We're excited to announce the founders and angels who have personally backed HertzFlow from its earliest days. Builders who share our vision, and who are helping us shape what comes next.🎲 📣Shoutout to: Cedric @eth_cedric — @flapdotsh Leo @Leozayaat — @42space Mirror Tang @mirrorzk — @zerobasezk Richard Liu @DrPayFi — @humafinance Ryan Li @ryanli — @Surfdeveloper Shane Qiu @shaneqiu — @BitwayOfficial Timon — @Raydium Wee Kee @everythingempty — @virtuals_io Winchman @Plus_Ultra_715 — @renaissxyz Xin Yan @realyanxin — @Sign Henry @henrybuild — @CetusProtocol Yisi Liu @yisiliu — @masknetwork And more to come. Step by step, together, we’re bringing the “Uniswap moment” to derivatives!⚡️

After a decade, the regulated ICO is coming. This is how crypto was always meant to work. Post-2017 ICO bubble, crypto VCs became a chimera. Venture capital is optimized for one asset, equity in a company. It wants board seats, ten-year fund cycles, and a terminal liquidity event. Token networks want the opposite: broad distribution and immediate liquidity, because the users ARE the network. The SAFE+token warrant, standard instrument of the past decade, was duct tape over a question neither side could answer: does value accrue to the equity or the token? Anyone who has signed one knows the answer was "we'll figure it out later." Every crypto cap table since 2017 sits on top of that deferred question. In the last few years, VCs heavily funded what the equity model could price, which meant the infras. Huge rounds, insane val, single-digit users. The things users demonstrably wanted were left to bootstrap themselves. The numbers have since settled the argument. In Q1 this year, global venture deployed a record $297 billion; AI took 81 percent of it. OpenAI raised more in one round than crypto venture deploys across multiple years. Meanwhile eight new crypto funds raised about $1.1 billion in Q1, the lowest formation since 2020. Only 150 investors participated in crypto rounds in July, the fewest since November 2020. Seed deals are down 88% from 2022. Capital did not fully leave crypto; it concentrated into the few categories where value accrual is legible. There, equity is clean and venture works as designed. What went extinct is the pretense that venture equity was ever the native funding primitive for token networks. Most of crypto is networks. The 2017 ICO era deserves its reputation. Most of those projects earned their deaths. However, a permissionless global sale that places tokens in users' hands remains the most effective capital coordination tool this industry has produced, because it delivers the one thing venture money structurally cannot: distribution. At last, the SEC is answering the question the industry deferred for a decade. Still a proposal, details will change, but the direction likely will not. Crypto is the most powerful global coordination machine ever built. Capital formation was always the native application. The law has finally caught up, and now we build the way we were supposed to from the start.

Remember when people wanted to back stablecoins with hedged bitcoin hashpower? ... kinda appalled to see the idea of "compute-backed stablecoins" floating around. Basically the same concept rebuilt with GPU-hours. Collateralize a rack of H100s, hedge the GPU-hour rate, mint against the "stabilized" revenue stream (somehow). Pitch deck even mentions hashprice.

42 isn't just a place to trade anymore 🪻 It's an ecosystem where everyone has a way in, and a way to win. Have a take? Post it. Following a market? Trade it. Whatever your way in, Tickets take you further.

The next ByteDance is a permissionless market Media didn't just change. Its objective function did. Distribution shifted from editorial curation to engagement maximization, and the two optimize for completely different things. More than half of Americans now get news from social platforms, and the feeds ranking that news are tuned to predict what holds attention, not what is true. LLMs make this worse: they personalize at near-zero marginal cost, so the diversity of inputs any one person sees collapses toward whatever their prior already rewards. The echo chamber isn't a failure. It's the equilibrium of any system that maximizes attention. Markets are the exception, because a price is the one signal in media that costs something to produce. A market weights each opinion by conviction, and punishes error in real time. That discipline is what turns dispersed, private, tacit knowledge into public. In a media of infinite mirrors, the market is the only output that has skin in the game. But demand for that signal is thin and lumpy. Activity follows a power law: a handful of elections and headline events absorb almost all volume, while the long tail of markets sits at near-zero open interest. Two distinct failures produce this. On the demand side, the right markets never reach the right users. Distribution can't match a question to the person who actually holds an edge on it. On the supply side, even when a market exists, no market maker can afford to price it. ByteDance didn't win on better content; it won by solving the matching problem for long-tail supply. An events market feed needs the same machinery. The asset being matched is different, but the economics are identical: a vast long tail of supply that is worthless until it finds its precise audience. The supply-side failure, though, is structural. The Conditional Token Framework is clean and composable, but it pushes price discovery onto external market makers and loss-bearing LPs. Unlike perps or spot tokens, where every participant shares one deep order book and liquidity nets across the whole venue, each prediction market is a bespoke, non-fungible risk that has to be subsidized on its own. So the marginal cost of opening a market doesn't fall as the platform grows; it stays roughly constant and high. That is the inverse of software economics, and it's the real reason liquidity bootstrapping never gets cheaper no matter how many markets launch. The long tail gets excluded precisely where its information value per dollar is highest. The future of media doesn't devolve into a glorified sportsbook for lack of interest; the cost structure selects for the sportsbook. Breaking that requires a core mechanism whose engagement is invariant to notional size, where a $100 market feels as alive as a $100 million one. Without innovation at the protocol layer, every new market pays the same toll. That's the problem we're solving at 42. We're building an events market protocol that's permissionless for all creators. Pairing a suite of liquidity-agnostic mechanisms with precise distribution so that consensus can form on any topic. Long-tail topics aren't niche. They're where most tacit, local knowledge lives, and they're where prediction markets have always been theoretically strongest and practically absent. Come build the next generation of media with us. Break free from the world of infinite mirrors.