Vladimir Mocan

[Bill Gurley @bgurley]

This is how mature enterprises solve security problems (vs braggadocios press releases that create panic instead).

[Le Crapaud @Le_Crapaud47]

🚨Exclusivité🚨

L’Union européenne décide enfin de réagir et de se lancer dans la course à l’IA avec un produit révolutionnaire

[Bill Gurley @bgurley]

If you are on the verge of AGI or ASI, why isn’t your model smart enough to recognize espionage distillation in real time? You say “cure cancer in a few years.” Isn’t sniffing illicit distillation quite a bit easier than curing cancer? Why write letters to DC? Just use AGI.

[Vladimir Mocan @VladimirMocan]

@milesdeutscher Trade

[Vladimir Mocan @VladimirMocan]

@mpawlo @AutismCapital 🤣

[Brian Armstrong @brian_armstrong]

One of my favorite lessons I’ve learnt from working with smart people:

Action produces information. If you’re unsure of what to do, just do anything, even if it’s the wrong thing. This will give you information about what you should actually be doing.

Sounds simple on the surface - the hard part is making it part of your every day working process.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

You are a taker, not a maker. All you’ve done your whole life is take from the makers of the world.

The zero-sum mindset you have is at the root of so much evil. Once you realize that civilization is not zero-sum and that it is about making far more than one consumes, then it becomes obvious that the path to prosperity for all is just let the makers make.

Regarding Tesla, the reality is that I have been given nothing.

However, if I lead Tesla to become the most valuable company in the world by far and it stays that way for 5 years, shareholders voted to award me 12% of what is built. Anyone who wants to come along for the ride can buy Tesla stock.

If Tesla “merely” becomes a $1.999 trillion dollar company, I get nothing. This is a great deal for shareholders, which is why they voted so overwhelmingly to approve this, for which I am immensely grateful.

And they did so by a margin far more than you won your political seat.

[Brian Armstrong @brian_armstrong]

I've never been more bullish about clear rules for crypto. It’s obvious that market structure is a freight train that's left the station.

But that hasn't stopped the big banks from coming for another handout - this time paid by your crypto rewards. They want to undo your right under the GENIUS Act law to earn USDC rewards. Don't let them.

Banks want to ban rewards to maintain their monopoly, and we're making sure the Senate knows bailing out the big banks at the expense of the American consumer is not ok.

[Vladimir Mocan @VladimirMocan]

@Immutable exi

[Robbie Ferguson | Immutable @0xferg]

Many of you first met @Immutable back in 2021. Meanwhile:

2021: 6 games
2025: 680+ games

2021: 450k GU players
2025: 5.6m registered on Play

2021: laughed at by web2
2025: onboarding some of the biggest studios in the world

[Robbie Ferguson | Immutable @0xferg]

Tokyo Beast hit the 8th most streamed game on Kick over the weekend. More viewers than Minecraft, COD, CS2, and FIFA.

[Sadie @Sadie_NC]

Corruption is not bad. It is only bad of I am not a part of it.

That seems to be the thought process many in our government.
🤨🤨

[Robbie Ferguson | Immutable @0xferg]

We've now had a @MARBLEXofficial game hit no. 1 on Google Play in Korea.

It's happening.

[Marine l MC² Finance @VCMarine]

I just witnessed a rare civilisational-level conversation.

@VitalikButerin builds Ethereum.
@balajis predicts the collapse of old paradigms.

These are 10 predictions they made. A 🧵:

[Bryan Johnson @bryan_johnson]

Few things bring greater joy than self respect.

Few things generate self respect as deeply as self mastery.

[Brian Armstrong @brian_armstrong]

In the long run, economic freedom always wins over communism

[Chris Dixon @cdixon]

Stablecoins: Payments Without Intermediaries

The internet made information free and global. So why is it still so hard — and expensive — to move money?

The early internet promised a future where anyone could publish, build, or transact without permission. Protocols like email and the web were open and neutral — and they sparked an explosion of creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship. But somewhere along the way, we veered off course.

Today, the global financial system resembles a patchwork of corporate networks: centralized, closed, and extractive. Behind every transaction is a Rube Goldberg-machine of intermediaries — points of sale, payment processors, acquiring banks, issuing banks, local banks, correspondent banks, foreign exchanges, card networks, and others — each taking a cut, adding latency, and imposing rules. These networks levy unnecessary taxes on commerce and curb innovation. They turn what should be neutral plumbing into high-friction bottlenecks.

Stablecoins, or cryptocurrencies pegged to stable assets like the U.S. dollar, are a way out, a reset — a way to bring the internet’s original vision to money.

The Disruptive Opportunity of Stablecoins

The current payments stack wasn’t built for the internet — it was built for a world rife with fee-taking middlemen (who had been necessary to manage local partnerships, fraud, and operations). Even today, international remittances can cost up to 10% in fees. (A $200 remittance cost 6.62% on average in September 2024.) These aren’t just friction points — they’re effectively regressive taxes on some of the world’s poorest workers. The system we’ve inherited is slow, opaque, and exclusionary, and it leaves billions of people underserved or entirely cut off from the global financial system.

For many businesses, the inefficiencies of traditional payments are also massive. Stablecoins could dramatically improve the situation. B2B payments from Mexico to Vietnam take 3-to-7 days to clear and can cost anywhere from $14-to-$150 per $1000 transacted, passing through as many as five intermediaries along the way, each of whom takes a cut. Stablecoins could bypass legacy systems, like the international SWIFT network and associated clearing and settlement processes, and make such transactions nearly free and instant.

This isn’t theoretical — it’s already happening. Right now, companies like SpaceX are using stablecoins to manage their corporate treasuries (including by repatriating funds from countries with volatile local currencies, like Argentina and Nigeria). Other companies, like ScaleAI, are using stablecoins to make faster, cheaper payouts to global workforces. Meanwhile, on the B2C side, Stripe is the first widely used service to offer crypto payments and it is already offering 1.5% on checkout — half what incumbents charge. This could drastically improve certain businesses’ profit margins: As a16z crypto’s @SamBroner has shown, for a very low margin business like a grocery store, a 1.5% improvement could potentially double net income. (And in a competitive, blockchain-based market, I would expect transaction fees to go much lower.)

Unlike the old financial stack, which evolved in silos, stablecoins are global by default. They live on blockchains: open, programmable networks that anyone can build on. There’s no need to negotiate with dozens of banks across borders. You just plug into the network. People are already recognizing the advantages. In 2024, stablecoins moved $15.6 trillion in value, effectively matching Visa’s volume. While that figure mostly represents financial flows (versus retail payments), its magnitude still suggests we’re on the verge of a financial infrastructure shift, one that doesn’t rely on duct-taping 20th-century systems together.

Instead, we can build something new, something truly internet-native — or what Stripe calls “room-temperature superconductors for financial services,” where rather than lossless energy transmission, you get lossless value transmission.

The WhatsApp Moment for Money

Stablecoins are our first real shot at doing for money what email did for communication: make it open, instant, and borderless.

Consider the evolution of text messaging. Before apps like WhatsApp, sending a text across borders meant paying 30 cents per message. Even then, you were lucky if it actually got delivered. Then came internet-native messaging: instant, global, free. Payments are now where messaging was in 2008: Fragmented by borders. Burdened by middlemen. Gatekept by design.

Stablecoins offer a clean-slate alternative. Instead of stitching together clunky, costly, and outdated systems, stablecoins flow seamlessly on top of global blockchains. These systems are programmable, composable, and designed to scale across borders. Already, stablecoins are slashing the cost of remittances: Sending $200 from the U.S. to Columbia using traditional methods will cost you $12.13; with stablecoins, it costs $0.01. (Fees to convert from stablecoins to local currencies can range from as high as 5% to as low as 0%, and prices continue to fall due to competition.)

Just as WhatsApp disrupted costly international phone calls, blockchain payments and stablecoins are transforming global money transfers.

Regulation: From Bottleneck to Breakthrough

It’s tempting to frame regulation as an obstacle — but smart legislation is actually the unlock.

Clear rules of the road for stablecoins and crypto market structure could finally allow these technologies to move out of the sandbox and toward widespread adoption. For years, decentralized finance (DeFi) was trapped in a kind of self-contained, circular, “crypto-for-crypto” economy. Not because the tools weren’t useful, but because regulators made it incredibly difficult to bridge into traditional financial systems.

That’s changing. Policymakers are now actively shaping rules to recognize and regulate stablecoins in ways that maintain U.S. competitiveness, protect consumers, and allow innovation to flourish. Thoughtful regulation — like frameworks that differentiate network tokens from security tokens — can protect against bad actors while giving good actors the clarity they need to build. In fact, a forthcoming bill clarifying this regulation could pave the way for even broader adoption and integration into the global financial system. (Congress is hashing out the details as I write.)

Building Public Goods for Everyone’s Benefit

Traditional finance is built on private, closed networks. But the internet showed us the power of open protocols — like TCP/IP and email — to drive global coordination and innovation.

Blockchains are the internet’s native financial layer. They combine the composability of public protocols with the economic strength of private enterprise. They are credibly neutral, auditable, and programmable. Add stablecoins on top and you get something we’ve never really had before: open money infrastructure.

Think of it like a public highway system. Private companies can still build the vehicles, the businesses, the roadside attractions. But the roads themselves are neutral and open for everyone.

Blockchain networks and stablecoins are doing more than just cutting fees. They’re enabling new categories of software:

- Programmatic payments between machines: Imagine AI agent-powered marketplaces automatically brokering deals for computer resources and other services.

- Micropayments for media, music, and AI contributions: Imagine setting a budget with some simple rules and leaving it to “smart” wallets to disburse the payments.

- Transparent payouts with full audit trails: Imagine using these systems to track spending in government.

- Global commerce without a mess of intermediaries: Imagine settling international transactions instantly at negligible cost — in fact, you don’t have to imagine it as it’s already happening.

The moment for blockchain networks and stablecoins is now: Technology, market demand, and political will are lining up and making these applications a reality. A stablecoin bill could be on the floor this year, and regulatory agencies are weighing frameworks that finally align risk with the right oversight. In the same way that early internet startups were able to thrive once it was clear they wouldn’t be shut down by telcos or copyright lawyers, crypto is ready to cross the chasm from financial experiment to infrastructure backbone, with stablecoins leading the way.

We don’t have to patch the old system.

We can make a better one.

[Naval @naval]

Any country that can’t manufacture its own drones will be a vassal state.

[Palmer Luckey @PalmerLuckey]

"Unprecedented embrace of protectionism", they say.

No, reciprocal tariffs are the opposite. The whole point is to encourage free trade rather than lopsided "free trade" we currently have with so many countries.

"It's very simple. If they charge us, we charge them."

[Eugen Caraion @EugenCaraion]

In an interconnected world - separated by world views and beliefs of a path forward - Sam’s needed