Whitney is one of the most talented founders I've ever met. Online dating is a brutal business. Whitney built Bumble from nothing, took it public, and came back to run it when it was struggling. That took real grit. It was way harder than it looked from the outside. I'm bullish on Bumble. @GuptaRK22 and John Hegeman are great operators, and the category needs to be reinvented with AI. Human connection matters more than ever, and I can't wait to see what they build together. Congrats @WhitWolfeHerd.

"Where do you make money in tokenization?" The core monopoly we're disrupting in crypto is ownership over the rails. Complete control over the rails gives banks a HUGE leg up over everything built on top of the rails. By moving finance onto rails that are owned by no one, suddenly it's possible to build massive global businesses subject to different rules than fin services. Want an example? Look no further than @Uniswap , which directly benefits from Robinhood's push into tokenized finance. How about @Morpho and @aave ? What do you think is going to happen exactly when $3T of stablecoins come onchain? The answer for who benefits (on a 2-3 year time horizon) of tokenization, are the tokens themselves.

ARK's Lorenzo Valente contrasts AI's funding frenzy with crypto teams bullied into buying back tokens instead of investing in growth "You have the AI venture market where literally investors are calling the startups and they're preempting rounds like a week after they raise to give them more money." "In crypto, we have 1 or 2-year-old startups that are saying, hey, the best way we can invest capital is just gonna be to buy back and burn our token." "Honestly, from the investment perspective, it's such a turn-off because basically you're telling me, we think we're the best. We think there's nowhere to grow. The best use of capital is just to buy back the token." "Obviously, we know that's not the real answer for a lot of these companies. But they're basically getting bullied into buybacks."

ARK Invest's Lorenzo Valente calls for founder-led signature upgrades over governance votes, as self-custody slowly dies "I'm not a cryptographer, and obviously, a lot has been said about ECDSA, which is kind of the elliptic curve cryptography that Bitcoin and Ethereum use." "Self custody is just a harder and harder sell in terms of the core crypto ethos. We've been having this thesis internally that self custody is slowly dying and I think this is just accelerating." "It's one of the core reasons DeFi is actually not growing, because we don't have anyone that's willing to self custody. We're waiting for the Robinhoods, the Coinbase, and other applications to actually onboard users." "The other thing that is scary is the solution to that, which is other sets of signatures. They're not well known. They're not well tested. People have very divergent opinions about it." "A lot of the L1s that we build, Ethereum and others, now they have an amount of governance. The miners. There's onchain votes. There's the users, the stakers." "This seems like a topic where you want founder mode. You want someone to say, we're gonna make this transition. We're gonna use these signatures, and we're gonna do this before mid next year." "My concern is a lot of these will get lost in governance and votes and stuff like that. And so that's also the part that is a bit scary."

ARK Invest's Lorenzo Valente says $ETH accruing billions is hard to imagine as L2s take the activity and fees "It's pretty clear that where we are today the value accrual is pretty broken. Imagining a world where Ethereum accrues several billions of dollars is just very, very hard to imagine, if not clearly impossible." "The base layer is used to store assets. Not much activity is happening at the base layer, so it's not producing a lot of fees." "And activity has been outsourced to these L2s. Mainly two L2s, it's Base and Robinhood. It's basically 5 to 7 L2s that have 99% of the activity. And those fees are not accruing to Ethereum." "Robinhood was making several millions of dollars a day and basically, Ethereum base layer was accruing $100." "Ethereum has this franchise model where, basically, it's scaling through franchises, really Base and Robinhood. You can think of it as a McDonald's franchise." "Growth is not happening anymore at the Ethereum layer 1."

Holy shit... A random Chinese company purchased CryptoBilis (the authorised Ledger reseller that issued the spy-implanted Ledgers) from its Malaysian ex-owner, then put him under a confidentiality agreement preventing him from disclosing the sale publicly. What a wild attack.

All in. Every time. Julia Garner and Anthony Boyle star as Caroline Ellison and Sam Bankman-Fried in this limited series about the love scorned prodigies behind the FTX scandal. The Altruists premieres November 19.