chaoren

感谢关注

[梁岷Liam @Lyangminn]

最近，Claude 开始强制 KYC，百度又被鞭尸，大家好奇Claude 的缔造者 Dario Amodei ，也是当今全球对华芯片管制最响亮的倡导者之一，到底在百度经历了什么，让他如此“反华”？

比起被百度迫害，我现在更相信的是“百度成就了Dario Amodei”。

他职业生涯的第一个 AI 成果，就是用��文训练出来的。
2014 年 11 月到 2015 年 10 月，他在百度工作了整整十一个月。在吴恩达领导的硅谷 AI 实验室里，和一群华人工程师一起，做出了 Deep Speech 2。

这是一个能同时识别英语和普通话的语音系统，被 MIT Technology Review 选为 2016 年十大科技突破。

更重要的是，他在后来的访谈里亲口承认，AI 领域最重要的"缩放定律"（scaling law），"模型越大、数据越多，智能越强"这个影响了整个 AI 行业底层逻辑的发现，他最早的观察，就是在百度做语音识别时发现的。

换句话说，今天驱动 Claude、驱动整个万亿级 AI 产业的那个核心直觉，最初是由一个美国年轻人在一家中国公司，用中文数据喂出来的。

Amodei 曾与百度顶尖的中国工程师和科学家并肩工作，也知道中国团队在算法优化、数据清洗和工程落地上的强悍能力，所以他也知道，“中国只能抄袭、无法创新”只是傲慢和偏见。

但作为一名物理学家，Amodei 太相信了 Scaling Laws，算力 + 数据 = AGI，在这个公式下，世界是一场零和博弈，中美或者东西方就必然对抗。

算力（高端芯片）是有限的，如果中国获得了强大的算力，中国就必然获得超级智能。那么，作为应对，唯一的物理手段就是切断算力供应。

DeepSeek 是一次验证，只要给中国一点点缝隙，即使是落后的芯片，也能通过极致的工程优化追赶上来。因此，他主张必须对算力和数据进行全面封锁。

十年之后，他也彻底不装了。

2026 年 1 月，他发表了长达两万字的《技术的青春期》。文章里他写道：中共是"通往 AI 赋能的极权主义噩梦最清晰的路径"。

在达沃斯世界论坛上。Amodei 抛出了那句著名的论断：
“我认为卖芯片给中国太疯狂了，这有点像向朝鲜出售核武器”。

所以，无论 Amodei 是否在百度任职过，他都会走上这条AI冷战对抗之路，百度反而是 Amodei 前进路上的恩人。

[Naval @naval]

@mrvarmax Don’t look for gaps, create new things.

[Cypherpunk ($CYPH) @cypherpunk]

The fact that you can carry ZEC in your head is still mind-boggling to us.

[Eli Ben-Sasson | Starknet.io @EliBenSasson]

Bullish on Starknet
Bullish on Bitcoin
Bullish on Zcash
Bullish on Ethereum
Bullish on Near
Bullish on Solana
Bullish on ZK
Bullish on Crypto

[Barry Silbert @BarrySilbert]

The "privacy" era in crypto has officially begun

[chaoren @Chaonren]

欢迎大家用我的链接注册zcash 域名，现在注册还有奖励，越早越值钱https://t.co/VWoLin1lXo

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

SpaceX is actively hiring world-class engineers/physicists for SpaceXAI, even if you have zero prior experience in AI. Smart humans figure it out fast.

Please send an email with ~3 bullet points demonstrating evidence of exceptional ability to [email protected].

[chaoren @Chaonren]

amazon首席执行官安迪·贾西2025年致股东信https://t.co/lj0Vg3en8s

[Josh Swihart 🛡 @jswihart]

Over the past few weeks, it's become clear that the majority of Bootstrap board members (a 501(c)(3) nonprofit created to support Zcash by governing the Electric Coin Company), specifically Zaki Manian, Christina Garman, Alan Fairless, and Michelle Lai (ZCAM), have moved into clear misalignment with the mission of Zcash.

Yesterday, the entire ECC team left after being constructively discharged* by ZCAM. In short, the terms of our employment were changed in ways that made it impossible for us to perform our duties effectively and with integrity.

We're founding a new company, but we're still the same team with the same mission: building unstoppable private money.

Importantly, the Zcash protocol is unaffected. This decision is simply about protecting our team’s work from malicious governance actions that have made it impossible to honor ECC's original mission.

We'll have more soon. Hang tight.

Onward.

* Here's what constructive discharge means:
https://t.co/qT975X8vxm.

[Red Xiao @Red_Xiao_]

Today marks a moment I'll remember for the rest of my life.

When we started Manus, few believed that general AI agents could work. We were told it was too early, too ambitious, too hard. But we kept building. Through the doubts, the setbacks, and the countless nights wondering if we were chasing the impossible.

We weren't.

This isn't just an acquisition. It's validation that the future we've been building toward is real, and it's arriving faster than anyone expected.

But this is not the end. The era of AI that doesn't just talk, but acts, creates, and delivers, is only beginning. And now, we get to build it at a scale we never could have imagined.

To everyone who believed in us before it was obvious: thank you. The best is yet to come.

[Eli Ben-Sasson | Starknet.io @EliBenSasson]

The rise of ZEC and Privacy:

As co-founder of @Zcash I've been following it since inception.
(note: I later on co-founded @Starknet, and today I am admiring Zcash from afar)
For the past 3 years or so, ZEC price was in the $20-$50 area, and the chain was not even on the top 100 count.

All this changed roughly starting October this year, and as I'm writing this, ZEC is $500+ and top 30.

Fueled by the surge of Zcash, Privacy became a super-hot topic. As I'm writing, it seems to be the hottest topic in crypto today. This is good because privacy is not only normal, it's important.

One important question is - why now?
The best explanation I heard was that it's a combination of 3 factors, in decreasing order:

1. Good product -- the combination of the shielded Zashi wallet and Near Intents makes it easy for users (especially on Solana) to get good UX with good privacy.

2. Scarcity -- the halvening that took place one year ago made the inflation rate lower and new issuance more scarce.

3. Regulatory atmosphere -- this is the most favorable US administration to crypto, so this fueled interest in privacy tech.

All these factors led to investors being interested in Zcash, and CT, along with KOLs, talking about it. According to this explanation, substance comes first, and the public chatter boosts that.

I'm reading now the excellent book on Common Knowledge by Steven Pinker, and he talks about the ability of humans to reach common knowledge: Everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone knows (and so on ad infinitum).

Within crypto, we've now reached Common Knowledge that Privacy is normal, needed, and an essential part of crypto infra.

What about Privacy and Starknet? Privacy will be a focus in 2026.
Stay tuned.

[Haseeb ＞|＜ @hosseeb]

In Defense of Exponentials

I used to tell founders, the reaction you are going to get to your launch is not hate, it’s indifference. By default, nobody cares about your new chain.

I have to stop telling them that now. Monad just launched this week, and I’ve never seen so much hate about a blockchain that just launched. I’ve been investing into crypto professionally for 7+ years now. Before 2023, almost every chain I’ve ever seen that launched was mostly met with enthusiasm or indifference.

But now, new chains are born into a chorus of hate. The amount of haters I’ve seen for projects like Monad, Tempo, MegaETH—before they even hit mainnet—is a genuinely new phenomenon.

I’ve been trying to diagnose: why is this happening now, and what does it mean about the psychology of this market?

The Cure is Worse than the Disease

Forewarning: this is going to be the vaguest blockchain valuation post you ever read. I don’t have any fancy metrics or charts to sell you on. Instead, I’ll be arguing against the zeitgeist of Crypto Twitter, which for the last couple of years, I’ve been constantly on the opposite side of.

In 2024, I felt like what I was arguing against was financial nihilism. Financial nihilism is the belief that none of these assets matter, it’s all memes at the end of the day, and everything we’ve built is inherently worthless.

Thankfully, that’s no longer the vibe. We have broken out of that spell.

But the zeitgeist now is what I’d call financial cynicism: OK, maybe some of this stuff has value, maybe it’s not all memes, but it’s grossly overvalued and it’s only a matter of time before Wall Street finds that out. Not that all chains are worthless. But these things are all maybe worth 1/5th-1/10th of what they’re currently trading at (have you seen these PE ratios?), and so you’d better pray like hell Wall Street doesn’t call us on our bluff, because once they do it’s all getting wiped out.

You’ve got many bullish analysts now trying to conjure up optimistic L1 valuation models, inflating PE ratios, gross margins, DCFs, trying to fight against this mood.

Late last year, Solana very proudly embraced REV as a metric that could finally justify their valuation. They proudly announced: we—and only we—are no longer bluffing to Wall Street!

And, of course, almost immediately after REV was embraced, it fell off a cliff (though $SOL, tellingly, did better than REV did).
Not that there’s anything wrong with REV. REV is a very clever metric. But the point of this post is not metric selection.

Then came the launch of Hyperliquid. A DEX that had real revenue and buybacks and PE multiples. And the chorus said—look, look I told you! Finally, for the first time ever, a token that has some real profits and a proper PE multiple. (Nevermind BNB, we don’t talk about that.) Hyperliquid will eat everything because obviously Ethereum and Solana don’t make any real money, we can stop pretending to value them now.

Hyperliquid, Pump, Sky, these buyback-heavy tokens are all great. But the market always had the ability to invest into exchanges. You could always buy Coinbase, or BNB, or whatever. We own $HYPE, and I agree that it’s a fantastic product.

But that’s not why people were investing in ETH and SOL. The fact that L1s don't have exchange-like profit margins is not why people were buying them—if they wanted that, they could’ve bought Coinbase stock.

So if I’m not critiquing blockchain financial metrics, maybe you think this post is going to be chiding the sinfulness of the token-industrial complex.

Obviously, everyone has lost money on tokens in the last year, VCs included. Alts are down bad this year. And so the other half of the zeitgeist on CT is arguing about who's to blame. Who’s become greedy? Are the VCs greedy? Is Wintermute greedy? Is Binance greedy? Are the farmers greedy? Are the founders greedy?

The answer, of course, is the same as it’s ever been.

Everyone is greedy. Everyone. The VCs, Wintermute, the farmers, Binance, the KOLs, they're all greedy, and you are greedy too. But it doesn't matter. Because no functioning market has ever required anyone to act against their self-interest. If we're right about crypto, we can all be greedy and the investments will still work out. Trying to analyze a market that has gone down by figuring out “who’s greedy” is going to be about as fruitful as commissioning witch trials. I guarantee you, nobody just started being greedy in 2025.

So this, too, is not what I’m going to be writing about.

Many people want me to write a post about why $MON should be valued at X or $MEGA at Y. I’m not interested in writing this post, or advocating that you buy anything in particular. In fact, you probably shouldn’t buy any of them if you don’t already believe in them.

Will any new challenger chain win? Who knows. But if it has a material chance of winning, it's going to be priced on that basis. If Ethereum is worth $300B or Solana is worth $80B, a project that has a 1-5% chance of becoming the next Ethereum or Solana will be priced according to those probabilities.

Somehow CT is scandalized by this, but it’s no different than Biotech. A drug that has less than a 10% chance of curing Alzheimer's is priced by the market as worth billions of dollars, even if 90% chance it won’t pass stage 3 trials and will go to 0. That's how the math works—and turns out, markets are pretty good at doing math. Binary outcomes are priced on probabilities, not on run rates or moral turpitude. It’s the “shut up and calculate” school of valuation.

I really don’t think that’s an interesting question to write about. “5% chance to win? No way, that’s clearly a 10% chance!” Markets, not articles, are the best way to assess that for any individual token.

So here’s what I am going to write about: CT doesn't seem to believe anymore that chains are valuable.

I don’t think this is because they don’t believe new chains can win market share. We just saw Solana dominate market share after emerging from the ashes less than 2 years ago. It’s not easy, but of course it’s possible.

It’s more that people have come to believe that even if a new chain wins, there’s no prize worth winning. If $ETH is just a meme, if it’ll never generate real revenue, then even if you win, you won’t be worth $300B. The contest is not worth winning, because these valuations are all bunk and it’ll all come crashing down before you go to claim your prize.

Being optimistic about chain valuations has become passé. Not that nobody is optimistic—obviously there must be optimists out there. For every seller there’s a buyer, and as much as CT cool kids love to drag L1s, people are comfortable buying SOL at $140, ETH at $3000.

But there’s a perception now that all the smartest people are over buying smart contract chains. Smart people know the jig is up. If not now, then soon. The only people buying here are suckers—Uber drivers, Tom Lee, and KOLs who say stuff like “trillions.” And maybe the US Treasury. But not the smart money.

This is bullshit. I don’t believe it, and you shouldn’t either.

So I felt like I had to write a smart person’s manifesto on why general purpose chains are valuable. This post is not about Monad or MegaETH. It’s really in defense of ETH and SOL. Because if you believe ETH and SOL are valuable, the rest is straight downstream.

Defending ETH and SOL valuations is generally not my job as a VC, but fuck it, if nobody else is willing to do it, then I’ll write it.

Feeling the Exponential

My partner Bo experienced the Chinese Internet boom first-hand as a VC. I’ve heard how “crypto is like the Internet” so many times now that it doesn’t even register for me anymore. But when I hear his stories, it always reminds me how costly it is to be wrong about these things.

A story he often tells is about when all the early e-commerce VCs (it was a small group back then) got together for coffee in the early 2000s. They debated: how big is the market for e-commerce going to be?

Is it going to be mostly electronics (maybe only techies will use PCs)? Could it ever work for women (perhaps they’re too tactile)? What about food (maybe impossible to manage perishables)? These were deeply important questions for early VCs to decide what to invest in and what prices to pay.

The answer, of course, was that literally every single one of them was devastatingly wrong. E-commerce would sell everything, and the target audience was the whole fucking world. But nobody at the time actually believed it. And even if they did, it would be too absurd to say out loud.

You just had to wait long enough for the exponential to show you. Even among the believers, very few thought e-commerce would become as big as it became. And those few who did, almost all of them became billionaires from just not selling. Every other VC—as Bo tells me, since he was one of them—sold too early.

It has become passé in crypto to believe in the exponential.

I believe in the crypto exponential. Because I’ve lived it.

When I started in crypto, nobody used this stuff. It was tiny and broken and awful. TVL on-chain was in the millions. We invested into the first generation of DeFi, MakerDAO, Compound, 1inch, back when they were science projects. I remember playing around on EtherDelta back when DEXes traded single digit millions a day, and that was considered to be a huge success. It was complete dogshit. Now we routinely trade in the tens of billions on-chain every day. I remember believing it was crazy that Tether hit a billion dollars in issuance and was being written up in the NYT as a ponzi scheme on the brink of shutdown. Now stablecoins are over $300B and regulated by the Federal Reserve.

I believe in the exponential because I’ve lived it. I’ve seen it over and over again.

But you might respond—well, stablecoin growth might be exponential, maybe DeFi volumes are exponential, but they don’t accrue to ETH or SOL. The value doesn’t get captured by the chains.

To which I answer: you still don’t believe in the exponential.

Because the exponential’s answer is always the same: it doesn’t matter. This stuff is going to be so much bigger than it is today. And when it’s absolutely enormous, you’ll make it up on scale.

Study this chart.
This is Amazon’s P&L from 1995 to 2019. That’s 24 years. Red is revenue, gray is profit. You see that little blip on the end where the gray line goes up? That’s when, 22 years in, Amazon started actually making a profit.

Amazon was 22 years old when this little gray line of net income first peeled off of 0. Every single year before then, there were op eds and critics and short sellers claiming that Amazon was a ponzi scheme that would never make any money.

Ethereum just turned 10 years old. This is what the first 10 years of Amazon stock looked like:
10 years of chop. All along the way, Amazon was beset with doubters and non-believers. Is e-commerce a VC-subsidized charity? They’re selling underpriced cheap low-quality knick-knacks to bargain hunters, who cares? How are they ever going to make actual money, like Walmart or GE?

If you were arguing about Amazon’s P/E ratio, you were in the wrong regime. That’s the regime of linear growth. But e-commerce was not a linear trend, and so every single person for 22 years arguing about P/E ratios was devastatingly wrong. No matter what you paid, no matter when you bought, you were not bullish enough.

Because that’s what exponentials do. When it comes to truly exponential technologies, no matter how big you think it’s going to get, it just keeps getting even bigger.

This is the thing that Silicon Valley has always understood better than Wall Street. Silicon Valley was raised on exponentials, while Wall Street was raised on linearity. And over the last few years, crypto’s center of gravity has migrated from Silicon Valley to Wall Street. You can feel it.

Granted, crypto growth doesn’t look as smooth as e-commerce’s growth. It’s burstier, it goes in fits and starts. This is because crypto, being about money, is deeply tied to macro forces, and it also has more violent regulatory push and pull than e-commerce. Crypto strikes at the heart of the state—money—and so it’s more unnerving to governments than e-commerce ever was.

But the exponential is no less inevitable. It's a crude argument. But if crypto is exponential, then the crude argument is correct.
Zoom out.

Financial assets want to be free. They want to be open. They want to be interconnected. Crypto turns financial assets into file formats, makes it as easy to send a dollar or a stock as to send a PDF. Crypto makes it possible for everything to talk to everything. It makes it all 24/7, global, interconnected, and open.

That will win. Open always wins.

If there’s no other lesson I've learned from the Internet, it’s that. Incumbents will fight against it, governments will huff and puff, but eventually they will give up against the adoption, the generativeness, the sheer efficiency that this technology enables. It’s what the Internet did to every other industry. Blockchains are how that same trend will gobble up all of finance and money.

Yes—with enough time—all of it.

An old saying goes: people overestimate what can happen in two years, but they underestimate what can happen in ten.

If you believe in the exponential, if you zoom out enough, then it’s all still cheap. And it should humble you that every day, the holders outlast the sellers and naysayers. Big capital has a longer time horizon than CT swing traders might lead you to believe. Big capital has been trained through history not to fade big technologies. You know, the big gushy story that originally got you to buy $ETH or $SOL? Big capital believes that story and hasn't stopped.

So what exactly am I arguing?

I am arguing that applying P/E ratios to smart contract chains (the “revenue meta,” as it’s now called), is giving up on the exponential. It means you have consigned this industry to the regime of linear growth. It means you believe 30 million DAUs on-chain and <1% of M2 is it. Crypto is just one of the things in the world. A sideshow. It did not win. It was not inevitable.

More than anything, I’m arguing to be a believer. Not just a believer, but a long-term believer.

I’m arguing that this exponential will be bigger than anything else you’ve been a part of in your life. That this is your e-commerce. That you will look back when you’re old and tell your kids—I was there when it all happened. Not everyone believed it was possible, that whole societies could change, that all of money and finance would be transformed by programs running on decentralized computers that we collectively owned.

But it actually happened. It changed the world.

And you were a part of it.

Disclosure: These are my own views. Dragonfly is an investor in $MON, $MEGA, $ETH, $SOL, $HYPE, $SKY among many other tokens. Dragonfly believes in the exponential. This is not investment advice, but is advice of another kind.

[Lao Mao @Imlaomao]

视频出来了，愿意听我聊天的可以看视频了，感谢 @Mercy_okx 用心做采访，视频包含更多文字版不包含的内容。

[Naval @naval]

If you don’t commit to meaningful work, life will fill your time with busywork.

[chaoren @Chaonren]

看空你做空就行了嘛，
10倍你也发了
在推上炫耀一下有人给你发钱吗
纯粹就是坏

[Mr Panda @PandaTalk8]

1989年的杨乐昆在他的电脑上演示了卷神经网络的demo。

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

I hope Zcash resists the dark hand of token voting.

Token voting is bad in all kinds of ways (see https://t.co/Cvl7CFVgtc ); I think it's worse than Zcash's status quo.

Privacy is exactly the sort of thing that will erode over time if left to the median token holder.

[chaoren @Chaonren]

I'm signing the Dogecoin Manifesto! @dogecoinFdn @dogecoin https://t.co/DCIXtqeNHw #dogecoinManifesto

[chaoren @Chaonren]

@OKXHelpDesk_cn @Bridgerlang @okxchinese @wallet @okx @Haiteng_okx 草泥马，你们把客户真不当回事

[Barry Silbert @BarrySilbert]

Curious about what this Bittensor $TAO thing is all about?

Take some time this weekend to watch The Incentive Layer, a new documentary by @evert_scott

https://t.co/YdCtsrblU8