Primitive° 🇺🇸

Ghost duck online

[PARTYBET @partybet]

Welcome to PartyBet.

Sports Prediction Markets + Casino Games, built into Telegram.

Place a bet.
Drop it in the chat.
Let your friends Tail instantly.

Sign up for the Guestlist, follow @partybet & RT for a shot at the $10,000 Prize Pool.

Join: https://t.co/QLjTOFGPHn

[JT Liss @JTLissPhotoArt]

This is a moment ngl. Big thanks to @BusinessInsider for profiling @cycol_gallery. We work extremely hard to bridge the traditional and digital art worlds and articles like this level up our legitimacy.

S/O to @solana @Pedromiranda @TheOnlyNom and @bonk_inu for believing in the vision, and the Cycol team for bringing it every exhibition, further proving we are one of the most exciting new galleries to come out of NYC.

Pull up tonight as we showcase @FrankApeWorld for his first solo exhibition in almost a decade.

Link to the article in the comments.

[Blockworks @Blockworks]

https://t.co/aYafGCqWsU

[jay plemons @jayplemons]

Visual representation of the distance between Earth and the Moon

[Primitive° 🇺🇸 @PrimitiveMoney]

Founders matter. Conscious capitalism matters. The reasons we do things matter.

They are actively solving massive friction in cross-border payments for the emerging markets that legacy finance has historically ignored. What they are solving is important to the greater good.

Sphere is a constant reminder to me of why I fell in love with this space. It had the chance of real change. They are doing it.

[The Index Podcast @theindexshow]

Left everything behind. Lived on the ground in Latin America. Built stablecoin rails for markets no one else touches.

That's Arnold Lee (@0xdirichlet) of @sphere_labs.
Full ep with @afkehaya on @theindexshow → https://t.co/TclwjL7HIS

[Isaiah Taylor - making nuclear reactors @isaiah_p_taylor]

Valar Atomics is on track to make power before July 4th in our Ward250 reactor. But before we do that, I asked the team to look back at Project Nova and reflect on what we learned.

We also got some footage of Nova declassified and are sharing it here for the first time. Enjoy!

[JT Liss @JTLissPhotoArt]

Over 200 people showed up on Friday night for @cycol_gallery’s opening of Only In NY.

No one was talking about bear markets, or algorithms, or rug pulls, leaving the space, or making fun of people leaving the space, or anything negative. It was about connection and collaborative opportunities. It was about art and our love for it. It was people meeting for the first time and being genuinely excited to be on the cusp of something special as we build between the worlds of art, tech, and finance. It was love from start to finish.

The TL here has been hurting for some time now. Don’t get sucked into the bullshit. Show up for those who are continuing to forge ahead. Support and learn from them. Then start building your own things that connect a broader community. Start small and hold onto the tiny wins to keep you going. Imagine if you did that now, right now, where you will be in 5 years.

Don’t focus your life around this energy sucking cesspool of an app. Go live. Go build something you’ll be proud of down the road.

[Primitive° 🇺🇸 @PrimitiveMoney]

@SquatsAlot420 @armaniferrante @Backpack NFT dynamics simply do not work in 99% of the cases we saw them 'raising' for. It was the job of the 'investors' to see this as well.

[Primitive° 🇺🇸 @PrimitiveMoney]

Anyone holding and trading Mad Lads back then knew or should have known it was always and clearly, a free capital raise. Most their capital to build Backpack was on FTX and locked up in bankruptcy. They were out of runway. This was clear public knowledge if you read anything or through the lines at all.

They had to figure out what to do with them after. Which was almost every NFT project. Free capital raise for founders and then pretend like they matter. I think that model is mostly a bad thing but maybe, maybe, in a few settings it could work. This was not one of them and was never going to be.

I don't think people should be manipulated. I also don't think you should have been holding these ever expecting anything. That's your own accountability.

[ufuk @ufukdogancrypto]

We Were Never His Community. We Were His Fundraise. | Full Long Story

Let's start with something most people get wrong. @armaniferrante didn't build Mad Lads alone. @tristan co-founded Coral with him, co-founded Backpack with him, and was the person who spent over a year curating the community before the mint even happened. The allowlist process, the culture, the "WAO — We Are One" identity — that was Tristan's work. Him and @monkdoesnt. They made Mad Lads a name that commanded genuine respect across the entire Solana ecosystem.

There's something worth noting. FTX collapsed in November 2022. The Mad Lads mint happened in April 2023, months later, as Solana was still trying to find its footing. Looking back, that mint wasn't just a community launch. It was a lifeline. A way to rebuild and fund the exchange Armani actually wanted to build all along. We were the funding round. We just didn't know it at the time.

After Tristan and Monkey left, everything that came after is Armani's legacy alone. The community started hollowing out slowly. The Mad Lads Twitter went quiet. Discord went cold. New Backpack employees had zero respect for Lads holders, some distanced themselves publicly, some talked openly about not caring. But Armani kept saying the right things. Community matters. Loyalty matters. So we stayed.

Then the Backpack Exchange announcement dropped and we lost our minds, in the best way. We bought more Lads immediately. At that point Mad Lads was genuinely bigger than Backpack as a brand. The name carried more weight, more trust, more recognition. We thought: this is it. We are the face of something that could become the next Binance. Our patience is about to pay off.

Then came the Seasons. Trading points, volume based rewards, the promise of a $BP airdrop. Mad Lads holders are not traders, we never were. We are believers, holders, community people. But we didn't want to be left behind. So we tried. We generated volume. Lost real money. And told ourselves: it's fine, TGE is coming, he won't forget us.

Season 2. Season 3. Still no utility for Lads. Still no mention of Lads. The only thing we ever received was a fee reduction on the exchange, a benefit built for traders, given to a community of people who aren't traders. By that point, I don't think they thought about us much at all.

The signals were everywhere. Mad Lads Twitter stopped posting. Armani became active on Backpack Discord and went silent on Lads Discord. His language shifted from "our community" to "Mad Lads are not our product." When KOLs posted hit pieces on Backpack, who was in the replies defending him every single time? Lads holders. Always.

Someone slid into my DMs, an ex-Backpack employee. Said simply: "Lads will not get an airdrop." I dismissed it. We all did. We thought Armani was filtering out farmers. The real ones would be taken care of. He values loyalty, right? We chose to believe that.

When people close to the team started posting about "all the airdrops Lads already received," we read between the lines. The message underneath was obvious: you already ate, stop asking. But we held on. When Armani posted "NFTs might be dead but Lads are just getting started" we took it as confirmation. He still sees us.

He didn't.

Then the snapshot. The tokenomics. The number that made the whole community go silent.

One percent.

Not for bots. Not for farmers. For the people who had been there from the beginning. Who defended him publicly. Who absorbed trading losses to generate volume for his exchange. One percent for the backbone.

The response when the community asked why? Simple. Cold. You already ate.

Then came yesterday, one day after the TGE. As community managers have now confirmed, newly traded Mad Lads will no longer receive VIP status on Backpack. If you held before, you are grandfathered in. But anyone buying today gets nothing. No utility. No benefit. No connection to the exchange we spent years supporting.

He waited until after the airdrop to quietly close the door. No announcement. No explanation. Just policy.

That is not an oversight. That is housekeeping. The community served its purpose, the token launched, and the last remaining thread was cut the very next day.

Here is what I believe now. Armani got lucky. He got lucky that Tristan was brilliant at building community culture from the ground up. He inherited loyalty that most founders spend years trying to manufacture. And instead of stewarding it, he extracted it. Quietly, gradually, until there was nothing left to take.

Mad Lads was never the goal. Backpack was always the goal. Mad Lads was the vehicle that got him there. Once it served its purpose, it got parked.

And the tragic part? It didn't even work. The TGE underperformed. The trader community is fractured. Chinese holders are rising up over witch-hunt accusations. He distanced himself from the community that loved him unconditionally and couldn't hold the one he replaced us with.

Mad Lads gave Armani everything. Capital, credibility, cover, and community. We were there when nobody else was. We made Backpack look legitimate before Backpack had earned that on its own.

WAO. We Are One.
We meant it.
He never did.

[Primitive° 🇺🇸 @PrimitiveMoney]

It would be insane as a business to distribute 15% to an NFT portion of your project. You are not investors and NFTs never had any equity correlation. That was the problem with them all along.

This is not a Mad Lads problem. This was a problem with NFT dynamics no one did right.

[Primitive° 🇺🇸 @PrimitiveMoney]

@Freyy_is Apple has such an opportunity to create dumb phones for kids and de-tech our world under their hardware and ecosystem.

It's what people want. It's probably not what they will do. They haven't innovated in so long, they should remove innovation to be innovative.

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Uber founder Travis Kalanick just inverted the entire automation panic.

Everyone assumes AI eliminates human value.

The physics say the opposite.

Kalanick: “Let’s say the entire world, everything in our world, was automated except for plumbers. You had machines making buildings. You would basically have like a thousand buildings a day.”

The algorithm can design a skyscraper in a millisecond.

It cannot connect the pipes.

When compute violently accelerates the speed of construction, the unautomated human becomes the ultimate bottleneck.

And the bottleneck captures all the margin.

Kalanick: “How valuable would those plumbers be? Extremely valuable. Those guys, each and every plumber would be like LeBron. Why? Because plumbing is the long pole in the tent to progress.”

If the machine needs a human to finalize physical execution, that human doesn’t get replaced.

Their economic value goes exponential.

Kalanick: “You got so much efficiency everywhere else that you need millions of plumbers.”

The market thinks automation drives human wages to zero.

The physics dictate it drives the bottleneck’s wages to infinity.

The next decade doesn’t belong to whoever out-computes the machine.

It belongs to whoever stands at the exact point where the digital engine meets the physical world.

Kalanick: “If we get to this place where autonomous cars are everywhere, if it was a thousand to one, you still probably have, I don’t know, 20 million jobs, 50 million jobs.”

The panic over job destruction assumes a static volume of output.

When output goes infinite, the system demands more human oversight. Not less.

Waymo doesn’t delete the human. It shifts them from driver of one vehicle to director of a thousand.

Kalanick: “Until we get super AGI, humans are valuable and they are going to become more and more valuable because they will be the long pole in the tent to progress.”

You are no longer the engine.

You are the grid.

[Valar Atomics @valaratomics]

Introducing the Modular Citadel production line, capable of producing over 1,000 shielding blocks per year.

The Modular Citadel is a pre-cast, self-tensioning shielding system built for mass-manufactured scale.

Block production is on track for July 4th!

[Primitive° 🇺🇸 @PrimitiveMoney]

Reminder. There are some VERY cool things being built on chain. Stablecoins and Solana payment rails are a better mousetrap.

The better mousetrap wins.

[Dirichlet @0xdirichlet]

Takes me back to December 2022 when we were first pitching a stablecoin payments company on @solana (@sphere_labs) and very serious people kept asking:

Why the hell would you use Solana?

And who tf outside of tiny emerging markets would want to use stablecoins for payments?

😭

[Primitive° 🇺🇸 @PrimitiveMoney]

@Topo_G Makes sense.

If given an ultimatum I would go with the US gov't every time. At least you then can regulate back and there is a legal system to challenge use.

Tech leaders should not be the dictator of the future, AI makes it much worse.

I don't like it though.

[Primitive° 🇺🇸 @PrimitiveMoney]

This is good context for my own thinking.

[Milk Road AI @MilkRoadAI]

Palantir CEO Alex Karp told you the most important thing about the Pentagon vs. Anthropic standoff.

And nobody is connecting the dots.

Watch and save this clip, then read this thread.

Karp said something most tech CEOs would never say out loud:

"A small island in Silicon Valley that would love to decide what you eat, how you eat, and monetize all your data should not also decide who lives in your country and under what conditions."

He's talking about his own industry.

And his argument is simple.

There are elections, there are rules.

There is a transfer of power from one president to another.

Silicon Valley does not get to override that.

"The view of Silicon Valley that we get to decide should not be the way these things are decided."

This cost him everything.

His house was protested for month, Palantir's offices were protested.

Employees pushed back internally and some walked out.

He didn't change course.

Then the interviewer asked if he supports the Trump administration's approach.

His answer might surprise you.

"I've been a card-carrying progressive my whole life. My family is progressive. I have a degree in what amounts to progressive thought."

He said he's never stopped being critical of this administration.

He's not planning to vote for it.

But then he said the thing that changes the entire Anthropic debate.

"The core issue is: who decides?"

Not whether the policy is right and not whether you agree with the mission.

Who decides.

He made it personal.

"It's commonly known that our software is used in operational context at war."

"Do you really think the warfighter is going to trust a software company that pulls the plug because something becomes controversial?"

Let that sit for a second.

"Currently, when you're a warfighter, your life depends on your software."

"They will never trust you if you pull the plug just because you're unpopular."

This is a man whose software powers classified military operations across the West.

He's describing what happens when trust breaks.

Now apply that to what's happening right now.

Anthropic built Claude, the only AI running on the Pentagon's classified networks.

It was used in the operation that captured Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro in January.

The Pentagon loves it and it works.

But Anthropic has two red lines: No mass surveillance of Americans and no autonomous weapons without a human pulling the trigger.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave Anthropic a deadline: 5:01 PM Friday.

Drop the red lines or face the Defense Production Act.

Anthropic's CEO said no. "We cannot in good conscience accede to their request."

But here's where it gets complicated.

Anthropic isn't refusing to work with the military, Claude already does.

It's refusing two specific things. Two.

But here's the problem, congress hasn't passed a single law governing military AI.

There are no elections on this and no rules.

The Pentagon is using contract language and Cold War era emergency powers to decide the future of AI in warfare.

That's not democracy either.

Two private parties are fighting over rules that elected officials should have written years ago.

The deadline is today. Friday. 5:01 PM Eastern.

If the government forces these guardrails off, no AI safety commitment ever means anything again.

If Anthropic wins, tech CEOs become the gatekeepers of American defense.

Either way, the system is broken.

[Primitive° 🇺🇸 @PrimitiveMoney]

@SecWar Dangerous path you're walking.

[Primitive° 🇺🇸 @PrimitiveMoney]

@Cryptoweaver_ @zerohedge Literal psychopath.

[Primitive° 🇺🇸 @PrimitiveMoney]

The guy who didn't care much about the human race all, suddenly when hit with a funding wall is all in on America....

Controlled by economics but not by morals is not a great path when it comes to building out the next intelligent being.

[Sam Altman @sama]

Tonight, we reached an agreement with the Department of War to deploy our models in their classified network.

In all of our interactions, the DoW displayed a deep respect for safety and a desire to partner to achieve the best possible outcome.

AI safety and wide distribution of benefits are the core of our mission. Two of our most important safety principles are prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and human responsibility for the use of force, including for autonomous weapon systems. The DoW agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement.

We also will build technical safeguards to ensure our models behave as they should, which the DoW also wanted. We will deploy FDEs to help with our models and to ensure their safety, we will deploy on cloud networks only.

We are asking the DoW to offer these same terms to all AI companies, which in our opinion we think everyone should be willing to accept. We have expressed our strong desire to see things de-escalate away from legal and governmental actions and towards reasonable agreements.

We remain committed to serve all of humanity as best we can. The world is a complicated, messy, and sometimes dangerous place.