AVI

[AVI @avimeyers]

https://t.co/czpvEo8k0W

[AVI @avimeyers]

We’re at a watershed moment in crypto that almost no one is naming clearly.

Public blockchains aren’t just “ready for prime time.”

They’re being integrated by major financial and consumer networks in real time:
Cash App → Solana
Calastone → Polygon
JPMorgan → Base
Arc (Circle), Tempo (Stripe), and Robinhood Chain coming soon.

These aren’t sandbox experiments — they’re early signals of a broader migration of payments, settlement, and fund flows onto public rails.

For the first time, retail users and Fortune 500s are choosing the same public infrastructure.

That’s the unlock.
And when that happens, the incentives change.

You can’t fake traction anymore when your counterparties are banks, merchants, and fund networks settling real revenue onchain.

The casino-era growth hacks — airdrops, points meta, memecoin rotations — stop being the center of gravity.
The market starts to care about product, retention, and credibility again.

But this doesn’t mean innovation slows.
It means it shifts.

The next wave of creativity will be in privacy, consumer payments, commerce rails, compliance tech, wallet UX, and incentive design that holds up under real economic weight.

Public rails are going live.
Crypto is being re-priced.
This next phase is going to be fun.

[AVI @avimeyers]

@andyyy where the wind blows

[AVI @avimeyers]

@chuk_xyz @CashApp major unlock, not to mention the solana news for early 2026

https://t.co/1ZYYD6l8E9

[Solana @solana]

BREAKING: @CashApp, with 57 million monthly users, to enable USDC payments in early 2026.

And it’s powered by Solana 🔥

[AVI @avimeyers]

@mikewchan Deployments and pilots from institutions on public infra are picking up. Capital flows are just a fraction of the broader institutional moves happening

[AVI @avimeyers]

@solana @CashApp Huge

[AVI @avimeyers]

@donalt lol now we can admit it

major industry housekeeping underway

[AVI @avimeyers]

@CoachingRocha @jameslavish Right agreed, but you said the pilot was in 2019 - which it wasn’t, so was clarifying key milestones

[AVI @avimeyers]

@serpinxbt @thattallguy I imagine he knows the difference, but wants their capital to stay on Base so he’s going to take this position publicly

[AVI @avimeyers]

@CoachingRocha @jameslavish Thanks — the ECB launched the digital euro project in mid-2021

Pilot testing is planned for 2027, they just approved moving to this phase last month

Was curious if this is why James is hyped

[AVI @avimeyers]

@serpinxbt Great that can we have a transparent conversation about this finally

[AVI @avimeyers]

on public infra, amazing

[Base @base]

From proof of concept to fully live.

J.P. Morgan’s USD deposit token, JPMD, is now available for institutional transfers on Base.

Moving money should take seconds, not days. Commercial banking is coming onchain.

[AVI @avimeyers]

Solid perspective, early users taking risk and providing feedback is definitely valuable

But here's the problem: once you scale, those farmers become a dependency. Projects optimize for metrics that attract farmers instead of real users.

Then you're kinda stuck, can't evolve without tanking your numbers.

[AVI @avimeyers]

When crypto was niche, we could ignore broken incentive structures. Now that broader adoption is accelerating, all the "everyone knows it's BS but nobody says it" practices have to go.

[Hasu⚡️🤖 @hasufl]

Airdrops are high on my list for garbage ideas that are holding this space back and will hopefully not make the cut into 2026.

[AVI @avimeyers]

@icobeast preach

[AVI @avimeyers]

We talked about this constantly @flipsidecrypto and @cjohan247 just gave a great perspective.

Grateful that @hosseeb and others are being transparent about it now.

Farmers have always been the 🐘 in the room in terms of onchain activity & network relevance.

The crazy part isn't that farming is bad (we knew this), it's that the incentive structure made everyone pretend it wasn't.

Projects needed farmed numbers for exchange listings. Exchanges wanted "activity for legitimacy." Farmers extracted value. Everyone lost except the farmers.

Saying it out loud is step one. Changing how we evaluate projects & support growth is step two.

[Haseeb ＞|＜ @hosseeb]

Late to this, but as a VC, here’s my perspective on airdrop farming:

Farmers are obviously not useful to projects.

@Cobie is right that as a VC, I ignore farming activity. I’m extremely skeptical of easily farmed metrics, and we always dig into the data to try to identify farming. Wherever we see it, we heavily discount it.

Farming is, by definition, people who pretend to use a product and pretend they will be long-term users, in order to get paid via an airdrop.

Let that sink in for a second. Crypto has broken all of our brains on this. If a normal consumer startup paid people to pretend to use their product and pretend to retain, that’d be considered fraud. Airdrops started as an idealistic and egalitarian practice, but the rise of industrial farming has evolved it into something straightforwardly toxic. Farmers try to emulate real users and make it hard for teams (and investors) to identify the difference.

So, no. Farming is obviously bad for startups. If it weren’t bad, farmers wouldn’t try to hide that they're farmers.

But farmers will reply: the value of farming is that farmers pump up metrics of successful projects, and therefore, it’s good for the projects.

This is so wrong it’s hard to even know where to start.

First, if farmers are “pumping up metrics,” who are they pumping them up to? Who is being fooled here by inflated metrics? Is it the VCs? If so, farmers are claiming that founders are conspiring with farmers to dupe their VCs. (And on many heavily farmed projects, VCs are underwater.)

Note: this is incompatible with the theory that VCs are the primary culprit of bad token launches. Either the VCs are dastardly villains conspiring with founders to dump on retail, or they’re stupid fools being duped by founders with farmer-inflated metrics. But it can't be both at the same time.

The other option is that it’s not the VCs who are fooled--VCs see through it--it’s retail who’s being fooled. So maybe farmers are conspiring with founders to dump on retail, and that’s why it’s good for founders. The problem with this theory is that founders don’t get to dump day 1, only farmers do. So by the time the chickens come home to roost, the metrics have already plummeted, the farmers got out by selling their airdrops, and the founder is left holding the bag. Only the farmers profited from retail, not the founder.

But even if we rationally agree with this analysis, to most people, it doesn’t matter. Because we all know that despite this, all good projects get farmed. So if nobody shows up to farm your project, that must imply your project is not good, and therefore you’ll do poorly in the market. Don’t you want to be like all the other good projects? So you need farmers to show up, whether you think they're parasitic or not.

This sounds convincing. But it’s totally wrong, for the age-old reason: correlation is not causation. Yes, good projects get farmed. But the project being good causes the farming, the farming doesn’t cause the project to be good. All big cities have crime, but that doesn’t mean crime is causes cities to get big. The causation is backward. You can have a good project that isn't farmed.

To tell you the truth, I think the actual dumb money here is the exchanges. Exchange listing teams reward farmed metrics more than VCs do. But the market is already correcting on this, and norms are changing. It’s just exchanges tend to be the last to notice, as they’re furthest back in the capital stack.

Now all that being said, there’s nothing morally wrong with airdrop farming. No more than there being anything wrong with running MEV bots or sniping token launches. The game is the game. As long as you’re following the rules, all is fair. So there's no reason to look down on airdrop farmers. They're strategically trying to make money with the resources they have.

But are farmers providing value to founders?

No, obviously not.

(Caveat: “Linear” farming is an exception--if you’re being paid to provide liquidity or an insurance backstop, or some other clear assumption of risk, I’d call that more classic liquidity mining, which is totally valuable. Or if you’re being paid to market make or provide tight spreads, that’s also valuable. This kind of farming is pay-for-performance that contributes to a product moat. But that’s not like the vibes based “pretend to be a user and touch everything" type farming I’m talking about above, which tends to be more common for L1/L2s or for consumer products.)

[AVI @avimeyers]

Crypto is finally seeing institutional adoption at scale

So why isn't everyone popping bottles?

I wrote about what we gain, what we lose, and what survives when revolutions grow up

👉 The Revolution Will Be Notarized
https://t.co/vI0dlUz27m

[AVI @avimeyers]

Great framing, I'm continuously struck by how different this phase of the crypto industry feels

8 years ago when I first entered the space, it was very idealistic and the open source, cypherpunk mentality was pervasive

In hindsight, the 2 core ingredients of the dream were incompatible

Financial revolution and mass adoption are in fact mutually exclusive - at least the type of revolution that many dreamed of

With the rise of corpochains, regulation, stablecoins, RWAs, institutional capital is finally moving onchain in earnest

To some it is triumph, but to others acquiescence

Either way, the times are a changin

[mert @mert]

it's clear at this point that there are 3 classes of crypto

i) commercial crypto

ii) casino crypto

iii) cypherpunk crypto

commercial crypto is RWAs, stablecoins, institutions

things that use crypto for its function in increasing the efficiency of finance

faster payments, faster settlement, better composability, and a universal API for money

this is mostly a positive development, but it does necessarily ignore most of the core ideals of why crypto was started

there are a lot of relatively invisible chokepoints of control here that most people have not woken up to

i.e., that 95% of stablecoins can be frozen or single sequencer censorship

casino crypto is mostly things that are borderline regulatory arbitrage and are heavily premised on speculation

too wild for institutions, but still not necessarily native to crypto ideals

most of the aim here seems to be making money

I don't have anything against this as I believe people should do whatever they do without harming others, but it's not something I'm personally interested in

the final, least prevalent and almost extinct class of crypto is the cypherpunk class

this is ironic as the cypherpunk class is responsible for starting the entire industry as well as underlying its most important set of functionality

satoshi was a cypherpunk

cypherpunks use cryptography and code to build systems of freedom

freedom from state overreach, freedom of speech, and the right to transact

this group gets confused for what is actually criminal behaviour like breaking the law or buying janky ass drugs on the darknet which does nothing but cheapen the ideals of liberty for some false virtual mental dopamine hit of being an edgelord

cypherpunks are libertarians and believe in free markets and understand that autonomous systems that can't be messed with are the only way to achieve this

the commercial and casino classes of crypto have had all the recent spotlight

but crypto without the cypherpunks is not crypto

I believe most of this has been a messaging, education, and storytelling problem

we are going to fix this and we are going to make crypto cypherpunk again

you are already seeing the ideals live within systems like zcash, but soon it will enflame everywhere

cypher/acc