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Annie and I were heartbroken this morning to learn of the passing of Ray Gaesser. On Tuesday of this week, I had the privilege of sitting alongside Ray at a town hall in Southwest Iowa, talking about farming, the future of agriculture, and the challenges facing the people who make their living from the land. Ray was everything you hope an Iowan would will be: positive, hardworking, thoughtful, innovative, and deeply committed to leaving the land better than he found it. He spent his life not only farming, but serving as a tireless advocate for Iowa agriculture and the people who sustain it. It is difficult to comprehend that just days after sharing a conversation with him, he is gone. My heart and prayers are with Ray’s wife Elaine, Ray’s family, his friends, and the entire Southwest Iowa agricultural community. Iowa lost a great farmer and a good man today. I feel incredibly fortunate to have spent some of his final days listening to him and learning from him.

🚨 JUST IN: Mitch McConnell’s office has released a statement and PHOTO of the Senator sitting in his hospital bed confirming he will NOT be on the Senate floor anytime soon Hey McConnell: you do not OWN that Senate seat. If you can’t do your job, RESIGN. Kentuckians deserve their representation. And you’re not representing them. I’m sorry you’re in bad shape, but Kentuckians should not be burdened by your inability to do the job you were elected to do. — FULL STATEMENT FROM McCONNELL’S OFFICE: “To my fellow Kentuckians –    When you elected me to a seventh term and made me our Commonwealth’s longest serving Senator, you did so trusting that I’d keep showing up to fight for you every day. And over the past several weeks, Elaine and I have appreciated both your well wishes and your honest questions about what was keeping me away from the Senate.   You all know how folks of my generation often hesitate to share the vulnerability that comes with growing older. Even in the public eye, I feel that same instinct – I can’t help it.   But at the same time, I’ve had more than my share of experience with physical vulnerabilities. Surviving childhood polio meant spending my entire life with mobility challenges. They haven’t exactly gotten easier to manage with age. And last month, I took a fall which landed me in the hospital.   My doctors have confirmed that I didn’t break any bones or suffer a concussion. I didn’t have a heart attack or a stroke. I don’t have any tumors or hemorrhages. But I was briefly unconscious and was taken to the hospital. While receiving excellent care over the past several weeks, I’ve also had to deal with a mild case of pneumonia.   I can assure you that I’ve been a good patient. At my age, I tend to do what my doctors tell me to do. I’ve submitted to every test they can think of to help figure out what caused this incident. And I’m continuing to do everything they ask to speed my recovery. In fact, with signs of continued progress, I’ve been able to move from hospital care to a rehabilitation center where I’ll keep regaining my strength.   As much as it frustrates me, this process takes time. And on the advice of my doctors, I won’t be able to return to the Senate floor to vote quite yet. But rest assured that, in the meantime, I’m not taking a break from the Senate business that matters to you. I’ve been working closely with my legislative staff on current issues, and with my Kentucky team who help me provide timely constituent services across our Commonwealth. I’ve also been keeping in touch with my Senate colleagues on the appropriations process, midterm politics, and everything in between.   You’re right to expect your representatives to work hard for you. And part of my decision to retire at the end of my term this coming January was being honest about the demands of Senate work. But I still have unfinished business to complete on your behalf, and I have every intention of finishing the job you elected me to do.   I’ll keep working hard to get back on the Senate floor as soon as possible. And I’ll keep you posted on the progress of my recovery. Until then, I’m so grateful for your prayers and well wishes.

positions in new coins, and plans right now: i've seen this period of the market play out four times now, in four different cycles, and it's the same pattern (see screenshot for this annotated on a chart). -BTC rips off the lows, a new meta cements itself -clear winners emerge, and many coins pump nonstop for a week+ -majors range for a while, while longer term moving averages catch up -coins stop pumping 50% a day, and people's dopamine receptors are too fried to contextualize that majors need to go sideways for a bit, and the liquidity brakes are on momentarily -*(WE'RE HERE) instead of putting coins going sideways (or down 20-30%) into context of majors being rangebound (or also cooling slightly), they rotate into opportunistic scams, traps, and froth that occurs during this period of time. "there must be something wrong with my ideas about these bags!" -majors put in a leg higher (ie BTC pumps 5k on a good data release, whatever), and all the coins they were previously in hours-days ago rip 300% in a straight line tale as old as time not every single one of these will "make it" in terms of riding it all the way to the end of the bull run ~1 year+ from now, but this is the basket of "new stuff" i have right now, and feel pretty good about: new lindy launchpads that have great buyback/burns, and feel established: -stonk -pons new memefi/pair coins: -zcat (first consensus meme on the tl i've seen in years) -nudes -fatcoin -boner -spacehood -moo -ligma -knots (nanocap gamble. doesn't seem like a rug so far, unless the team is playing the long game and doing a really sophisticated one) on BTC's next leg up (to probably at least 84k, i'd imagine, with eth to 2700-2800, sol to probably 120), going to monitor these - if, on that move up, one of them is severely lagging, i'll probably look at cutting. right now, while btc is sideways/down, there's nearly zero signal if there's any coin you think i'm severely missing, let me know. as always, feel free to join or follow me on fomo, where i buy/post about new ones in real time in my 1k-100k challenge wallet

I want devolution to be a success. It would addresses many of the legitimacy challenges which central government faces, and done well would create much better incentives for growth. But I see four big risks which devolution advocates need to address: 1.Devolution expands the welfare state Pushing power down to regional government creates the scope for a fresh start on many problems, particularly incentives for economic growth. If local areas can see the benefits of infrastructure being built, because their government can retain some of those benefits locally, it will go a long way to creating goodwill for data centres, nuclear facilities and FDI. But they’re also a chance to start again on social policy. If areas have to pay for the constant expansion of the welfare state out of their own pockets, then they might think twice about it. My worry though is that if we design the system badly then it’ll just recreate all the worst tendencies of the centralised welfare state. Particularly if fiscal devolution isn’t set up so areas carry the consequences of financial mismanagement. Westminster has to be prepared to let parts of local government fail badly, and go through significant fiscal contractions, or the system will just create endless moral hazard. And in areas where that’s unrealistic, we shouldn’t be pursuing devolution. For example, funding social care locally out of council budgets has been a huge political failure, and there’s a strong consensus that it shouldn’t be the job of local government to finance care spending. Need is distributed relatively randomly throughout society, and it’s an area where the public have a strong sense that fairness is important. Because of this, my colleagues at Re:State have come up with an excellent alternative model for a prefunded social insurance system for social care, pooling risk at a national level. Social care is an example of where a local approach has failed, there are similar areas we should avoid devolving so we don’t just shifting a large welfare state to local areas to continue funding. 2.Devolution gets confused with redistribution. I expect that governments in the foreseeable future will want to do much more financial redistribution away from London to the regions. Not just to get “good growth in every postcode”, but to try to equalise or ‘level up’ economic opportunity across the regions in part by increasing transfers from London’s economy. Even doing this in isolation would be a mistake - the economy already has massive inter-regional transfers, though most are done through the NHS, welfare system and other public services rather than grants to local government. But even there, there is significant redistribution. Continuing the trend of taxing the South East more to pay for the rest of the country will deepen the divide politically. And it risks killing the growth engine of London so that it can no longer support the rest of the country even at current levels - London isn’t competing with Manchester and Glasgow for investment, but with Paris, New York and Tokyo - if it loses that race then we all lose out. But if more inter-regional redistribution is done in conjunction with a big devolution programme, then devolution will end up tarred with the same brush, and it will feel like ‘devolution for them but not for us’. 3.Devolution gets caught up in national efforts to improve local government Andy Burnham’s leadership has started with lots of moves to improve local government, but driven by Westminster. Policies like unilaterally capping bus fares, cutting business rates for some businesses, and committing to act on garish shop signage are all decisions about issues which should be made locally, not in Westminster. Burnham can’t go from being the Mayor of Manchester to the Mayor of Great Britain, he has to let other areas make decisions for themselves. That isn’t just a point about local legitimacy, though I think that’s does play a role. On lots of issues, we’ll make better decisions locally than nationally. Take Canada’s federal Housing Design Catalogue - the standardised housing designs made to smooth planning decisions at a national level are unattractive because they’re a compromise trying to have as wide an appeal as possible. If you make decisions about the built environment locally, they’re likely to be more tailored and thoughtful. 4.Devolution loses a cross-party consensus If some combination of issues 1-3 come about, many people may feel devolution has been a failed policy. But even if that doesn’t happen, and the outcomes are mixed, any of these scenarios and more seem likely to see the breakdown of the cross party consensus in favour of devolution. An increasingly patchy landscape of regions with strategic authorities and regions without them will make governance pretty tricky. Lots of areas don’t want a mayor. On balance I think they should all want one, and it’s worth trying to standardise the regional tier in the medium term. But imposing it against people’s will, particularly if it also seems to come with big costs, will likely mean the end of the strong cross-party consensus in favour of devolution that we’ve enjoyed for well over a decade. You can already see challenges between national and regional leaders that we didn’t used to have, for example the governments insistence that the retained income tax model for fiscal devolution can’t be used by conservative and reform mayors to give local rebates. More of these breakdowns along political lines seem likely in the future.

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗜 𝗧𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗸 𝗔𝗯𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘁 𝗜𝘀 𝗧𝗿𝘆𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗼 𝗕𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱 I've spent a lot of time looking at Abstract, and the more I understand how the different pieces fit together, the more I think there is a bigger idea behind it. If we zoom out a bit, the macro picture is actually pretty simple. Crypto has become extremely good at building infrastructure. The harder part has always been turning that infrastructure into something normal people actually want to use. For years, using crypto meant learning how wallets worked, keeping seed phrases safe, installing extensions, switching networks and figuring out which transaction you were supposed to sign. Abstract seems to be approaching that problem from the other direction. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗳𝗶𝗿𝘀𝘁 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗯𝗹𝗲𝗺 𝗶𝘀 𝗴𝗲𝘁𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝗻 AGW removes a lot of the friction that normally appears before someone even reaches an application. Email and social login. Passkeys. Account abstraction. A much simpler way to create and use an on-chain account without forcing a new user to understand crypto infrastructure first. For people who have been in crypto for years, these might sound like small improvements. For someone completely new, they can determine whether the first interaction feels natural or confusing. Mass adoption won't come just from making crypto interfaces easier. It happens when people can interact with on-chain products without constantly worrying about what's happening underneath. 𝗧𝗵𝗲𝗻 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗲𝘀 𝗱𝗶𝘀𝗰𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆 Removing friction from the wallet is only useful if there is something worth doing afterwards. This is one reason I find the Portal important. There are already countless applications being built on-chain. The problem isn't always availability. Sometimes it's simply knowing where to look. A user shouldn't need to arrive with a complete understanding of the ecosystem. They should be able to explore it. See what's available. Find something interesting. Move on to something else. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗻𝗴𝗲 𝗶𝘀 𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗹𝗼𝗰𝗸𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝗳𝗲𝗲𝗹 𝗹𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗹𝗶𝗸𝗲 𝗮 𝗯𝗹𝗼𝗰𝗸𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗶𝗻 The chain doesn't need to be the reason someone opens an application. The application itself should be enough. The blockchain simply needs to make the things happening underneath possible without constantly getting in the way. You still need the ownership, settlement and programmability that make on-chain applications interesting. But the user shouldn't have to think about every underlying mechanism just to use the product. Abstract seems to be pushing much of that complexity underneath the surface. 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱 𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗱𝗶𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗻𝘁 It's what happens when the wallet, account abstraction, discovery layer and applications are designed around the same user experience. A person can enter more easily. They can discover something without already knowing its name. They can interact without constantly thinking about networks and transaction mechanics. And if the experience is good enough, the technology underneath becomes almost invisible. As on-chain activity grows and more applications start competing for attention, discovery becomes increasingly important. The more useful experiences appear on Abstract, the more valuable the layer connecting users to those experiences becomes. That is probably the direction consumer crypto needs to take. Not asking everyone to become a crypto expert before they can use a crypto product. Building products that people can simply use, while the complicated parts happen underneath. If this trend continues, Abstract could grow alongside the maturation of consumer crypto itself. And I find that much more interesting than simply asking whether another blockchain can process more transactions. Today is XP day. What expectations do you have? @AbstractChain @Abstract_Eco @AbsTVx

2026, day 235 Good morning from Asia. ‘Iran’s Top Politicians Urge an End to the War’ (WSJ); ‘Tehran says US sanctions ‘declaration of war' on all nations’ (AJ); ‘Iran says any country joining new US sanctions would be ‘considered an enemy’’ (AFP); ‘Iranian hackers shut down UK power plant’ (Telegraph); ‘Iran grants permission for a number of Iraqi oil tankers to pass through Hormuz’ (Reuters); ‘Saudis Shuttle Oil North On Tankers To Evade Houthis’ (BBG); ‘Israel must stop Erdogan's military expansion before Turkey reaches its borders - opinion’ (JPost); ‘Katz says Israel directly warned 'highest levels' of Syrian regime before giving IDF green light to strike air base’ (ToI); ‘US envoy suggests Israeli strike in Syria was election ploy aimed at 'baiting' Turkey into clash’ (ToI); ‘Time to question Israel’s warnings of a new Sunni axis’ (Ynet); ‘On anniversary of gas attack, Syria asks to join anti-chemical weapons partnership’ (ToI); ‘Putin says Ukraine opened 'Pandora's box' with strikes on economic targets’ (Reuters); ‘Germany plans a €12B missile program to deter Putin’ (Politico); ‘Macron pledges air defence as 13 killed in Russia, Ukraine strikes’ (Euractiv); ‘Spain rejects Morocco's call for talks on Ceuta and Melilla sovereignty’ (Euronews); ‘Chinese research centre near MoD site is ‘enormous concern’, says ex-spy chief’ (Telegraph); ‘How Pacific nations walk a tightrope between Western security and Chinese trade’ (SCMP); ‘Mainland Chinese research ship spotted near Taiwan’s largest naval base’ (SCMP); ‘Why China may have little to lose as ‘weakened’ Trump seeks North Korea talks’ (SCMP); ‘North Korea says record-high Japan defense budget would risk ‘turmoil’’ (AFP); ‘China's rise lays bare the aging of the U.S.-Japan alliance’ (Nikkei Asia) - “Partnership approaching 75th year faces challenges in military capacity, strategic focus”; ‘Lula turns to Donald Trump as unlikely ally in Brazil’s clash with Marco Rubio’ (FT); ‘Hit by Trump tariffs, Quebec loses appetite for quick separation from Canada’ (Reuters); ‘U.S.-sanctioned ICC head warns against ‘demise of international rule of law’’ (AFP); In geoeconomics, ‘Global oil inventories on the decline again amid Hormuz stalemate’ (Nikkei Asia); ‘China's NewNew Shipping Line Pushes Deeper Into Arctic With First Murmansk Container Run’ (gCaptain); ‘Panama Canal Draught Restrictions Set to Add to Congestion Chaos’ (The Loadstar); ‘US Sanctions Fishing Fleet Accused of Shipping Cocaine to Mexico’ (BBG); ‘U.S. Imposes 50% Tariffs on Some Canadian Goods After Last-Ditch Talks Fail’ (WSJ); 'Mark Carney says Canada is now ‘at war’ with US over trade’ (FT); ‘Threat to Quebec's French language, identity key reason Carney ends trade talks with Trump’ (Montreal Gazette); ‘U.S. Economy Could Feel the Sting From Trade War With Canada’ (NYT); ‘Canada sets retaliatory tariffs in response to 50% U.S. levies as trade talks fail’ (WaPo); ‘As premiers rally behind Carney in trade dispute, Alberta’s Smith questions retaliation plan’ (Globe and Mail); ‘Things are about to get verrrrrry ugly: The pain will be felt on both sides of the border’ (National Post); ‘Nvidia Is Spending $6 Billion to Build a Powerful U.S. Alternative to Chinese AI’ (WSJ); In politics, ‘Rising data center backlash shakes up midterm races’ (The Hill); ‘Federal judge rules against Trump’s 75-country visa ban’ (The Hill); ‘Trump: I’ll be impeached if I lose the midterms’ (Telegraph) - “US president warns Republicans they will ‘lose everything’ if Democrats take control of Congress”; ‘Burnham to send ‘mansion tax police’ to assess home values’ (Telegraph); ‘Fedorov decries corruption in Defense Ministry, doubles down on calls for elections’ (Kyiv Independent); In markets, ‘Oil markets are tuning out Trump's "truths"’ (Axios); ‘The Bank of England is costing the taxpayer billions. It must stop’ (Telegraph)

Column: For the past month, on my commute, in the elevator and at birthday parties, I’ve been challenging myself to talk to strangers. I wondered: Would it actually feel good, or just awkward? For me, the payoff has been worth it.