career advice for people trying to break into crypto: - go to events, but skip the lines to talk to "top" folks. toly is a genuinely open and helpful dude, but he has 10,000 people in line to talk to him. instead find the "head of ___" person at the protocols you like. they have space to help you, are always on the lookout for talent, and you might actually be able to add value for them. - commit visibly to one ecosystem. @solana is the best place to do it, but even if you go elsewhere, double down. the industry is still tribal (for better or worse) and reputation compounds most when you stay put. - stop cold dming. mostly a waste of time. get warm intros. if you can't find a path to a warm intro, reconsider reaching out until you have one. - be the node in your city. run the meetup, host the dinner, start the group chat. organizers meet everyone by default. this is the singlest greatest "hack" to building your reputation, but no one does it because its time consuming, difficult, and has the potential for embarrassment if no one shows up. - pick a lane. the industry is finally big enough to reward specialists. go deep on a sector (be the tokenized fund expert) or a skill (be the incentive design person). "interested in crypto" is not a lane. - actually use the products. daily. most applicants have never touched the thing they want to work on, and it shows in the first five minutes. this should be obvious, but for some reason it is not. (obligatory shill: using @JupiterExchange is the best way to build up knowledge of multiple products at once) - proof of work beats resume, always. a dune dashboard, a tool, a teardown of a protocol's onboarding flow. one artifact that circulates does more than 100 applications. - hunt bounties and grant programs. @SuperteamEarn is the best on-ramp on solana. it pays you while you build the proof-of-work. - optimize for the team, not the token. every good team has a diaspora, and it hires. - ~1 hour a day on twitter drafting real replies. not "gm". showing up thoughtfully in other people's replies is the cheapest reputation you will ever buy. - get involved when it's quiet. bear markets are the best entry points. everyone else applies at the top. and obviously: join @superteam + talk to @SuperteamTalent

STOP IMPROVING PERFORMANCE!! many ppl have seriously told me this. “artificial scarcity will increase fees” we’re not listening. Solana is not here to make blockspace expensive. we’re here to eat finance

BREAKING: Morgan Stanley launches a Solana ETP, $MSOL, on NYSE Arca. Their first crypto ETP pulled $381M in months. SOL now sits inside a $14B product suite, staked, with every reward passed to investors.

🚨BREAKING: @Solana is set to increase its mainnet block compute limit by 66% in less than 24 hours, from 60M to 100M CUs, with SIMD-0286 scheduled to activate at the start of Epoch 1009.

Almost everything in crypto that failed the first time will eventually work sometime in the future. Bitcoin looked like it had failed many times in the past. The same will happen with NFTs, creator tokens, DAOs, gaming, TCRs, onchain reputation, rebase tokens, decentralized storage etc As time passes each of these ideas will make even more sense. I just think we’re still too early for many of them, and we don’t quite understand the need yet. But eventually it’ll make sense.

Open source for critical technology may just be the one thing that everyone - east and west - can agree on, both coming from selfish and competitive reasons yet landing on the same conclusion One way to understand why is: because open source means max distribution potential. And for those on the competitive shortlist, distribution wins over near term profits particularly in early stages of growth. I think this is applicable to our debates within blockchain from recent years (“users don’t care about decentralization”; “we prioritize commercial competitiveness over open source”) In the long term blockchain will also necessarily converge on open source, decentralization, global accessibility as well Where ideology becomes pragmatic strategy

I've been loudly pushing back on the corp-chain FUD that MEV makes permissionless networks un-useable for traditional fin'l tx's. My article in @traders_tweets today lays out the full rebuttal. Open networks have won out every time; they'll win again now.

"openness may be one of the most important paths to AI safety and security" — @a16z, @bfl_ai, @Box, @CrowdStrike, @Dell, @huggingface, @IBM, @linuxfoundation, @Meta, @Microsoft, @MistralAI, @mozilla, @nvidia, @PalantirTech, @perplexity_ai, @Replit, @ycombinator + more

.@calilyliu on what Solana set out to build from the very beginning: "The long-term value proposition has always been to be this financial infrastructure that everybody on the internet can use." "Some people forget that the title of the Bitcoin white paper is not digital gold. It's a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. And that's what Solana set out to build from the very beginning." "As the industry has moved into tokenized RWAs, the hero asset class is equities. And when you look at equities and what's happening on the internet, you've got 24/7 trading, billions of dollars of volume throughout the weekend, and sometimes we're even doing more volume on Solana than the NASDAQ is doing on a Monday."

I am pleased to announce that a memorandum of understanding has been signed between the Republic of Kazakhstan and Network School. Our new campus will become a haven for global techno-optimism, with expedited visas, streamlined redomiciliation, and active recruitment of talent.

The future is open source. We need to embrace it and get on with it. Imagine if America closed the door on open source. We would explicitly be forcing American companies to pay $26-56 per 1MM tokens for the same intelligence their adversaries/competitors around the world would pay $0.50-1 for. This is economically unsustainable unless AI is bullshit. If it’s the supposed through line of all future economic activity that we’ve been told it is, we can’t handicap America at such a meaningful cost disadvantage. This can also be viewed thru a military lens and not just a simple economic one as well. Letting our adversaries attack us for $0.50 per 1MM tokens while we spend $26-56 per 1MM tokens to defend ourselves is equally ruinous. It’s the Cold War Soviet collapse in reverse.

This is concerning. For the first time, a Chinese model Kimi K3 has taken #1# on the Frontend Code Arena and is scoring at or near the frontier on other benchmarks. Meanwhile America is tying itself in knots: politicians and bureaucrats are banning new data centers, piling on state regulations, and pushing for new federal agencies to pre-approve frontier models. This is how you lose the AI race. The rest of the world won’t play by our rules if we bog ourselves down. Permissionless innovation is how America won the internet and became the technological envy of the world. We can do it again with AI -- while addressing risks in a targeted way -- or we’ll watch our lead evaporate.