Announcing the 2026 Cosmos Lecture. Anthropic co-founder and Cosmos Founding Fellow @jackclarkSF will be speaking at Oxford on how to live a self-directed life in the AI age. Apply for tickets here:

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory will have the capability to alert scientists of minute changes in the night sky. This firehose of data is expected to transform our understanding of the cosmos, from asteroids to the death throes of exhausted stars.

There’s wonder above, below, and all around us. The salt flats of Bolivia blur the line between Earth and the cosmos. 🌍💫 #StepIntoWonder# #WelcomeToEarthSeries# is now streaming on @DisneyPlus and @hulu.

A Small Manifesto Against the Current @Zcash Bandwagon Zcash is a remarkable piece of cryptography, but cryptography isn't the bottleneck for crypto in 2026. Distribution, liquidity, and developer adoption are. And those are the exact dimensions on which Zcash is structurally disadvantaged. 1. Network effects work against single-purpose privacy chains Privacy is a network-effect product: the larger the anonymity set, the stronger the privacy guarantee. Zcash currently has ~30% of supply in shielded pools, and most activity moves in and out of the shielded layer rather than staying within it. A shielded pool with ~5M ZEC and a few thousand daily active users provides meaningfully less privacy than the same cryptographic primitives running on an L1 with 10M+ daily addresses. The math is brutal. If 100 people hide in a room, finding any individual is hard. If 100 million people hide in a room, it's impossible. Privacy coins concentrate users. Privacy features on general-purpose chains recruit them. 2. Liquidity and acceptance are non-negotiable A privacy coin that gets delisted from major exchanges, as Zcash repeatedly has across Japan, Korea, the UK, and parts of the EU, becomes harder to acquire, harder to exit, and harder to use at scale. Privacy tools built on Ethereum, Solana, or Base inherit the liquidity of the underlying chain. You don't have to choose between privacy and the ability to transact with the rest of the financial system. Zcash forces that choice. Nobody wants to make it. 3. People don't want private money. They want private applications Most people don't need to hide a $50 ZEC transfer. They need confidential business payments, private payroll, undisclosed treasury operations, sealed-bid auctions, private voting and confidential DeFi positions that don't leak through transaction graphs. None of these run on a privacy coin. They run on smart contract platforms with privacy primitives like @aztecnetwork on Ethereum, @AleoHQ as its own L1, @solana 's confidential transfers, @penumbrazone in the Cosmos ecosystem, FHE-based chains like @fhenix and ZK-rollups in general The future of privacy is programmable, not denominational. 4. The technology has been completely commoditized zk-SNARKs were Zcash's moat in 2016. By 2026, they're the foundation of every major L2, dozens of privacy systems, and most rollup architectures. The Zcash team did the foundational research, and then watched the IP escape. The chains that benefited most aren't paying rent to Zcash, and they never will. It's one of the cleanest examples in crypto of pioneering a technology and capturing none of the value. 5. Regulatory exposure cuts the wrong way Privacy coins occupy a uniquely vulnerable regulatory category. Privacy tools on general-purpose chains can be designed with selective disclosure, view keys for auditors, compliance hooks and they live inside chains regulators have already accepted as legitimate financial infrastructure. Zcash has built the same compliance tooling (view keys, selective disclosure protocols) but still carries the "privacy coin" label that triggers automatic delisting regardless of actual functionality. The technology isn't the problem. The category is. 6. The unit-of-account problem For privacy to matter for real economic activity, it has to be denominated in money people actually use, this is the biggest lesson in crypto over the past 5 years. Nobody pays salaries, settles invoices, or runs treasuries in ZEC. They use USD, EUR, USDC, USDT. Privacy that requires switching unit-of-account is privacy that won't be used at scale. The winning model is private stablecoins and private transfers of mainstream assets, which requires programmability Zcash structurally doesn't have and isn't on a path to building. 7. The "private Bitcoin" comparison is just stupid At the end of the day, Zcash only really competes with Bitcoin, except it doesn't, because the "private Bitcoin" framing falls apart on contact with reality. You don't get to slap "private" on as a feature and call yourself Bitcoin's successor when you don't have the liquidity, the decentralized robustness, the regulatory acceptance, the size, or the history. Bitcoin's hashrate is distributed across hundreds of pools and tens of thousands of independent miners globally. Zcash's hashrate is functionally controlled by a handful of pools running ASICs from a few Chinese manufacturers. Zcash inherited Bitcoin's consensus model with a fraction of Bitcoin's decentralization. And decentralization isn't a sliding scale where "more" earns you partial credit. It's binary. You're either close enough to Bitcoin to inherit the monetary properties that come with extreme decentralization, as Ethereum genuinely is, or you're not, and the "moneyness" argument doesn't apply to you at all. Ethereum and even Solana have an order of magnitude better chances of reaching Bitcoin's market cap than Zcash does. That's not a controversial claim. It's just looking at the data.

Multiple identities and cross-border capital operations Hu Xiaowei = Chen Xiaoer = Wu An Ming According to publicly available information Hu xiaowei first used the passport under the name Chen Xiao’er in 2017, before officially changing it to Wu An Ming by 2020. 1 HKE Holdings In September 2019, Hu Xiaowei, operating under the alias Chen Xiaoer, acquired approximately 75% of the Hong Kong–listed company HKE Holdings (stock code: 1726) through his British Virgin Islands–incorporated vehicle, Eagle Fortitude Limited. Following the acquisition, he assumed the roles of Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer. In 2020, Chen Xiaoer formally changed his name to Wu An Ming (Hu Yanming). In April 2021, he fully exited the investment by disposing of his entire shareholding. 2 Evergrande Property Services Group Separately, in August 2020, Hu—again using the alias Wu An Ming—invested via another BVI-registered entity, Future King Inc. (incorporated in February 2017), as a limited partner in Tisé Opportunity Fund I, managed by Zhang Yutao. Through this structure, he indirectly acquired a 1.194% stake in Evergrande Property Services Group prior to its public listing. Other strategic investors participating in the same financing round included funds and entities associated with major institutional players such as ： Sequoia Capital ChinaSCC Growth VI 2020 B, L.P.（「Sequoia Capital China Growth」）, CC Eagle Investments Limited（「CITIC Capital」）, YF Evergreat Property Limited（「Yunfeng Capital」）, Golden Fortune Holding Limited （「Tencent Holdings」）, Huatai Securities, and ABCI Global Opportunities SPC （「Agricultural Bank of China」） among others. 3 China Reserve Securities Through Future King Inc., Hu Xiaowei (Wu An Ming) is the beneficial owner of at least two Hong Kong-based asset management firms: China Reserve Securities Ltd, which is licensed by the Hong Kong Securities & Futures Commission, and Future Wing Financial Company Ltd. Records show Future King acquired China Reserve Securities in December 2018. 4 Nanomix Corp Through Future King Inc., Hu Xiaowei (Wu An Ming) has also been a stockholder in Nanomix Corp, a Nasdaq-listed medical company that markets tests to detect or monitor diseases. 5 Boyaa Interactive International Limited As of August 21, 2025, Hu Xiaowei—operating under the alias Wu An Ming (Hu Yanming)—held approximately 5.4% of Boyaa Interactive International Limited ( through a network of entities, including Future King Inc., Future Cosmos Limited, and Future Oasis Pte. Ltd. Boyaa Interactive, a HKEX–listed company founded by Dai Zhikang , is often described as a “lightweight MicroStrategy of Hong Kong equities,” reflecting its dual exposure to online gaming and cryptocurrency investments. The company currently holds more than $400 million in Bitcoin reserves. Dai Zhikang @Crossday was previously the boss of @DujunX , and was an early investor in ventures associated with @LeonHuobi , including both the original Huobi platform and @_BitfireGroup 6 HyalRoute Communication Group Through Future King Inc., Hu Xiaowei (Wu An Ming) has also been a shareholder in HyalRoute Communication Group Limited, a Singapore-based company that specializes in developing fiber optic networks. @BBCWorld @BBCBreaking @WSJ @business @nytimes @cnni @Reuters @Forbes @TIME @TheEconomist @UN @AP @washingtonpost @MarketWatch @WSJecon @FAANews @NTSB_Newsroom @FoxNews @FT @YahooFinance @SkyNews @NBCNews @thejusticedept @fincennews @ukhomeoffice @nca_uk @govuk @ica_singapore @govsingapore @MFAsg

in 1990 he convinced nasa to turn voyager 1 around and photograph earth from six billion kilometers away. our planet showed up as a single pixel... he called it the pale blue dot. he wrote that every saint, every sinner, every emperor, every farmer, every dreamer you have ever heard of had lived their whole life on that one piece of dust. before that, he chaired the committee that decided what humanity should send to anyone who might find us. two voyager spacecraft. one golden record on each. music from 27 cultures, 55 greetings, the sound of a kiss. ann druyan was on his team. while sagan was traveling, she quietly had her own brain waves and her own heart sounds recorded for the disc, while specifically thinking about being in love with him. they were not a couple yet. those neural patterns are now traveling through interstellar space at thirty-six thousand miles per hour. he and ann married soon after. she is still alive. in 1985 he testified before the us senate about the greenhouse effect. thirteen years before kyoto. forty years before any of it would be a normal thing to argue about. his peers in the national academy of sciences kept refusing to elect him. they thought making the universe legible to taxi drivers and the merely curious was beneath the profession. 500 million people across sixty countries watched cosmos. he was the most famous scientist on earth and the academy still said no. he never actually said billions and billions. that line was johnny carson doing him on the tonight show. december 20, 1996. pneumonia. age 62. ann was holding his hand. if voyager 1 is ever opened, the loudest signal on the disc is a woman thinking about him. what carl sagan moment first made the universe feel real to you?