Appreciate.
A man got fired from his job, was unemployed for 10 months, watched his savings crash 75%, and somehow built one of crypto's biggest exchanges.
> In July 2017, Siemens laid off Hayden Adams, a 24-year-old mechanical engineer.
> He had no software engineering career to fall back on.
> His friend Karl Floersch told him Ethereum was the future and convinced him to learn smart contract development.
> Hayden spent two months learning to code.
> Then Karl showed him an idea from Vitalik Buterin about how people could trade tokens without a traditional exchange matching buyers and sellers.
> Hayden started building a prototype. Called it Uniswap.
> By April 2018, he'd been unemployed for 10 months and the crypto he was living on had lost over 75% of its value.
> Most people would've started looking for another job.
> Hayden booked a flight to South Korea to attend a crypto conference.
> He didn't even have a ticket to the event and was turned away at the entrance.
> Then he ran into Karl, who introduced him to Vitalik Buterin.
> Vitalik pulled out his phone and read Hayden's smart contract right there.
> He adviced him to apply for an Ethereum Foundation grant.
> Hayden applied and got the grant which was valued at around $100,000 on paper.
> After $ETH's price dropped, its actual value was closer to $55,000–$60,000.
> He kept building.
> On November 2, 2018, Uniswap launched on Ethereum.
> Today, it's one of the most important decentralized exchanges in crypto, allowing people to trade tokens without relying on a traditional centralized exchange.
A man lost his job, watched his savings collapse, and built one of crypto's biggest financial platforms.
Imagine if he'd just updated his CV and moved on.
นับถือใจคนกล้าเปิด leverage ในตลาด Crypto จริงๆ
โดยเฉพาะ คนที่เปิด Leverage พวกเหรียญ Meme ซึ่ง Meme มันซิ่งอยู่แล้ว ยิ่งเปิด Leverage = *2 ของความซิ่ง
To make money in crypto you need four things
1. Insights
2. Connections
3. Market Intuition
4. Critical Thinking
Because in this market knowing what's coming before everyone else is a massive advantage.
Example f k case like @AbstractChain that core contributor @0xCygaar who sold $PENGU before the announcement that Abstract was shutting down.
So information is power.
Why people stopped trading and started holding just to belong.
When trading gets saturated and most people lose to bots + insiders, people will shift toward holding because they want to be part of a story or technology not just trade for short-term gains.
Example case = $ZEC [people hold it for the Privacy narrative not to trade]
Likely next
1.Projects that make holders feel like they own part of the system will win.
2. Narratives like Privacy, Decentralized AI, and Anti Ai thesis will attract stronger conviction holders.
I think $PENGU and Pudgy Penguins are cooked
1. @AbstractChain was abruptly shut down with no clear transition plan.
2. The core team went silent when the community needed answers most.
3.Pudgy Penguins is facing massive selling pressure as holders lose confidence.
The biggest problem isn't the price. It's the loss of trust.
ZK/Privacy Investment Thesis 2026
1. Low float
2. Strong team + strong US-based VCs
3. Programmable privacy (ETH-native private smart contracts)
4. Clear token utility (Use token as a gas)
5. Strong developer tools
6. Post-quantum roadmap
7. Privacy narrative on Ethereum heating up + valuation still reasonable
$AZTEC $ZK $STRK Who will win in this cycle ?
Why $NEAR Went From “Dead Project” to Top 20 marketcap
1/ Who thought NEAR was dead?
From an ATH of ~$20 in early 2022 down to around $0.8 in early 2026.
Now back above $5 and re-entering the top 20.
But this rebound isn’t just about NEAR Intents narrative.
2/ NEAR Intents has volume
• $30–34B+ cumulative
• ~$4.8B in September
• Fee switch directing some revenue into $NEAR Buyback
But for me, Plenty of projects do intent-based or cross-chain swaps though (Across, Relay, THORChain, etc.). Volume alone doesn’t fully explain the move.
3/ It looks like a coordinated effort.
= Bitwise launched the first US spot NEAR ETF (NRR) in late September 2026
- Strong day-one inflows (~$35M)
- Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan has been publicly supportive, framing it as a real business + AI upside
- Public treasury company SVRN holds tens of millions of NEAR, with support from the NEAR Foundation itself
- US operators and voices are also stepping in such as @mert who called Zcash at $600m marketcap and he just joined the NEAR Foundation Council.
4/ NEAR’s recent move
1. Real usage + revenue from Intents
2. Institutional access via ETF
3. US operators/voices joining the narrative
4. AI positioning that the market currently likes
Btw If I had to guess which projects will keep getting hyped next
1. USA-based team and strong team
2. Narrative that most people can easily accept (AI, privacy, real usage, buyback)
3. Clear institutional support (ETF, public companies, big names backing it)
zkVM by Microsoft.
Interesting
Introducing Magnetar from Microsoft Research, the first zkVM that is: (1) general-purpose (RV64), (2) post-quantum from standard hashes alone (no curves, no lattices, no Poseidon), and (3) built for recursion.
Despite its conservative security, it is the fastest zkVM: 7.2–8.7 MHz on a laptop, 10–39× faster than existing zkVMs across 15 workloads! An optimized version reaches 9.5–12.8 MHz.
Links in the thread below.
When $ZEC was at $30 nobody talked about it.
When it hit $1,500, suddenly everyone was talking about it.
So
Price goes up = Narratives explode.
Price drives the narrative, not the other way around.
Who's next?
OH. $zk is here.
Big congratulations to the @zksync airbender team for this milestone.
At this point, I consider the battle for speed to be definitively won, and the top priority for zkEVMs should shift fully to security.
To me that means formally verifying
(i) equivalence of the arithmetization to the ethereum spec
(ii) a hard maximum bound on (prover cost) / (amount of gas in block)
(iii) security of the proof system itself
firefly.social/post/x/211001…
PLEB | ContributionDAO - priv/acc retweeted
Interview with Jez (@izebel_eth) about how to make it this cycle
Timestamps:
0:00 Bull or Bear Market?
3:51 How Jez Got into Crypto
10:20 Long Degeneracy
18:21 Building Conviction & Risk Management
28:37 Importance of Finding Your Group
34:07 Learning from Past Blowups
41:48 Launching @papertrade_xyz
55:48 Are Great Traders Born or Made?
1:01:31 Most Memorable Trades
1:07:20 Why is Leverage so Addicting?
1:10:26 How to Make it This Cycle
1:22:45 Final Words of Advice
Less goo!!
Announcing Zypherpunk!
We are calling up builders, researchers, and creators to come and shape the future of Zcash.
Our aim is to create an entry point for new talent in Zcash, where they can learn, contribute, meet like-minded people, and also get rewarded for their efforts.
Dozens of developers are already contributing via Zypherpunk with projects like thus-spoke-zakura, and more are being created as we speak.
We will be focused on the following:
- building more projects like thus-spoke-zakura collaboratively with developers
- creating content and media that accelerates developer-focused education for Zcash
- events and meetups that bring more high-quality technical talent to Zcash
- hackathons to identify the next big projects for Zcash and help them find the right partners for mentoring, funding, etc.
The encrypted money for humanity needs the brightest minds of our generation building for it.
If this sounds interesting to you, please fill out the form to join our Discord below 👇
Last year nobody cared about $ZEC.
It had been sitting around a $600M market cap for years. Almost no hype, no attention.
Then influencers started talking about it. The price pumped, and suddenly everyone remembered why Privacy matters.
That's when the Privacy narrative took off.
A classic crypto market story. People buying euphoria
Just a week ago, nobody cared about $STRK. Barely anyone was talking about it
Then the price started pumping, and suddenly everyone remembered what a promising project it was
Some were buying at $0.12, expecting it to keep climbing all the way to $1
And now we're back below $0.08
Suddenly, $STRK isn't that interesting anymore
Personally, I haven't bought back a single $STRK since receiving the airdrop. Unfortunately, I was one of those who held onto 50% of it
Oh, no, no. I'm not a hater. I'm just someone who's hurting
Privacy is the next big thing in crypto.
And only a handful of deep-tech teams can actually build it.
$ZEC went from a $600Mcap to a $28Bcap in just one year.
Now, what about ethereum:0xa27ec0006e59f245217ff08cd52a7e8b169e62d2?
Noted - Vitalik backed and Invested Aztec.
Deep tech is making a comeback. Privacy is just getting started.
Only in Crypto - This $BTW reached 300x in 5 months
$4B Mcap
$25B Mcap
i will pass 100%
