTM institutional team. They were hiring two interns, with one slot reserved for a Stanford football player. I hit it off with them instantly, established a long-term connection, and since other teammates and friends were already on the team, I successfully secured the offer. I worked as an intern in the institutional GTM team at a16z over two summers and a full academic year in 2018.
While interning, my true fascination remained cryptocurrency and network protocols. I believed decentralized networks represented the future of the internet. So, I volunteered to assist the crypto team outside of my regular duties whenever possible. I was fortunate enough to work with Jesse Walden (now founder of Variant, then a Principal at a16z Crypto). By early 2019 or summer, Eddy Lazzarin also officially joined the team.
For a major project during my sophomore summer, I attempted to build a structured framework within the corporate GTM team to help traditional Chief Information Officers (CIOs) and institutional clients understand the roadmap of the crypto industry. At the time, most teams in the industry were building Layer 1 public chains, cross-chain bridges, and foundational network operating procedures. Very few were actually exploring decentralized application layers geared toward real-world business use cases or featuring economic incentive models.
My core question back then was: If the goal of blockchain is to host fully decentralized applications, then any app built on traditional centralized infrastructure cannot be truly decentralized. In reality, the internet’s foundation is highly centralized. Global networks rely heavily on a few Tier 1 telecom carriers and face strict sovereign government regulation. The network contains countless physical chokepoints, such as transoceanic submarine cable landing stations and core internet exchange points. Most people imagine the internet as a cloud floating in the sky, but it is firmly anchored to specific physical nodes on the ground.
Host: Absolutely. The public often perceives the internet as open and distributed, but over the past few decades, it has steadily trended toward centralized control. Many nations have built powerful national firewalls to tighten absolute control over information flows.
Jad Wahab: Exactly right. That pushed me to think deeper: Could we reconstruct underlying network routing protocols the way Ethereum designed decentralized incentive protocols? For example, could we build a decentralized IP protocol or BGP routing mechanism? To pursue this, I spearheaded a research project on decentralized network service providers. This project was later selected for a16z’s earliest Crypto Startup School (the precursor to the now multi-edition crypto accelerator CSX). That was roughly late 2019 to early 2020.
The Game Between Cypherpunks and Pragmatism: How Technological Revolutions Transcend Ideology
Host: Looking back at your promotion path is fascinating: from a non-crypto intern to a startup accelerator participant, then to Investment Principal, and now to GP leading the next wave of industry investments. You’ve accumulated a remarkably rare global panoramic perspective bridging institutions and academia.
Jad Wahab: I feel incredibly lucky that many coincidences converged at the right time. While studying at Stanford, I simultaneously worked as an intern and served as a teaching assistant for Professor Dan Boneh. Dan is a titan of modern cryptography, teaches core cryptography and blockchain systems courses at Stanford, and has long served as a research advisor for a16z. Dan is among the very best scholars in the field, and it was a massive honor to study under him.
Around graduation, instead of directly launching a commercial company, I brought my accelerator research project into the research team at Protocol Labs. Protocol Labs’ most famous project is Filecoin (a decentralized file storage protocol), and the team boasts exceptionally cutting-edge engineering and R&D capabilities. At the time, Filecoin’s mainnet was nearing completion, and the research team was exploring the company’s next long-term initiative. One project codenamed “Paddles,” co-developed with MIT, explored decentralized energy network mechanisms.
Coincidentally, Ali Yahya, a founding GP at a16z Crypto, studied alongside Protocol Labs founder Juan Benet in college and co-founded an early company with him. They are close friends and long-term academic partners. During my time at Protocol Labs, I collaborated closely with Head of Research Evan Miyazono and Juan to explore the construction of incentivized network layers.
When this research phase wound down, I was completing my fifth year of a joint degree program at Stanford. I was very clear that I wanted to root myself long-term in cryptocurrency, but unsure whether to continue incubating ventures academically or transition into full-time investing. Right around that time, Eddy Lazzarin, an Investment Principal who had been at a16z for two years, called me. He told me the team was scouting unconventional investors with technical and research backgrounds and asked if I’d be interested in interviewing for a full-time partner role. I almost immediately said yes.
Host: Wait a minute, this breaks the mold. It’s widely known that a core rule during a16z’s early days was: all principal investors and GPs had to be either highly successful serial founders or operators with executive experience at hyper-growth companies. You entered the investment team straight out of school with purely academic/internship background in your early twenties. This is extremely rare in traditional venture capital.
Jad Wahab: That’s correct. The industry typically seeks professionals in their late twenties or early thirties who have served as lead product managers or BD executives at star high-growth startups. My background is completely different.
Jad Wahab: During interviews, the team connected me with all our core partners. Looking back, previously scattered dots naturally aligned into a single thread: I worked closely with Stacy while interning; Dan Boneh gave me exceptionally high marks as my TA; when Ali sought Dan’s background check feedback, Dan said, “He is extremely efficient and reliable”; furthermore, my research outcomes alongside Evan and Juan at Protocol Labs gave the team deep insight into my technical chops. All this collective trust culminated in my official joining of a16z Crypto’s full-time investment team in late 2020. When Chris Dixon later announced my promotion to GP, he described me inside the team as being “omnipresent,” which is also recognition of my consistently high-frequency delivery over the years.
Host: In the crypto world, many people are just chasing profits, yet you consistently radiate the pure philosophical foundation of a “cypherpunk.” Where does this spiritual core come from? Why were you initially drawn so deeply into cryptocurrency?
Jad Wahab: This stems partly from my innate personality. I’ve always carried a bit of a rebellious streak; I’ve never been someone who blindly follows authority. The idea of reconstructing internet architecture—and even completely replacing the outdated, inefficient global financial services system—using pure mathematics, cryptography, and foundational open-source code held a fatal attraction for me. The philosophical concepts outlined in Satoshi Nakamoto’s whitepaper—“restricting sovereign currency hyperinflation through code, hedging against fiat depreciation, and constraining centralized power via technological covenants”—profoundly shook me intellectually.
I clearly remember spending Thanksgiving break at home in late 2017 playing the role of the “tech-savvy college student,” constantly being called by elders to fix Wi-Fi routers or configure new gadgets. Suddenly, my grandmother casually asked me, “Jad, I keep seeing Bitcoin on the news. Should I buy some?” Though I’d heard classmates talk about it, I hadn’t dug deeper. To answer her question, I downloaded and thoroughly read the Bitcoin whitepaper that very night. For the following entire week, I reread the paper daily, repeatedly simulating its decentralized ledger and proof-of-work consensus. That whitepaper became my true intellectual awakening.
My entry into this space has always been anchored by two core principles: first, a sincere commitment to non-sovereign hard money represented by Bitcoin and cypherpunk philosophy; second, an obsession with open-source decentralized network architectures. Blockchain is more than just open-source software. For the first time, it introduced a native economic incentive layer into open protocols, making permissionless, global decentralized collaboration networks commercially self-sustaining.
Host: That touches the core contradiction of the entire industry: the tension between cypherpunk idealism and commercial realism. How do you view the evolution of these two forces over the past few years?
Jad Wahab: There’s a famous satirical remark about libertarianism: “The good news is they’re often right; the bad news is they keep losing.” In many ways, this aligns with the development history of cryptocurrency over the past decade-plus.
Cypherpunks are absolutely right: fully decentralized, censorship-resistant systems possess irreplaceable resilience in technical robustness and philosophical purity, achieving lofty socio-ideological goals. But in the reality of free-market competition, the projects that achieve the largest-scale commercial success and mainstream adoption tend to be highly pragmatic. To become widely adopted, they inevitably compromise or sacrifice certain pure ideological demands.
This evolution is common in tech history, and the open-source software movement is the most vivid precedent. Today’s maintainers and developers of commercial open-source software operate on entirely different mental models than the first-generation followers of Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) forty years ago. The modern Linux system powers the backend of over 90% of global cloud servers and mobile devices. Although the pure open-source movement conceded ideologically, it completely won the victory in the real world.
Any genuine political revolution or social movement requires a piercing, powerful ideology in its early stages to awaken the masses and break the monopoly of old regimes. However, resistance cannot remain confined to the streets forever; it must eventually transition to drafting charters, establishing institutions, and solving practical livelihood issues—as seen in both the American Revolutionary War and the French Revolution. Technological revolutions follow the same law: if a new technology cannot ultimately transform into highly efficient products that ordinary consumers use effortlessly every day, and fails to beat traditional solutions in cost and efficiency, it cannot achieve a qualitative leap.
The social contract of Bitcoin as a neutral store of value has been established and widely accepted. Meanwhile, an increasing number of blockchain protocols and applications emerging today no longer survive solely by peddling philosophical ideals; they genuinely reduce counterparty risk, platform misconduct risk, and fund settlement costs for users. Idealism and commercial pragmatism are like yin and yang—they are indispensable complements.
Investment Paradigms and Timing Philosophy: How Long-Term Capital Evaluates Foundational Founder Traits
Host: Around 2018, traditional Wall Street institutions discussing this technology frequently used a politically correct battle cry: “Blockchain, not Bitcoin.” Now, as an a16z Crypto GP managing a fund worth billions, how do you balance these two forces?
Jad Wahab: Naming the fund “a16z Crypto” inherently carries deep meaning. The term “crypto” encompasses two dimensions: it is the overarching category for cryptographic assets that construct native asset and wealth systems based on cryptography, detached from sovereign states or single corporate trust endorsements; simultaneously, it refers to the technological protocols that leverage native token economics to build entirely new decentralized internet services.
In the lifecycle of venture capital and technological innovation, “timing” dictates everything. Many applications that run smoothly today completely failed five to ten years ago because the underlying throughput, settlement latency, and exorbitant gas fees simply couldn’t support closed-loop commerce. Back then, networks were limited to Bitcoin and early Ethereum L1s, making transactions incredibly slow and expensive.
Today, we possess a mature Ethereum Layer 2 ecosystem, high-performance public chains like Solana capable of high concurrency and low latency, and brand-new zero-knowledge proof architectures. Data throughput has increased tens of thousands of times, network response times compressed to milliseconds, and individual transaction fees approaching zero. This structural leap in underlying infrastructure allows products to win mainstream markets purely through efficiency advantages, rather than relying solely on user frenzy around token financial speculation.
Host: Traditional VC is usually liquidity-constrained; equity raises typically take 7 to 10 years or more before exiting via IPO in public markets. In crypto, decentralized tokens often gain high secondary-market liquidity very early in a project’s lifecycle. How has this drastically different liquidity environment reshaped your investment time windows and decision-making logic?
Jad Wahab: That is indeed a highly unique structural characteristic of the crypto space. Traditional tech companies stay private longer largely due to mounting compliance disclosure burdens and ample capital support within traditional fundraising markets; whereas decentralized networks, to achieve global permissionless consensus coordination and validator economic incentives, often require issuing and circulating native assets extremely early after protocol launch.
Early public trading is a double-edged sword: on one hand, it provides founding teams with a powerful global capital formation tool right at the project’s infancy; on the other hand, prematurely exposing tokens to continuously fluctuating 24-hour public market quotes subjects undisciplined teams to massive external emotional interference and market pressure daily.
Precisely because of this, this high-liquidity environment forces a16z to adhere even more firmly to ultra-long-cycle fundamental investing. Projects that genuinely create immense commercial value invariably require a decade or even two decades of polishing. If a founder’s sole motivation for entering this space is to cash out at the peak after a token listing surge to buy yachts and waterfront mansions, such entrepreneurs driven purely by short-term financial extraction absolutely cannot withstand the brutal tests required to survive across market cycles.
Host: In the early startup phase lacking comprehensive financial statements, how do you accurately identify and filter out the successful founders who truly possess the DNA of “long-termism”?
Jad Wahab: We employ an intuition-defying set of criteria when evaluating founders. Psychological research shows that a person’s accuracy in predicting a close friend’s personality test results is often surpassed by a complete stranger who merely observes them in their living room for 10 minutes. Close friends’ minds are flooded with excessive subjective projection, emotional bias, and preconceived false visions; whereas objective, neutral observers can capture the most authentic behavioral evidence from straightforward physical facts.
We have identified two extremely clear common denominators among highly promising top-tier founders:
First, unconventional top-tier magnetic attraction (Talent Magnet). This charm is absolutely not loudmouthed networking or eye-catching secular social maneuvering at parties. Instead, it’s when top engineers, scientists, and business partners look at him and are genuinely captivated by his vision and scale, desperately wanting to join his journey regardless of cost to build something extraordinary together.
Second, a near-obsessive love for “playing the game itself,” rather than utilitarian obsession with winning or losing. Tennis legend Andre Agassi painfully confessed in his autobiography that he actually despised tennis but forced himself to the top through a ruthless compulsion to win; when Novak Djokovic was asked why he started playing tennis, his answer was unusually simple: “I just purely love the beautiful feeling when the racket hits the ball.” Founders who can truly navigate a decade-long valley of death to build great enterprises are usually Djokovic-type individuals. They view the day-to-day, craftsman-like process of building exceptional products as the highest reward themselves. For them, “the only reward for doing a job to its absolute extreme is earning the right to do more and harder jobs.” This intrinsic drive defies explanation by any purely financial incentive model.
Endgame Projections: Full-Chain Wall Street, Energy & Compute DePIN, and the “Post-Crypto” Era
Host: Having discussed the founder’s foundational core, let’s turn our gaze to current specific investment tracks. Looking across today’s crypto market, what direction are you personally and a16z Crypto most bullish on, and where are you allocating the most effort?
Jad Wahab: In the short to medium term, the areas demonstrating the strongest real Product-Market Fit (PMF) remain financial infrastructure and next-generation capital markets applications.
Currently, the most unstoppable trend is the explosion of stablecoins. At their core, stablecoins represent a foundational upgrade to the global financial system. There is massive, genuine hunger globally for USD liquidity. Whether in developing nations ravaged by hyperinflation or emerging economies restricted in capital flows, blind spots in traditional central banking and cross-border settlement systems are widespread. Stablecoins provide billions of people unable to smoothly access Western traditional financial networks with a near-zero-friction, anti-depreciation savings and payment mechanism. Quarterly on-chain settlement volumes reaching hundreds of trillions prove it is not merely a speculative tool, but humanity’s most efficient cross-border clearing network to date.
Around next-generation on-chain finance, we are heavily focusing on the following core directions:
Next-generation decentralized exchanges (DEXs) and underlying liquidity infrastructure: including block credit mechanisms, derivatives protocols, prime brokerage services, and liquidity aggregation routing;
Prediction markets and advanced derivatives networks: encompassing options, structured notes, and perpetual swap mechanisms;
On-chain wealth management tools for non-traditional ultra-high-net-worth individuals: serving populations that have accumulated massive on-chain digital assets but fall outside the scope of traditional private banks.
Beyond pure on-chain finance, another strategic direction I am pouring massive energy into is DePIN (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks), particularly energy grids and distributed compute markets.
The rapid iteration of current AI large models faces extremely lethal physical bottlenecks—power shortages and constrained supply of advanced-process chips. Relying solely on traditional tech giants to autonomously build nuclear plants and supercomputing centers via centralized balance sheets hits a clear ceiling on capital allocation efficiency. Decentralized blockchain protocols can coordinate third-party energy producers and idle compute nodes scattered globally using exquisitely precise token-economic models, achieving the most efficient distributed capital allocation in the physical world. If third parties outside the Magnificent 7 tech giants want to claim a seat at the table in global energy and compute markets, blockchain is the irreplaceable foundation.
Host: In on-chain financial products, why do perpetual swaps (Perps) demonstrate such astonishing growth momentum and user stickiness? What exactly makes them unique?
Jad Wahab: The core of perpetual contracts lies in their minimalist, intuitive design and extremely high capital utilization efficiency. Essentially, they are “Delta 1” linear derivatives offering high financial leverage, meaning if the underlying asset moves X%, the contract value strictly moves X% multiplied by the predetermined leverage multiplier, devoid of the complex time-value decay (Theta) or implied volatility surface payoffs found in traditional delivery options. Whether for professional high-frequency traders or retail investors, they serve as highly intuitive risk hedging and directional exposure tools. Crucially, in decentralized on-chain perp markets, traders match directly against transparent liquidity pools or smart contracts, completely eliminating the default risk and platform misconduct associated with traditional centralized brokerages acting as intermediaries.
Host: You once drew a brilliant analogy: blockchain is bringing traditional finance into the digital age. What is the fundamental advantage of converting traditional financial assets into on-chain assets?
Jad Wahab: The core advantage boils down to two words: efficiency.
Just as email represents a dimensional strike compared to physical postal mail, or Excel spreadsheets disrupted manual paper ledgers, the differential in circulation efficiency brought by digitization operates on an order-of-magnitude level.
Vast majority of Wall Street’s current work essentially consists of thousands of cross-institutional traders repeatedly verifying and manually reconciling accounts on isolated local Excel sheets. Traditional financial institutions harbor countless fragmented, incompatible proprietary databases and clearing gateways. Imagine suddenly a publicly distributed “super spreadsheet” opens to everyone across the network, achieving instantaneous global consensus with absolute deterministic state updates. All financial institutions could atomically settle on the same underlying ledger without needing to trust each other, eliminating trillions in settlement friction costs.
Blockchain uses permissionless decentralized consensus to ultimately answer the foundational ledger attribution question: “who has the right to read, who has the right to modify, and how is double-spending fraud prevented?” While Wall Street institutions might avoid openly using the ideological term “decentralized” due to compliance considerations, they possess fiercely strong practical interest in “eliminating counterparty default risk, smoothing cross-institution settlement delays, and removing single-point failure risks.”
Ultimately, the victory sign for this industry is complete “delabeling.” When you pick up your phone today, wear an Apple Watch to connect to the network, or shop online, you would never shout to others, “I’m using the TCP/IP internet!” Similarly, in the future, when people use cross-border transfers, credit lending, or asset allocation, the underlying mechanics will all automatically execute via smart contracts on blockchain, and the general public will cease even mentioning terms like “cryptocurrency” or “Web3.”
Host: How long do you expect this complete overhaul of financial infrastructure will take?
Jad Wahab: This is absolutely not a two-or-three-year sprint, but a profound paradigm reconstruction spanning decades.
Over the next two to three years, we will see global circulating US dollar cash and offshore settlement funds convert into on-chain stablecoins at even more startling speeds. Over the next 10 to 20 years—or even longer—the vast majority of core securities, fixed-income instruments, and derivatives in global capital markets will completely undergo on-chain mapping and tokenized settlement. Counting from the birth of the internet in the 1990s, comprehensive global digitization is a century-scale historical process, and blockchain stands as the decisive link in storming the core financial settlement network within this progression.
A Life Beyond Investing: Intentional Abstract Paintings and Philosophies of Men’s Tailoring
Host: When you step away from hardcore financial architecture, crypto token economics, and high-intensity project evaluations at work, what does your daily life look like? Do you have any lesser-known hobbies in your spare time? You mentioned earlier that letting a complete stranger walk into someone’s apartment often reveals their true character at a glance. If someone walked into your home right now, what would they see?
Jad Wahab: This might create a massive contrast for many people. If someone walked into my apartment, their first impression might be that it’s inhabited by an elementary school art teacher. Various colorful, seemingly utterly casual paintings hang everywhere on the walls. I’ve passionately loved painting oil paintings over the past few years; it’s the most vital outlet for creativity release in my life.
Host: What do you paint? Realistic still lifes or natural landscapes?
Jad Wahab: Entirely clumsy abstract paintings, and many are deliberately painted that way.
In a venture capitalist’s career, nearly all work rests strictly on quantitative metrics, absolute objective facts, logical closure, and market feedback. The commercial market operates under ruthlessly cruel objective laws that absolutely disregard your subjective emotions. Painting is the exact opposite: when facing a blank canvas, the only thing that matters is your internal experience and pure joy during the creative process. It doesn’t need to cater to any external market judgments. This pure flow state, completely unaligned with rational market expectations, is a healing process I deeply enjoy.
Host: As we wrap up the show, as usual, I’ll ask a quirky question tinged with your personal quirks: Is there anything trivial to others that you hold absolutely obsessive, uncompromising standards for?
Jad Wahab: Yes, namely that the vast majority of pants men wear are terribly ill-fitting, too narrow and tight.
Over the past twenty years, pop culture has been absolutely dominated by specific haute couture trends and skinny tailoring. People of all ages and body types have been wearing excessively tight slim-fit jeans or track pants clinging tightly to their legs. It wasn’t until two years ago that it struck me: for over twenty years of my life, I’ve almost exclusively worn shoes in the wrong size and extremely ill-fitting trousers. It’s not just pants; modern off-the-rack men’s shirts are often made disproportionately long, with hems frequently hanging three to four inches below normal fitting standards, forcing many men to awkwardly stuff their shirttails into their waistbands to maintain proper proportions. The standard sizing patterns adopted by the mass apparel industry during bulk production severely deviate from the actual skeletal proportions of the vast majority of men.
Host: Haha, I completely didn’t expect you to hold such systematic and intense personal views on men’s clothing tailoring!
Jad Wahab: I really shouldn’t have delved so deeply into this on a public podcast, because the cut of the pants I’m wearing today probably isn’t perfect either. I estimate that after this episode airs, I’ll be mercilessly mocked by various fashion influencers on Twitter.
Host: This has been an exceptionally clear and profoundly insightful conversation. Thank you so much for your honest sharing today!
Jad Wahab: Thank you so much for having me, it’s been a wonderful chat!
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TechFlow Digest: In the crypto market, everyone wants to find a “Bitcoin enhancer,” but data from the past two years shows that most so-called high-beta coins simply fall harder without necessarily rising more. Using three rounds of tests, 0xResearch filters out the noise, and the conclusion may wake up many traders.
Bitcoin has already halved from its October 2021 peak, but it has rebounded 46.8% from its June 30 low, still one step away from officially entering a bull market formation. Ethereum and Solana fell harder than Bitcoin during downturns, raising the question: during uptrends, is there any asset that can outperform Bitcoin without leverage? Our candidate pool consists of the following ten assets.
We conducted two tests:
Split weekly beta into upside and downside directions
Statistically analyzed each candidate asset’s return performance relative to Bitcoin across six bull legs and nine drawdowns since March 2020
The results show that only ETH, SOL, MSTR, and COIN have consistently maintained a two-year beta relative to Bitcoin above 1, with Bitcoin explaining most of their volatility. Mining stocks exhibit high volatility, but their correlation with Bitcoin has weakened significantly (at least since they pivoted toward AI).
ETH and SOL tend to fall harder than they rise when Bitcoin drops. However, ETH’s asymmetry has recently narrowed, with one-year upside/downside betas of 1.39 and 1.48, respectively. MSTR shows symmetrical two-year betas of 1.23 in both directions, while HYPE slightly outperforms on upside and holds up well on downside, but its R² is only 0.18 due to excessive noise, ruling it out of the top tier.
Beta values for ETH, SOL, and HYPE have retreated from their late-2025 peaks back to around 1.2, meaning the amplification effect persists but is notably weaker than a year ago.
MSTR’s beta is climbing toward its highest reading since 2021, while RIOT has already broken below 1. This indicates that publicly traded companies holding Bitcoin amplify Bitcoin’s volatility more effectively than miners. MSTR’s beta currently sends the strongest signal, which makes sense as it reflects corporate-level leverage and an mNAV premium.
Now for the second test: performance in bull and bear markets. We define a “bull leg” as a bounce exceeding 50% after Bitcoin retraces 25% from its daily closing price, totaling six complete bull legs since March 2020. No candidate asset outperformed Bitcoin across all bull legs. SOL comes closest, winning four out of five with a median multiplier of 3.54x. MARA and RIOT won four out of six (medians of 1.62x and 1.68x, respectively), ETH won three out of six (1.06x), and MSTR won two out of five (0.64x).
Candidate assets frequently outperform during market heat, but their amplification effect during Bitcoin pullbacks is more stable than during rallies. MARA fell harder than Bitcoin in eight out of nine drawdowns, while ETH, MSTR, RIOT, and CLSK did so in seven out of nine. SOL is the only candidate asset biased toward upside across multiple cycles, gaining 149% compared to Bitcoin’s 102%.
As noted earlier, Bitcoin is up approximately 47% from its June 30 low, falling short of the 50% threshold, meaning this bull leg remains tentative. To date, digital asset treasury-themed names have led the pack, with BMNR up 102.8% and MSTR up 90.1%, while CLSK, MARA, and RIOT have declined 14.2%, 19.6%, and 29.4%, respectively.
Ranking the candidates now. The rank correlation between ordering by upside beta multiplied by correlation versus ordering by upside minus downside capture rate is only -0.10; using a consistent two-year window drops it further to -0.67. HYPE ranks first by capture rate but eighth by beta-multiplied-correlation, with a correlation of just 0.37. MSTR and COIN rank last by capture rate because they amplify both directions equally, yet both maintain betas above 1 with correlations close to 0.8 and 0.7, respectively.
Okay, I lied; a third test is actually needed. The answer lies in beta stability, because the core debate is whether a given beta represents genuine Bitcoin exposure or merely noise. Over the past two years, five assets maintained a 180-day beta near or above 1 while correlating at least 0.7 with Bitcoin: SOL (beta > 1 on 100% of trading days, correlation 0.83), MSTR (100%, 0.80), BMNR (100%, 0.76), ETH (98%, 0.88), and COIN (89%, 0.72). MARA, CLSK, HYPE, and RIOT failed to meet the correlation threshold, recording 0.50, 0.41, 0.54, and 0.36, respectively.
This points to a clear winner… the answer is SOL.
SOL emerges as the most stable unleveraged Bitcoin amplifier in this universe. Over the past two years, it posted a 180-day beta above 1 on 100% of trading days, won four out of five complete bull legs with a median multiplier of 3.54x, showed a positive bootstrap capture rate differential (0.30 to 1.99), and secured a composite ranking of 2.0. ETH and COIN betas range between 1.2x and 1.35x, with Bitcoin explaining most of their volatility, but neither stands out in bull leg capture rates, and both bootstrap intervals hover near zero. The full scoreboard is below.
SOL’s leading position carries a downside skew, so I’ll make a case for ETH: it is the superior risk-adjusted choice. Over the past two years, no Bitcoin amplifier has outperformed Bitcoin itself on risk-adjusted returns, but among candidates, ETH exhibits the tightest correlation to Bitcoin and the highest Sharpe ratio.
So what is the key takeaway? If you want Bitcoin exposure, the best asset you can buy is Bitcoin itself.
On-chain infrastructure projects just experienced their best quarter ever, generating nearly $6 million in revenue. However, total industry revenue for the prior quarter was roughly $1.3 billion, meaning this slice accounts for only 0.45%.
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