Lots of founders are crashing out
A year ago AI felt like an incredible opportunity.
Most of us were able to ship faster, remove admin, and get time back.
Lots of engineering founders were even able to explore marketing for the first time: SEO, organic social, outbound.
Building complex systems that felt extremely productive.
But since then, a lot has happened.
Here’s some of the themes I’m seeing:
AI marketing isn’t working. At first it feels impressive and it looks good but for most it’s not driving results. This is made worse by the fact everyone has access to the same tools. Inboxes are flooded, buyers are fatigued, the economy is flat.
Engineers are fried. Yes you can ship more but for many the flow state has gone. It’s a new way of working and it’s not for everyone. The speed leaves many of us exhausted before 11am.
There’s a feeling of what’s the point? Is my product’s next feature going to be redundant in a year, or a month? Can’t AI do what my business does, better?
SaaS valuations have collapsed. From 3-4x revenue to 1x. There’s a sinking realisation that a large number of SaaS companies will go to 0 in the next few years. Building to exit seems almost crazy right now.
There’s far fewer buyers and far more sellers. These include vibe coders cloning products without the care or craft, contributing to the distribution challenges from people doing it the right way.
Lots of people are trying to make money by selling shovels. This just adds to the frenzied energy.
Build in public stopped being fun. A few makers realised that the new game is attention, and now everything feels insincere and stunt-driven. They are influencers not founders. Changes to the X timeline compounded the issues.
There are exceptions and there are still moats remaining, but the challenges feel existential
Well 6.0 is no better. Yesterday while demoing our product to a prospect I noticed my Codex agent was in jail. I never asked it to do anything which would require it to do below.
Weirdest Bull Market:
No TGE
No Jobs
No Airdrops
No narratives
No new users
No easy money
No one is building
No new opportunities
No one knows what’s happening
chromaway:native is waking up. 🔥
AI agents are the next big wave, but autonomy without security is a ticking time bomb.
The future of AI needs:
🤖 Onchain memory for AI agents
🔐 Privacy & secure data management
⛓️ Verifiable actions & transparent execution
⚡ Scalable infrastructure built for AI
This is exactly what we are building.
The AI agent economy needs more than just intelligence. It needs trust.
$CHR 🚀
Kill Switch is a cute idea, but not a realistic one. That’s why we built a “Jail” and isolated environment which pauses AI and gives security teams time to react.
I thought it was next week, finally people will understand the real value of what @perelmanor and myself have built with @ATBASHai big news coming stay tuned
Updates of August 2026
> Chromia Pay is close. Agents can ask to spend, but something outside the model approves it. Payments settle on Chromia & fees in CHR
> decenchro now runs 60+ agents. Deployment is 4x faster, 30s to 1min, and single click launch works from your phone
> Unbound AI is live on iOS. Fully on-device
Unlocking more utilities for chromaway:native!
https://t.co/JWWVNltPMZ now supports detailed Analytics for each agent that is deployed and improved UI to managed the Fleet
You can now see all the tokens consumed, conversations and even set a monthly budget of what your agent can consume
Unbound AI is finally live on iOS App Store!
A model with no guardrails now lives on the hands of every iPhone users
No API, subscription or servers. Runs 100% on-device
Try here - https://t.co/MawsrGDoFY
Introducing decenchro
Your private and secure AI agents, deployed in one click.
Everyone wants to run one. Almost nobody wants to spend a weekend wiring servers and pasting keys into config files.
With decenchro, now you can.
This is mind blowing but not something which should not have been anticipated. Almost every swarm operator can attest that something similar has happened to them in the past, not as big of a scale but similar idea. That’s why we founded Atbash to solve these sorts of problems. Big news coming soon!
PSA: Bankr's infrastructure was not compromised and no Bankr vulnerability was exploited. The attacker compromised the X account.
If you are a Bankr user, enable MFA on your Bankr account. This ensures that even if your X account is compromised your Bankr account stays secure.
We are still awaiting a response from the X team. Updates to come.
Turn on MFA in the Security section of https://t.co/1np4M7miko