Grant Hummer

Disintermediate the Leviathan

@etherealize_io

[Grant Hummer @gphummer]

Thrilled to announce I’m part of @etherealize_io as the final cofounder! I’m also the first cofounder. Does that sound a bit confusing? Let me explain…

ETHEREALIZE’S ORIGIN STORY

I’ve been involved in Ethereum for a decade. I believe in it deeply - it’s the only real shot the world has at putting civilizational infrastructure on fair, transparent rails.

July 23rd, 2024: the Ethereum ETFs launched. It was the day I’d been waiting for all year - Wall Street would finally wake up to Ethereum’s potential as the new operating system for global finance and further cement its position as the premier smart contract blockchain.

The ETF launch fell short of my hopes, prompting me to dig deeper. I soon realized that the level of education and knowledge about ETH on Wall Street was still extremely low. While Bitcoin benefits from a clear “digital gold” storyline, Ethereum’s complexity makes its value harder to communicate—and no one was bridging that gap. Compounding the issue, competing layer-1 blockchains were—and still are—spreading relentless lies and gaslighting to chip away at Ethereum’s market share.

The solution became obvious: Ethereum needed evangelization. It required a dedicated marketing and business development effort aimed squarely at Wall Street institutions. Together with my good friend @jamesfickel, an early ETH investor and Etherealize advisor, we dug deep into the Ethereum community for the right person to spearhead this effort. That’s when we met Vivek Raman. Vivek is a rare talent—a true unicorn. He’s brilliant, tirelessly hardworking, emotionally grounded, and perfectly suited for the role, with over a decade of experience on Wall Street and five years in Ethereum.

We reached out to Vitalik Buterin and the Ethereum Foundation with our idea. They not only endorsed it but provided a grant to kick things off. When Vivek saw Vitalik’s support, he committed fully to Etherealize, and we hit the ground running! Soon, though, we discovered that sparking Wall Street’s interest in Ethereum meant more than talk—it meant action. We needed to build products and software to seamlessly integrate Ethereum into their systems.

Enter Zach Obront.

Vivek brought in his friend Zach to develop prototype applications. Zach delivered an extraordinary suite of tools in record time—an entire production-ready prototype in just weeks. Having met thousands of developers and working for years as a software developer myself, I can say I’ve never seen anyone ship high-quality code that fast. As Etherealize’s ambitious mission to bring Ethereum into the real world crystallized, Zach joined as a cofounder.

Meanwhile, we’d been discussing our plans with Danny Ryan, an Ethereum legend who played a major role in driving critical improvements to the Ethereum protocol between 2018-2024. Danny was considering returning to the EF, or doing something new. We shared Etherealize’s vision with him, and he grasped it instantly. He became excited about the prospect of contributing to real-world adoption and dealing closely with important users, which could feed back into protocol R&D. After an intense weightlifting session with Vivek, Danny was on board—the rest is history.

After ideating Etherealize and mostly operating behind the scenes, I’ll now be taking on the role of Chief Strategy Officer. I will work to position Etherealize in the Ethereum ecosystem and drive the highest impact ways we can accelerate our mission of bringing Ethereum to the real world.

As we stand on the cusp of a transformative era, Ethereum’s moment to triumph is here. The Ethereum Foundation has appointed two exceptional co-Executive Directors, and we look forward to collaborating closely with them. Etherealize is partnering with the entire ecosystem to bridge innovation and real-world adoption. We’re here to energize Ethereum, elevate its narrative, and enable its potential to reshape the world. This is the moment we’ve all been waiting for—Etherealize is ready to help Ethereum not just succeed, but soar.

Ethereum is open for business.

[Elad Gil @eladgil]

Note to founders - small, high trust boards are the best way

Berkshire & SpaceX examples

Avoid the university professors, hired gun CEOs of unrelated companies etc that "governance experts" will push for as you go public

[Avichal Garg - Electric ϟ Capital @avichal]

As I’ve said many times - BTC was the existence proof for a digital Store of Value.

There will be multiple SoVs, including BTC and ETH (and likely a few more)

[Haseeb Qureshi ＞|＜ @hosseeb]

ETH is playing the biggest game, which is the SoV game.

Read this.

[vittorio @IterIntellectus]

it’s actually insane to think how when elon was 31 he made $180 million from the sale of PayPal and he could have just bought a private island and spent the rest of his life in peace, without having to work another day

instead he sacrificed basically everything trying to build the future. failed multiple times, almost went completely broke, but he kept going, spending the last 20 years building reusable rockets, electric cars, global satellite internet, AI, brain interfaces. basically the whole infrastructure for the future of civilization

just to end up in a world where people are publicly calling for his execution, and getting applauded for it

you don’t even have to like him to realize how completely fucking backwards the world has become

[Grant Hummer @gphummer]

Increasingly capable AGI (especially open source models without California-instilled RLHF brain damage) is ushering in a glorious era of truth, democratized research, and accountability for the previous era's lies. Make the gentleman scientist great again.

[Joshua Achiam @jachiam0]

People who have been in research fields develop a felt sense that most "research" (in almost any field that isn't exactingly technical) is research theater, and many superstar careers enjoy star status not because of a unique connection to the truth but because of a unique connection with an audience. No one really has the time or stature to, from a position of objectivity and trust, bring popular researchers to heel. But it will get increasingly hard to hide from serious critique. The machines can do critique now, at the level of depth and rigor previously only possible for the academically deranged. We're going to have to revise a lot of what we "know" about the world that isn't really knowledge but is actually just received popular consensus - like floating voltages without grounding wires. The grounding wires are coming.

[Grant Hummer @gphummer]

@hosseeb @HadickM @tomhschmidt @dragonfly Congratulations!

[st. vincent-st. marys grad @PuckFupett69]

You’re 25x more likely to be a millionaire than be homeless in the US

[Tomasz K. Stańczak @tkstanczak]

This is also what will happen to Ethereum - the pace of changes will be beyond human governance abilities and the chain will start behaving like an adaptive system with hierarchies defined by the value of signal and infrastructure shape in the given region.

[Clouted @CloutedMind]

someone asked me in token if im still bullish ETH

told them yes

they asked why and how

i said ETH provides a type of value that is not possible to be provided by anything else in the world and as time goes on that value will only be more and more important to every single person

what is that value?

a fully trustless, permissionless, privacy possible value that can have endogenous financial capabilities like accessing credit and yield

in a world of further capital controls, surveillance, transparency and totalitarianism, this is only more and more valuable for anyone with money

its quite literally that simple, and its underpriced.

[Grant Hummer @gphummer]

@csvoss @paularambles Congratulations!

[Severin Field 🦅 @sevdeawesome]

Claude 5.5 Opus responding to “AI is a normal technology” is still the best AI-created video I have ever seen

[Antonio García Martínez @antoniogm]

One of the most slept-on, unpriced-in things is that the world's wealth--dollars, bonds, stocks, derivatives, you name it--is all getting transmuted into smart contracts on blockchains, in the biggest financial reboot since joint-stock companies.

This isn't memecoin bullshit or monkey JPEGs.

Your personal financial app's backend will be a blockchain; you'll earn yield or invest via assets that exist on a blockchain; the biggest institutions in the world will slosh around value on blockchains. It's likely to happen so fast that most people won't even notice.

[Just Another Pod Guy @TMTLongShort]

I’ve made this point multiple times over the last 18 months but I’ll do it again now.

The game-theory optimal approach for the labs is to use safety as an excuse to not make frontier capabilities widely available and to instead go up the stack with vertical-specific incumbent partners via a whitelist program in return for rev share.

It’s so obvious and it solves multiple problems at once including distillation, enterprise inertia, deflation of TAM and safety concerns.

You co-opt the incumbents brand and distribution. You help them gut their employee base if desired or just keep them on if you don’t want bad PR and let them jump from 10-20% market share to 90%+ as they undercut everyone given better model access.

And every competitor who isn’t whitelisted dies.

Watch what kind of panic this drives.

Game theory 101.

[The Rollup @therollupco]

Vitalik is years ahead of the market. Always has been.

He just laid out Ethereum's "cryptographic world computer" vision.

Rob on why that's actually bullish for ethereum:native:

"When you have futuristic people thinking far out, it takes the market a while to catch up. Vitalik is at least a few years ahead."

"So when he puts out a paper like this, it takes time for people to grasp the implications."

"It spreads through the stewards of Ethereum in the institutional world, @fundstrat, @joechalom, @ethereumJoseph, who explain it. And the market catches up."

[Watcher.Guru @WatcherGuru]

JUST IN: Cathie Wood's ARK Invest launches tokenized venture fund on Ethereum that trades 24/7.

[banteg @banteg]

>be me
>discover effective altruism
>apparently normal charity is inefficient
>why donate to random sad thing when spreadsheet can tell you optimal sad thing
>fair enough
>buy mosquito nets
>save lives
>numbers look good
>feel powerful

>couple years later
>someone asks an innocent question
>why only count people alive today
>huh
>future people matter too
>obviously
>my grandchildren shouldn't matter less just because they haven't spawned yet
>reasonable.jpg

>keep following logic
>what about their grandchildren
>also yes
>what about people in 500 years
>sure
>5000 years
>why not
>500 million years
>starting to get weird but morality is morality

>open calculator
>humanity could survive for an astronomically long time
>could colonize galaxy
>could have trillions upon trillions of descendants
>maybe digital people too
>maybe simulated civilizations
>maybe dyson spheres full of happy uploaded minds
>calculator starts smoking

>realize currently living humans are rounding error
>8 billion people suddenly looking extremely beta
>future contains potentially 10^something people
>can't even fit beneficiaries in google sheets

>new moral priority unlocked
>protect the long-term future

>stop thinking in units of "people helped"
>start thinking in "fraction of cosmic endowment preserved"

>malaria?
>terrible
>but only kills existing humans
>AI extinction could delete the entire light cone
>nuclear war could permanently derail civilization
>bad institutions could lock in terrible values for ten million years
>someone invents wrong constitution in 2140
>quadrillions suffer
>better fund governance workshop now

>friend says maybe we should improve hospitals
>explain opportunity cost
>friend says hospitals are full of actual sick people
>explain scope sensitivity
>friend stops inviting me to dinner

>need to decide what to fund
>easy
>expected value

>suppose project has one in a million chance of preventing extinction
>sounds tiny
>but extinction destroys 10^50 future lives
>multiply
>mother of god

>$10 million project has expected value of several galaxies
>charity evaluation complete

>someone asks where the one-in-a-million number came from
>expert judgement
>which expert
>us
>how calibrated
>extremely thoughtfully

>reduce estimate to one in ten million to be conservative
>still beats curing cancer by 38 orders of magnitude
>epistemic robustness achieved

>someone says maybe project doesn't work
>assign 20% chance
>still astronomical

>maybe project makes problem worse
>assign 5% chance
>still astronomical

>why 5
>because 30 felt pessimistic

>publish 46-page report
>contains seventeen sensitivity analyses
>every sensitivity analysis begins after assuming intervention has positive sign

>critic says you're multiplying enormous hypothetical stakes by extremely uncertain probabilities
>yes
>that's literally why it's important

>critic says the uncertainty might be structural rather than numerical
>make probability smaller
>critic says no, I mean maybe your model is wrong
>make probability smaller again
>critic begins rubbing temples

>discover AI safety
>perfect longtermist cause
>AI might kill everyone
>or create utopia
>or seize galaxy
>or tile universe with paperclips
>or create billions of conscious software minds
>finally a problem with numbers big enough for me

>start AI safety nonprofit
>mission: prevent dangerous AI
>hire smartest people available
>smartest people immediately start building better AI to understand dangerous AI
>interesting

>we must understand capabilities to understand safety
>we must scale models to study alignment
>we must race ahead so less responsible actors don't get there first
>we must deploy systems to learn how deployment can go wrong
>we must build the thing quickly because building the thing quickly is dangerous

>outsider asks why the people most worried about AI apocalypse all work at AI companies
>complicated field

>company releases stronger model
>very concerned
>company begins training even stronger model
>extremely concerned
>company raises $14 billion
>concern reaches unprecedented levels

>need to influence government
>future is at stake
>normal democratic process too slow
>politicians don't understand exponential curves
>public doesn't understand x-risk
>experts must guide them
>who counts as expert
>people who understand x-risk
>who understands x-risk
>our friends

>someone objects that this seems politically convenient
>explain we're representing future generations
>future generations unavailable for comment

>develop concept of value lock-in
>terrifying possibility that one ideology controls civilization forever
>therefore extremely important that civilization adopts correct values before lock-in
>whose values
>let's circle back

>begin with impartial morality
>end with small group of people deciding what quadrillions of hypothetical beings would want
>beautiful arc

>meanwhile actual humans keep doing annoying things
>voting wrong
>having parochial attachments
>loving family more than strangers
>caring about local community
>getting upset when told their suffering is cosmically negligible
>evolutionary biases everywhere

>explain that moral intuition cannot be trusted
>except intuition that future digital people count
>and intuition that extinction is uniquely bad
>and intuition that our probability estimates are sane
>and intuition that our institutional choices improve the future
>those intuitions survived peer review

>someone donates $5k to local homeless shelter
>inefficient
>could have funded 0.0000000000003% of an AI governance researcher
>think of all the simulated people you just killed

>okay maybe don't phrase it that way publicly

>PR team says "future generations deserve a voice"
>much better

>journalist asks what longtermism means
>say "future people matter"
>everyone agrees
>great
>journalist asks what follows from that
>well technically we should redirect enormous resources toward low-probability interventions affecting astronomical futures
>journalist raises eyebrow
>return to "future people matter"

>motte has entered the chat

>critic: of course future people matter
>me: glad we agree
>critic: I don't agree that your institute knows how to help them
>me: why do you hate our grandchildren

>eventually notice uncomfortable implication
>if future value dominates everything
>then helping people today mostly matters through effects on future
>education matters because future institutions
>health matters because future productivity
>democracy matters because future trajectory
>human beings slowly become instrumental variables in their own moral philosophy

>see starving child
>feel compassion
>check spreadsheet
>child's direct welfare contribution negligible
>but perhaps childhood nutrition improves national institutional quality
>compassion restored

>tell myself this is impartial altruism

>one day assistant asks obvious question
>"how do you know your intervention actually improves the far future?"

>silence

>open spreadsheet
>increase column width
>add confidence interval

>assistant asks again
>"no, I mean how do you know the sign is positive?"

>stare into cosmic light cone

>10^50 people staring back

>none of them exist
>none of them can tell me
>none of them can falsify my assumptions

>realize I have invented the perfect constituency

>infinitely important
>completely silent
>and always represented by me

[Joscha Bach @Plinz]

Anthropic and OpenAI cannot become profitable unless they can reduce the ratio of training cost to inference profits. In the long run, their survival may depend on outlawing competitive open source models. This can only be done under the guise of safety regulation.

[Pessimists Archive @PessimistsArc]

"The art of printing can be of great service in so far as it furthers the circulation of useful & tested books; but it can bring about serious evils… …it will, therefore, be necessary to maintain full control over the printers” - Pope Alexander VI, 1501

[Grant Hummer @gphummer]

@CloutedMind @Parmenides5BCE 🤝

[Grant Hummer @gphummer]

Translation: our gross margins are getting competed down to 0 by open source models and our capex burn rate is too high.

Let’s maintain our margins with regulatory capture, ban open source models, and slow down the capex arms race. All with a virtue signaling cherry on top.

[Dario Amodei @DarioAmodei]

We Must Pace the Frontier: I’ve written a new essay on why the AI industry should slow down, with a three-part plan for doing so.

Anthropic is unilaterally committing to the first of these steps. We’ll provide third-party evaluators with permanent, employee-level access to our systems, so that they can verify adherence to our safety measures, report on incidents, and assess models’ alignment during training.

You can read the full post here: https://t.co/OGyPb7yaYt

[Grant Hummer @gphummer]

@BillAckman @AnthropicAI @OpenAI Appreciate the amplification, Bill - in crypto, I saw this exact same regulatory capture playbook up close with SBF. They even come from the same milieu.