@__comma__ | A new-paradigm crypto fund investing at the frontier of community, technology, culture, and capital.
DUMBO, NY
Joined August 2021
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Crypto's best businesses are cheap. And nobody owns them.
A memo to the skeptics from your friends @__comma__
CRYPTO'S APPLICATION LAYER: A FUNDAMENTAL ANALYSIS ⬇️
h/t @Blockworks @blockworksres for the data
Pretty closely aligned with my POV/how I'm positioned
Buy and Hold good coins, my thesis for the cycle. How I'm picking cryptomoneys and money making protocols. +plus my detailed thoughts on Ethereum & Solana
0:25 the dot-com crash
3:52 the '21 cycle vs now
6:13 this is a selective market
10:52 crypto money vs everything else
24:05 coins that make money
26:37 buy the good projects and wait
Devin Baker retweeted
you think you’re depressed because you possess awareness, yet that is the one thing you don’t possess. you attribute your melancholy to your depth, blindly subscribing to the “deep and troubled artist” motif and feeling better because of it. when will you realise that is a game of the devil? he’s duped you into believing that misery is a virtue. joy—he stripped you of it. joy—you don’t even know what that is. you think its food and sex and nicotine hits and matcha after-tastes. in truth it’s a human’s highest achievement and most essential birthright. when have you felt joy before? when have you felt deeply alive and connected with God? as a child? well no wonder. children are not merely happy little humans, they’re joyous angels traversing the earth cognisant of nothing but God. all is colourful. all is filled with light. remember: “truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” become child again. strip yourself of sin. become joyous.
Last week, BTC closed above its 50-week moving average for the first time in almost a year.
The last time it did this on the way up was March 2023.
Afterwards, held above the 50-week for 2.5 years.
BTC was +144% after 1 year, and +340% at its October 2025 peak.
The biggest takeaway from the last month:
Despite a bunch of bad news, crypto is rallying in the face of it all.
The CLARITY Act failed AND the Fed hiked 25 bps in September (rates are skyrocketing).
This is a VERY important signal - bear market over.
We are all ordinary heroes. Heroes are all around us.
Joseph Campbell (h/t @TheAnnaGat)
Many have written off crypto.
Almost everyone has written off its application layer.
My bet is that they will be proven badly wrong.
Crypto is a generational technology at its inflection point.
The most explosive investment opportunities are at its application layer.
App revenue is up 30x from last bear market. Prices are not.
A memo to the skeptics from our founder @devbakes.
Devin Baker retweeted
Blackrock excited about AI agents <> digital assets 👀
Our latest research paper explores the growing connection between AI and digital assets and explains why broad AI adoption may drive new demand, utility and applications across the digital asset economy. blackrock.com/us/individual/…
BOTH the crypto and AI trades will work in tandem over the long term
Frontier tech wins
Both crypto and AI are frontier tech
They need each other
"If we were to drop four of the formative founding fathers into today's culture (let's say George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Ben Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson, and maybe let's throw John Adams in there too), what would they say we should do to improve the parts of our political, cultural, and economic systems, frankly, today that aren't working as well as they should be? A lot of people are talking about how things are broken but we're having trouble finding a solution. Assume that we read them in on all the technology and that they're up to speed in our current technological and cultural context give me a summary as well on what they would agree on. Treat them as a board and they have to come to a consensus and a combined recommendation or recommendations. What would they say?"
ON SOVEREIGNTY
> The vast majority of the world will run on non-frontier intelligence. This market is larger than the market for frontier intelligence in the long-run and is the one with the overall greater impact on humanity. Yes, it does come downstream of the frontier intelligence push, so let me reiterate that frontier (and based on my assumptions, closed) AI matters. So a very important question that’s not getting enough airtime in my mind is what the landscape for the rest of non-frontier intelligence looks like.
> Is this world also owned by the closed labs? A key question to answer that in my mind is this: will the far vaster, far more varied and diverse universe that comprises non-frontier intelligence demand care about the same things as those demanding the frontier-est of frontier intelligence? Or are there needs that are left unaddressed by the frontier labs - needs that, if addressed, would capture demand not currently served by the frontier labs, and perhaps even pull current frontier lab customers away to a solution that addresses those other needs? My answer is yes.
> Chief among those, in my mind, are the values that I mentioned above. Sovereignty. Freedom, ownership, choice. For sake of length, I’ll save the philosophical arguments. Just look to any political, economic, or technological debate in our history. Nay - don’t look at the arguments - just look at how our systems have evolved. In each case, the technology arrived closed and controlled. But then, a more open, sovereign, freer version followed. It followed because people needed it, and people built it.
> The printing press broke the Church’s monopoly on written story and ideas. The PC broke the mainframe’s monopoly on computing. The internet broke the walled garden approaches to information networking. Gold, then Bitcoin broke the state’s monopoly on money. AI is following the same arc.
On the morality and intelligence vs. sovereignty axes of AI
MORALITY
> I stay out of morality debate. Technology advances regardless. Plus history shows that the feared catastrophe is almost never the one that arrives. The world is spectacularly more complex and dynamic than we often imagine, so our ability to play God is misguided and ineffectual.
> Relatedly, I fade P(doom). Nothing is zero risk. But looking through the lens of P(doom) deteriorates into cynicism and lost agency. Either do all you can to literally stop it completely (like some politicians), or work to steer it in the direction that you think matters. Through this lens, this is why I can at least respect the anti-AI politicians at some level, even if I strongly disagree with them. At least they aren’t simultaneously contradicting themselves by slamming their foot on the gas pedal while saying it’s going to kill all 8 billion humans.
> So, we choose to have a point of view on how the technology should best exist. And steer it there. We know the technology is present and continues advancing - the genie is out of the bottle. With that as a baseline, what underlying values matter to be champions of?
INTELLIGENCE VS. SOVEREIGNTY
> The frontier is centralized by nature. Breakthrough innovation happens with speed, leverage, and resources. I wager the frontier continues to be driven by focused, centralized, closed groups. An open, decentralized ecosystem is diffuse by nature, so I wager it’s unlikely to produce a frontier model.
> That’s fine, and in fact I welcome it. Closed, singular actors innovating is what has always driven humanity forward. But I welcome it only so long as the technology diffuses out to embody and represent other important values and principles - values and principles which round out the full set of choice for individuals and societies to act in the world to the full extent of their innate agency.
> So what are those values and principles that need to be championed to round out the proliferation of AI as a technology? What’s missing today - and increasingly, glaringly so? Sovereignty. Freedom, ownership, choice.
> The breathless conversation on AI since that fateful day in November 2022 when ChatGPT first launched has been focused on the level of intelligence. Collectively, it feels as though we have that covered. As in, the gravitational force in the field is pulling us all towards advancing the level of intelligence available. What we don’t yet have covered is a breathless conversation focused on the level of sovereignty of our intelligence. We need another gravitational force in the field that pulls us towards advancing the level of sovereignty in today’s instance of humanity’s-most-important-technology-ever (so far).
On the morality and intelligence vs. sovereignty axes of AI
MORALITY
> I stay out of morality debate. Technology advances regardless. Plus history shows that the feared catastrophe is almost never the one that arrives. The world is spectacularly more complex and dynamic than we often imagine, so our ability to play God is misguided and ineffectual.
> Relatedly, I fade P(doom). Nothing is zero risk. But looking through the lens of P(doom) deteriorates into cynicism and lost agency. Either do all you can to literally stop it completely (like some politicians), or work to steer it in the direction that you think matters. Through this lens, this is why I can at least respect the anti-AI politicians at some level, even if I strongly disagree with them. At least they aren’t simultaneously contradicting themselves by slamming their foot on the gas pedal while saying it’s going to kill all 8 billion humans.
> So, we choose to have a point of view on how the technology should best exist. And steer it there. We know the technology is present and continues advancing - the genie is out of the bottle. With that as a baseline, what underlying values matter to be champions of?
INTELLIGENCE VS. SOVEREIGNTY
> The frontier is centralized by nature. Breakthrough innovation happens with speed, leverage, and resources. I wager the frontier continues to be driven by focused, centralized, closed groups. An open, decentralized ecosystem is diffuse by nature, so I wager it’s unlikely to produce a frontier model.
> That’s fine, and in fact I welcome it. Closed, singular actors innovating is what has always driven humanity forward. But I welcome it only so long as the technology diffuses out to embody and represent other important values and principles - values and principles which round out the full set of choice for individuals and societies to act in the world to the full extent of their innate agency.
> So what are those values and principles that need to be championed to round out the proliferation of AI as a technology? What’s missing today - and increasingly, glaringly so? Sovereignty. Freedom, ownership, choice.
> The breathless conversation on AI since that fateful day in November 2022 when ChatGPT first launched has been focused on the level of intelligence. Collectively, it feels as though we have that covered. As in, the gravitational force in the field is pulling us all towards advancing the level of intelligence available. What we don’t yet have covered is a breathless conversation focused on the level of sovereignty of our intelligence. We need another gravitational force in the field that pulls us towards advancing the level of sovereignty in today’s instance of humanity’s-most-important-technology-ever (so far).
The philosopher-entrepreneur is the modern day philosopher-king
(Or philosopher-creator, or philosopher-artist...you get the point)
Devin Baker retweeted
Most tech giants in the 2000s built their infrastructure and product as one entangled unit. Amazon had the foresight to separate out AWS as an API layer, of which Amazon retail was the first of many users. Today, AWS generates more profit than all of Amazon's other business lines combined.
Hyperliquid is built with the same philosophy. Housing all of finance requires thoughtfully designed, open financial primitives. Each primitive should obey the Unix principle of "Do one thing and do it well." Talented builders then have the foundation to chain these together to create magical applications.
HyperCore borrowing is an example to highlight this philosophy in action.
Most other platforms implement portfolio margin by marking an account's collateral to market value with an LTV haircut, creating borrowed assets without an explicit lender. This system is simpler to implement, but misses a golden opportunity for composability.
Hyperliquid instead begins with a borrow/lend protocol on HyperCore. Every borrowed asset is sourced from a supplier, so risk is isolated within the borrow/lend primitive instead of platform-wide. HyperCore's portfolio margin system is implemented as an orchestration layer that composes borrow/lend, with other primitives such as perps, spot, and outcome trading.
This decomposition has several nice corollaries:
1. Today's announcement of manual borrowing is not a new feature, but simply an extension of the underlying primitive. Borrowers on day one have access to 400M and growing of supplied liquidity.
2. Portfolio margin users earn interest on their idle stablecoin collateral. This is not a new feature, but a natural byproduct of composing trading with lending.
3. System safety is easier to reason about when perp and borrow/lend margining are independent.
In the same way that math theorems almost prove themselves when the right abstractions are defined, composable designs just feel right.
Manual borrows are live on Hyperliquid
Portfolio margin and manual borrows use the same underlying HyperCore infrastructure, with $269M in assets borrowed today.
Users can supply HYPE and BTC as collateral to borrow quote assets (USDC and USDT). Borrowed quote assets pay interest, and supplied quote assets earn interest, with rates set by utilization.
Devin Baker retweeted
>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