>be me >discover effective altruism >apparently normal charity is inefficient >why donate to random sad thing when spreadsheet can tell you optimal sad thing >fair enough >buy mosquito nets >save lives >numbers look good >feel powerful >couple years later >someone asks an innocent question >why only count people alive today >huh >future people matter too >obviously >my grandchildren shouldn't matter less just because they haven't spawned yet >reasonable.jpg >keep following logic >what about their grandchildren >also yes >what about people in 500 years >sure >5000 years >why not >500 million years >starting to get weird but morality is morality >open calculator >humanity could survive for an astronomically long time >could colonize galaxy >could have trillions upon trillions of descendants >maybe digital people too >maybe simulated civilizations >maybe dyson spheres full of happy uploaded minds >calculator starts smoking >realize currently living humans are rounding error >8 billion people suddenly looking extremely beta >future contains potentially 10^something people >can't even fit beneficiaries in google sheets >new moral priority unlocked >protect the long-term future >stop thinking in units of "people helped" >start thinking in "fraction of cosmic endowment preserved" >malaria? >terrible >but only kills existing humans >AI extinction could delete the entire light cone >nuclear war could permanently derail civilization >bad institutions could lock in terrible values for ten million years >someone invents wrong constitution in 2140 >quadrillions suffer >better fund governance workshop now >friend says maybe we should improve hospitals >explain opportunity cost >friend says hospitals are full of actual sick people >explain scope sensitivity >friend stops inviting me to dinner >need to decide what to fund >easy >expected value >suppose project has one in a million chance of preventing extinction >sounds tiny >but extinction destroys 10^50 future lives >multiply >mother of god >$10 million project has expected value of several galaxies >charity evaluation complete >someone asks where the one-in-a-million number came from >expert judgement >which expert >us >how calibrated >extremely thoughtfully >reduce estimate to one in ten million to be conservative >still beats curing cancer by 38 orders of magnitude >epistemic robustness achieved >someone says maybe project doesn't work >assign 20% chance >still astronomical >maybe project makes problem worse >assign 5% chance >still astronomical >why 5 >because 30 felt pessimistic >publish 46-page report >contains seventeen sensitivity analyses >every sensitivity analysis begins after assuming intervention has positive sign >critic says you're multiplying enormous hypothetical stakes by extremely uncertain probabilities >yes >that's literally why it's important >critic says the uncertainty might be structural rather than numerical >make probability smaller >critic says no, I mean maybe your model is wrong >make probability smaller again >critic begins rubbing temples >discover AI safety >perfect longtermist cause >AI might kill everyone >or create utopia >or seize galaxy >or tile universe with paperclips >or create billions of conscious software minds >finally a problem with numbers big enough for me >start AI safety nonprofit >mission: prevent dangerous AI >hire smartest people available >smartest people immediately start building better AI to understand dangerous AI >interesting >we must understand capabilities to understand safety >we must scale models to study alignment >we must race ahead so less responsible actors don't get there first >we must deploy systems to learn how deployment can go wrong >we must build the thing quickly because building the thing quickly is dangerous >outsider asks why the people most worried about AI apocalypse all work at AI companies >complicated field >company releases stronger model >very concerned >company begins training even stronger model >extremely concerned >company raises $14 billion >concern reaches unprecedented levels >need to influence government >future is at stake >normal democratic process too slow >politicians don't understand exponential curves >public doesn't understand x-risk >experts must guide them >who counts as expert >people who understand x-risk >who understands x-risk >our friends >someone objects that this seems politically convenient >explain we're representing future generations >future generations unavailable for comment >develop concept of value lock-in >terrifying possibility that one ideology controls civilization forever >therefore extremely important that civilization adopts correct values before lock-in >whose values >let's circle back >begin with impartial morality >end with small group of people deciding what quadrillions of hypothetical beings would want >beautiful arc >meanwhile actual humans keep doing annoying things >voting wrong >having parochial attachments >loving family more than strangers >caring about local community >getting upset when told their suffering is cosmically negligible >evolutionary biases everywhere >explain that moral intuition cannot be trusted >except intuition that future digital people count >and intuition that extinction is uniquely bad >and intuition that our probability estimates are sane >and intuition that our institutional choices improve the future >those intuitions survived peer review >someone donates $5k to local homeless shelter >inefficient >could have funded 0.0000000000003% of an AI governance researcher >think of all the simulated people you just killed >okay maybe don't phrase it that way publicly >PR team says "future generations deserve a voice" >much better >journalist asks what longtermism means >say "future people matter" >everyone agrees >great >journalist asks what follows from that >well technically we should redirect enormous resources toward low-probability interventions affecting astronomical futures >journalist raises eyebrow >return to "future people matter" >motte has entered the chat >critic: of course future people matter >me: glad we agree >critic: I don't agree that your institute knows how to help them >me: why do you hate our grandchildren >eventually notice uncomfortable implication >if future value dominates everything >then helping people today mostly matters through effects on future >education matters because future institutions >health matters because future productivity >democracy matters because future trajectory >human beings slowly become instrumental variables in their own moral philosophy >see starving child >feel compassion >check spreadsheet >child's direct welfare contribution negligible >but perhaps childhood nutrition improves national institutional quality >compassion restored >tell myself this is impartial altruism >one day assistant asks obvious question >"how do you know your intervention actually improves the far future?" >silence >open spreadsheet >increase column width >add confidence interval >assistant asks again >"no, I mean how do you know the sign is positive?" >stare into cosmic light cone >10^50 people staring back >none of them exist >none of them can tell me >none of them can falsify my assumptions >realize I have invented the perfect constituency >infinitely important >completely silent >and always represented by me

Standard Chartered just initiated coverage of $SKY. Sky is "DeFi's federal bank." It issues USDS, sets the rules, and lends wholesale to on-chain agents that have already borrowed 5.9bn. The bank's call is 5x by 2028, and it hinges on yield-bearing stablecoins taking share of a market SCB sees hitting $2tn. That's the thesis $SDEV was built on. Full report coverage, including the risks: Disclosure: I'm CEO of $SDEV, which holds $SKY. SCB's view, not investment advice.

Earlier today, Geoff Kendrick, Global Head of Digital Asset Research at @StanChart, published his first research report on @SkyEcosystem. IMHO very cool to see another G-SIB who is paying significant attention to this space! The report describes the specialization of Sky’s agent model: capital provided at a wholesale rate to allocators operating across distinct markets and strategies, within defined parameters. From a capital markets perspective, this creates a modular structure for capital allocation. Individual agents can specialize by asset class, market or strategy, while the broader system retains a common source of capital and framework for risk (the Sky Atlas). As the balance sheet grows, expanding the investable universe doesn’t necessarily require centralizing the investment function; it can instead mean adding specialized sources of origination, execution and risk-taking around a common capital base. Additional reporting:

The first SKY burn is approaching. Under Stage 2, 5% of each month’s Net Protocol Surplus is allocated to buying SKY on the open market and permanently removing it from circulation. Once executed, it will establish a recurring link between protocol performance and reductions in SKY supply.

Total supplied cbBTC on SparkLend surpassed 4,000, up 49.8% over the past 30 days. cbBTC collateral backs $185M in stablecoin borrowing. Easy Borrow here:

The biggest risk in bringing traditional finance onchain is still the link between the offchain and onchain worlds. Nik Kunkel & Rune Christensen discuss attribution, operational trust, and the data infrastructure needed to make that link more resilient.

Sky Ecosystem Rewards give you another way to use USDS. Supply USDS to the module, and you can accrue tokens or points from independent Sky Agents and ecosystem partners. Different rewards. Different mechanics. Here’s how it works ↓

Institutions are not slow to come onchain because they don't want to. They are slow because checking us out is slow and expensive. Before a bank or a fintech touches anything, a room full of people has to work out what is real about a protocol. What is behind the asset, who values it, what happens in a liquidation or a worst case event. Then come the questionnaires, the committees, the attestations, the follow-ups to the follow-ups. Months of it, and it starts over with the next counterparty. All of that work exists to produce one thing: trust. Built by hand from scratch every time. If we want institutional adoption to move faster, we have to enable institutions to verify for themselves. That is what we are focused on at @SkyEcosystem. Open books, risk parameters in the open that move as the market moves, real time reporting. When a system becomes verifiable, that work doesn't get faster; it disappears entirely. Adoption accelerates the moment checking is cheaper than doubting. That's the standard we should be building toward.

USDS (and Dai), 2026 All stars (grove, spark, obex, osero), collateral ilks, and recursive holdings modeled. And all the dozens of downstream vaults holding USDS/sUSDS as well.

Still standing by every word of this. The update since April: $124m record quarter, back-to-back $100m+ quarters, five straight quarters of profit. $121m of ethereum:0x56072c95faa701256059aa122697b133aded9279 bought back in total. Real USDS demand, not rented. The market noticed even if people don't speak about it as much as they should: Out of top 50, SKY is a top 5 performer YTD (~+20%), green alongside names like hyperliquid:native and zcash:native Turns out you can run a good business onchain.

USDS staking rewards have returned to Sky! When staking SKY you can now choose if you want rewards in SKY or USDS. The rewards are entirely funded by protocol income Additionally permanent token burn funded with protocol income have also started

Excited to finally announce the closing of @grovedotfinance's first institutional warehouse lending facility in partnership with @galaxyhq for $500M, financing their origination of senior secured loans to institutional borrowers. This is what Grove Financing was built for: institutional scale capital for crypto and stablecoin native businesses, structured to fit the borrower's needs. Crypto native originators have a financing problem. Banks largely will not warehouse digital asset collateral, and most onchain capital is passive, fickle, and unstructured. Grove Financing closes that gap. Grove brings committed capital, bespoke structuring, and real credit underwriting to businesses the traditional system cannot serve. Warehouse facilities have funded mortgage and auto lenders for decades. We applied that model to Galaxy's book with the same discipline: BTC and ETH collateral including staked variants, qualified custody at Anchorage Digital and BitGo, fully funded, terms of two years or less, committed in USDS. At full deployment, this facility deepens a relationship that started with Grove anchoring $50M of Galaxy's tokenized crypto backed CLO. Structured to the originator's needs at every step. If you are building a crypto or stablecoin native business and need institutional scale capital from a partner that deeply understands onchain finance and credit structuring, @grovedotfinance is here for you.

Proud to have John on the team at Sky Frontier Foundation! Crypto is entering a new era of institutional adoption and John will help actually convert all that interest into actual integrations and adoption.