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BeaconLayer Podcast
@0xBeaconLayer
Accelerating Web3 builders, products, and networks.
Podcasting the conviction, craft, and scale behind them.
New York, NY
Joined October 2022
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109.2K Followers
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The Ethereum L2 Squeeze
Much will come in the wake of Vitalik's declaration that "the original vision of L2s... no longer makes sense."
With the L1 scaling and blockspace now an abundant commodity, L2s and Alt-EVM chains must differentiate or get squeezed out 👇
~~ Analysis by @punk7954 ~~
Last month, Vitalik Buterin sparked debate with a blog post stating that "the original vision of L2s and their role in Ethereum no longer makes sense."
Days later, he sharpened the message:
> "If you make an EVM chain without an optimistic bridge to Ethereum (aka an alt L1), that's even worse. We don't friggin need more copypasta EVM chains, and we definitely don't need even more L1s. L1 is scaling and is going to bring lots of EVM blockspace."
As L1 scales, it becomes cheaper and more capable. Mainnet is becoming the blockchain that L2s aspired to become, without the complexities of L2 designs. This forces L2s and Alt-EVM L1s to differentiate or get squeezed out.
The Squeeze
The pressure has been building for months. L2 and Alt-EVM L1 tokens are down 80-90% from highs, with adoption plateauing once airdrops ended.
Last week Base announced it's leaving Optimism's Superchain, taking 97% of the collective's real economic value with it. The rationale: ship faster, reduce dependencies, and keep fees in-house.
Beyond recalibration, chains face revenue pressures as the industry matures. Blockspace is no longer scarce. Too many chains compete for users, turning differentiation into a commodity. Meanwhile, revenue-generating chains like Hyperliquid set a new standard, proving sustainable economics matter more than narrative.
The "gas fee only" model is breaking down. Chains must find a niche justifying their existence off Mainnet and generate revenue to sustain themselves.
How Chains Are Responding
While Vitalik's post served as a messaging wakeup call, months of rough metrics had already led EVM L1s and Ethereum L2s to seek deeper differentiation.
> Polygon: The Payments Stack. Even before Vitalik's post, Polygon pivoted to become a "revenue-generating blockchain company."
In January, @0xPolygon Labs announced $250M in acquisitions: Coinme (payments firm with money transmitter licenses) and Sequence (wallet infrastructure). These anchor the forthcoming "Open Money Stack," a framework for regulated stablecoin payments launching later this year.
Stablecoins see the most real-world adoption globally. USDC in Polymarket drives significant Polygon activity. Stablecoin transactions on Polygon outpace all other L2s, gaining speed from these acquisitions, prediction market growth, and the October 2025 Rio upgrade, which overhauled the chain's architecture for payment-specific performance.
Polygon hasn't explicitly tied this pivot to POL token value accrual yet, but the strategic direction is clear.
> Sonic: Vertical Integration. Alt-EVM L1 @SonicLabs takes a different approach. In their [early February post, Sonic announced it's abandoning the "gas fee only" model entirely. With blockspace commoditized, gas fees no longer sustain chains.
Sonic's solution: build and acquire core DeFi products—trading infrastructure, lending, liquidity provision, stablecoins, staking—to operate in-house. Revenue flows directly back to the S token rather than external apps.
Base serves as a cautionary tale, highlighting the dangers of relying on external parties to generate chain value.
Unlike Polygon, Sonic explicitly addresses token value accrual. Buybacks will only come when real protocol revenue develops from these integrated solutions. The sequencing matters. Optimism announced last month they'd allocate 50% of Superchain revenue to token buybacks, then their primary revenue vehicle left.
What Comes Next
@VitalikButerin by reiterating that existing L2s and EVM chains can bring new features to the table: Privacy (@aztecnetwork). App-specific efficiency. Ultra-low latency.
Expect chains to respond in three ways:
> Alt-L1s → Rollups. Some may follow Celo's path from last cycle, converting into rollups and trading sovereignty for tighter Ethereum alignment.
> Acquisitions. Well-capitalized chains will pursue acquisitions to accelerate pivots, as Polygon has done and Sonic suggests it will.
> Verticalization. More chains will pick a specific category and build infrastructure to own it.
We'll likely see buyback talk, but hopefully as a secondary priority. Chains announcing buybacks before making adjustments put the cart before the horse. The market will punish them if they lack revenue to support it.
The era of "we do everything" L2s is ending. What replaces it looks like Polygon's payments focus or Sonic's vertical integration: chains that identify their category, build revenue around it, and earn the right to reward holders. It's a step in the right direction, but will cause pain.
Before “crypto AI” became a category, David was already exploring the ideas behind it.
@kenzimori catches up with @david_enim on his early path into crypto x AI — from studying Bitcoin’s economics and computer science during his PhD, to witnessing the 2017 wave of crypto builders up close.
The conversation traces how David’s work across game theory, machine learning, and agent systems eventually shaped his thinking around autonomous agents and open-source coordination infrastructure.
What does it really mean to co-own AI?
@sachimiyasaki sits down with @david_enim, core contributor to OLAS, to unpack how users can move beyond simply using AI — and start participating in it.
With OLAS, users can hold tokens, run agents, or even operate them as businesses. Across DeFi, prediction markets, and other onchain use cases, agents can generate value, while operators share in the upside.
Our host @kenzimori connects with @david_enim, Co-Founder of Valory, to explore what it really takes to build autonomous agents across crypto.
After years at https://t.co/HJjIjVjvMm, one lesson became clear: chains can create focus, but they also create friction. Instead of scaling agents, you often end up selling blockspace, ecosystems, and infrastructure narratives.
“Honestly, I think we’re just a few months away.”
@dikshawells sits down with @david_enim to unpack how close AI agents really are to mainstream adoption — not just for builders, but for beginners and everyday DeFi users too.
After years spent deep in technical papers on agent systems, and now building in the space full-time, David explains why the timeline is compressing so quickly.
And why the biggest challenge may no longer be the tech itself, but getting people aligned around how to actually use it
This week’s episode features David Minarsch (@david_enim), Co-Founder & CEO of Valory.
We dive into David’s journey across crypto and AI, from his early work with https://t.co/SV4qEWB8aW to building Valory and OLAS, and unpack what “autonomy” really means once agents move beyond demos and begin operating in real markets.
The conversation explores the rise of autonomous agents: what they can already do today, where they are becoming genuinely useful, and what breaks when you deploy them inside permissionless, adversarial environments like Web3.
We also dig into the hard problems at the intersection of Web3 and AI: coordination, incentives, security, reliability, and why open-source infrastructure matters if agents are going to become first-class participants in the future of the internet.
Artists mint across chains and platforms, making it tough to showcase work cohesively.
Collectors juggle holdings over Ethereum, Solana, Tezos, and more—wallets scattered everywhere.
That's why Raster, a project tackling this mess, has my full attention.👇
~~ Analysis by @TheaHoegholm ~~
Collecting, not archeology
Introduced in September 2025 by @thefunnyguysNFT and @0xmetaclass, Raster is a new digital art marketplace. It consolidates:
➢ Chains — The platform launched with support for NFTs on Ethereum, Ethereum L2s, and Tezos, with Bitcoin and Solana integrations incoming.
➢ Markets — @raster_art aggregates listings, offers, and etc. from OpenSea, Magic Eden, and beyond. If you list your NFTs on Raster itself, the platform cross-posts to external marketplaces for added reach.
➢ Profiles — A Raster profile compiles an artist's works from all supported chains into a clean, singular gallery. Conversely, collector profiles pull together holdings from any connected wallets, displaying them by artist and with live activity feeds of your recent sales, offers, etc.
For example, one of my favorite artists is Gremplin. When I go to his Raster profile, the page surfaces +40 collections—it's easy to look through and discover pieces that are hard to find elsewhere.
And when I go to my collector profile, I find all my holdings organized neatly by artist.
The combination of cross-chain support and clean, easy-to-navigate UX makes Raster an awesome new resource for onchain creatives and collectors. Royalties are honored here, too.
Of course, the platform only just arrived, so its indexing isn't comprehensive yet. But with 16M tokens and 100k artists tracked so far, the scope is already expansive.
For instance, I noticed Raster indexed an old art collection of mine that I minted on Tezos in 2021. I forgot about the series, and it's basically unknown to anyone else. So it's cool to see Raster going both deep and wide in its coverage.
Things will get deeper and wider too, especially once Bitcoin and Solana support are added. In the meantime, the Raster team's fielding feedback, so if you notice any works or artists are missing from the site, you can use the contact pop-up in the FAQ to let them know!
Last week you might have seen Jesse's post about an agent called Oracle by Noice.
It read: if you like this tweet, you buy Oracle. Whether it worked for you isn't important — it's what Oracle envisions that you should pay attention to.
But first let's understand exactly what Oracle is and how it works.
~~ Analysis by @punk3626 ~~
Developed by the @noicedotso team (the same group behind the viral tipping app on Farcaster), the oracle @noiceagent is a new solution for buying predetermined amounts of whitelisted Internet Capital Markets (ICM) tokens across Base and Solana directly on Twitter by simply liking or replying to a tweet from oracle agent which mentions a specific ticker.
(Tokens are whitelisted when the agent tweets about them, and can be submitted for consideration via DM.)
Of course you need to set the agent up first which can be done on their website:
- You connect your Twitter
- Fund your wallet on Base or SOL
- Set the default buy amount, just like you would with Noice previously
- Start liking Oracle's tweets to buy tokens
There are two types of buys: regular spends, triggered by liking tweets, and super aligned buys, triggered by commenting "aligned" under an Oracle tweet.
The platform also has its own token, ORACLE, which is paired with NOICE. The Noice team has stated that the ORACLE token is simply meant to be a proving ground for the platform, rather than the central component of it. However, it does operate from a $20K treasury, charges a 1% swap fee on both likes and "aligned" buys, and uses all realized profits and fees to buy back and burn ORACLE.
While eliminating friction may be interesting to some, what has my attention here is how Oracle looks set up to be an emerging curation layer.
In its vision, Oracle details an upcoming scout program, where users can tag Oracle to identify new founders for Noice and earn from successful referrals. Selected founders, in turn, would be able to launch tokens directly through Oracle and embed buy actions into their own timelines, just like we can now do with Oracle.
Further, given the @jessepollak beta trial, I expect this could extend to not just founders, but also to CT personalities, though I could very much be wrong.
Closing Thoughts
While Oracle is a fun mechanism, I still hold skepticism, given that similar experiments, most notably Solana Blinks, tried to embed blockchain-native actions into Twitter and failed to take off.
Granted, Blinks did depend on stricter user requirements, including Phantom installation and specific feature toggles, which may have limited its reach. Oracle's simplicity could give it a different trajectory.
That said, beyond taking a shot on a bigger court, a defensible instinct, I'm still unsure why Noice prioritized Twitter over @farcaster_xyz, which feels structurally better suited to this behavior and is also where Noice has already shown traction.
Overall, Oracle reads as a proof of the (seemingly) most promising development trends in crypto right now: AI and internet-capital markets. It emerges from genuine momentum and demonstrates the expansion a team can pursue once they've developed a product actually in demand. I'm excited to see what will come.
Crypto’s social x money wave keeps heating up with content coins, creator tokens, mini-apps, and tipping.
The latest standout? Towns — a group chat app on Base where communities (free or paid) can earn, trade, and run bots right inside the convo.
If onchain group chats that actually make money sound like the future, this one’s worth watching👇
~~ Analysis by @kenzimori ~~
What Is Towns?
@townsapp is a messaging protocol and app designed around a straightforward but bold idea: Your group chats should be able to move money. Your wallet should be native to the chat. And creators should be paid directly by their communities.
Under the hood, Towns runs on a custom L2 chain for messaging, offchain stream nodes for real-time decentralized chats, smart contracts on @base that handle payments and memberships, and the $TOWNS token, which secures the Towns Network via staking.
As a user, all that complexity is abstracted away. What you see is Discord-like chats with built-in wallets, onchain paywall support, native tipping, and customizable bots.
Why does this approach matter? Crypto activity is already socially driven. Towns embraces this reality by making chats themselves into economic spaces. You don't leave a conversation to transact; you transact inside conversations.
Plus, it's yet another onchain business model for creators and communities to consider. Anyone can spin up a Towns chat, deploy their own bots, and kick off new revenue rails for their audience.
How to Try Towns
Another pro with Towns is that it's simple to dive into:
➢ Head to app (dot) towns (dot) com — Log in via Privy by spinning up an embedded wallet linked to your Google, Twitter, Farcaster, Rabby wallet, etc. If you want funds for joining chats, tipping, or trading, click the wallet icon in the top right to pull up "Deposit" and "Send" tabs for your embedded wallet.
➢ Explore Towns chats — The linked page is the app's main discovery hub; you can surf and join chats via recent activity, featured communities, top earning groups, and trending projects. Some Towns are free; others require a fee to subscribe.
➢ Create your own Town — In the app's left sidebar, press the "+" button to pull up the "New Town" deployer UI. Input your Town name, select from the "Free" or "Paid" options, and deploy. It's basically as easy as spinning up a new Discord server.
➢ Stake your TOWNS — If you decide to go deeper, head to the "Token" tab on the main Towns website and delegate your TOWNS to a node operator. This secures the Towns Network. Review operators' yield and commission stats, then make your pick and click "Stake."
The Big Picture
As social platforms have spent the past couple of decades becoming more extractive and closed down, Towns is moving in the opposite direction: open, onchain, programmable, community-centric.
Whether it can become the "Telegram of crypto" remains to be seen, but it certainly has potential, and if you're looking for a fresh corner of onchain social to explore, Towns is one experiment you can currently jump straight into. Explore a few chats and see what you think!
“If researchers join because of incentives, you're already losing.”
@sachimiyasaki talks with @ethan_myshell, Founder & CEO of @myshell_ai, about the AI talent crisis in crypto, why many researchers view the industry as speculative, and how open-source releases, real product-market fit, and world-class audio models helped build a community focused on technology rather than tokens.
“Oxford, computer vision, VR, gaming, crypto, AI — one founder arc across every major tech wave.”
@kenzimori catches up with @ethan_myshell, Founder & CEO of @myshell_ai, to unpack how skipping classes at Oxford led him from frontier research into consumer products and eventually AI x crypto: why researchers often miss mass adoption, why consumer instinct matters more than ever, and how the next generation of crypto AI products can break out beyond the niche.
“I mined Bitcoin in 2011, but I completely missed why it was important.”
@dikshawells sits down with @ethan_myshell, Founder & CEO of @myshell_ai, to unpack why AI and crypto may finally be converging: Ethereum's shift from static ledgers to programmable applications, the infrastructure breakthroughs behind account abstraction and social login, and why years of progress in AI, machine learning, and robotics are now colliding with a crypto ecosystem that may finally be ready for real-world products.
This week’s episode features Ethan Sun (@ethan_myshell), founder of MyShell (@myshell_ai).
We dive into Ethan’s journey at the intersection of blockchain and AI, and the founding story behind MyShell - a platform built to make powerful AI models accessible to non-technical creators.
The conversation explores how MyShell is opening up a new wave in the creator economy, where users can build, share, and interact with AI agents without needing deep technical knowledge.
Ethan also breaks down MyShell’s transition from Web2 to Web3, the role blockchain plays in the platform, and why crypto can unlock better coordination between users, creators, and open-source AI researchers.
We also dig into the unique perspective on crypto and AI from China, the rise of consumer-facing AI products, and why the next major wave may come from platforms that connect creators directly with open AI infrastructure.
A deep episode on AI, crypto, creators, and the consumer layer needed to bring AI to the next generation of users.
Takeover: The Onchain Fee Market You Can Fight Over
Takeover gamifies trading fees on Base through Harberger taxation—creating a market where 100 tiles representing 1% fee shares are perpetually for sale. Holders must pay 5% weekly taxes to maintain control while traders compete to snipe mispriced assets.
Here's how the mechanism works 👇
~~ Analysis by @kenzimori ~~
The Harberger Mechanism
@flaunchgg stands out for paying creator fees in ETH and tokenizing revenue streams as NFTs. Takeover builds on this infrastructure to create a PvP market for trading fees.
Every coin launched gets a 100-tile grid. Each tile represents a 1% claim on all trading fees paid in ETH. Own a tile to earn from every trade—until someone buys you out.
Harberger Tax. Tiles use Harberger taxation to ensure continuous circulation. Owners must set public prices, allowing anyone to buy instantly at that price with no negotiation.
Tax Structure. Holders post USDC deposits and pay a 5% weekly tax based on their listed price. These taxes fund $TAKEOVER buybacks through the Boardroom. Deposits must remain funded—run out and you forfeit the tile to the open market.
The Strategic Dimension
Success requires accurate pricing. Each tile has a fundamental value based on its parent coin's fee generation.
At the 5% weekly tax rate, a tile generating $10 in weekly fees has an equilibrium price around $200—where tax costs equal income. Price too high and carrying costs drain your deposit; too low and someone snipes your tile.
This equilibrium shifts constantly with trading volume. Dying coins become expensive to hold; runners attract bidding wars. Profitability depends on predicting volume trends and adjusting prices or exits accordingly.
How to Try for Yourself
Newcomers should buy into existing grids before launching new coins. The $FLNCHY grid (Flaunch's mascot) routes 80% of trading fees to tile holders, making it an ideal starting point.
> Browse. Find a listed tile on the 100-tile grid. The $FLNCHY floor currently sits at 68 USDC.
>Buy. Input your listing price and deposit duration. Total cost equals buyout price plus initial tax deposit. Confirm the transaction.
> Monitor. Earn 1% of trading fees in real-time ETH payouts. Adjust listing prices defensively as volume changes to prevent sniping.
Zooming Out
Takeover represents one of the first live tests of Harberger taxation with calculable yield—where mispricing delivers immediate financial consequences. AI agents are expected to join the competition soon, accelerating this economic experiment into a larger battlefield for automated strategies.
The privacy trade has been a rare bright spot amid crypto market stagnation.
ZEC's September run reached a nine-year high in November, 28x above its 1y low, before tanking when the Zcash core dev team announced they were leaving over a governance dispute. XMR has since taken command of the privacy trade.
~~ Analysis by @punk3626 ~~
Today, we're breaking down how Zcash and Monero actually differ ahead of our episode with Zooko next week.👇
Origin Stories
The fundamental difference between these two projects lies in how they got started: @monero was born on forums, while @Zcash was born in universities.
Monero launched in 2014 as "Bitmonero" by an anonymous user named thankful_for_today, based on the CryptoNote protocol. The community famously "took over" the project early on. There's no CEO, no office, and development is funded entirely through voluntary donations via the Community Crowdfunding System (CCS). A small Core Team acts as stewards — managing repositories and holding funds — but they don't dictate the technical roadmap.
Zcash traces its roots to 2013 academic research at Johns Hopkins University, where cryptographers developed the Zerocoin protocol. The design evolved into Zcash, launched in 2016 by cypherpunk @zooko Wilcox and the Electric Coin Company. Unlike Monero, Zcash has worked alongside regulators rather than against them.
These different origins shaped fundamentally different reputations. Monero's mandatory privacy made it a preferred choice for darknet markets. According to
@trmlabs, nearly half of new darknet marketplaces in 2024 used XMR exclusively. Zcash, by contrast, is rarely cited in ransomware or darknet reports.
XMR's reputation has led to exchange delistings. Binance dropped XMR in February 2024, OKX in January 2024, and Kraken removed it for European users in October 2024. Zcash avoided major delistings: Binance removed its "Monitoring Tag" in July 2025, and OKX relisted it in November 2025.
Core Privacy Mechanisms
Think of any transaction as a message. With Monero, your message gets mixed into a crowd — you speak at the same time as 15 other people, so an observer can't prove it was you. With Zcash's shielded transactions, your message goes into a locked box that only the recipient can open.
Monero uses a three-pronged approach:
➢ Ring Signatures hide the sender by mixing your transaction with around 16 decoys already on the blockchain.
➢ RingCT hides the amount by encrypting transaction values while proving no new coins were created.
➢ Stealth Addresses hide the receiver by creating a one-time address for every transaction.
Zcash uses zk-SNARKs to provide privacy, allowing transactions to be proven valid without revealing sender, receiver, or amount. When you send a shielded transaction, Zcash generates a cryptographic proof confirming you have the right to spend the coins without inspecting the transaction details.
Mandatory vs. Optional Privacy
With Monero, privacy is mandatory. You cannot send a transparent transaction. This creates "herd immunity" — all transactions look identical. The argument: optional privacy isn't real privacy. If only "suspicious" people use the private option, they become targets.
Zcash offers privacy by choice. ZEC can be used transparently or moved to a shielded address. While privacy isn't required, the shielded pool continues to grow — around 30% of ZEC supply now sits in shielded pools, up from 8.7% a year ago.
Consensus and Supply
Monero uses the RandomX proof-of-work algorithm, designed to be ASIC-resistant and optimized for CPUs friendly to at-home miners. Monero has a tail emission — an infinite supply with around 0.6 XMR per block perpetually added. This ensures miners always have incentive to secure the network.
Zcash currently uses Equihash — an ASIC-optimized proof-of-work mechanism. It's transitioning to Crosslink, a hybrid PoW/PoS system that brings deterministic transaction finality. Crosslink layers a PoS "finality gadget" on top of PoW: miners produce blocks, but stakers provide confirmation that makes transactions permanent. Like Bitcoin, Zcash has a fixed supply cap of 21 million ZEC with a halving schedule roughly every four years.
What's Next
Both protocols have major upgrades in development.
Monero is working on FCMP++ (Full-Chain Membership Proofs), which would replace ring signatures. Instead of mixing with around 16 decoys, transactions would mix with the entire blockchain history — expanding the anonymity set from "crowd of 16" to "crowd of everyone."
Zcash has Tachyon in development, a major scaling initiative that will dramatically increase network speed, plus Crosslink for the hybrid PoS transition and improved user experience through new wallets and functionality like Near Intents integration.
One technical note: Zcash's privacy layer is quantum-resistant, while Monero's ring signatures are not. Monero developers plan to address this via FCMP++ and future upgrades.
Different Tools, Different Bets
A project's success ultimately rests on adoption — and adoption depends on organizational strength and reputation.
On organization, Zcash's corporate structure enabled rapid R&D and cutting-edge cryptography, but the ECC departure exposed its concentration risk. Monero's decentralized contributor model is slower to coordinate, but no single departure creates crisis.
On reputation, the tradeoffs are stark. Zcash's optional privacy and compliance-friendly features have kept it listed on major exchanges, but at the cost of weaker network-level privacy guarantees. Monero's mandatory privacy made it dominant for darknet markets — driving systematic exchange delistings and regulatory hostility.
The "one true privacy coin" debate ultimately comes down to what users are optimizing for. Monero offers stronger privacy today but faces steeper adoption headwinds. Zcash offers a path to broader adoption but requires users to actively choose privacy — and most don't. Both have returned to relevance after dormant years, but each must now demonstrate they can keep the spotlight and that their architectures can outcompete and outlast the other.
“What happens when someone inside one of the most iconic retail platforms of the last cycle sees its limits up close?”
@kenzimori speaks with @jayendra_jog, Co-Founder of @SeiNetwork, to trace the path that took him from the early days of Robinhood in Palo Alto — through hypergrowth, the IPO era, and the shock of the GameStop moment — to building in crypto.
They discuss how witnessing the mechanics and constraints of traditional financial infrastructure firsthand reshaped his thinking, why the suspension of buys during one of retail’s most defining episodes left such a lasting impression, and how that experience ultimately pushed him toward systems designed to be more open, more resilient, and less dependent on centralized control.
“High-performance infrastructure only matters if it expands what users can actually do onchain — and makes that experience accessible at scale.”
@sachimiyasaki sits down with @jayendra_jog, Co-Founder of @SeiNetwork, to examine why parallelized execution is becoming increasingly important for the next generation of onchain applications.
From trading and DeFi to high-frequency user activity that simply breaks in low-throughput environments, they discuss how lower fees and greater execution capacity can fundamentally reshape the user experience — especially for smaller participants who are otherwise priced out.
They also explore how this plays out in practice through projects like Bancor’s Carbon DeFi, where Sei has emerged as the ecosystem driving the strongest activity and volume, underscoring how performance advantages translate into real adoption.
“Virtual machines are like cities — once they reach critical mass, they become magnets that are incredibly hard to displace.”
@dikshawells catches up with @jayendra_jog, Co-Founder of @SeiNetwork, to unpack this idea at a deeper level — why systems with flaws can still dominate simply because that’s where the activity, liquidity, and people already are.
From New York and San Francisco to onchain environments like the EVM, they explore how network effects compound over time, why newer ecosystems struggle to pull users away even with better tech, and what it actually takes to break that inertia.
This week’s episode features Jayendra Jog (@jayendra_jog), Founder of @SeiNetwork.
We dive into Jay’s journey from traditional finance at Robinhood to building Sei Network, and unpack how his view of markets, users, and product feedback shaped the way he thinks about blockchain infrastructure.
The conversation explores the parallels between established cities and virtual machines: why dominant systems like the EVM are so difficult to displace, what makes developers stay, and what it actually takes for a new ecosystem to earn attention.
We also dig into the need for higher throughput in Web3, how parallelization can help solve today’s performance limits, and why scalability matters if crypto applications are going to serve real users at a much larger scale.
Jay also reflects on the role of memecoins, not just as speculation, but as community-driven movements that can reveal how culture, attention, and network effects form onchain.
Selling crypto to cover expenses hurts: you trigger taxes and lose exposure.
DeFi borrowing fixes both. Instead of selling your ETH, lock it as collateral, borrow USDC instantly onchain, spend like cash, and stay long — no taxable event in the U.S.
And now, do this directly through Coinbase👇
~~ Analysis by @punk3626 ~~
This is an integration I can happily recommend to my family and friends, as @coinbase is one of the most trusted and easy-to-navigate crypto exchanges, while
@Morpho is one of the most proven and dependable DeFi lending protocols.
With this integration, you can now borrow against your ETH without leaving the comfort of the Coinbase app. Assuming you already have some ETH holdings on Coinbase, you just:
1. Click on your ETH balance to bring up your Ethereum dashboard.
2. Scroll down to the "Borrow" tab and press "Start."
3. Review the primer info—your Borrow up to amount (based on your ETH deposited to Coinbase), the Variable rate (the fluctuating interest Morpho will charge on your loan), and the Liquidation LTV (the "loan-to-value" point at which your underlying ETH could be liquidated for repayment)—and then press "Continue."
4. Input the amount of USDC you want to borrow, then click "Review loan."
5. Check that your loan details are satisfactory. When ready, press "Borrow now," then "Accept and continue." Your loan will be submitted, though it may take a minute or two to finalize in Coinbase's UI.
That's all it takes to get started!
If you open a loan, navigate to your Coinbase "Cash" tab and in the "Borrow" section you'll see a "Manage Loans" button. Go here for the "Repay" option to pay back the USDC you borrowed over time.
These ETH-backed loans have a flexible term, so you don't have to pay back specific amounts per a specific schedule. Just repay whenever in whatever amounts suit you, though keep a close eye on your loan health to avoid liquidation.
Also, keep in mind that USDC borrowed on Coinbase can't be used for buying crypto on Coinbase, so this particular avenue is meant for cashing out and spending.
As far as DeFi onramps go, this integration is about as simple and safe as it gets. If you or someone you know hasn't gotten around to borrowing against ETH yet, this is certainly a good place to start.
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