2026 has been a weird, sideways year for crypto. You would never know it from the self-celebratory BS on X. Self-celebration is a waste of time. It works for influencers, it doesn't work for building anything. Crypto has gone a long way since the last cycle. Crypto is already changing the world, more than our wildest dreams in some areas. But its most ambitious ideas in distributed consensus are still looking for PMF. Permissionless, immutable infrastructure struggles to find grip in its purest form. AI has made every risk bigger. And venture money keeps chasing the next shiny thing, with its usual high-school crush on the-next-'special'-founder-who-will-change-the-world-in-a-day. That shiny thing is now AI-everything. All of this reminded me what it means to be a founder and to build companies. Many of you are fellow founders. Others are founder glorifiers, or founder haters. Founding a company is awful. It hurts, it beats up your ego and tests your conviction. It is the loneliest job in the world: you have no peers, everybody envies you and nobody actually wants the job. You are the repository of the worst shit in the company. But founding a company is amazing. You shape the world with your ideas. Giving the middle finger to the status quo is the ultimate superpower in life. So here is the reminder I keep on my mirror, for me and for whoever needs it. I hope it's useful: (1) Excellence is the ability to endure pain - If you have not proven you can endure it, your ability to build great things exists only in your head. Train. (2) Consensus is usually vanity, not care for others. Truth is uncomfortable, and we owe it to others and to ourselves. Not everyone will love it. Fine. (3) Work-life balance is an illusion - Meaningful work bleeds into private life, and separating the two is artificial and unproductive. Work hard, rest hard. (4) Information should be shared - Always. Hierarchies are useful, and they still try to kill every company with politics. Whip politics into submission. (5) Leading is teaching - A business, like any social endeavor, must be permeated by its leaders' view of the world. If X is a lever to spread a vision and enact change, let's use it. If it is vanity for vanity's sake, our time is better spent elsewhere. Let's build. What's on your mirror?

Very interesting point that brings us back to one core theme in stablecoin-land we have all been struggling with lately: logical extension fallacy. While stablecoins have confirmed themselves as The Settlement Layer for offshore/ global/ fringe financial use cases, their adoption in the core financial markets is still entirely to be proven. Yes might happen, but it might take a huge amount of time for the old to die out. This is not new: while the improvements of a digitally-native substrate is unquestionable, the untangling cost from legacy finance is non negligible and things work kind of ok already in those places. If we consider "agentic financial actors" as another frontier of finance, the same applies: while it might well be the case that non-human actors might prefer more advanced forms of money for novel and uncovered use cases, it is a logical fallacy that they will prefer it for anything simply because the agents (and not the markets they operate in) are more technologically savvy.