this California wealth tax thing is just incredible. so in October 2025, a California healthcare union proposed a "one time" 5% tax on any billionaire's wealth. the ballot measure will be voted on next month. In early December 2025, California announced that it would be a retroactive tax if passed, applying to anyone with CA residency as of Jan 1, 2026. The objective is to pay for Medi-Cal, California's incredibly dysfunctional healthcare system. (which also functions as a glorified welfare apparatus, but that's a discussion for another time). polls reveal that the CA electorate is split around 50/50 on the tax, but prediction markets only give Prop 40 a ~23% chance of passing (there are competing measures on the ballet that would nullify it). there are 200 billionaires in CA, worth collectively somewhere between $2.3 and $2.6 trillion. 5% of that is around $100b, accounting for a small amount of attrition. proponents of the tax forecasted a significant windfall, assuming only a 10% departure rate. supporters thought they were being clever with the retroactive concept. no billionares would leave CA in the few short months between the tax being proposed and the residency cutoff date, without the tax even having passed yet, right? well as it turns out, they did. a new paper [1] from two academics at Stanford called "The Net Present Value of the California Billionaire Tax Act", argues that not only did more billionaires leave due to the proposed tax than its proponents expected, but that the value of the tax, if it does pass, is actually negative. proponents of the tax only assumed 10% avoidance, that is, only 10% of the taxable base of targeted billionaires would leave CA within the very short Oct-Dec 2025 window. Jaros and Rauh, the Stanford academics, find that a lower bound of 28.6% of the taxable base managed to leave. just based on known departures, those departures total $577b in net worth, or $28.8b in potential tax lost. this of course does not capture everyone (many left without announcing their departure), so the authors normalize to departure rates estimated from other wealth tax events, and apply other discounts for litigation, arriving arrive at a figure of only $28-$36b in forecasted tax revenues. but this isn't all! all of the income taxes paid by the departed billionaires are also forsaken. the authors estimate that CA billionaires pay $3.3- 5.8b in annual income taxes. they assume a midpoint of $2b lost in annual collections from departed billionaires. the net present value of that lost income stream is -$68.9 billion. so when you add it all up you get: + $30b one-time tax windfall (estimated) - $69b in present value of lost future income taxes = - 38.9b overall net present value of the tax of course, this analysis is highly estimate driven. the authors simulate the parameters 100k times and find a negative NPV of the implemented tax 85 percent of the time. and if the tax doesn't pass, which it's not looking like it will, California still ended up losing at least $577b in departed net worth, and they have permanently poisoned the well with entrepreneurs who will now worry about future wealth taxes. [1]:

This is total nonsense. We're one of the largest early investors in Polymarket, and this story that Shayne was "caught red-handed" using company money is just a flat out garbage hit piece. Shayne wasn't taking a salary. He was 21 when he started Polymarket, he was living hand-to-mouth running the company out of his apartment, barely making ends meet when he was raising his seed round. We were his first term sheet and literally offered to loan him money personally, but he ended up not needing it when the seed round came together. After COVID and the crazy Biden-era crackdown on crypto that was happening at the time, there was a lot of chaos in almost every company in the industry. As an investor, we saw a lot of companies go through pandemic-era startup craziness, and Polymarket was no exception. But Shayne disclosed every dollar he spent, which turned out to annualize to about a software engineer's salary. That's including the flights, none of which were personal flights. Plus, SHAYNE STARTED the accounting and payback process, no one “found” it. In aggregate, it was nothing that an investor would balk at. He paid it back to the company in full, and then got on a normal salary like everyone else. It was an accounting problem, not an integrity problem. It was not a big deal. Polymarket has had growing pains, no doubt. It went from a small fledging startups to one of the most explosive consumer brands in America. But Shayne has leveled up alongside the company, and as investors we have total confidence in him. Enough of this stupid FUD. The end.

For 15 years I've marketed products to people. My new one is built for AI agents. I've joined @krakenfx to lead marketing for AI products, starting with Kraken CLI, which lets agents trade. I'm also working with @arjunsethi again after ten years, and I report to @kamobit, who was our growth advisor at @farmsteadapp. I spent three years at @askjoai building a personal AI agent, and I wasn't done with agents. My growth rule since @Yahoo has been "never ship without an experiment behind it," so I'm happy Kraken CLI has paper trading built in. Your agent tests a strategy against live prices, and when it works, "kraken paper buy" becomes "kraken order buy." If you live in terminal and film builds or trading breakdowns, I want to see what you'd make with Kraken CLI. Same goes for the influencer marketers and agencies behind them. I also want to hear from newsletters and communities that reach developers, AI builders, and crypto people. Want to join Kraken, solo or with your whole team? DM me. You can try Kraken CLI without an account:

$45,000,000,000 From $1B → $45B in volume in just one year. Accelerating tokenization by scaling xStocks across every front: 1,000+ assets, 150+ integrations, 110+ countries.

The worst housing market over the last decade is somewhere people would least expect. Manhattan. Values in New York County dropped by -11.9% from September 2016 to 2026, falling from 1.41M to 1.24M. Which is an astounding -51.2% drop in inflation-adjusted terms. Condo/co-op/townhome values inn Manhattan are now at record lows compared to incomes and rents. Making it one of the most undervalued housing markets in America, despite it's still expensive price tag. Values have actually started turning recently, up 3% YoY. Meaning it could be a good time to buy in NYC. Check the value trends for your county at:

Payward Co-CEO @arjunsethi sharing the @money2020 stage with speakers from @AlpacaHQ, @citsecurities and @solana talking tokenized equities, who gets access to markets and how adoption is growing worldwide.

Kraken co-CEO Arjun Sethi on why the exchange is buying a bank to give customers yield and loans "We've agreed to acquire a company called Saldo, which is the bank in Lithuania. We're still going to work with regulators and hopefully, knock on wood, we expect that to happen, closed out in 2027." "I think today a payments firm can park your money. It has safeguard. It's one for one in some cases. It can't pay you on it. And it can't lend against it. A bank can do both." "I always go back to first principle, which is collateral. What you want to be able to do for your customers with collateral is anything that a bank can do." "Lending against what you hold becomes really important for that collateral. Getting yield, as much yield as possible becomes important." "A lot of people ask, why are you doing these? It's because our customers have been asking for all of these products and services around banking and asset management." "A bank license in one EU country then can also passport to the other member states."

Kraken co-CEO Arjun Sethi calls going public in the US the slowest piece of financial plumbing left "Going public in the United States is expensive. It is the slowest piece of financial plumbing left." "I'm living it, and so are my portfolio companies." "What I've seen up close from the founder side, sitting on the boards of companies and investing in them is time. The process is measured in quarters and years, not weeks." "Audits, controls, filings, every number defined and then redefined and then restructured. Every metric then is argued over with people who have never run your business in any capacity." "Frankly, they learn more on your dime than they can give you advice for."

The most innovative DeFi Earn program in the market just launched another innovation. @krakenfx is introducing @Firelightfi onchain cover for the Kraken Protected Strategies USDC vault (formerly Boosted USDC), curated by @SentoraHQ: The vault ( has approximately $49.49 million in TVL, representing meaningful capital already deployed into DeFi strategies. And this is happening at an entirely different scale than most DeFi experiments. Kraken's broader DeFi Earn program has already crossed $902 million in TVL and 100,000 unique depositors, combining Sentora's strategies with Veda's infrastructure to bring onchain yields to BTC and USDC holders. To our knowledge, this is the first onchain cover integration into a major exchange Earn program. Kraken deserves tremendous credit for pioneering this. Making DeFi accessible to mainstream users is one achievement. Making institutional-grade protection part of the experience is another. Think about this like engineering a production system. Testing reduces the probability of failure. Recovery mechanisms address what happens after failure. Nobody would argue that good tests eliminate the need for recovery. Financial infrastructure should follow the same logic. Audits and risk management remain essential. But cover adds a different primitive: capital explicitly committed to absorbing defined failures. For Kraken Protected Strategies USDC, Firelight introduces three important capabilities: Adaptive protection: Coverage scope, price, and capacity are registered onchain and recalibrated every 30 days against the vault's composition and risk profile. Explicit coverage: Protection against six defined failure modes, including smart contract exploits, oracle failures, governance attacks, mechanism-driven bad debt and depegs, and protocol-related redemption failures. Continuous risk monitoring: Sentora's institutional risk infrastructure and Hypernative monitor the underlying exposures in real time. The architecture is particularly interesting. Firelight uses a shared pool of staked capital to back its protection programs. Stakers receive protocol emissions but accept potential slashing when covered events occur. When incidents happen, independent security specialists and Firelight's five-firm Risk Consortium validate the event against predefined coverage criteria. Confirmed claims result in programmatic onchain payouts to the applicable vault. Notice the combination: committed capital + continuous risk intelligence + independent validation + programmable settlement. This is not simply insurance attached to a yield product. It is an attempt to make protection a native component of DeFi infrastructure. The Kraken launch also represents our third insured vault, following Sentora's USD Protected Vault and Protected RWA Vaults. The mission of @Firelightfi is straightforward but ambitious: build the missing protection layer for onchain finance. For years, DeFi has focused on optimizing yield, liquidity, composability, and capital efficiency. Protection has remained fragmented, optional, and largely disconnected from the underlying financial products. That architecture needs to change. As DeFi evolves from an ecosystem of protocols into infrastructure powering exchanges, fintechs, and eventually autonomous financial agents, protection must evolve from something users purchase separately into something applications can integrate natively. Kraken is taking an important step in that direction. The next generation of DeFi won't just optimize how capital earns yield. It will fundamentally rethink how that capital is protected. More technical details in Firelight's official launch announcement:

bombshell report from the OCC out today confirming what we all suspected: between 2020 and 2025, based on a review of 100,000 complaints, America’s largest banks systematically denied banking to lawful businesses based on political and reputational considerations rather than objective financial risk, effectively appointing themselves arbiters of which industries deserved access to the financial system. digital assets was specifically named as one of the six most affected industries. TLDR: we weren't imagining it. OCP2.0 was real.

Thank you @POTUS, @SecScottBessent, and @USComptroller for your work to end unlawful debanking practices and protect Americans' financial freedom. No longer will Americans be punished for embracing financial innovation or denied access to the system for exercising their right to choose how they manage their money.

Under the direction of @POTUS and pursuant to his Executive Order, “Guaranteeing Fair Banking for All Americans,” the @USOCC today released our debanking report. With @SecScottBessent’s leadership, we are working to end politicized debanking. Access to banking should be based on financial risk, not political beliefs or whether a lawful industry is out of favor. Read our findings: