A few thoughts on ZCash (disclosure: Paradigm is an investor in ZEC and ZODL): - All blockchain ecosystems struggle with long-term funding, especially of public goods, and an inflation-funded developer fund is an elegant mechanism to do so. How this fund is allocated is a fair debate, and we should strive to improve it. But, we believe the dev fund is important, particularly in this age of AI cyber capabilities, rate of quantum progress, etc. - As ZCash grows in acceptance and adoption as a private complement to Bitcoin, we think pure coinvoting governance introduces unpredictability that could limit long-term trust as a monetary asset, and it is better for the project to combine coinvoting with other forms of governance.

We just launched gold and silver perpetuals in the US. And commodity derivatives are now our fastest-growing product. Markets started with grain and metals, expanded into rates, indices, and other financial assets, and are now expanding into information itself, pricing not just assets but outcomes about the future. Prediction markets ask questions with defined resolution: What will GDP be this quarter? Who will win tonight? Perps ask continuous questions, with no expiration: Where is gold going? Prediction markets, traditional futures, and perps are built on the same idea: match buyers and sellers, let them compete in an open market, and discover a price. Traders bring different information and beliefs, and that competition produces a price the rest of us can use as a signal. It’s part of a centuries long evolution toward markets as a general-purpose technology for pricing and managing uncertainty. Prediction markets are one frontier of this evolution. Commodity perps are another.

AI-soluble domains (cyber, math) now seem to be a dark forest where humming datacenters redeploy 10K agent swarms of compute toward the most worthy problems. Just knowing that a vulnerability exists or a math problem may be solvable is sufficient to attract such a swarm.

Tempo and @privy_io are launching a limited-time 7% Earn boost for eligible customers. Apply by Sept. 30 for a boosted rewards rate on the first $10M, plus no gas fees for 3 months. Supported vaults use @morpho infrastructure and @sentorahq curation.

Excited to share Wave 2 of Frontiers by @paradigm Speakers! Frontiers is our intense annual conference & hackathon for those beyond the edge in SF, Oct 12-14th 2026. - @johannes_hage of Prime Intellect - @_patrickogrady of Commonware - Sam Herring of Nous Research Apply to attend in the link below! Logistics: - Wave 1 of acceptances goes out today. - 2 weeks left for any new applications. - Merch and more sick videos to be announced. - 1 more super special speaker to be announced!

GPU World: A story competition from Neal Stephenson, Gwern, and me. The AI future is unevenly distributed. What would the world look like with AI broadly diffused, such as if we had one GPU per person? 1000-5000 words, fiction or non-fiction. $100K in total prizes.

Between wallets for agents with @link (and @privy), MPP, Tempo, MCP, Stripe CLI, Agentic Commerce Suite, sandboxes, OpenRouter, Metronome/metered billing, Radar and distillation/token fraud, it turns out that "the economic infrastructure for AI" implicates a lot. Pretty much every layer of the Stripe stack is changing, and it’s a very good time to join if you want to build high-scale software that facilitates the practical deployment of this new intelligence.