code is easy to copy. accumulated operating knowledge is much harder. especially across two different domains.

how many people live better lives because of what you built?

tokenization is one of the least interesting things you can do with crypto more soon

never give up never back down embrace uncertainty be comfortable being uncomfortable get after it

I will be at @token2049, will you?

repositioning for the next 5 years

WoW 2024 post always early.

Crypto résumés are never normal. Coinbase’s first hire was a former lumberjack. weird past × current position = the sentence only you can say what’s yours?

(medical/wellness/education) + (blockchain) today is ZEC in 2020. but with AI factored in, maybe more like 2024.

the elephant in the room after CLARITY failed is that clarity was only part of the problem. what we really needed was certainty that the rules wouldn’t materially change again in a few years. builders can work with strict rules. investors can price strict rules. what’s much harder to price is volatility in the rules themselves. crypto builders have already experienced a smaller version of this with L2s. an ecosystem makes a vertical a priority, startups raise money and spend months/years building around it, then priorities shift. for the L2 it’s a roadmap change. for the startup it can be millions of dollars and years of runway you don’t get back. regulatory volatility creates the same problem at a much larger scale. when you invest in a startup you’re already underwriting product, execution, market and competition risk. now add something neither the founder nor investor controls: the possibility that the regulatory assumptions the company was built around materially change. you can’t diligence that away. you can only price it in. and that cost isn’t equal. a well funded company can hire more lawyers, restructure products and survive another regulatory cycle. a 6-person startup with 18 months of runway pays for the same change with time and survival probability. that’s where regulatory uncertainty becomes an investability problem. capital gets more expensive. fewer long-duration bets make sense. founders spend more runway adapting. and eventually jurisdiction itself becomes part of the investment decision. if another country offers a framework investors and builders believe will still exist five or ten years from now, building there isn’t some ideological statement. it’s reducing one variable from an already extremely risky bet. and that’s where this becomes a US competitiveness problem. the companies that define new industries don’t start as 10,000-person incumbents. they start as 5 people trying to survive long enough to become 50, then 500. where those first 5 people choose to build matters. because the engineers, capital, IP, suppliers and eventually entire ecosystems tend to form around the companies that survive. regulatory volatility doesn’t just determine whether capital enters crypto. it helps determine where the next generation of companies gets built. the companies America worries about losing tomorrow may simply never be started here today. clarity tells founders what they can build. certainty helps determine where they build it. we needed CLARITY for certainty, not just for clarity itself.

You will own nothing. You won’t be happy.

In the US, the crypto industry will be rewritten every few years for the next decade. Quality builders will leave the US because of this. Can’t build on sand. Remove all dependencies.

PASS CLARITY

Finally someone else speaks out! 💯

Not everything you build will work. Not every bet will pay off. Not every season will feel like progress. Keep learning, keep showing up, and keep building. The breakthrough is simply becoming the person who can make it through the setbacks without losing excitement.

the opportunities, possibilities, and ideas are endless right now…just about evaluating each of them against each other to decide what comes next.

power and control are consolidating in an effort to benefit, restrict access and opportunity and steer outcomes. open source and true decentralization must win.