Over the past year, many people I talk to have expressed worry about two topics: * Various aspects of the way the world is going: government control and surveillance, wars, corporate power and surveillance, tech enshittification / corposlop, social media becoming a memetic warzone, AI and how it interplays with all of the above... * The brute reality that Ethereum seems to be absent from meaningfully improving the lives of people subject to these things, even on the dimensions we deeply care about (eg. freedom, privacy, security of digital life, community self-organization) It is easy to bond over the first, to commiserate over the fact that beauty and good in the world seems to be receding and darkness advancing, and uncaring powerful people in high places are making this happen. But ultimately, it is easy to acknowledge problems, the hard thing is actually shining a light forward, coming up with a concrete plan that makes the situation better. The second has been weighing heavily on my mind, and on the minds of many of our brightest and most idealistic Ethereans. I personally never felt any upset or fear when political memecoins went on Solana, or various zero-sum gambling applications go on whatever 250 millisecond block chain strikes their fancy. But it *does* weigh on me that, through all of the various low-grade online memetic wars, international overreaches of corporate and government power, and other issues of the last few years, Ethereum has been playing a very limited role in making people's lives better. What *are* the liberating technologies? Starlink is the most obvious one. Locally-running open-weights LLMs are another. Signal is a third. Community Notes is a fourth, tackling the problem from a different angle. One response is to say "stop dreaming big, we need to hunker down and accept that finance is our lane and laser-focus on that". But this is ultimately hollow. Financial freedom and security is critical. But it seems obvious that, while adding a perfectly free and open and sovereign and debasement-proof financial system would fix some things, but it would leave the bulk of our deep worries about the world unaddressed. It's okay for individuals to laser-focus on finance, but we need to be part of some greater whole that has things to say about the other problems too. At the same time, Ethereum cannot fix the world. Ethereum is the "wrong-shaped tool" for that: beyond a certain point, "fixing the world" implies a form of power projection that is more like a centralized political entity than like a decentralized technology community. So what can we do? I think that we in Ethereum should conceptualize ourselves as being part of an ecosystem building "sanctuary technologies": free open-source technologies that let people live, work, talk to each other, manage risk and build wealth, and collaborate on shared goals, in a way that optimizes for robustness to outside pressures. The goal is not to remake the world in Ethereum's image, where all finance is disintermediated, all governance happens through DAOs, and everyone gets a blockchain-based UBI delivered straight to their social-recovery wallet. The goal is the opposite: it's de-totalization. It's to reduce the stakes of the war in heaven by preventing the winner from having total victory (ie. total control over other human beings), and preventing the loser from suffering total defeat. To create digital islands of stability in a chaotic era. To enable interdependence that cannot be weaponized. Ethereum's role is to create "digital space" where different entities can cooperate and interact. Communications channels enable interaction, but communication channels are not "space": they do not let you create single unique objects that canonically represent some social arrangement that changes over time. Money is one important example. Multisigs that can change their members, showing persistence exceeding that of any one person or one public key, are another. Various market and governance structures are a third. There are more. I think now is the time to double down, with greater clarity. Do not try to be Apple or Google, seeing crypto as a tech sector that enables efficiency or shininess. Instead, build our part of the sanctuary tech ecosystem - the "shared digital space with no owner" that enables both open finance and much more. More actively build toward a full-stack ecosystem: both upward to the wallet and application layer (incl AI as interface) and downward to the OS, hardware, even physical/bio security levels. Ultimately, tech is worthless without users. But look for users, both individual and institutional, for whom sanctuary tech is exactly the thing they need. Optimize payments, defi, decentralized social, and other applications precisely for those users, and those goals, which centralized tech will not serve. We have many allies, including many outside of "crypto". It's time we work together with an open mind and move forward.

Every chain feels like a different region, but FastBridge makes them feel connected. Where other bridges go from one place to another, FastBridge can go from multiple places to one, in one go! Move your assets across multiple chains in a single transaction👇

Change is easier to name after it already happened. What is harder is feeling it while it is still moving through daily life, before the old language has caught up to what is actually going on. That is where strength starts to matter. Not because someone decided it should, but because staying with change before it becomes obvious requires something real. Strength is being asked for in a time when the systems around life are still standing, but less and less able to carry what they were built to hold. They still shape daily life. They still hold influence. But they no longer truly serve the needs that created them. They remain anyway. A system can survive for decades while failing the exact needs that created it. That is the pressure underneath what is happening across the world right now. The arguments sound political on the surface, but the force driving them is more basic than ideology. Food. Sleep. Safety. The moment those three become unstable, the structure around them starts shaking too. The systems being used now were not created by accident. They solved real problems for a long time. They organized survival, distributed resources, created stability, and held societies together through periods where humanity still lived inside older limits. Humanity began pushing beyond those structures, and the same systems that once held life together started feeling like limits around it. The systems still speak the language of stability, but larger parts of life are experiencing them as limitation. Not because transcendence suddenly became a mass obsession. Not because the streets are filled with philosophers. Survival pressure reaches the body first. That is why the reactions happening across the world cannot be understood through slogans alone. What gets called populism is usually described as manipulation through ideas, as if large movements happen because a population suddenly gets captured by one philosophy. But underneath the language, the same pressure keeps returning. Something to eat. Somewhere to sleep. A sense of safety about tomorrow. Once those begin weakening, the emotional structure of society changes with them. That is the real force underneath the protests, the instability, the exhaustion, the anger. The argument on the surface is political. The mechanism underneath it is biological. The body reacts long before philosophy catches up. And that is why strength becomes one of the central questions of this period. Not strength as domination. Not strength as performance. Strength as the capacity to remain stable while old structures stop working the way they once did. Strength as the ability to face transition without collapsing into fear, ideology, or blind reaction. The deeper problem is not that humanity created systems. The deeper problem is that humanity is starting to outgrow them while still depending on them to survive. Philosophy becomes dangerous when it explains the world but never gives anyone a way to live. That is where the work has to become practical. Not practical in the shallow sense of turning every idea into a method, but practical in the sense that understanding has to touch action. It has to help life move without becoming another ideology. The point is not to force awareness onto everyone. That already becomes another form of pressure. It starts as consciousness, then becomes demand, then becomes the same old pattern wearing better language. The real task is not to make everyone speak the same language, walk the same path, or enter the same interior process. The real task is to build tools that return agency. That is where strength enters again. Strength is not something that arrives because the whole world finally understands the same thing. Strength has to be built. Made. Chosen into structure. It cannot wait for everyone else to walk the same road before it starts acting. That mistake happens easily when the path becomes personal. Once a certain kind of awareness starts opening, it is easy to imagine that the entire world must open in the same direction. But that assumption comes from being inside the path, not from seeing the whole. Music shows the mistake in a simple way. Some musicians treat one band as if it is the foundation of all real taste. If that band does not move someone, then the judgment comes fast. Maybe that listener does not understand music. Maybe there is no taste there. But that is absurd. Music can still be loved deeply without loving the thing someone else treats as essential. Consciousness work can fall into the same trap. The ones walking that road can start believing everyone else must wake up the same way for the world to change. But most of the world is not here to perform a consciousness process. Many are simply trying to live, eat, sleep, stay safe, and keep life from breaking. So the work cannot be to push everyone into awareness. The work is to translate philosophy into something usable without turning it into ideology. Ideology explains and gathers followers. Philosophy, when it becomes practical, should help create conditions where life can be ruled from within. An idea stays trapped inside philosophy until it can be touched. A board can be explained for hours. The surface, the ink, the chemistry behind why the marks disappear with water. All of that can be described intellectually. But the moment someone writes on the board, erases it with their own hand, and sees it happen directly, the relationship changes. The explanation arrives after contact. Movements can organize around ideas, symbols, language, identity, theory. Philosophy can also stay suspended above life if it never enters action. That is why philosophy cannot end in discussion. Words alone do not feed anyone, protect anyone, or give anyone a place to rest. The point of learning any of this is not to collect better concepts. The point is to turn understanding into action capable of addressing the three pressures that keep shaping human life underneath every ideology. Food. Safety. A place to sleep. Most of humanity is not waiting for a spiritual framework or a philosophical answer before the end of the month arrives. Most are trying to survive long enough to breathe. That is the ground every system eventually answers to whether it admits it or not. So the responsibility falls differently on the ones asking deeper questions. Not to force everyone into awareness. Not to hand out manuals telling everyone exactly what to do. The point is to awaken enough inner potential to build something real wherever that potential exists. Different places. Different projects. Different forms. But all rooted in the same movement from understanding into manifestation. History shows the same mechanism again and again. Revolutions are remembered through philosophers because philosophers later gave language to what happened. But the pressure underneath the movement usually began somewhere more immediate. Hunger moves faster than theory. The French Revolution did not begin because whole populations suddenly became intellectually devoted to republican philosophy. Bread disappeared. Survival pressure intensified. The body reached its limit first. Then philosophy entered the opening created by that pressure and helped shape a new structure afterward. That is the sequence history keeps revealing. Need arrives first. Theory comes later, once pressure has already opened a space where the old structure can no longer carry what life is asking from it. That is why awakening cannot remain internal only. Understanding has to become capable of building conditions where human beings can eat, rest, and feel safe again. Once those conditions stabilize, another kind of question finally becomes possible. Then philosophy stops being a luxury suspended above survival and becomes something life can actually reach toward. That brings the whole question back to strength. Because strength is still being imagined through the logic of conflict. Through resistance. Through opposition. Through the belief that change only happens when enough force gathers together against an enemy. That idea shaped civilizations for thousands of years. Entire societies were organized around territory, conquest, defense, survival through dominance. Unity became associated with war because survival depended on collective force. The stronger side won resources, protection, land, continuity. That logic stayed inside institutions long after the battles themselves changed form. It still shapes the imagination now. The phrase “unity creates strength” carries that older structure underneath it. A group gathers. An enemy appears. Pressure builds. Victory belongs to the strongest side. Even many movements trying to create change still unconsciously operate through that same architecture. But something stops working once reality begins changing faster than the structures built to contain it. Strength cannot continue meaning permanent combat against something outside. That model eventually traps everything inside reaction. Every movement needs an enemy to survive. Every identity needs opposition to hold itself together. Every system starts feeding on conflict because conflict becomes the source of coherence. Then the search for blame never ends. Another hidden group. Another controlling force. Another secret structure somewhere behind reality pulling the strings. The mind keeps looking for one thing to fight because the older idea of strength depends on having an opponent. But most of the systems shaping life now do not function through one hidden controller standing above everyone else. Power became structural long ago. Institutions, economies, governments, corporations, universities, media systems, political movements, cultural pressures. All of them interact and reinforce each other at different moments. There will always be individuals trying to gain influence or control, but reducing reality to one enemy keeps attention trapped in reaction when creation is the work being asked for. That is why blame cannot become the center of transformation. The moment all energy gets organized around fighting shadows, inner strength starts depending on the existence of an opponent. Then identity itself needs conflict in order to feel purpose. These times require another kind of strength. Not the strength of domination. Not the strength of the strongest male entering battle to conquer territory. Not the strength of permanent resistance. The old model can destroy structures, but it does not automatically know how to build new ones afterward. And that is the part becoming unavoidable now. No matter how much collapse, corruption, instability, or exhaustion becomes visible in the world, the real question remains the same. What can actually be built differently? What can sustain life differently? What can create food, rest, safety, and direction without reproducing the same structures again under new names? That work cannot come only from opposition. It has to come from inner stability strong enough to create without needing an enemy in order to move. The path turns inward before it turns outward, not as escape from the world, but because anything built externally without inner foundation eventually recreates the same patterns it tried to escape. That is where strength connects to power. Power outside and power inside are not the same movement. The older meaning of power was tied to mastery, ownership, authority over something beyond the self. To rule. To direct the destiny of others. That is still the structure behind political power, institutional power, governmental power. A population hands its will to someone else and trusts that structure to decide direction, protection, order, and future on its behalf. But that transfer happens more easily when inner strength is weak. The problem is not only that power concentrates outside. The deeper problem is that uncertainty inside makes external authority feel necessary. The less inner structure exists, the easier it becomes to search for someone else to hold direction together. That is why strength cannot mean aggression. Strength is construction. A structure becomes strong when all its parts hold together tightly enough that pressure cannot immediately break it apart. The image behind the word points toward solidity. Something difficult to move. A mountain. Stone bound by weight, pressure, and coherence. Yet real strength goes further than remaining unmoved. The same inner coherence that keeps a thing from breaking can also make action more precise and less scattered. It does not fight the mountain from every direction. It stands from one center long enough for what seemed fixed to begin shifting. This is why ancient civilizations built on elevated ground, surrounded by walls, towers, and fortresses. Not only for military defense. The fortress stood as a living image of stability. A place that held firm against chaos from the outside. A place from which danger could be seen in advance. A place where others could rest because something solid existed at the center. The same architecture exists inside a human being. Self knowledge starts building that fortress inside the being. The more disconnected someone becomes from inner history, inner structure, and inner understanding, the easier external forces begin shaping identity, decisions, reactions, and perception. That is why forgetting becomes dangerous. A human being disconnected from memory, history, and self understanding becomes easier to direct because nothing stable remains underneath the pressure. The center weakens. Then identity gets assembled externally through systems, trends, slogans, fears, distractions, and emotional reactions arriving from outside. Strength begins disappearing long before freedom disappears. And that is why education matters far beyond information alone. Knowledge by itself does not automatically create strength. Entire systems can produce enormous amounts of surface knowledge while avoiding the deeper process of helping someone know themselves. Facts can be memorized without ever constructing an inner foundation capable of standing on its own. But the moment self knowledge begins deepening, direction stops depending entirely on external authority. Inner power starts appearing because awareness begins organizing the structure from within instead of waiting for identity to be handed over from outside. That is the real meaning behind this movement toward strength. Not collective aggression against an enemy. Not building another ideology. Not replacing one ruler with another ruler. Real strength appears when the being becomes stable enough internally that power no longer has to be surrendered outward in exchange for direction. Ignorance hands power away. Self knowledge takes it back.

anybody who uses or learns agentic systems, SHOULD READ THIS the install order I run before any new agentic project: 1. PRIVACY: direnv + a real secrets manager install direnv, then plug it into your team's password manager (1Password CLI via op run, doppler, infisical, vault, pick one) what direnv does: loads per-folder environment variables when you cd in, unloads when you cd out. the real move is wiring it into your secrets manager so credentials NEVER live in plain text on disk what this stops: - API keys accidentally committed to git history, the most common AI agent breach pattern in 2026 - credentials leaking from one project into another through your shell history - shared .env files that one teammate quietly backs up to Dropbox - secrets that survive a laptop theft because they were sitting in /Users/you/projects the part nobody mentions: most "my agent got jailbroken" stories actually trace back to one credential the agent had access to that it shouldn't have. scope keys to projects, scope projects to folders, and the blast radius of any single compromise drops dramatically I shipped 2 agents with keys in .env files before switching. the day I plugged direnv into op run I stopped having that whole class of nightmare 2. TOKENS: litellm or portkey as your model proxy one URL that fronts every AI provider (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Mistral, local models). all your spend flows through one place what it saves you: - response caching keyed by prompt hash, cuts your bill 30-60% on repeat tasks - automatic fallback on rate limits (Sonnet hits a 429? falls to Opus, then GPT, then your local backup, no broken users) - per-feature and per-user budget caps, block the call before it costs $200 instead of auditing it after - model routing rules, cheap tasks to Haiku, expensive ones to Opus, never the wrong way - PII redaction before requests leave your network, security side benefit the part nobody mentions: every "$4k AI bill" story I've heard ends with "we didn't have a proxy in front." this is where you put guardrails around spend BEFORE the spend happens I built my own router for 2 weeks. it took 20 minutes to replace with litellm. I will be embarrassed about this forever 3. CONTEXT: uv + git commit on every passing eval install uv (the new Python package manager, 10-100x faster than pip+venv, by the Astral team behind ruff). then commit every time an eval suite PASSES, with the model version and pass rate in the commit message what this preserves: - exact dependency set via uv.lock, you always know which packages your agent was using, no nasty surprises from a quiet update - exact prompt + code state, you can reproduce any past run from a single git hash - exact model version paired to exact pass rate, a paper trail when prod breaks weeks later - one-command rollback to a known-working state when a refactor goes sideways - a compliance story, every prompt version tied to a model version in your commit log the security side: when something blows up in prod, you want to say "the prompt was version X, model was Sonnet 4.6.1, last eval pass rate was 94%." not "I think we deployed on Tuesday?" the first is an incident report. the second is a resignation letter I've lost more agents to "I changed 3 prompts in one session and broke something" than to any actual bug 4. VISIBILITY: mitmproxy in front of every LLM call it's basically a wiretap for your agent. install it, point your agent through it, and now you see every conversation your agent has with the model in real time what actually shows up: - every silent retry your SDK sneaks in when a call fails - the full prompt being sent (including any creds you accidentally embedded) - what the model returns BEFORE your code reacts to it - exact token cost per call, per tool, per loop iteration - responses that quietly trigger your code into doing something you didn't intend, this is where prompt injection lives the part nobody talks about: if a website your agent scraped slipped instructions into its data, mitmproxy is how you SEE the moment your agent decides to follow them. without this layer, you're trusting your agent did the right thing, not verifying I shipped 3 agents before adding this. I have no honest idea what they were doing in production 5. EVALS: inspect-ai (the framework the labs actually use) an eval framework is what tells you "this agent works" with numbers instead of vibes. inspect-ai is the one Anthropic, DeepMind, and the UK AI Safety Institute use for the eval reports you read in their papers. open source, MIT licensed what your homegrown version won't have: - run the same task across 5 different models and compare scores side by side - pre-built tests for risky agent behavior (lying, manipulating, misusing tools) - proper structure for evaluating tool-using agents, not just chat - repeatable scoring, the same input always gets graded the same way - reproducible eval seeds, so a flaky test is actually flaky and not just unlucky I wrote my own eval harness 4 times across 4 projects. threw it out 4 times if you ever want to say "my agent passes safety checks" out loud, the check has to come from a framework someone else can re-run. this is that framework the move that ties this together: keep a /lessons.md in every repo. every weird agent behavior, every edge case, every config change you find at 2am, write it down you will not remember it. you'll come back in 3 weeks and the lessons file is the only reason you still know what's going on lock these 5, keep the lessons file, your next agentic system takes 2 days instead of 2 months p.s. half of "AI agent" content online is people who've never run mitmproxy on their own loop. they don't actually know what their agent is doing. they're shipping demo videos. don't be that guy

BREAKING: If the Wall Street Journal’s sourcing holds, the UAE just became the most consequential actor in this war. Not the US. Not Iran. Not Israel. The UAE. Here is why this is the tweet of the day. Dubai has been Iran’s financial oxygen for forty years. Not metaphorically. Literally. Through every round of American sanctions, every UN resolution, every OFAC designation, every European bank exit from Iranian correspondent relationships, Dubai remained the one global financial center where Iranian money could move, convert, and access global trade. The shadow network operating through Dubai’s currency exchanges, free-zone shell companies, and gold trading houses is not a marginal phenomenon. It is Iran’s primary mechanism for converting oil revenues into usable foreign currency, for paying for weapons components, for funding proxy operations from Hezbollah to the Houthis to every other instrument of Iranian regional power. The US Treasury has spent twenty years trying to close it and has never fully succeeded because closing it required UAE cooperation that the UAE, for its own sovereign economic reasons, consistently declined to provide. The UAE is now, according to the Wall Street Journal, considering providing it. Understand what has changed. The UAE’s entire strategic calculus for forty years was based on a deliberate ambiguity. Dubai would not be a sanctions enforcer. It would be a neutral financial hub, a free port for global capital regardless of political origin, and in return it would receive the economic dynamism that comes from being the one place money can always go. That ambiguity was worth hundreds of billions of dollars in financial services revenue, real estate investment, and trade flows. It was also worth significant leverage over Tehran, which needed Dubai and therefore could not completely antagonize it. Iran fired 1,072 drones at the UAE in six days. Iranian missiles struck Dubai’s international air corridor. Iranian ordnance forced the closure of 70 percent of regional flights. Iranian attacks on the Fujairah bypass threatened the one infrastructure node that allows UAE oil to reach markets without transiting Hormuz. Iran did not merely attack a military ally of the United States. It attacked the economic infrastructure of the country that had been its financial lifeline. If the UAE freezes those assets, it is not a sanction. It is a severance. It is the moment when the country that kept Iran financially connected to the global economy for four decades decides that the relationship has a price, and that Iran has paid it. Every Iranian proxy operation, every weapons procurement, every foreign currency mechanism that runs through Dubai collapses simultaneously. Not because of American pressure. Because Iran made it politically impossible for Dubai to continue providing the service. The 1979 US asset freeze of $12 billion was a superpower’s financial declaration of war. This would be the financial declaration of war from the country that has been the last exit from financial isolation that Iran possessed. Tehran spent forty years cultivating Dubai. It spent six days destroying the reason Dubai would protect it. The invoice, again, has been delivered by Iran to itself.

The new ATF Forensic Crime Gun Intelligence Laboratory is purpose-built to transform how law enforcement investigates violent firearms crimes. As the first forensic laboratory to specialize in DNA recovery from fired cartridge cases, FCGIL combines advanced DNA collection and analysis with a high-throughput workflow. This enables rapid development of investigative leads from crime scene evidence and felon-in-possession cases, linking suspects through the national DNA database hits and connecting crimes even when different firearms are used. “This laboratory is a force multiplier for law enforcement,” said ATF Director Robert Cekada. “It brings together DNA, casing acquisitions into NIBIN, firearm examinations, serial number restoration, latent fingerprints, and intelligence support in one place, allowing us to move faster and provide investigators with the leads they need. Every hour matters in a violent crime investigation, and this facility helps close that gap and strengthens our ability to go after those who use firearms to harm our communities.” Learn more about ATF labs at #CrimeGunIntel#

For the last 3 years, I've been building @planepowers across geographies, constantly moving between Hyderabad and London. Today, Plane supports teams across aerospace, financial institutions, automobiles, retail, defense and large enterprises, helping millions of people move work forward inside their organizations. With that scale comes something heavier than growth. Responsibility. When your systems sit at the core of how organizations operate, you don't just ship features. You carry the weight of their progress. Over the last year, one thing became clear: A large part of that responsibility sits in the US. And I wasn't close enough. At the same time, the way Plane is being adopted is changing. Fast. Larger deployments. Deeper integrations. A shift toward agent-driven capabilities across the stack. The conversations are different now. The expectations are higher. The surface area is expanding faster than any of us anticipated. This phase demands proximity. To customers. To operators. To builders shaping how these systems evolve in real time. We're building Plane to be the coordinate system for how serious companies run their work, with humans and agents on the same plane. > One place where every team, every project, every outcome is plotted together. That mission belongs closest to the people we serve. So I made a decision. I've moved to San Francisco. Permanently. Not as an experiment, but as a commitment to be closer to the people who trust Plane to run their mission-critical systems, and to build the next phase of the company with more clarity, speed, and depth. The gap between idea and execution is collapsing. I want @planepowers to move at that speed. We're building from the US now: hosting gatherings, going deep with teams operating at the edge, and meeting the people defining what comes next. If you're one of them, I'd love to meet. P.S. A few frames of SF from my last few weeks. There's something about this city that makes you want to build. Couldn't capture the Karl yet!

“Hyperliquid”: The "Three" I’ve Finally Found After Years of Search Note: This article offers no investment advice or guidance, but pays tribute to the decentralized philosophy of Laozi and Satoshi Nakamoto. Three years ago, the crypto industry’s uncertainty was still validated by the high volatility of Bitcoin's price, and the DeFi summer driven by Ethereum had faded. When I opened the Tao Te Ching, the foundational scripture of the indigenous Chinese religion, Taoism. I found the power behind cryptocurrency, rooted in Eastern beliefs and philosophy, within the textual context from two thousand years ago.. The "decentralization" from Bitcoin's blockchain technology aligns perfectly with the Taoist ideas of "Wu Wei" and "Dao Fa Zi Ran" (governance through non-action) found in the Tao Te Ching. In 485 BCE, Laozi authored the Tao Te Ching, then left for the West, disappearing without a trace. In 2008 CE, Satoshi Nakamoto anonymously published the Bitcoin whitepaper, launching the first Bitcoin network the following year, eventually decentralizing its management to the community. Over two millennia, both figures disappeared after spreading their teachings, embodying the decentralization philosophy through their absence. The Tao Te Ching says: "By doing nothing, nothing is left undone." Satoshi Nakamoto says: "A truly peer-to-peer electronic cash system should allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without the need for a financial institution." This non-intervention aligns with the principles of Wu Wei, where Bitcoin’s market value has grown from zero to a $2 trillion asset over 15 years.The Bitcoin system operates through non-action, yet governs all without interference; it does what is uncontentious, yet nothing can challenge it. Subsequently, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) in smart contracts emerged, following the same 'non-intervention' approach as the Bitcoin system. Interestingly, their abbreviation, DAO, coincides with the pinyin of the Chinese word 'Dao,' embodying the brilliant essence of 'The Dao that can be told is not the eternal Dao.' The Tao Te Ching also says: "The Way (Dao) follows nature." Natural laws, including decentralization, cannot be altered by human will. Just like the running of wind, rain, thunder, and lightning, Bitcoin's system operates autonomously through its code, neither good nor bad. The Tao Te Ching says: "Dao produces one, one produces two, two produces three, and three produces all things." In cryptocurrency, "one" is Bitcoin, the decentralized "Dao" producing peer-to-peer blockchain technology. "Two" is Ethereum,the peer-to-peer blockchain technology has evolved into a decentralized application system with smart contract functionality, which is expected to develop into a global decentralized computing system in the future. But what is "three"? I once thought that stablecoins, represented by USDT and DAI, were 'the third' because they made cryptocurrency pricing and transactions simple and efficient, allowing everything to flourish. However, I overlooked the exchanges that facilitate the transactions themselves. To this day, exchanges are still dominated by centralized exchanges (CEX), led by Binance. Even during the DeFi summer, where various smart contracts surged with decentralized protocols, decentralized exchanges (DEXs) like Uniswap, driven by AMM (Automated Market Makers) liquidity, emerged. However, due to fragmented liquidity, high latency, slippage, and risks like Permit authorization, they have been limited in widespread adoption, and can only serve as supplements to centralized exchanges—providing liquidity and acting as hubs for some long-tail assets. Even with the V3 iteration moving towards concentrated liquidity, similar to an automated market-making strategy, it has improved liquidity and reduced slippage, but is still mainly used by DeFi enthusiasts, professional market makers, and traders. As of today, Uniswap's TVL (Total Value Locked) is only $6.37 billion, down over 30% from its peak of $10 billion in November 2021. Meanwhile, Binance’s TVL, as shown in the December 2023 Merkle proof of assets, exceeds $100 billion. In terms of volume, Uniswap’s daily volume is $3 billion, while Binance exceeds $100 billion. Whether in terms of TVL or volume, DEXs cannot compete with CEXs. The stagnation of DEX development has directly impacted the growth of decentralized protocols’ TVL, which is an inevitable result. As the development of DEXs falters, assets reliant on CEX trading are not being withdrawn to the blockchain, causing on-chain assets to stagnate (where asset prices rise but TVL declines). Fortunately, the situation is gradually reversing. Over four years of DeFi development, on-chain oracles have become increasingly stable, cross-chain interoperability is becoming more secure, and TPS (transactions per second) on Layer 1 and Layer 2 chains are rising, while ensuring security and decentralization. POS (Proof of Stake) validation is becoming more decentralized, with more native and mapped assets on-chain. Hardware wallets, such as AA wallets, have improved in usability and risk resilience, while infrastructure is becoming more robust. Decentralized protocols and applications are thriving, and the four-year development of smart contracts has cultivated a large user base for decentralized applications. As assets, applications, and users all move towards decentralization, yet the most important liquidity exchange scenarios remain centralized, this is far from truly decentralized. Then came HYPE (Hyperliquid), and it seemed that the 'third' I had been searching for all these years was confirmed and validated the moment I discovered it. The weight I had once placed on stablecoins has also shattered. The 'third' I had been pursuing, the one that could enable large-scale adoption, was always the DEX capable of achieving this—before HYPE appeared, DEXs were merely optional supplements. But after HYPE emerged, it introduced a high-performance EVM chain designed for financial transactions, a Layer 1 product component with low latency and high throughput, creating a DEX with an on-chain order book that rivals CEXs. It has been running smoothly for over a year and a half, even during peak trading periods, ensuring a low-latency, high-performance trading experience. Large-scale adoption has already been proven by time, and its zero-incident reputation has attracted a large number of real users. Even without token rewards or incentives, users, TVL, and volume have all continued to grow steadily. Before the mainnet launch, the TVL, based solely on USDC deposits, reached $1.2 billion. The project team is low-key, humble, and not greedy, focusing solely on the product itself, with no VC investment or promotional campaigns. Word-of-mouth and user referrals have been the only drivers. The token distribution (TGE) is entirely oriented towards benefiting real users. This style, almost akin to the original ethos of Bitcoin, is even more focused on user-centricity than Ethereum or Bitcoin itself. It can be foreseen that when HYPE's mainnet goes live, with native and mapped assets executing simultaneously, mainstream asset spot trading and perpetual futures with joint margin trading will be launched. TVL will quickly surpass $10 billion, triggering a positive flywheel effect. Both TVL and volume will surge, outpacing all others. A large number of market makers, professional investors, and users will bring their capital on-chain for long-term involvement. Centralized exchanges (CEXs), for strategic reasons, will be forced to inject liquidity and invest in their tokens to secure some degree of pricing power. A variety of decentralized protocols will flourish after the HYPE mainnet launch, including decentralized lending, stablecoins, staking, restaking, and RWA (Real World Assets) protocols. The entire DeFi market will benefit from the irreversible shift towards decentralized on-chain trading that HYPE will drive, particularly decentralized lending platforms like AAVE and stablecoin DEXs like CRV. As on-chain assets and transactions grow, lending derivatives and more frequent stablecoin swaps will follow. For other DEXs of similar types, such as DYDX, unless they find a differentiated path to evolve their products, their TVL and volume will be continually suppressed until they collapse. Uniswap, as an AMM-based market maker for spot trading, will initially benefit, but as HYPE's spot trading area improves, its growth will be hindered. However, AMM liquidity will still have a long-term market position as supplementary liquidity for order books and a venue for long-tail asset trading. The biggest beneficiaries will be AI. The number of trading strategy AI models will rapidly increase alongside HYPE's growth. Various types of AI will be able to freely trade with different strategies on HYPE without worrying about CEX asset freezes or withdrawal issues. At present, some users may mock the idea of HYPE becoming the Binance of the blockchain as a joke. However, years from now, they will only remember that Binance was the off-chain HYPE. The deconstruction of CEXs and the reconstruction of DEXs is quietly taking place in this winter. There is no longer the brilliance of DeFi's Summer, only the quiet beauty of CEXs, which are now being stared down by death. If my judgment is wrong, it will only be because HYPE has failed to fulfill its mission as a DEX. However, in the future, there will be one or even multiple 'HYPEs' that will carry on this vision and complete the irreversible revolution in the cryptocurrency era. And I, too, will eventually find the missing 'third' in the crypto faith that has been absent for so many years—the 'three' that gives birth to all things. @HyperliquidX @HyperFND @chameleon_jeff

Creators and project teams today actually own a lot of assets. But most of these assets are only usage rights granted by platforms. Xiaohongshu, Douyin, TikTok, X, YouTube, Claude, OpenAI, Notion, Google Drive, GitHub, Discord. Accounts, followers, content libraries, historical interactions, recommendation weight, API access, payment channels. All of them live under someone else’s rules. TikTok’s official account safety page clearly includes processes for content removal, account bans, appeals, and data downloads. Anthropic’s transparency page also states that policy violations may lead to warnings, suspensions, or termination of access, and disclosed 1.45 million banned accounts in the second half of 2025. This is not a conspiracy theory. This is simply how platform governance works. People felt this less strongly in the past. That made sense. Back then, many people treated internet assets mainly as traffic tools. Losing an account hurt, but it did not always feel like a systemic loss of assets. That has changed. Content, customers, private communities, automated workflows, AI prompts, historical data, agent memory, community relationships, and brand credibility are all now stored online. The more assets accumulate online, the more damaging platform restrictions become. But this problem cannot be solved by a few on-chain platforms alone. Existing assets are already in a vulnerable state. People’s content, followers, transaction records, project reputation, and account weight have long been accumulated inside centralized platforms. Building a new decentralized platform usually does not solve the short-term problem, because users will not automatically migrate, and traffic will not automatically migrate either. A more realistic way to look at this is to break it into four layers. First, the content itself can be made safer. Articles, source video files, images, creative assets, prompts, model outputs, workflows, user research, and community records can all be stored in self-controlled storage, backups, knowledge bases, Git, object storage, or decentralized storage. The goal is simple: if a platform deletes your post or bans your account, you still keep the original assets. Second, identity can be made safer. Account names, domains, wallet addresses, DIDs, email lists, websites, RSS, and newsletters can form an identity layer outside any single platform. Bluesky’s AT Protocol treats account portability as a core design goal, so users can migrate their account if a Personal Data Server fails or stops operating. Nostr also separates identity from any single server through public keys and relays. Third, the social graph can be made partially safer. Follow relationships, subscriptions, address books, community members, and customer lists can be backed up and synced across platforms. But this is much harder, because social relationships have strong network effects. People interact where their habits already are. Exporting the data does not mean the interaction can be exported with it. Fourth, distribution power is extremely hard to decentralize. TikTok’s For You feed, Xiaohongshu’s recommendation system, X timeline, YouTube recommendations, the App Store, and Google Search are all traffic allocation systems. They decide who gets seen. Web3 can preserve your content and identity, but it is very hard to replace the attention-distribution power of centralized recommendation systems. Many Web3 founders die from one illusion: believing that once data is on-chain, users will naturally show up. Reality is heavier than that. Founders have to accept the algorithmic power of TikTok, Xiaohongshu, YouTube, and other major platforms, and accept that social graphs are very hard to make effective across platforms. So the more realistic direction is not to replace every platform. It is to add an escape layer. Centralized platforms can remain the traffic entrance. Your own website, domain, newsletter, private community, content library, wallet identity, and on-chain records become the asset base. Platforms are used for acquisition. The base is used for accumulation. That way, even if one platform goes wrong, your core assets can still be migrated, reused, and redistributed. AI degradation follows a similar logic. Teams should not tie their core production system entirely to one model. A more resilient approach is to keep prompts, workflows, knowledge bases, code, agent configurations, evaluation standards, and historical outputs in places they control. Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, open-source models, and local models are all just execution layers. Models can change. Core assets and workflows should remain. So the practical strategy is not to fantasize about leaving centralized platforms. Wherever the traffic is, you keep using those platforms. But all core assets should gradually move away from dependency on any single platform. Content needs backups. Identity needs a primary entrance. Users need to be reachable again. Workflows need to be portable. AI production assets need to stay in your own hands. On-chain records should only be used for the most critical states that truly require verification. This is the realistic meaning of Agent Sovereignty. The narrative that AI has a soul, or that AI should own a wallet and make money by itself, is too far away and too likely to attract regulatory pressure. But if Agent Sovereignty means the portability and tamper-resistance of core states, such as memory, permissions, workflows, identity, reputation, and historical behavior records, then it becomes a real need. If a developer spends six months tuning a high-value agent, they absolutely cannot tolerate losing every prompt, output history, and memory because OpenAI or Claude triggers one risk-control action. At the execution level, there are still several traps to watch. First, frictionless experience is the default human preference. Adding an escape layer inevitably adds extra steps. In real life, most people strongly prefer frictionless experiences. If they can take business class on a high-speed train, they do not want to squeeze onto a bus. If they can log in with one click, they do not want to remember a seed phrase. Backups, cross-platform syncing, multisig, and maintaining an on-chain identity are naturally against user behavior. An escape layer only works if the infrastructure becomes extremely smooth. If asset continuity requires creators or developers to spend one extra hour every day maintaining the base layer, the whole solution will collapse. Second, asset portability does not equal asset reusability. A Claude-optimized prompt may produce terrible results when moved to an open-source model. Agent memory accumulated on one platform, such as a JSON file, may not be directly readable by another platform at all. So storage and backup alone are not enough. Real infrastructure also needs to solve standards and formats. Otherwise, what gets exported is unreadable dead data, not live assets that can immediately return to production. Third, only people who have felt the pain are willing to pay. This logic is defensive by nature. Before a systemic crisis happens, ordinary creators and junior developers are unlikely to pay time or money for a probabilistic risk.

Recent thoughts: The Shift to Long-Horizon Tasks The most likely breakthrough this year will be in long-horizon tasks. We are moving toward a stage where Large Language Models (LLMs) learn to complete extended, complex missions by interacting with Agent environments. This is perhaps where the true value of LLMs lies. Take cybersecurity as an example: imagine a model that continuously hunts for software bugs and vulnerabilities. While it sounds like a search process, it’s actually the model learning the high-level intuition and methodology of a professional hacker. Unlike humans, AI can run 24/7 without fatigue. It could potentially find exploits at a much higher frequwill ency and claim bounties on platforms like HackerOne or BugCrowd. It sounds fun, but fundamentally, it's a revolution that displaces the hacker. If even hackers are being "disrupted," one can only imagine the impact on general programmers. From One-Person to None-Person Companies Building on long-horizon capabilities, Autonomous Agent Systems (AAS) will inevitably become the next frontier. Last year, we were discussing the rise of the "One Person Company" (OPC). I didn't expect us to move so quickly toward the "None Person Company" (NPC). It’s an ironic twist—we might all end up as NPCs in this new ecosystem. Engineering the Impossible: Memory and Learning To realize the vision above, we must solve three technical pillars: Memory, Continual Learning, and Self-Judging. I used to think these would require massive paradigm shifts and years of research. However, the pressure from both the technical and application sides is so intense that we are seeing these capabilities emerge through ingenious engineering "tricks": Memory: Long context windows (1M+) and RAG have significantly bridged the gap. Continual Learning: While true continual learning remains difficult, the release cycles are shrinking. Global models are updated monthly; domestic models are catching up. If we reach weekly updates by next year, it will effectively function as continual learning. Self-Judging: This remains the most elusive, yet models like Opus 4.7 are already demonstrating early self-correction and judgment capabilities. The Self-Evolving Endgame The most difficult—and most promising—path is Self-Evolution. The current wave is incredibly fierce. I suspect that models like Claude may have already achieved a baseline for self-training: writing their own code, cleaning their own data, generating synthetic data, and then training on it. It might "waste" some compute, but it saves the most precious resources: human labor and time. In the LLM era, speed is everything. Rapid iteration is what creates the cognitive gap between leaders and followers. Claude’s rumored 2-million-chip cluster for next year is likely dedicated to exactly this: autonomous model self-training. Technical Summary: 1M Context: Necessary baseline. Memory & Continual Learning: Prerequisites, likely solved first via "tricky" engineering. Harnessing Environments: The breakthrough point. Self-Judging: The tipping point. Full Self-Training: The endgame. Redefining AGI and the Industry If this is the road to AGI, then AGI’s definition should be the sum of all human collective intelligence, not just an individual’s intelligence. It must possess the creative capacity to produce something as profound as the "Theory of Relativity"—meeting the bar set by Hassabis. During this transition, every APP will need to be reconstructed as AI-native. In fact, we might move past the concept of APPs entirely. The most significant challenge will be the reconstruction of the operating system itself. In the future, you won’t see a traditional desktop; you will see an LLM OS, where applications are "generated on demand." This challenges the 80-year-old Von Neumann architecture and represents a total upheaval of the computer science industry. The Irreversible Wave From completing long-horizon tasks to fully autonomous operations, every sector—Security, Finance, Law, E-commerce—will be reshaped. Many friends have reached out lately, asking how to transform their enterprises to keep pace with AI. But few truly realize that this irreversible process has already begun. As this massive technical wave hits, we must be prepared to act, but we must also start thinking seriously about how to regulate it.