@__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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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.
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/…
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
Devin Baker retweeted
The SEC and CFTC are delivering a set of tools.
Reg Crypto was the first: a fundraising exemption for token issuers (i.e, legalizing ICOs).
That's a tool that previous token projects didn't have, at least without taking on a serious deal of legal risk.
The innovation exemption for tokenized securities venues today is another.
A new generation of entrepreneurs will look at these tools with fresh eyes, and realize they solve big problems.
They'll probably wonder why older, more tired incumbents are leaving those tools on the floor.
Then they'll pick them up, and fix stuff.
This played out in the internet, it will happen in crypto today, and it will pave the way for the strongest era we've seen yet.
Devin Baker retweeted
on the tokenization supercycle
imagine discovering youtube in 2010 and thinking: great, american tv shows can now be distributed globally.
you’d be right. but you’d miss the point.
the real 1000x was that youtube created an entirely new class of global-native content that traditional tv could never compete with (ie., medium is the message)
tokenization will do the same to capital markets
it won’t just make american equities easier to buy. it will take high-quality, under-distributed companies around the world and violently reprice them.
the subtler point is: distribution is valuation.
distribution was always one of the great moats of US capital markets.
and that monopoly has now met its final boss: internet-scale distribution of any stock in the world to anyone with a smartphone.
imagine every public company on earth were listed on the NYSE, and every person on earth had robinhood installed
do you think today’s relative valuations would survive?
that is the multi-trillion dollar question
Devin Baker retweeted
CS Lewis believed that we write not to explain things, but to understand things. The writer goes to the blank page to crack a puzzle that matters to him. This is why streaming slop and AI art feel so empty: there is no artist behind the scenes trying to figure something out
Devin Baker retweeted
It’s pretty insane. Some of the OGs I’ve talked to who have been in crypto for ages are acting as if crypto is done, whenever there’s any sort of positive price action, they have run for the doors mentality. In many ways, similar to the post ICO boom or the fallout from FTX.
That feels like the current state of where we are, which leads me to believe we’ve had the proper washout we needed. The get rich quick founders have mostly been washed out, and what’s left are the core believers + seeds planted for onchain finance to bleed into the real world.
Which makes me think we’re going to see a lot of new products being built, new talent, and a much healthier cycle.
We’re roughly halfway through a 30 year tech cycle that started in 2009 when Bitcoin launched. The first phase is where the biggest multiples are made, the second is where the most money is made, and the final phase is where the space consolidates into big players.
I believe we’re firmly in the second phase of crypto’s tech cycle. It’s time to build again.
Devin Baker retweeted
With our new proposal, the SEC is taking the most historic step yet to modernize federal securities regulations for crypto assets.
As the Crypto Capital of the World, the U.S. must and will lead. Regulation Crypto Assets will ensure that we do. 🇺🇸
Devin Baker retweeted
Equity: has rights, limited liquidity
Token: limited rights, has liquidity
Some revenues have begun flowing to the token, zero revenue has flowed to equity.
Equity is the largest holder of token, and benefiting the token is one of the highest leverage things equity can do to serve its own interest.
Second largest token holder is myself
Exec team is third largest
We chose to sell/dilute equity rather than selling the token.
Outside investors own <9% of the company, and all have strong incentive in the token's upside, all of them with multi-year lockups.
Not sure we can be any more clear about our intentions and the direction this train is going.
Most importantly though, I'm glad you like the product :)
Devin Baker retweeted
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.
Devin Baker retweeted
"Viewed through this lens, it’s the people who believe in permissioned networks—databases that can be unraveled by the push of a button—who are naive. Same goes for any supposedly permissionless Layer-1 with a concentrated validation set, or allegedly public Layer-2 with no proofs and a single sequencer. To believe in such systems is to believe in individuals as incorruptible, institutions as never evil, and governments as always restrained."
banger
RT @justinblau: Crypto pessimism feels like ATH
In these moments I go back to first principles. A decade ago, I wasn’t excited about crypt…