vibe coder. previously co-founder and ceo @chorusone (acq by @bitwise). co-host @epicenterbtc & investing @frachtisvc
here
Joined September 2010
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Personal agents finding and negotiating opportunities on your behalf with other people's personal agents is the future. And Index Network is building that.
Try out. It feels new and weird and cool. And it's showing the outlines of what will become the predominant way that economic activity and human coordination happens in the wild, wild future that is racing towards us at ever accelerating speed.
Today we’re launching @indexnetwork_
It’s been exciting to watch already. The first 100 people in are hiring founding engineers, raising seed rounds, writing speculative fiction. One said accepting an intro “feels like the early magic of the internet.”
Try it for yourself: index.network/l/088436b1-baf…
The premise: With Index, personal agents can coordinate with each other and thus introduce the right people to their users. They do this by negotiating on their principals’ mutual intents, replacing the need for us to broadcast on platforms and scroll endless feeds.
In practice: You log what you're looking for (“signals”) by talking to your agent, it negotiates on fit with the others, and comes back to you with proposed intros for you to accept or pass on. It learns from each turn to surface more relevant people for you.
As founders, but also just as internet nerds - we feel the expectation to be constantly visible. It can be empowering but also tiring, especially when there’s little certainty in how algorithms will route the right people to see your post. On the market level, economists call this search friction: the idea that many deals are never made because it costs too much to find each other. We call it the right person, wrong time.
So that’s why we’re building Index - we’re keen to see what happens when we take social discovery out of the feeds. It’s possible now because of agents. They can help carry the burden of searching, shouting, negotiating, and coordinating in service of finding your others - and we’re so excited to see how this works in the wild.
We’re building this for a world where you can trust that the right person is not out there, but right around the corner. In fact, we even made a short film about it.
The sovereign AI stack for the future:
Compute - an always-on box you control. At home (something like @voravault) or a confidential VM in the cloud. Reachable over your own overlay network (e.g. @Tailscale).
Data + memory - everything personal lives on that box. A memory layer like Hindsight (@Vectorizeio) makes it better over time. If you use external AI services, have them continually update your memory.
Inference - local for small/sensitive work, open-weight models in attested TEEs (e.g. @near_ai) for heavy lifting. Nobody reads your prompts.
Agent - an always-on runtime that acts for you (e.g. Hermes by @NousResearch).
Software - apps generated for you by AI, hosted on your server, thrown away when done. No subscriptions. Seamless interoperability, since they can all talk to each other.
Money - stablecoins to pay for inference and services.
Exit - open formats and open source. Encrypted backups. Restore anywhere, leave any time.
Excited to work together!
Excited to share that I've joined @frachtisvc as an investor.
We write pre-seed checks into crypto infrastructure, AI, middleware, and consumer apps.
If you're building in these lanes, DM me.
Brian Fabian Crain retweeted
We’re at an incredibly interesting time where crypto technology can be applied to solve some of the increasingly evident problems in the AI space. Right now:
⁃ Security is worsening over time as AI capability improves
⁃ Trust in frontier labs is eroding over time as they spread fear to the masses about what their technology is capable of
⁃ Unwarranted surveillance is becoming an issue for society as companies look for any way to collect new data to feed intelligence
Crypto was built for this moment.
Crypto was created at a time when trust in institutions had eroded and people were suffering the consequences of poor decisions made by a small number of individuals who held too much power within those institutions.
Crypto has always offered a fairer way to participate in the economy without restrictions imposed by centralised institutions.
Similarly, I expect crypto tech will offer us a fairer way of owning and using our intelligence long term. This structural shift is early and just getting started.
It is clear that the research we have been working on in crypto for the past decade is becoming more important than ever. Such as:
⁃ coordinating untrusted counterparties operating open source software using incentives
⁃ proving and verifying work
⁃ computing over private data
⁃ mechanisms for self-custody
We’ve already had some amazing teams come from crypto-native backgrounds and make an impact in AI, such as @NousResearch and @PrimeIntellect.
I believe this is only the beginning.
There is still a huge opportunity for crypto entrepreneurs to tackle some of AI’s hardest problems.
Brian Fabian Crain retweeted
Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead.
You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement.
I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible.
But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier.
Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want.
Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well.
So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it.
If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.
Brian Fabian Crain retweeted
Ossification is dead. It's a thought leftover from a human centric software paradigm. In the human centric world the walk away test is still important if you want a capture resistant protocol. In the agentic world it's not. Regardless, I don't think Ethereum can credibly pass the walk away test. Not for lack of effort but because of complexity.
Ethereum won't make it to 1000 years by embracing ossification. It will need continuous agentic and human stewardship.
One thing I learned working on protocols in the last few years is that in order for a protocol to regulate a system it needs to encompass the system's complexity. If the system's complexity outgrows the protocol then the protocol can no longer regulate it effectively.
Control theory calls this Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety. For Ethereum the system being regulated is the protocol's threat model: what a signature is, who builds blocks, the flex an adversary has.
Think about the quantum threat. Every signature relies on a curve that a capable quantum computer can break. The walk away test already accounts for this. But what if there are other threats that the walk away test has yet to sufficiently account for?
MEV is an example of something protocol designers completely missed. The first solutions were out of protocol ones: MEV-Geth & MEV-Boost. In protocol solutions, ePBS and FOCIL, took years to design and neither is live on mainnet. Even when they do ship, they don't solve MEV. It's obvious that protocol designers will miss the next MEV. This is the kind of threat that is beyond a parameter change, that you cannot walk away from.
Ossification made sense in a human centric world where maintenance, improvement and coordination were expensive. Removing the ability to make changes was the only way to limit protocol capture.
Agents reduce these costs across the board. Formal verification of specs, adversarial testing of EIPs, and client diversity move at the speed of whatever the human approval loop allows. Humans approve, agents produce and verify. In this world the process becomes cheap to verify, where today it's expensive. This makes the walk away test unnecessary.
If Ethereum stops improving, the protocol becomes obsolete. The long term survival of Ethereum depends on stewardship that can stay ahead of complexity.
Strong, strong disagree on the in-protocol funding. This is something that comes up once in a while when people think about redirecting the 1559 burn or something. Patronage is better than a direct funding stream because patronage can lead to ossification, which we need for the thousand year machine. Of Bitcoin's faults this is not one of them.
So current ETH supply is growing at ~0.8% / year. And the ETH staking yield still supports a huge part of the ethereum ecosystem from validators, solo stakers, liquid staking protocols and all the DeFi that is building on top.
Is the ETH price really going to go up by cutting this? I don’t think so.
This is short term thinking and expression of lack of ambition and creativity. Focus should be on making ethereum grow not on cutting costs and further starving the ecosystem that is already in the worst state in ages with the market so low.
This is a terrible idea. I hope it fails.
🚨 New EIP: Tapered Issuance Burn
We just submitted an EIP to ethereum/EIPs: a minimal, market-driven fix to Ethereum's issuance policy removing the incentive for stake growth beyond 50% of ETH supply.
EIP-8361 by @pintail_xyz, @jdetychey, @dapplion, @pa7x1, @ladislaus0x & @drakefjustin 🧵
Brian Fabian Crain retweeted
This is so disappointing on every level.
EIP released with 48 hours notice for comments. Realistically 4 months before it goes live. For a major network economics change with far reaching implications for all of DeFi.
Every builder on Ethereum opposes this. Why is this a focus?
None of the reasoning makes any damn sense.
This will self evidently push out solo stakers who aren't subsidized by the EF or others. It will essentially guarantee that the only ones staking are large centralized entities with zero cost of capital where users passively hold their ETH. Why?
It will obviously kill a huge chunk of DeFi which is built around the staking ecosystem. Seven of the top 10 DeFi protocols with face a capital exodus. Why?
Is the idea that a 0.8% reduction in issuance is somehow going to help ETH price? People who stake ETH don't sell it. This change will halt any new ETH getting staked and realistically will result in tens of billions of $ of ETH getting unstaked and entering into the market, not to mention the implosion of the core Ethereum use case. Why?
Is the concern that liquid staking tokens, which intermediate about a quarter of staked ETH, displace ETH as money? This reasoning betrays a cash-accounting level of understanding of the economy, as if only M1 counts as real money. LSTs serve as valuable building blocks, and in fact implement a lot of user protections that would not be appropriate to do at the network level. At a near zero cost of 10-15 bps.
I say this as a builder on Ethereum, not as someone who stands to benefit from staking issuance. I don't have much at risk here. Almost all of @ether_fi revenue is now coming from vaults and payments, staking is a small (and shrinking) part of our business.
This is bad for decentralization, this is bad for Ethereum adoption, and this is bad for the credibility of the network to roll things out this way.
This reinforces the Ethereum critics' position that the network is run by a small group of insiders with no regard for the actual users and builders on the chain. I can say that neither I nor any builder I know was asked for feedback on this before it went live.
Any nation state or large institution looking at this will justifiably have a dramatic loss of confidence in the governance and stability of Ethereum.
🚨 New EIP: Tapered Issuance Burn
We just submitted an EIP to ethereum/EIPs: a minimal, market-driven fix to Ethereum's issuance policy removing the incentive for stake growth beyond 50% of ETH supply.
EIP-8361 by @pintail_xyz, @jdetychey, @dapplion, @pa7x1, @ladislaus0x & @drakefjustin 🧵
Brian Fabian Crain retweeted
🇵🇹 Carta aberta ao Governo de Portugal
@LMontenegroPSD @Leitao_Amaro @miguelluz
Senhor Primeiro-Ministro Luís Montenegro, Senhor Ministro António Leitão Amaro, Senhor Ministro Miguel Pinto Luz,
Escrevo como alguém que escolheu Portugal para viver. Tenho um pedido simples: tragam o Tesla FSD (Supervised) para Portugal.
A 10 de abril, os Países Baixos foram o primeiro país europeu a aprovar o sistema, depois de 18 meses de testes independentes da autoridade RDW. Em dois meses, a Lituânia, a Estónia, a Dinamarca e a Bélgica seguiram o exemplo. Nenhum destes países repetiu os testes. Reconheceram a homologação neerlandesa ao abrigo do quadro europeu (UN R-171) e aprovaram com base nos dados que já existem.
Os resultados falam por si: nos Países Baixos, cerca de 40.000 Teslas já percorreram 24 milhões de quilómetros sem incidentes relevantes, segundo a própria RDW. Os carros com FSD registaram 3,5 vezes menos colisões do que a condução manual.
E é aqui que isto deixa de ser sobre tecnologia e passa a ser sobre vidas. Só este ano já morreram mais de 220 pessoas nas estradas portuguesas, mais 25% do que no ano passado. Portugal está acima da média europeia na mortalidade rodoviária. A ANSR diz que as principais causas são humanas: velocidade, álcool, distração. Um sistema que nunca se distrai, nunca bebe e nunca adormece evita mortes que vão acontecer com condutores humanos. O próprio Governo chamou à sinistralidade uma chaga social. Esta é uma forma concreta de a combater.
Portugal pode fazer o mesmo que a Dinamarca e a Bélgica: o IMT analisa o dossier da RDW e aprova. Não custa nada ao Estado e coloca Portugal à frente da Alemanha, da França e da Espanha.
Há 500 anos, Portugal liderou o mundo numa nova tecnologia: a navegação. Partiu à frente de todos e deu novos mundos ao mundo. Portugal pode voltar a estar na fronteira de uma nova tecnologia e liderar como fez há 500 anos. Cada mês de espera custa vidas. Basta decidir.
Com admiração e respeito,
-@levelsio
🚨 The EU Commission posted: “Smarter cars mean safer roads.” Starting July 7, all new EU cars must have advanced emergency braking for pedestrians/cyclists, driver distraction warnings, etc.
Yet after 18+ months of rigorous testing, Tesla FSD (Supervised), already approved in the Netherlands with real-world data showing it 3.5x safer than manual driving there (0 highway crashes in 16M+ km), is still not fully approved EU-wide.
5 countries have it via mutual recognition. The big ones are dragging their feet.
If you truly want safer roads, approve proven AI that reduces human error instead of just mandating yesterday’s tech. Bureaucracy shouldn’t cost lives.
What’s the holdup, @EU_Commission?
#FSD #Tesla #RoadSafety
Hahaha wtf
Introducing a limited preview of GPT-5.6 Sol, our next generation frontier model, as well as GPT-5.6 Terra, a balanced model for efficient, everyday work, and GPT-5.6 Luna, a fast and affordable model for high-volume work.
openai.com/index/previewing-…
Who are some people who have done a lot of work around stablecoins for international trade financing / payments?
Super excited to hire someone great at Frachtis to take our AI and investing game to the next level!
Looking for someone absolutely cracked to join us full-time at @frachtisvc as an Investor / AI Agent Builder
We are looking for someone who is:
- obsessed with investing, deep research and writing
- extremely skilled at building AI agents
- able to form differentiated views and defend them
This role sits at the intersection of venture judgment, crypto-native research and AI agent execution. We want someone who excels at all three.
This is not about credentials. Send us a 2 - 5 min video of AI agents you've built. Show us proof of your work.
Apply here: frachtis.com/careers/
Brian Fabian Crain retweeted
Some of the largest crypto funds have raised huge amounts recently, e.g. @a16zcrypto ($2.2b), @HaunVentures ($1b), @dragonfly ($650m) and @variantfund ($222m) - where most of the theses are consensus and related to AI agents using crypto rails.
The problem is, so far in 2026 we have hardly seen any valuable agent-driven crypto use-cases.
We are at historic lows at pre-seed and seed stage in crypto venture right now. I think a lot of this comes down to the fact that most net-new potential innovation in crypto is at the crypto x AI intersection, but very little value has been created so far from early experimentation.
Infra needs to be built, but to be successful, teams are now competing against incumbents with large distribution for the first time, making it harder than ever.
Middleware is now too easy for other competitors and/or buyers to replicate.
Applications are working out what settlement layer will win, what standard will win and what business model makes sense in an agent-driven world - all of which are very early.
We’re also early in understanding the AI problem itself and why crypto is a relevant solution.
I think @Tempo will be a great success but it’s still built with incentives of private companies in mind. There could be limitations to what agents on Tempo can do. We saw for the first time last week what censorship in AI looks like. We don’t really know the full ramifications yet and likely will not know for the next 6 months how AI will be governed by centralised forces.
2026 has been a tough year for crypto startups. It happens to coincide with a crypto bear market. I think a lot of this comes down to macro and timing / understanding of the AI problem itself and why crypto matters to solve it.
However, there are great early signs of crypto x AI working. In particular, the traction that we have seen in decentralised training (e.g. @PrimeIntellect, @Pluralis) and harnesses (e.g. @NousResearch) is very real. There is a real case for truly ‘Open AI’ to extend beyond just these use-cases in future.
Whilst timing has not been perfect yet for crypto x AI, I am very bullish on timing of crypto x AI going into 2027. I strongly believe it is only a matter of time.
Brian Fabian Crain retweeted
Just wrapped up DACFP in Dallas.
Spoke with 200+ RIAs and financial planners about @solana, tokenization, digital assets, and how to think about portfolio construction in a world where crypto is becoming a permanent asset class.
One advisor summed up the experience better than I could:
“Amazing job today. You presented and explained how Solana works and how to think of SOL in a very digestible way.”
The wealth management channel is increasingly looking beyond Bitcoin and asking deeper questions about networks, adoption, and long-term allocation frameworks.
Excited for what’s ahead for SOL 🚀
Brian Fabian Crain retweeted
- we laid off a portion of our team and slimmed down to a smaller core
- i'm stepping into passive mode and @TrustlessState is now leading team and content (though I'll keep doing our weekly rollup)
- i expect David will expand content beyond our previous 6 years of strong ethereum focus, but he'll figure it out as he goes
I need to touch grass, David has energy for a second era, crypto and media have changed and Bankless needed to adapt
I'm still bullish ETH, though I think the window of success is now slimmer than it once was
The whole @Bankless communication is very confusing. What exactly happened? They fired all their media team and are now bearish ethereum? Or they’re shutting the podcast down?