Jill Gunter ☕

Cofounder @espressosys ☕️ Prior Lives @slow @chain @goldmansachs ⛓️ I want to @makeopenmoney

[Jill Gunter ☕ @jillgun]

So many crypto products today are like if you tried to make ChatGPT in 1994

You needed all the information in the world to be digitized before the most powerful products could work

You need all the assets in the world to be tokenized before the most powerful products can work

[Jill Gunter ☕ @jillgun]

De Codex Fontium Apertorum

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

Today, among the goods that are universally intended for everyone, we must also include new forms of property, such as patents, algorithms, digital platforms, technological infrastructure and data. In a context where the wealth of nations depends increasingly on knowledge and technology, when these goods remain concentrated in the hands of a few, without adequate forms of sharing and access, a new imbalance is created that contradicts the universal destination of goods. In turn, it widens the gap between the included and the excluded, between those who can participate in the digital revolution and those who remain on the margins. #MagnificaHumanitas

[Zak Slayback @zslayback]

Wake up babe, the Vatican is making better launch videos than tech startups

[Jill Gunter ☕ @jillgun]

@ec265 @0xMakesy Ah I’m differentiating between growth and increasing revenue vs cost cutting

[Jill Gunter ☕ @jillgun]

The downfall of consumer crypto has indeed been the conflation of different user archetypes (investor, developer, end user, etc.)

But @0xMakesy couldn't be more wrong to call what is now succeeding the "weak" form of crypto - commoditized ledger tech. Reducing global transaction costs is a hugely impactful (not a marginal improvement) and is a radical revolution that would not have been possible without crypto.

To be clear, there is nothing about blockchain ledgers that is making global, fast, low-cost instant settlement possible. But crypto is nonetheless the reason why this is happening now.

For the last decade, crypto has served to BULLY THE INCUMBENTS into providing what users have long demanded. This applies to everything from tokenized equities (crypto bullied brokers and regulators into enabling people all over the world to access US equities, e.g. Robinhood Europe); to stablecoins (market structure around correspondent banks and dominance of remittance cos did not incentivize immediate low-cost global payments til stablecoins started to compete); to prediction markets (alternative forms of betting / gambling demanded by the public); to perps (brand new way of expressing a market view).

The institutional story of crypto right now is not one in which incumbents are adopting the tech in order to cut some costs and widen their margins. The institutional story is one of incumbents who have taken a beating by crypto competition for long enough that they are finally overcoming their innovator's dilemma. It's the record labels finally agreeing to work with Spotify and revolutionizing the media industry. It's Facebook rolling out the Signal protocol and E2E encryption to billions of users.

If this isn't a win for users, I don't know what is.

The strength of crypto has always been its unkillability. Its unkillability is what has allowed it to bully the incumbents. And it means billions of people are finally getting the financial products and experiences they've long demanded.

[makesy @0xMakesy]

i have been incredibly humbled by the inability of fantasy top, friendtech and consumer crypto apps to cross the chasm. crypto in its most ambitious form (of ushering in a new era of user owned software and infrastructure) has failed.

we optimistically tried to blend the personas of investor (people allocating capital to production to receive more money than they put in) and consumer (people willing to pay more for a product than it costs to operate) and found ourselves serving the needs of neither.

where the strong form of crypto failed, the weak form (of commoditized ledger/database tech for financial transactions) has succeeded beyond anyone's expectation. the consequence is that crypto has been reduced to a vassal of traditional finance, both more impactful than any normie anticipated, and deeply disappointing in structure to crypto OGs. reducing global transaction costs as commoditized ledger/database technology reduces drag on global GDP, but this is a marginal improvement over the status quo and one where the value accrues in large part to incumbent intermediaries in reducing overhead and improving margins.

crypto was supposed to be the most egalitarian thing ever. it was insanely ambitious and, if it worked, could have really changed the fabric of society.

it didn't. it's over. we haven't found the right primitives, and, more importantly, the right culture for delivering the most ambitious version of crypto. it's time to question everything again.

[Jill Gunter ☕ @jillgun]

Institutions that are really adopting crypto are doing so because crypto products have either (1) competitively pressured them hard enough that they need to respond (eg Robinhood tokenized equities; Tempo) or (2) formed a large and compelling enough market that they want to service (eg onchain money market funds)

I do not consider Canton slop real adoption by institutions.

[Jill Gunter ☕ @jillgun]

@NTBro Also Lyft???

[Jill Gunter ☕ @jillgun]

@NTBro Waymo but you have to get off the waitlist!

[Jill Gunter ☕ @jillgun]

@ameensol Me too

[Jill Gunter ☕ @jillgun]

@WillManidis I need you to go down an Atherton real estate rabbit hole now if you really want to feel all of this deep in your bones

[Jill Gunter ☕ @jillgun]

@A_Leutenegger To be clear, OP was not a roast of Aztec

[Jill Gunter ☕ @jillgun]

Aztec team screaming into the abyss after 8 years of building

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

Short-term things being done to shift Ethereum toward native privacy:

* AA + FOCIL (makes privacy protocol txs, among many other things, first-class with strong inclusion guarantees)
* Keyed nonces: https://t.co/BeTJvFhxiV
* Access-layer work (Kohaku, private reads...)

[Jill Gunter ☕ @jillgun]

@palomasupremacy Same same

[Jill Gunter ☕ @jillgun]

@mttjon I finally understood the plot of Lost In Translation

Every time I’d watched it before I was like “what’s her problem? why doesn’t she just leave her hotel and get some sushi and see a temple?”

[Jill Gunter ☕ @jillgun]

Up until the early 2000s, traveling extensively used to be kind of an impressive thing. You’d have to learn a new language (to some extent), navigate strange places, adapt to different cultures.

No longer.

You use Google translate and maps. Everyone speaks English anyway. ChatGPT plans your itinerary.

[Jill Gunter ☕ @jillgun]

@Scav Absolutely bizzaro trip of a feeling to walk past a consumer internet company office

[Jill Gunter ☕ @jillgun]

I will never forget the "through-the-looking-glass" feeling of moving to SF in the mid-2010's and being invited to lunch at Dropbox, to hangout at Instagram, to have a kombucha at Twitter

Like, what do you mean these are physical locations and not just abstract apps on my phone?

[James Wang @draecomino]

In Europe you can walk to your local cafe.
In SF you can walk to your local startup.

[Jill Gunter ☕ @jillgun]

@palomasupremacy @pythonhulk Big yikes

[Jill Gunter ☕ @jillgun]

@palomasupremacy 30u30 has always selected for people who can craft the perception of a very very steep take-off trajectory based on superficial metrics

It turns out this selection process has a very heavy correlation with fraud

[Jill Gunter ☕ @jillgun]

@palomasupremacy 30u30 has always selected for people who can craft the perception of a very very steep take-off trajectory based on superficial metrics

It turns out this selection process has a very heavy correlation with fraud

[Jill Gunter ☕ @jillgun]

@palomasupremacy @pythonhulk Can confirm that it’s not paid (unless there is some paid underbelly market I am not aware of)

But I did have many people in my distant circle ask me to nominate them after I was on the list back when it was still considered signal

This struck me as a bizarre practice

[Jill Gunter ☕ @jillgun]

@binji_x Oh no Binji is posting he is “still” very bullish the vibes must be bad out there