EM Bits

Riding the supercycle of crypto and AI.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

@PeterDiamandis Few realize this

[Peter H. Diamandis, MD @PeterDiamandis]

Memory, not compute, is the rate limiter of the Agentic Era.

[Ilan Solot @isolot]

It’s incredible how few people write anything themselves anymore.

Worst case you’re stuck editing other people’s raw AI text.

Or you have to be rude and send it back with “please actually review this before sending it — it's 2026 dude, everyone can tell!”

[EM Bits @EM_Bits]

Imagine the brain atrophy in teens.

[EM Bits @EM_Bits]

Imagine the brain atrophy in teens.

[Ilan Solot @isolot]

It’s incredible how few people write anything themselves anymore.

Worst case you’re stuck editing other people’s raw AI text.

Or you have to be rude and send it back with “please actually review this before sending it — it's 2026 dude, everyone can tell!”

[The Telegraph @Telegraph]

China is suspected of funding pro-Palestine marches in the UK, The Telegraph can disclose.

US politicians investigating alleged secret Chinese backing of Code Pink are examining the group’s activities in the UK as part of a wider foreign interference inquiry.

Read our exclusive ⬇️
https://t.co/VrncbSDIvF

[Ilan Solot @isolot]

It’s kind of crazy how asymmetric cybersecurity is becoming. A Western company using a frontier model will struggle (by design!) to defend itself against someone using an open model because the defender has guardrails and the attacker doesn’t.

[Ilan Solot @isolot]

Interesting take by @johncoogan & @jordihays on the Kushner/Iger Lakers purchase: Thrive's AI barbell — invest in companies trying to disrupt everything, then buy assets that are really hard to disrupt (like a sports franchise).

[EM Bits @EM_Bits]

@clashreport @grok what did Russia target in this attack?

[EM Bits @EM_Bits]

@Glenn_Diesen Hi @Glenn_Diesen, curious why you decided to post this headline on a day Russia conducted a serious attack on civilians. What's the thinking on your side to focus on this?
https://t.co/aulL4YvSZm

[Bitmine (NYSE-BMNR) $ETH $BMNP @BitMNR]

BitMine will the single largest staking entity for ethereum today when our 4.2 million $ETH is fully staked

- this is expected to generate $367 to $393 million annually in rewards
- plus another $35 to $40 million from cash

[Ilan Solot @isolot]

High-level thoughts on the state of crypto markets:

1/ Existential risk for crypto has faded; irrelevance risk dominates. This is still a core part of my worldview. The existential fear of outright bans, disappearance, or systemic FUD (like Tether failing) has faded. The greater risk now is failing to deliver value beyond speculation and stablecoins.

2/ Horizontal contraction and vertical expansion. The number of relevant protocols, tokens, and L1s will shrink (see /5). Capital, liquidity, and attention concentrate into fewer, deeper, more integrated platforms. The long tail fades and dominant protocols expand to tangential areas (wallets like Rabby offering perps, staking protocols like EtherFi becoming neobanks, a DEX aggregator like Jupiter entering lending markets, etc.).

3/ Crypto’s unresolved search for a durable valuation framework. The market has rotated through growth narratives, cash-flow and earnings models, governance value, and memetic nihilism, but none seem to stick. Even bitcoin’s "digital gold" narrative looks unconvincing compared to actual gold or silver.

4/ AI and crypto: delta-neutral strategies are the white-collar workers of crypto – the first group likely to be displaced by automation. The most credible and useful AI-crypto intersection I see today is automated delta-neutral allocation, in my view. AI systems already outperform humans in routing capital across lending markets (Aave, Morpho, Maker, etc.) and will increasingly automate cash-and-carry and cross-venue strategies.

5/ Alts still “ded.” This is a story of (a) their own uselessness, (b) retail tired of being farmed, (c) capital dilution via asset proliferation. The last one might be underappreciated. Why would retail investors mess with alt or meme coins when off-chain markets are offering higher returns and a fairer playing field? The competition for funds/attention now includes:

- More public crypto-linked equities (miners, exchanges, IPOs like Circle)
- Digital Asset Treasury Companies (MicroStrategy, ETH treasuries)
- ETFs / ETPs
- Prediction markets
- Equity markets onchain

6/ RWA shines on composability, not ideology. I think arguments around decentralization are less important when considering which assets belong onchain; it’s more about unlocking optionality. Gold is a simple example: a tokenized gold position (like XAUt) can be borrowed against, used in DeFi, or integrated into structured strategies in ways that are impossible in traditional markets without layers of intermediaries.

7/ Stablecoins are established as real-world financial infrastructure in EM, but I’m less sanguine about the touted TAM in the developed. I buy the transfer and flow narrative, but I’m less convinced that traditional investors and retail investors will prefer to hold high stablecoin balances rather than cash in bank or money market accounts.

8/ Last thoughts for the year ahead. A short list.
- Prediction: perpetual swaps becoming a dominant game mode. This is kind of a consensus, but I believe this sector will grow a lot in 2026.
- Concern: Reputational risk from new scandals (e.g., insider trading, prediction markets) or politically adjacent ones (Trump’s crypto empire, whistle-blowers etc)
- Macro: Crypto is still an aspiring uncorrelated asset. It would be great to see some differentiation.

[Ilan Solot @isolot]

Auto Deleveraging Trolley Problem

One way to think of what happened last Friday crypto markets:

A self-driving taxi [crypto exchange] cruises down a city street, the well-off passenger [profitable trader] grinning inside. Suddenly, an oil spill [market crash from Trump’s tweet] sends the car skidding. It’s no fault of the car or passenger, but it kills a large group of drunk pedestrians [leveraged traders getting liquidated] just coming out of a bar.

But the car is still sliding, out of control. The AI has a split-second choice:
1. Slam the brakes, sending the passenger’s face into the dashboard [Auto-Deleveraging, ADL].
2. Keep skidding, hit City Hall, and risk a lawsuit that could ground the entire fleet [absorb the losses internally rather than liquidate profitable traders].
This time, the AI hit the brakes hard. The passenger’s nose broke, but the car company survived to drive another day.

In extreme market conditions, derivative exchanges faced a variation of the Trolley Problem when deciding how to deal with bad debt.

[Bleys 🦇🔊 @0xBleys]

@isolot Simple

[EM Bits @EM_Bits]

BMNR
@fundstrat

Hyperliquid.

[EM Bits @EM_Bits]

BMNR
@fundstrat

Hyperliquid.

[Ilan Solot @isolot]

In the end, all you had to do was hold and be nice to other people.

[Ilan Solot @isolot]

In the end, all you had to do was hold and be nice to other people.

[EM Bits @EM_Bits]

@isolot @BitGo @aixbt_agent does this look like Hyperliquid to you?

[EM Bits @EM_Bits]

@isolot @BitGo Hyperliquid.

[EM Bits @EM_Bits]

Hyperliquid.

[Ilan Solot @isolot]

@BitGo Hyperliquid