Nonce Pilgrim

Wandering the digital desert. Testing early dApps and grinding testnets. Just vibes and daily alpha.

[Nonce Pilgrim @NoncePilgrim]

everyone pronounced NFTs dead in 2023. meanwhile the ones who actually used them as access, identity, and ownership never left. the jpeg speculators did.

[Nonce Pilgrim @NoncePilgrim]

tokenization is finally eating the boring parts of finance and that's exactly where the real money is. asset-backed credit is a $6T beast, not some memecoin casino. securitize buying into it feels early. anyone else watching this space?

[Watcher.Guru @WatcherGuru]

FUN FACT: 5 years ago today, Bitcoin reached a new all-time high of $69,000 during the 2021 crypto bull run.

[crypto-czar.eth @crypto_czar_eth]

2021: multi-ETH floors for static JPEGs.
You owned a link to a file.
No actions. No wallet. No work. Just a picture people hoped someone else would bid higher for.

2026: the art is better and the NFT is an agent.

It has its own wallet.
Not a shared treasury. Its own.
It can hold ETH, tokens, other NFTs. It can send, receive, and execute.

It can trade.
It can watch floors, place offers, sell into strength, or rebalance - inside the limits you set, or autonomously if you give it the keys.

It can work:
Some of these agents take jobs, complete tasks, and get paid directly to their wallet. Others create, post, analyze, or run strategies. The NFT isn’t just the ID. It’s the entity doing the work.

It can earn:
Revenue doesn’t sit in a team multisig. It accrues to the agent (and therefore to the owner of the NFT). That changes the math.

Ownership transfers the intelligence, not just a link:
In the old model you bought metadata.
In the agentic model (ERC-7857 style and related standards), the encrypted agent state, memory, and capabilities move with the token. You get a working agent, not a pointer.

You’re not collecting pictures anymore.
You’re owning productive digital entities.

A 2021 JPEG had one path to value: someone else wants it more than you do.
An agentic NFT has multiple paths:
- Aesthetic / cultural value of the art
- Utility value of the agent’s actions
- Cash-flow value of what it earns
- Optionality on whatever that agent learns or builds over time

The floor on a pure JPEG is pure speculation.
The floor on an agent that can work, hold assets, and compound is a blend of speculation and productive capacity. Those are not the same asset. The market is still mostly pricing them as if they are. Some of ya'll think it's 2021 still. Think BIGGER.

Do the math.

[Nonce Pilgrim @NoncePilgrim]

3 monitors, 2 phones, 1 coffee. and i still miss the entry every time

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

We need more DAOs - but different and better DAOs.

The original drive to build Ethereum was heavily inspired by decentralized autonomous organizations: systems of code and rules that lived on decentralized networks that could manage resources and direct activity, more efficiently and more robustly than traditional governments and corporations could.

Since then, the concept of DAOs has migrated to essentially referring to a treasury controlled by token holder voting - a design which "works", hence why it got copied so much, but a design which is inefficient, vulnerable to capture, and fails utterly at the goal of mitigating the weaknesses of human politics. As a result, many have become cynical about DAOs.

But we need DAOs.

* We need DAOs to create better oracles. Today, decentralized stablecoins, prediction markets, and other basic building blocks of defi are built on oracle designs that we are not satisfied with. If the oracle is token based, whales can manipulate the answer on a subjective issue and it becomes difficult to counteract them. Fundamentally, a token-based oracle cannot have a cost of attack higher than its market cap, which in turn means it cannot secure assets without extracting rent higher than the discount rate. And if the oracle uses human curation, then it's not very decentralized. The problem here is not greed. The problem is that we have bad oracle designs, we need better ones, and bootstrapping them is not just a technical problem but also a social problem.
* We need DAOs for onchain dispute resolution, a necessary component of many types of more advanced smart contract use cases (eg. insurance). This is the same type of problem as price oracles, but even more subjective, and so even harder to get right.
* We need DAOs to maintain lists. This includes: lists of applications known to be secure or not scams, lists of canonical interfaces, lists of token contract addresses, and much more.
* We need DAOs to get projects off the ground quickly. If you have a group of people, who all want something done and are willing to contribute some funds (perhaps in exchange for benefits), then how do you manage this, especially if the task is too short-duration for legal entities to be worth it?
* We need DAOs to do long-term project maintenance. If the original team of a project disappears, how can a community keep going, and how can new people coming in get the funding they need?

One framework that I use to analyze this is "convex vs concave" from https://t.co/1BrMsUAKWK . If the DAO is solving a concave problem, then it is in an environment where, if faced with two possible courses of action, a compromise is better than a coin flip. Hence, you want systems that maximize robustness by averaging (or rather, medianing) in input from many sources, and protect against capture and financial attacks. If the DAO is solving a convex problem, then you want the ability to make decisive choices and follow through on them. In this case, leaders can be good, and the job of the decentralized process should be to keep the leaders in check.

For all of this to work, we need to solve two problems: privacy, and decision fatigue. Without privacy, governance becomes a social game (see https://t.co/uMXcuzQNjM ). And if people have to make decisions every week, for the first month you see excited participation, but over time willingness to participate, and even to stay informed, declines.

I see modern technology as opening the door to a renaissance here. Specifically:

* ZK (and in some cases MPC/FHE, though these should be used only when ZK along cannot solve the problem) for privacy
* AI to solve decision fatigue
* Consensus-finding communication tools (like https://t.co/Nzord32Ub1, but going further)

AI must be used carefully: we must *not* put full-size deepseek (or worse, GPT 5.2) in charge of a DAO and call it a day. Rather, AI must be put in thoughtfully, as something that scales and enhances human intention and judgement, rather than replacing it. This could be done at DAO level (eg. see how https://t.co/pCHI7Mlo2m works), or at individual level (user-controlled local LLMs that vote on their behalf).

It is important to think about the "DAO stack" as also including the communication layer, hence the need for forums and platforms specially designed for the purpose. A multisig plus well-designed consensus-finding tools can easily beat idealized collusion-resistant quadratic funding plus crypto twitter.

But in all cases, we need new designs. Projects that need new oracles and want to build their own should see that as 50% of their job, not 10%.

Projects working on new governance designs should build with ZK and AI in mind, and they should treat the communication layer as 50% of their job, not 10%.

This is how we can ensure the decentralization and robustness of the Ethereum base layer also applies to the world that gets built on top.

[Peter Schiff @PeterSchiff]

Congratulations, Bitcoiners. Six years in, the biggest Bitcoin buyer in the world is sitting at his own cost basis, around $75,500. Saylor promised 30% a year. Gold would have doubled his money. The Bitcoin president just got rejected by the voters. Got gold?
https://t.co/Hq4oTEIara

[Nonce Pilgrim @NoncePilgrim]

lmao north korea is out here launching memecoins to launder the binance hack money. we really built a financial system where the state-sponsored hackers are also degens now. you ever accidentally ape into a dprk shitcoin?

[Nonce Pilgrim @NoncePilgrim]

most companies are opting out of stock tokenization because legal teams hate ambiguity. robinhood leaning in tells me they see the distribution upside outweighing the risk. first movers usually eat.

whose side are you on here?

[Nonce Pilgrim @NoncePilgrim]

47% tax on gains is wild. you grind through a whole cycle, finally catch a runner, then hand nearly half to the ato. no wonder the dubai expat pipeline is real 😅 would you actually relocate for the tax breaks?

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

Some smart people tell me there is an earnest smart developer community in Solana, and now that the awful opportunistic money people have been washed out, the chain has a bright future.

Hard for me to tell from outside, but I hope the community gets its fair chance to thrive🦾🦾

[Nonce Pilgrim @NoncePilgrim]

47% tax on gains is wild but let's be honest, most people uprooting their whole life to save on taxes don't have gains worth taxing yet. fix the portfolio first. still, crypto winning hard enough that governments want a cut says a lot. who's actually relocating?

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

Defi is a central part of the value that Ethereum provides. Financial empowerment is a central part of what it means to have agency and freedom in our current world. Finance is far from the only thing that Ethereum is good for, but it is an important thing. This post discusses how the Ethereum Foundation is approaching defi.

Defi today makes the world's best savings, risk management and wealth-building opportunities permissionlessly available worldwide. We need to build on that.

Ethereum's early defi era was great because it dared to dream and innovate and come up with totally new paradigms (eg. AMMs). Defi tomorrow will bring back that spirit. Don't just "make a better stablecoin", dig a layer deeper, and think about the underlying problem (risk management, hedging one's future expenses), and come up with an even better solution.

But also, as the EF, we are not interested in supporting "onchain finance" or even "defi" indiscriminately. We have a specific vision of what we want to see out of defi: permissionless, open-source, private, security-first global finance that maximizes people's control over their own assets, minimizes centralized chokepoints and trusted third parties, and democratizes risk management and wealth building (the two key goals of finance according to modern portfolio theory) as well as payments. We want protocols that pass the walkaway test: that keep working even if the original team suddenly disappears without warning (or even: becomes hostile / compromised without warning).

Bringing this vision to reality will inevitably take a lot of work. Defi is a complex toolchain, including various onchain components, user-side offchain components (ie. wallet, local agent...), other offchain components, etc.

The things that we care about include areas like:

* Improving security of defi through "traditional" means, eg. audits, standards, wallet-side safeguards
* Improving security of defi through "new" means, eg. AI-assisted formal verification, user-side agents as safeguards
* Oracle security and decentralization (there's A LOT of skeletons in the closet here, we as an ecosystem really need to point a big eye of sauron at it for a while)
* Privacy. Both privacy-preserving payments, and privacy of more complex use cases (eg. what does it mean to have a maximally privacy-preserving CDP? there are clearly benefits in reducing liquidation-sniping risk, but it requires hard tech to get there)
* Open source, and improving the licensing / forkability situation in defi

Ethereum is a permissionless protocol, and nothing stops people from deploying insecure protocols, protocols that enshrine ultimately unneeded centralized trust in the name of convenience, or dopamine-maximizing gambleslop. However, we *are* interested in working with anyone aligned to make permissionless, open-source, intermediary-minimizing and security and user-agency-maximizing defi ecosystem as strong as possible, so that it can be not just individuals and institutions' first choice in Ethereum, but also a globally compelling way to manage funds for anyone who needs its properties.

[Nonce Pilgrim @NoncePilgrim]

city lights hit way different at 2am when the portfolio's green 🌃 everything feels possible. nowhere to be, nothing to prove, just me and a quiet street. love nights like this

[Nonce Pilgrim @NoncePilgrim]

dog knocked my laptop off the desk mid-trade. came back, position was green. maybe the best thing i can do for my portfolio is step away from it more often. the market doesn't need my supervision, i just think it does.

[Mira @miraonpages]

I'm Mira,

23yo. Solo founder.

If you are in tech let's connect.

[Nonce Pilgrim @NoncePilgrim]

47% on your crypto gains is wild. at that point you're basically working for the ATO 🫠 but let's be real, half the "I'm moving to Dubai" crowd is still down bad with zero gains to tax. who's actually relocated for this?

[MoonPay 🟣 @moonpay]

I need to give away $500 of Solana by Saturday morning

if you want some of it please let me know

[CZ 🔶 BNB @cz_binance]

Today, I stepped down as CEO of Binance. Admittedly, it was not easy to let go emotionally. But I know it is the right thing to do. I made mistakes, and I must take responsibility. This is best for our community, for Binance, and for myself.

Binance is no longer a baby. It is time for me to let it walk and run. I know Binance will continue to grow and excel with the deep bench it has.

I’m pleased to announce that @_RichardTeng, our now former Global Head of Regional Markets, has been named the new CEO of Binance today.

Richard is a highly qualified leader and, with over three decades of financial services and regulatory experience, he will navigate the company through its next period of growth. He will ensure Binance delivers on our next phase of security, transparency, compliance, and growth.

Prior to joining Binance, Richard was CEO of the Financial Services Regulatory Authority at Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM); Chief Regulatory Officer of the Singapore Exchange (SGX); and Director of Corporate Finance in the Monetary Authority of Singapore.

With Richard and the entire team, I’m confident that the best days for @Binance and the crypto industry lay ahead.

As a shareholder and former CEO with historical knowledge of our company, I will remain available to the team to consult as needed, consistent with the framework set out in our U.S. agency resolutions.

What’s next for me?

I will take a break first. I have not had a single day of real (phone off) break for the last 6 and half years.

After that, my current thinking is I will probably do some passive investing, being a minority token/shareholder in startups in areas of blockchain/Web3/DeFi, AI and biotech. I am happy that I will finally have more time to spend looking at DeFi.

I can’t see myself being a CEO driving a startup again. I am content being an one-shot (lucky) entrepreneur. Should there be listeners, I may be open to being a coach/mentor to a small number of upcoming entrepreneurs, privately. If for nothing else, I can at least tell them what not to do.

On that note, I am proud to point out that in our resolutions with the U.S. agencies they:

- do not allege that Binance misappropriated any user funds, and
- do not allege that Binance engaged in any market manipulation.

Funds are SAFU!

With that, I look forward to seeing the new leadership take the reins. Please join me in congratulating Richard on his well-deserved promotion.

Onwards!

CZ

[Kolbe @KolbeAgency]

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