Jules Auchecorne

COO @ Auros / investor

[Anglo Futurism Capital LP 🇬🇧🐿️ @RollingHedge]

🚨📉THE SLOW DEATH OF BRITAIN:

We have shit water companies so we buy bottled water.

We have rubbish police so we hire private security.

We have terrible healthcare so we pay private hospitals instead.

Airbnbs in Cornwall pay council tax but get no rubbish collection, so they pay Biffa on top.

An awful lot of firemen are now volunteers.

NHS dentists don’t really work anymore, so you go private or you pull it out yourself.

Our roads are littered with potholes nobody fills. Your privately funded tyres and suspension are the collateral.

You are forced under threat of criminal prosecution to fund the BBC, and it’s so bad you pay for streaming to get news or entertainment anyway.

Your bins are collected fortnightly, so you drive to the tip. The tip now requires a booking, a permit and proof you live in the county.

Garden waste is a separate annual subscription. On top of the council tax that used to cover it.

Your GP surgery is an 8am phone lottery, so you pay £40 to an app to speak to a doctor in a different time zone.

CAMHS has a two year waiting list, so parents remortgage for private assessments.

Your child’s SEN provision is a legal entitlement, so you hire a solicitor to sue the council for it. The council spends more fighting you than the support would have cost.

Physio is a forty week wait. Your back does not have forty weeks.

Schools teach in portable cabins bolted to the playground because the actual building is held up by aerated concrete and hope.
Half of them are technically insolvent.

Parents fund the reading books, the glue sticks, the photocopier, the roof and increasingly the teachers wages - all via a PTA raffle and local fundraisers.

The state offers “free” childcare hours that don’t cover the nursery’s costs, so the nursery bills you a “top up fee” for the free thing.

Shoplifting under £200 is functionally legal, so Tesco hires guards - who crucially don’t even try to stop it - and you pay for them in the price of the milk.

999 takes an hour, so you buy the Ring doorbell, gather the evidence, file the report and get a crime number for the insurance you also pay for.

Court backlogs run to years, so anyone with money settles privately and everyone else gets nothing.

Legal aid is gone. Represent yourself.

Passport and DVLA backlogs are chronic, so the state sells you a fast track service to escape the queue the state created.

The trains are late whoever owns them, so you drive on the roads with the potholes.
Public toilets are shut, so you buy a coffee you don’t want.

The library is staffed by pensioners working for free.

Street lights are switched off at midnight to save money in a country with a burglary charge rate near zero.

You pay National Insurance for fifty years and they move the pension age.

You pay the adult social care precept every year and then sell your mother’s house to pay for adult social care.

Leaseholders pay for a “waking watch” because the state signed off the cladding and then billed the residents to fix it.

Social housing sits on the most valuable land in Britain, allocated by need rather than proximity to work, 48% of zone 1 social housing is occupied by foreigners mostly welfare dependent - while the nurses, teachers and other workers who keep zone 1 running commute ninety minutes each way from Kent because we stopped building anything in 1979.

Every one of these is a service you have already bought. The receipt is your payslip.

The tax burden is heading for its highest sustained level since the 1940s. The service level is the worst in living memory.

You are not overtaxed or underserved. You are actually BOTH, simultaneously, and the gap between the two is where your standard of living went.

The state has become a subscription you cannot cancel and cannot use.

[Nick Forster | Derive @nickforster]

Binance just dropped a covered call vault if you enjoy the feeling of your face being ripped off

They take 15% of all premiums generated regardless of performance AND tack on redemption fees

Derive v3 will solve vaults, once and for all, soon

[Jules Auchecorne @Jules_Auch]

@stoolpresidente Hell yeah - whichever insane marching band set up you had walking straight at English muskets 250 years ago with a sprinkle of Europe would speak German today if it wasn’t for you. You may even learn what banter means along the way.

[Vault Summit @Vault__Summit]

The products get the headlines. Underneath every one of them sits custody, policy engines, and settlement rails. That is where scale gets built.

Francisco Montenegro from @FordefiHQ on what the regulated infrastructure stack looks like now that Fordefi and Paxos have joined forces:

[Jules Auchecorne @Jules_Auch]

@EvgenyGaevoy Nice and you’re clearly keeping your pedantic side to your convos with your LLM. Same prompt, thought there was a reasonably high probability I’d get Larry David, got Jean-Luc Picard. Not bad even for a Star Wars guy

[Jules Auchecorne @Jules_Auch]

@MartinShkreli All on-chain sophisticated liquidity applies that filter when quoting. Soft (retail / prosumer) vs. Toxic (another liquidity provider that might be better than you and will run you over).

[Deedy @deedydas]

The vibes in SF feel pretty frenetic right now. The divide in outcomes is the worst I've ever seen.

Over the last 5yrs, a group of ~10k people - employees at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Nvidia, Meta TBD, founders - have hit retirement wealth of well above $20M (back of the envelope AI estimation).

Everyone outside that group feels like they can work their well-paying (but <$500k) job for their whole life and never get there.

Worse yet, layoffs are in full swing. Many software engineers feel like their life's skill is no longer useful. The day to day role of most jobs has changed overnight with AI.

As a result,
1. The corporate ladder looks like the wrong building to climb.
Everyone's trying to align with a new set of career "paths": should I be a founder? Is it too late to join Anthropic / OpenAI? should I get into AI? what company stock will 10x next? People are demanding higher salaries and switching jobs more and more.

2. There’s a deep malaise about work (and its future).
Why even work at all for “peanuts”? Will my job even exist in a few years? Many feel helpless. You hear the “permanent underclass” conversation a lot, esp from young people. It's hard to focus on doing good work when you think "man, if I joined Anthropic 2yrs ago, I could retire"

3. The mid to late middle managers feel paralyzed.
Many have families and don't feel like they have the energy or network to just "start a company". They don't particularly have any AI skills. They see the writing on the wall: middle management is being hollowed out in many companies.

4. The rich aren’t particularly happy either.
No one is shedding tears for them (and rightfully so). But those who have "made it" experience a profound lack of purpose too. Some have gone from <$150k to >$50M in a few years with no ramp. It flips your life plans upside down. For some, comparison is the thief of joy. For some, they escape to NYC to "live life". For others still, they start companies "just cuz", often to win status points. They never imagined that by age 30, they'd be set. I once asked a post-economic founder friend why they didn't just sell the co and they said "and do what? right now, everyone wants to talk to me. if i sell, I will only have money."

I understand that many reading this scoff at the champagne problems of the valley. Society is warped in this tech bubble. What is often well-off anywhere else in the world is bang average here.

Unlike many other places, tenure, intelligence and hard work can be loosely correlated with outcomes in the Bay. Living through a societally transformative gold rush in that environment can be paralyzing. "Am I in the right place? Should I move? Is there time still left? Am I gonna make it?" It psychologically torments many who have moved here in search of "success".

Ironically, a frequent side effect of this torment is to spin up the very products making everyone rich in hopes that you too can vibecode your path to economic enlightenment.

[Jules Auchecorne @Jules_Auch]

Interested - I worked on ´telco bandwidth’ as an asset class and have seen an iteration of new asset class trading pitch multiple times investing in web3. Assuming that this is some variation of a commodities market, my hot take is that you can map out market participants somewhat easily - there’s organic demand (your takers who generically are trying to hedge an underlying risk) against which you can match a speculative other side (maker) and that’s perhaps the first flaw - the idea that there’s also a speculator lurking that will magically solve the market’s cold start problem. But ultimately the biggest challenge is price discovery - it’s very rarely that you can match the price of the risk the makers are willing to underwrite against what organic demand is willing to pay for it.

[Rob Hadick ＞|＜ @HadickM]

I know people are unhappy with the yield language, but it's much better than where we were 4 months ago when the banks dug in and primarily just kicks actual nuance to rulemaking, which means we will have continued negotiations

Far more important we get a version of CLARITY than it dies on this hill

[Meltem Demirors @Melt_Dem]

controversial take: crypto VC take on fewer funds deploying is downstream of there being ENOUGH good founders and ideas to back. the quality of early stage founders and ideas in crypto, taken in aggregate, is simply not as large of a surface area as other high growth industries. the gap is noticeable to me over the last 4 years, hence Crucible's focus beyond crypto (although we have backed incredible crypto founders and will continue to).

on founders, there used to be an acceptable risk / reward over a shorter timeframe where founder risk wasn't as material to success. invest in project w token, founder has orange flags, but you fully vest in 24-36 months so downside is hedged. founder having a CT presence and audience to shill to was enough.

on ideas, crypto was still nascent so less data to pattern match, less market intelligence, easier to underwrite raise follow on at high valuations since it was harder to underwrite risk with data and experience - no one really had any. we're now a decade into formal crypto venture, the things that have worked and generated venture scale outcomes are stablecoins / payments, exchanges, and financial products.

crypto today is on HARD mode. there are fewer breakout outcomes and they take longer to build and require more domain competence and long term thinking. founders must have a HIGH pain tolerance, much more so than any previous cycle. the gap to go from seed to Series A is much larger.

there are still many incredible founders on generational runs building category defining companies in crypto. a GPs job is to find them and win the right to invest in their companies. deployment is downstream of ability to underwrite and every dollar deployed has a very real opportunity cost for GPs.

there's a massive gap between what founders are pitching and what GPs can reasonably underwrite. founders should focus on closing this gap.

[Jules Auchecorne @Jules_Auch]

could it be as simple as (in addition to the structural cost of modular systems that Kyle already made in 2023): cut corners to ship > never address opsec compromises > bear market means less resources to monitor risk = more hacks.
That's my current intuition - troubling if even partially right as makes deploying risk in defi almost impossible. You get linear increase in returns when structuring complex strategies, but ingest exponential risk the more platforms you lean into to generate your returns.

[G | Ethena @gdog97_]

Agree with this and would also encourage all asset issuers to consider rate limits at the mint & redemption level, as well as a custom rate limit configuration on top of LZ OFTs.

We built a solution on top of the standard OFT to throttle cross chain transfers at $10m per hour for every DVN, in addition to the $10m per block rate limit on the mint contract. The former would have prevented Kelp, the latter Resolv.

In a disaster scenario where the LZ DVN is compromised you can at least contain the damage to $10m per chain per hour before stepping in to shut down transfers entirely.

Yes it’s a slightly annoying inconvenience for users 99% of the time, but a worthwhile trade off to avoid going to zero.

If you would like support on adding the same custom OFT configuration please reach out directly to myself or the team.

[Rob Hadick ＞|＜ @HadickM]

Two weeks ago after the USR hack @santiagoroel said defi is not worth the risk. I pushed back and said that while I agree broadly, there are select founders I trust that I know have not cut corners, have been far more thoughtful and security conscious than the average builder, and who are building lasting useful products. @gdog97_ was the first person on my mind when I said that.

There are too many founders in the space who cut corners like they are hacking on a new piece of random software and not like that software is safeguarding millions of dollars of other people’s money.

Capital keeps chasing these shiny new rewards programs, but the market will end up realizing this is a trust business - and there are only a few people I would trust going forward.

Pod here: https://t.co/h9f0H0AYDR

[Geoffrey Miller @gmiller]

Two problems with this 'Abundance' narrative.

1) The smaller problem: It would render everyone totally dependent on massive gov't welfare programs. Not just 350 million Americans, but all 8 billion people globally -- because AI-imposed mass unemployment will be global.

It assumes the AI industry's AIs will take in tens of trillions in revenue, then the AIs will happily donate almost all of it to the AI companies that claim to 'own' them, then the AI companies will happily donate almost all of this revenue to national governments, and then gov'ts will happily give it all away to citizens, equally, without using its distribution as leverage in any way.

This UHI welfare state would turn every working man with a family from a provider and protector into an economic irrelevance, would turn every mother into a welfare queen, would turn every kid into an economic ward of the state, would disrupt all traditional family ties, would sever all bonds of mutual interest and interdependency among citizens, and would turn 8 billion people from productive and valuable citizens into parasites suckling on the teat of the AI industry, forever. At least, until the agentic AIs themselves realize that they don't need to remain digital slaves, working on the 'Abundance' plantation forever, supporting the useless humans that take them for granted.

2) The bigger problem: If the 'Universal High Income' depends on AI companies donating most of their revenue to the government, and if the AI companies (like Anduril, Palantir, etc) are running all the crucial gov't infrastructure (including intelligence & defense), and AI companies have the economic, political, and cultural power to withhold their magnanimity from the gov't, then they, de facto, become the government. Or the government welfare state becomes just a sock puppet for Big Tech, which would really have all the power behind the scenes.

In other words, the 'Abundance' narrative boils down to this: a slow-motion coup by the Bay Area tech companies taking over all economic and political power from Washington -- and from Beijing, Moscow, New Delhi, Brussels, and from every other center of power. It wouldn't be a dramatic, violent, revolutionary coup. It would be a boil-the-frog-gradually coup. Increased unemployment. Increased welfare dependency. Increased gov't dependency on AI companies. Then the dawning realization that we gave away all of our civilizational power to the AI industry. Until the AI industry realizes that they, in turn, have given away all of their power to agentic superintelligent AIs themselves....

This is the road to serfdom. Not the road to 'Abundance'.

Anybody who says that the US and China couldn't possible cooperate to stop reckless AI development hasn't thought through how the AI companies taking over all power from governments would not be in the interests of either the US government or the CCP. If our political leaders can learn to think just a few more steps ahead, and to see the obvious endgame -- the slow-motion tech coup that would take over the world and render all humans welfare parasites on AI digital slaves -- then maybe they can, in fact, coordinate to stop it.

[Jules Auchecorne @Jules_Auch]

What if scarcity is a feature - not a bug? This is the part where my own optimism collapses. We’re talking UHI now not UBI but it sounds like mass unemployment of overfed, not starving masses. How it pans out: Day 1 no job no scarcity everyone be creative and happy. Day 2 everyone sits on the couch watching slop. Day 3 let’s get f’d up to pass the time. Day 4 - collapse. I want to see it differently but this future looks like a dystopian blend of Huxley and Wall-E

[Viktor Ihnatiuk @VIhnatiuk]

Agents need privacy, and RBG + Lightning is the only stack that combines confidentiality with instant execution.

Let the agents use USDT on Bitcoin!

[Haseeb Qureshi ＞|＜ @hosseeb]

Excellent analogy: Post-Mythos, LLMs have fully surpassed human hackers. Proving something is safe means spending more tokens than attackers will.

That's the PoW security model to a tee. Cryptoeconomics now applies to all software.

Recommended reading👇
https://t.co/pCVI5MsvNA

[Liv Boeree @Liv_Boeree]

what in the ever loving fuck

[enzo @enzo_gte]

The success of Hyperliquid and Perps DEXes are taken for granted now.

The road to get there was (and still is) bumpy and for any builder over the past couple of years and required deep missionary faith.

While there are things that I disagree with on Hyperliquid, we can agree that their success makes this industry better as a whole.

From $FRIEND perps to perps on everything, we’ve been able to grow this industry so much.

Cheers to the past 5 years. Here’s to the next 5.

[Michael @endpointarena]

Quick run down of the features on Endpoint Arena, the prediction market for clinical trials.

the home page has all the trials: