dusha

it’s all worth it /// art, marketing, tech /// currently @spicenetio prev @nil_foundation @surge_women

[dusha @dushankas]

craaazy

[Cheng Lou @_chenglou]

My dear front-end developers (and anyone who’s interested in the future of interfaces):

I have crawled through depths of hell to bring you, for the foreseeable years, one of the more important foundational pieces of UI engineering (if not in implementation then certainly at least in concept):
Fast, accurate and comprehensive userland text measurement algorithm in pure TypeScript, usable for laying out entire web pages without CSS, bypassing DOM measurements and reflow

[Alex @AlexOnchain]

don't outsource your thinking
don't outsource your thinking
don't outsource your thinking

[dusha @dushankas]

take your protein pills and put your helmet on

[dusha @dushankas]

@kalashnikovapv this is an awesome series, thanks for putting it together! i saw you mentioned a newsletter above, imo it would be super useful to have this in one place and publish prev editions too, would def subscribe

[dusha @dushankas]

@alipaints huge respect @alipaints, this level of integrity is rare

[dusha @dushankas]

huge respect to @botanix and their team, this is how you do comms

honesty always wins + these are some genuinely valuable insights most companies in verticals beyond btc l2s are pretending they’re not seeing

obviously there are a lot of factors that made botanix shut down and they’re laid out in the post but i wonder from a purely marketing perspective; would they have found more users if they were this brutally honest from the start?

it’s fucking refreshing and i think a lot of ppl especially in the bitcoin space would have been more interested

[Botanix 🕷️ @botanix]

It is with a heavy heart that we announce we are winding down the Botanix network.

This decision is the hardest one we have made in four years, and we want to share the reasoning openly because the people who backed us, built with us, and used what we shipped deserve more than a quiet shutdown notice.

First off, an immediate practical consideration for the Botanix community: please withdraw your Bitcoin and other assets before July 9th, 2026.

When we started in 2022, the pitch was simple enough to say in a sentence: bring real utility to Bitcoin. What that actually meant in practice, and what we have spent nearly four years building toward, was more ambitious than that sentence made it sound. We were trying to build a Bitcoin-based blockchain that could find genuine product-market fit as a platform for Bitcoin applications, without using token incentives to drive growth, manufacture users, or simulate utility. Almost every chain that has launched in the last cycle has reached for the same playbook (issue a token without PMF, engineer the incentive surface, point at the resulting metrics), and we did not believe this route is a viable strategy in the long term. We wanted to know whether a Bitcoin chain could earn its users on the strength of what was built on top of it, the value it brings in the market with Bitcoin itself as the only meaningful economic primitive in the system.

And we built it. The Spiderchain went live and stayed live, a year of mainnet operation with one hundred percent uptime and zero security incidents on a genuinely novel cryptographic architecture. We built Dynafed, a dynamic federation that turned the Spiderchain from a static multisig set into a rotating, decentralized one, the technical milestone that most people in this space said could not be built on Bitcoin without compromising trust assumptions. Twenty-five million transactions, two hundred thousand wallets, and tens of millions of dollars in assets moved across the chain, every single number of that earned organically without a token, without airdrops, without points programs, or any of the manufactured-demand machinery. Chainlink, Morpho, GMX, Dolomite, Fireblocks, Alchemy, Galaxy, OKX Wallet, all integrated. We shipped a Bitcoin neobank with BINK on iOS and Android, with self-custodial email login for Bitcoin (something that had never existed before), native Bitcoin yield, and the lowest borrowing rates against Bitcoin anywhere in the world, all of it downstream of owning the infrastructure. The point of saying this is not to argue with our own conclusion. The protocol works, the product works, and our team and ecosystem worked in concert to do exceptional work.

We have run this experiment in earnest, with a working protocol, real applications, and a serious team, for over a year on mainnet and nearly four years in total. The honest answer we have arrived at, after living inside it every day, is that it did not work, at least not in this market and not on this timeline.

We want to share what we think we learned, with the caveat that some of this is conviction and some of this is still suspicion, and we would rather be transparent about the difference than pretend to have clarity we do not have.

The first thing I've had to sit with is timing. Bitcoin utility, making Bitcoin programmable, productive, and integrated into real financial activity, isn't where the real world users sit right now. The conversation is still on Bitcoin as a reserve asset, on its monetary and political positioning, on base-layer conservatism. Those questions are upstream of the ones a Bitcoin L2 needs people to be asking. I still believe Bitcoin gets there, but belief in the destination is not the same as being able to predict when, and nobody can. It's also possible the destination never materialises at all, and that Bitcoin's role as a reserve asset is simply where it settles. If that's true, there will never be a market for what we were building, and no amount of time or capital would change that.

The second is the token question. We intended to eventually launch a token. We saw it, and still see it, as a genuinely new form of equity, something closer to an IPO than an airdrop, to be done when you reach product market fit and the moment is right. That moment never came. What became clear over the last year is that the market largely stopped rewarding even the more considered versions of that playbook. Token launches across the board have broadly underperformed, and those that did go to market with tokens haven't seen the outcomes or PMF that the model is supposed to produce.

The third lesson is about where DeFi demand on Bitcoin actually lives. For most use cases that exist today, lending, yield, leveraged exposure, WBTC on a mature general-purpose L2 is genuinely sufficient. Users have voted with their behaviour, and the verdict is that the trust assumptions of a wrapped representation on Ethereum are acceptable to almost everyone who wants Bitcoin-denominated DeFi. Decentralisation matters to people in principle and in conversation; in practice, when something cheaper and easier is in front of them, they use it. The security case for a dedicated Bitcoin L2 is real, but it only matters for a narrower band of applications than our thesis required, one of the clearer lessons this market has taught us.

The fourth lesson is structural. The on-chain economy is consolidating around venues that own the user relationship: Hyperliquid, Robinhood, the major CEXes, and now TradFi participants absorbing an ever-larger share of attention, flow, and revenue. Convenience and institutional credibility win, every time, as soon as they're available. As retail participation thins, that concentration only deepens. We were, and still are, believers in decentralisation, but the current direction of on-chain growth is running through distribution, and any team building base-layer infrastructure today is rowing upstream against that current. We were no exception.

The fifth lesson is the most concrete. Both of the above played out directly in our economics. The users we attracted were primarily using Bitcoin as a store of value for yield, a legitimate use case, but not the high-frequency transaction volume that drives fee revenue on a network like ours. BINK was our answer to that: a Bitcoin neobank designed to bring daily usage of BTC and stablecoins on-chain, driving the transaction volume the network needed. It was the right strategic instinct, and one we never got the chance to fully test. BINK only landed on both app stores in the last few weeks, a product that by its nature could only be built once the underlying infrastructure was proven and live. When users choose the convenient option and economic gravity pulls toward distribution, what's left on a decentralised infrastructure layer is a user base that costs more to serve than it generates. Infrastructure costs are what they are, and the fee income never came close to covering them.

If you would like to see how we were imagining a Bitcoin future and what we have been working on since September, feel free to download BINK and give it a spin: it’s a full-fledged self-custodial Bitcoin Neobank with email login, one click borrowing, a Lightning integration and more.

App store: https://t.co/36aTfvcfHF

Play store: https://t.co/qoSQ26vbWr

This UX is where we think Bitcoin is ultimately heading towards although it feels too early. You can use invite code 1SD31R, but remember to remove your funds by July 9th.

We could keep going. We have chosen not to, however, because continuing past the point where additional time stops producing additional learning is not conviction, it is something that looks like conviction from the outside while corroding into something else on the inside. We would rather stop now, with integrity intact and resources available to take care of the people who took a chance on us, than push the experiment past the point where it still has something to teach us.

Reminder: Please withdraw all your assets by July 9th. After this, the federation will sweep the remaining Bitcoin. Any other assets or tokens on the network from then onwards will unfortunately be unrecoverable.
After this, the federation will sweep the remaining Bitcoin. Any other assets or tokens on the network from then onwards will unfortunately be unrecoverable.

To our investors, who backed a thesis that was harder to defend than it should have been, to our partners who built alongside us and bet pieces of their own roadmaps on ours, to the developers who deployed on Spiderchain, to our users and the BINK community who showed up for something experimental and stayed, and most of all to the Botanix team who shipped a genuinely novel system with rigour and care and who made every hard day worth the difficulty: Thank you, more than the words available here can carry.

[dusha @dushankas]

conversely, an event that is all girls is the highest aura possible

[rachaelsacks.eth @RAnSacks]

An event that is all dudes is low aura.

[dusha @dushankas]

@LindsayCasale truly excellent advice

[dusha @dushankas]

writing is an exercise in thinking and it’s an important one

i don’t think ive written anything non-ai assisted in the last.. six months? and i can feel myself growing dumber by the day

so, a challenge: write 1k words every day, on any topic.

rules: 0 ai use, the text can be anything from stream of consciousness to structured thesis and everything in between

might fuck around and do a substack around it too

[dusha @dushankas]

is this a serious question? pretty soon after making the wish and starting to date her he realized something’s not right and this nikki!=real nikki and he continued to date her regardless. from that follows that he did not in fact care about her personality at all and was happy to date a hollowed out version

[dusha @dushankas]

@ZoeCatherineF @bitrefill gorgeous design

[dusha @dushankas]

honored + worried

[dusha @dushankas]

r/perfumesthatfeellike has to be one of the most unhinged yet wholesome places on the internet

[dusha @dushankas]

may i suggest couple alternatives:

how vexingly quick daft zebras jump

and if you want to avoid offending zebras too, this one probably offends no one:

the job requires extra pluck and zeal from every young wage earner

[lewis @Lewiswbt1]

Oh great, you've thought of a sentence that uses every letter of the alphabet. Too bad it perpetuates harmful stereotypes about dogs and foxes. I hope it was worth it

[Joonas Virtanen @joonasvirtanen]

made a site that picks the closest rothko for how the weather feels outside your window

[dusha @dushankas]

people in 2026 asking for the alternative to google search

[dusha @dushankas]

the single most important thing you should do every day is write a page of text in your own voice

can be about anything

bonus points if handwritten

[dusha @dushankas]

@0xcoolgirl it definitely is superbad but like.. why. why is it superbad

[dusha @dushankas]

chatgpt is samaritan claude is the machine

[Lost Nomad @lost_nomad__]

There’s a temptation for painting, film, stories to ‘retreat’ into the past and make ‘historical’ art

We should resist that. We need way more present-day art. We need to see our own real lives put into artistic narrative, not just hearing about the past forever

[eigenrobot @eigenrobot]

asking people to read ai-generated text is offensive.

this is not because ai text is intrinsically bad. rather, the author has not paid a cost to write the text himself. this cost is a credible signal he finds its communication important.

so: not paying that cost is telling