Maxim Galash

Tailored crypto investment products @coinchangeio. Engineer, previously GP @bgsventure , co-founder @itmhouse. Proud Husband & Dad of 3

[Maxim Galash @maxgalash]

Perseverance and spirit have done wonders in all ages.

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

🇺🇸

[Maxim Galash @maxgalash]

@paoloardoino Lol @circle feels left behid the party

[Maxim Galash @maxgalash]

Gteat take on financialization of compute markets 🎯

[Jonah @jvb_xyz]

Compute trading probably won't happen anytime soon.

...and I really want it to. I also want to see @BrettHarrison win.

I watched people try and fail to financialize LNG liquidity for years.

As I study compute mkts, I am increasingly convinced they will go the way of LNG for the following reasons:

1/ Due to obsolescence, there is no enduring benchmark:

A contract on H100s loses relevance as the world rolls to H200/B200/GB200/Rubin. WTI, meanwhile, has been useful for decades.

2/ The chip universe will fragment:

NVIDIA won't be the only game in town for long. Soon you'll have AMD, Google TPUs, Trainium, custom hyperscaler ASICs, inference chips, sovereign AI chips, and workload-specific silicon competing for inference & training cycles. This will make benchmarking even more of a nightmare.

3/ The physical is too bespoke:

Successful commodities futures have a solid benchmark w/ physical delivery at a hub (to prevent manipulation) plus a few relevant bases. In compute, it's the opposite: no solid benchmark and bases galore.

PCIe vs SXM, InfiniBand vs Ethernet, 8-GPU node vs 4,096-GPU cluster, region, uptime, reserved vs spot, bare metal vs containerized, storage, egress, security, support, etc...too many taxonomies to financialize.

4/ Incumbents benefit from opacity:

This one really murdered the LNG exchange startups.

Just like Vitol/BP/Shell, the best-positioned compute purveyors make money from relationships & information asymmetry. They will not abdicate that edge for a few bps of startup equity.

5/ You need physical settlement for compute trading to be sustainable.

There are already plenty of potential “hubs,” but until real capacity can be delivered, rejected, upgraded, discounted, or arbitraged against the screen, the futures contract is too prone to manipulation by the oligopoly of compute producers & marketers.

Physical settlement, or a real EFP mechanism, is what forces convergence. Cash settlement should come after that, not before.

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Compute will probably financialize eventually...but not as "compute." It will start as narrow, ugly, basis-heavy contracts around specific chips, regions, terms, and vintages. These will probably be traded peer to peer, forming an OTC market more akin to treasury bonds than a futurized derivatives mkt akin to oil or crypto.

[Maxim Galash @maxgalash]

How does it impact @circle business?
You can already mint/burn usd/usdc at no fee @jerallaire

[Simon Taylor @sytaylor]

🚨 BREAKING: 100+ companies just backed Open USD, a dollar stablecoin run by a new independent company, Open Standard. Zach Abrams is interim CEO.

Five-minute reaction (and personal views only.)

The instinct is to count the logos when you see a lot of them. The design choices matter much more.

- No mint or redemption fees by default
- No arbitrary caps when you scale from $10k to $10m
- Reserve yield shared by default (issuers used to keep it)

This is clearly about scale, and going after the larger, industrial-grade payments volume.

Open Standard runs like a financial market infrastructure. It remids me more of things like SWIFT, the card networks, the clearing houses. Owned broadly, governed by a board, a little "boring" on purpose.

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Credible neutrality is the whole game.

One company's coin is a product. A coin a hundred competitors agree to share becomes a standard. The cap tables of SWIFT and the early clearing houses were the incumbents of their day in one room. This rhymes.

Look at the breadth too. Banks, card networks, crypto natives, fintechs, big tech, on one coin. A global PSP, a community bank, an international long-tail player. Everyone finds an animal in the picture that looks like them. That breadth is the ultra significant bit.

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For stablecoins to get beyond their current use cases, we needed something that got rid of the penalties for scale (like mint burn fees) and could handle massive volume.

Today's stablecoin use cases are a rounding error against what's coming. with ~$300B in circulation. SWIFT instructs an average of 5 to 6 trillions a day. The card networks settle trillions. Capital markets, QUADRILLIONS. The prize is moving those flows on-chain, 24/7, with the settlement guarantees regulated money actually needs.

If you build payments, capital markets or treasury, this is the rails question of the decade.

Read the design choices first. The logo wall is the easy story.

[Gary Marcus @GaryMarcus]

“If there is a deflation of the AI bubble, the optimists say that the new infrastructure will remain even if the companies do not — just as railways survived the 19th-century railway bust. However, this fails to reckon with the reality of depreciation (few pieces of silicon hold their value for very long because better chips inevitably come along) and the possibility that LLMs could be displaced by more efficient models less dependent on massive numbers of expensive AI chips.  

In placing massive hyperscaling bets, investors are setting lavish expectations about future earnings. But LLMs are not likely to replicate the near monopolies that have made the market power of current tech giants hard to assail. A better analogy for them might be airlines, which are hobbled by small margins, intense competition, high expenses and dependence on hardware created by outside vendors.”

– @garymarcus in @FinancialTimes

[Maxim Galash @maxgalash]

Circle of life 😂😵‍💫

[Maxim Galash @maxgalash]

Welcome to @OhioState

[Maxim Galash @maxgalash]

The longer I spend in a field, the faster I pattern-match and the less I actually see. My judgment, the thing I was selling, is in large part compressed repetition. It feels like wisdom from the inside. From the outside it looks a great deal like a model that has seen the situation ten thousand times, which is exactly the thing we are now able to build. I am not sure my judgment is as inseparable from me as my pride needs it to be. I suspect a lot of it could be written down, and once it can be written down, you already know where it goes.

[Maxim Galash @maxgalash]

Almost everything you think of as yours can be separated from you. And whatever can be separated from a person is, right now, going abundant and going cheap...

[Maxim Galash @maxgalash]

@jelmerhilhorst @nickfloats 😂🤯

[Maxim Galash @maxgalash]

Incredible physics and technology

[Midjourney @midjourney]

A technical dive inside our new "Midjourney Scanner"

[Maxim Galash @maxgalash]

@APompliano Took @elonmusk 24 years not 24 hours 😵‍💫😂

[Maxim Galash @maxgalash]

Success requires balancing a deep knowledge of history with an obsessive focus on the technological edge where disruption happens. @bgurley

[Maxim Galash @maxgalash]

The grit that matters most is learning to be your best when you’re at your worst. This is really the difference between elite-level performers and everyone else. And you have to train this kind of grit on its own, as a separate skill. But, if you can do this, what you discover is real power. There’s real power there—and it’s power you probably didn’t know you had @shaneparrish

[Maxim Galash @maxgalash]

😂😂😂

[Thomas Thornton @TommyThornton]

*AXIOS: IRAN DEMANDED A LARGE ALLOCATION TO THE SPACEX IPO. done deal

[Maxim Galash @maxgalash]

The alpha in a company is in the founder’s ability to spot non-obvious potential from their vantage point, apply it early and aggressively, and course-correct with new information.

[a16z @a16z]

"Late-stage venture is about late-stage founders. It's about a specific kind of person, who can keep deploying dollars attractively, indefinitely."

"The existence of founders like Ali Ghodsi or the Collisons has proven that the right kind of person can keep growing ambitiously, forever."

"You may as well accept that these founders are the asset class; let them cook."

a16z GP David George on what makes founders so good at growing ambitiously, forever: https://t.co/SIE701gbx1

[Maxim Galash @maxgalash]

@shaneparrish @bgurley 2 goats @bgurley wisdom and @shaneparrish curiosity
Amazng episode 🤓🔥

[Maxim Galash @maxgalash]

@dkhos was an analyst at Allen & Company working on the LBO model for Paramount. Barry [Diller] didn't want to talk to the MD or the VP or the associate. He'd say, “Who built the model? I'm going to talk to that guy.” He wanted to hear straight from the source. It's the filtering that gets the edge out of the situation, and it's often the edge that gives you an edge. It's not the average.