Intercoin

Intercoin builds the tech to help communities: Issue their own currency | Run their own payment system | Encourage local commerce | Build UBI for Cities

[Intercoin @IntercoinOrg]

This is the year societies around the world will begin to understand that many of our problems aren't because of people, but the existing systems.

And we can build our own alternative systems.
Intercoin apps help communities serve their members directly: https://t.co/gXHgDLhO2w

[hunter @hxxntrr]

Elon Musk hasn't sold a Tesla share in years and lives off $1 billion in personal loans

His Tesla stock keeps appreciating
The loans charge him 2-3% interest
The IRS never sees a single dollar of capital gains tax

This is exactly how the wealthiest people in America accumulate wealth without paying taxes and it's available to anyone with $100K+ in assets

The strategy is called "borrow against appreciated assets" or sometimes "buy borrow die." It's the single most powerful tax-minimization strategy used by ultra-wealthy individuals in America

Mechanics:

When you SELL an asset that has appreciated, you owe capital gains tax. Federal long-term capital gains rates: 0%, 15%, or 20% depending on income. Plus state capital gains in most states (CA: 13.3%; NY: 8.82%). Plus net investment income tax of 3.8% for higher earners (IRC Section 1411)

For someone like Elon Musk selling $1B in Tesla stock, the total tax bill would be approximately:

Federal capital gains at 20%: $200M
Net investment income tax at 3.8%: $38M
Texas state tax: $0 (Texas has no state income tax, this is why Elon moved there)

Total tax bill on selling $1B: $238M

When you BORROW against appreciated assets, you owe ZERO tax. Loan proceeds are not income under IRC Section 61. They never appear on your tax return. They never trigger a tax event

For Elon to access $1B in cash for spending purposes, the math is:

Sell $1B in Tesla stock: $762M in net proceeds after tax
OR
Borrow $1B against $1B in Tesla collateral at 2-3% interest: $1B in net proceeds tax-free

Selling costs him $238M in taxes
Borrowing costs him $20-30M/year in interest (or roughly $200-300M over a decade if held that long)

But the borrowing strategy has additional benefits:

Tesla stock continues to appreciate. Over 10 years, $1B in Tesla stock has historically appreciated to multiples of that. Selling locks in the gain at today's value. Borrowing keeps the upside

The interest paid on the loan is potentially tax-deductible if structured as an investment loan (IRC Section 163(d)). Effective after-tax cost can be reduced to 1-2%

The loan never has to be repaid during his lifetime. He can refinance it indefinitely. When he dies, his heirs inherit the stock at a "stepped-up basis" (IRC Section 1014). The accumulated capital gains die with him. The heirs sell the stock at the stepped-up basis, pay off the loan, and keep the entire upside tax-free

The wealth transfers from Elon to his heirs entirely tax-free if structured correctly. Estate tax is a separate question but is largely avoidable through proper trust structures

The ultra-wealthy version of this strategy:

Borrow against appreciated stock
Use the loan proceeds for consumption (homes, cars, art, business operations)
Never sell the underlying stock
Refinance the loan at maturity to extract more cash if the underlying has appreciated
Pass everything to heirs at death with stepped-up basis
Heirs sell with $0 in accumulated capital gains tax owed

This strategy is sometimes called "buy, borrow, die" by tax planners. It's the foundation of how billionaire wealth perpetuates across generations without significant taxation

Available products for this strategy:

Pledged Asset Line (Schwab): borrow up to 50-70% of portfolio value at SOFR + 1-2%
Securities Backed Line of Credit (Morgan Stanley, Goldman): similar terms, $1M+ minimum
Custom Lending Solutions (private banking): for $10M+ portfolios, rates can drop to 1-2%

The accessibility tier:

If you have $100K+ in investment assets at Schwab/Fidelity/Vanguard, you can open a Pledged Asset Line. Typical terms: borrow up to 50% of your portfolio value at SOFR + 1.5-3% (current rates roughly 6-8% all-in). No fixed monthly principal payments. Interest only or pay nothing as long as the loan stays below the maintenance threshold

For someone with $200K in stocks/ETFs:
Borrow $100K at 6.5%
Use the $100K for any purpose (real estate down payment, business operations, etc.)
Annual interest cost: $6,500
Tax savings vs selling stocks: roughly $20,000-$30,000 in deferred capital gains
Net benefit: $13,500-$23,500/year in tax savings during the borrowing period

For someone with $1M in stocks/ETFs:
Borrow $500K at 6.5%
Use the $500K for real estate purchases, business equity, etc
Annual interest cost: $32,500
Tax savings vs selling stocks: roughly $100,000-$150,000 in deferred capital gains
Net benefit: $67,500-$117,500/year

Comparison to the alternative:

If you sell $500K in long-term appreciated stock to access cash:
Federal capital gains at 15%: $75,000 owed
State capital gains (varies): $20,000-$40,000 owed
Net cash to you: $385,000-$405,000

If you borrow $500K against the same stock:
Net cash to you: $500,000
Tax owed: $0
Annual interest cost: $32,500

Even paying $32,500/year in interest, you're $90K-$110K ahead in year 1 and the gap grows because your stock keeps appreciating while you hold it

The compounding effect over 20 years:

Person A sells $100K of Tesla stock at 15% capital gains, takes $85K. Spends it
Person B borrows $100K against $100K of Tesla stock, takes $100K, spends it. Stock keeps growing at historical rate (let's say 20%/yr conservatively)

20 years later:
Person A: stock is gone. Whatever they bought with $85K is whatever it is
Person B: still owns the original $100K in Tesla, now worth $3.8M. Refinanced the loan multiple times. Currently owes maybe $200K against $3.8M in collateral. Net wealth on this position: $3.6M

Same starting position. Different decision. $3.5M+ difference in 20 years

Important caveats:

The strategy works only when underlying asset is appreciating
Margin call risk if asset value drops below maintenance threshold
Interest costs accumulate over time and eventually reduce the net benefit if rates rise enough
Some borrowing limits apply (typically max 50-70% of portfolio value)

The strategy is most powerful for:

Concentrated stock holdings in publicly traded companies (especially employee stock from tech companies, founder stock, ESOP grants)
Large diversified portfolios held in taxable brokerage accounts
Real estate equity (similar strategy via cash-out refinances)
Business equity (some forms of borrowing available against ownership stakes)

The strategy is least useful for:

Small portfolios under $50K (interest costs eat any benefit)
Retirement accounts (can't borrow against IRAs/401(k)s; some 401(k)s allow loans but limited to $50K)
Assets without an established lending market (collectibles, private real estate that's hard to finance)

The reason this isn't standard financial advice:

Most financial advisors are compensated based on assets under management. They make more money when you keep assets invested. They don't necessarily make money when you optimize for cash extraction. The strategy is genuinely good for sophisticated clients but doesn't fit the standard advisor compensation model

Banks DO know about this strategy. They actively market it to wealthy clients. The Pledged Asset Line and securities-backed line of credit products are billion-dollar businesses at every major brokerage. They're just not marketed to ordinary retail clients because the minimums and complexity make them inappropriate for mass market

The threshold for accessing this strategy:

$100K+ in liquid investment assets = entry-level access via Schwab/Fidelity
$1M+ = full access to most products and competitive rates
$10M+ = access to private banking rates of 1-2%
$100M+ = Elon-level rates of essentially 0% real cost after tax deduction and stock appreciation

At each tier, the math becomes more favorable. The richest Americans access this strategy at rates that mean borrowing $1B is essentially free relative to their portfolio appreciation

Most middle-class Americans never use this strategy because:

They don't know it exists
They don't have $100K+ in taxable investment accounts
They follow standard advice that says "live within your means and don't borrow"

The wealthiest Americans use it constantly because:

They have the assets
They understand the math
They follow advice from advisors who are sophisticated about tax optimization

The gap between the two groups isn't talent. It's understanding that the tax code is written to reward holding assets indefinitely and penalize selling them. Selling = taxable event. Holding + borrowing = no taxable event. The system rewards never realizing gains

Elon never sells Tesla. He never pays capital gains tax. The IRS doesn't collect a dollar from his accumulated wealth. The strategy is legal. It's mathematically optimal. And it's been written into the tax code since before any of us were born

You don't need to be Elon to use this strategy. You need $100K and a Schwab account

(we get business owners up to 250k in 0% interest business funding, link in bio)

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

Amazon had a secret code name for the Prime cancel button.

They called it Project Iliad.

The Iliad is a Greek poem. It is about a war that lasted ten years. It has 24 books and almost 16,000 lines. Amazon picked that name on purpose. They wanted canceling Prime to feel like a war. They wanted you to give up.

Here is how it worked.

You hit "Cancel my subscription." Amazon did not cancel it. They sent you to a new page. The page asked if you were sure. It showed you all the things you would lose. It put a yellow warning sign next to the cancel button. Then it asked you again.

You clicked "Yes, cancel." Another page. New offer. Maybe a discount. Maybe a pause. Maybe just turn off auto-renew. Anything to stop you from leaving.

You clicked through. Another page. Then another. Then one more.

By the time you reached the end, you had clicked six times. You had scrolled past four pages. You had said no to fifteen different buttons. Only one of those buttons actually canceled. The other fourteen kept you in.

The FTC has an official name for this. They call it the "Four-Page, Six-Click, Fifteen-Option Iliad Flow."

It worked. After Amazon rolled out Project Iliad, cancellations dropped by 14 percent. Hundreds of thousands of people gave up and kept paying.

Then somebody leaked the internal documents.

In 2021, the Norwegian Consumer Council found the same trap on Amazon's European site. They filed a legal complaint. Business Insider got the leaked emails. In June 2023, the United States FTC sued Amazon. They named three of Amazon's own executives in the lawsuit. They said the executives knew about Iliad. They knew it was hurting customers. They blocked changes that would have made it easier to cancel because the changes hurt the bottom line.

In September 2025, Amazon settled. They paid 2.5 billion dollars. One billion as a fine. One and a half billion in refunds to 35 million customers. It is the biggest fine in FTC history for breaking the agency's rules.

Amazon did not admit they did anything wrong.

Now think about this.

Every subscription on your bank statement was designed by people who studied Project Iliad. They watched what worked. They copied it.

Streaming services hide the cancel button under three menus. Gym apps make you call a phone number that no human ever answers. Newspapers offer you a "pause for three months" instead of a real cancel. Software trials switch to a paid plan the second your free week ends, with no warning email. Apple and Google make you cancel through their app store, not the app itself, so most people never find the right place.

The average American pays 219 dollars a month for subscriptions they do not actively use. That is 2,628 dollars a year. Most of them remember signing up for maybe three of them.

The rest are ghosts.

Apps you forgot. Free trials that turned into paid plans. Services your ex signed up for on your card. Streaming bundles you got for a movie six years ago and never canceled because the cancel button is buried inside an Iliad of its own.

Here is the fix. It takes 15 minutes. Do it tonight.

This is the Subscription Autopsy.

Open your bank app. Open your credit card app. Open Apple Pay or Google Pay if you use them.

Go back twelve months. Yes, twelve. You will be shocked.

Write down every recurring charge. Every one. Big and small. The 4.99. The 1.99 you do not even remember. Even the ones that say "Apple. com" or "Google" — those are subscriptions hiding behind the store name.

Now look at the list. Be honest with yourself. Three columns.

Column one: I use this every week.
Column two: I have not opened this in a month.
Column three: I do not even remember what this is.

Cancel everything in columns two and three. Tonight. Right now. Before you put the phone down.

If a cancel button leads you into an Iliad, do not give up. Search for the company name plus "how to cancel." Some states now have laws that force one-click cancellation. If a company makes it impossibly hard, you can call your bank and ask them to block the charge.

You will find money you did not know you had. Most people find between 50 and 200 dollars a month on the first autopsy. That is between 600 and 2,400 dollars a year.

Money that was never going to a product you wanted. Money that was going to people who designed a trap and gave it a Greek name and laughed about it.

The trap is still legal. The company that built it just paid 2.5 billion dollars and did not admit anything was wrong.

The only person who can close the loop is you.

Send this to one person whose bank statement is full of charges they do not recognize.

[Intercoin @IntercoinOrg]

This is also why investors need blockchain tokenization.

[TFTC @TFTC21]

Anthropic just published a support page that should terrify anyone holding its shares on the secondary market.

"Any sale or transfer of Anthropic stock, or any interest in Anthropic stock, that has not been approved by our Board of Directors is void and will not be recognized on our books and records."

Void. Not restricted. Not pending review. Void.

That means if you bought Anthropic shares through Forge, Hiive, or any other secondary platform without board approval, you are not a stockholder. You have no stockholder rights. Your transaction is invalid.

It gets worse. Anthropic says it does not permit SPVs to hold its stock. Any transfer to an SPV is void. Investment funds claiming to offer indirect exposure are "most likely relying on mechanisms that attempt to circumvent our transfer restrictions." Forward contracts, tokenized securities, synthetic exposure products, all of it potentially worthless.

Their advice to investors: "Assume that it is invalid."

There is a multi-billion dollar secondary market in Anthropic shares right now. Platforms are pricing the stock at $265-$1,400+ per share based on a $380 billion valuation. Real people have put real money into these positions. And Anthropic just told them none of it counts.

This is the purest possible illustration of counterparty risk. You can buy a share of a company and have the company itself declare your ownership void because you bought it through the wrong channel.

[Intercoin @IntercoinOrg]

This is why we invented the quantum-resistant crypto wallet.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihteshamali]

A mathematician at Bell Labs wrote something on paper in 1994 that made every government on earth quietly panic. The machine that runs it doesn't exist yet. The panic never stopped.

His name is Peter Shor. He is a professor of applied mathematics at MIT. He won the Turing Award in 2021, the highest honor in computer science. And the thing he is most famous for is a piece of mathematics he wrote in four days that he did not fully intend to write.

Here is the story almost nobody tells, and why it should change how you think about the security of everything you do online.

In 1994, Shor was a researcher at AT&T Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey. Bell Labs at the time was the most intellectually alive research environment in the world. The same building that produced Claude Shannon's information theory, the transistor, and the Unix operating system was now full of physicists who interrupted each other mid-sentence and argued through lunch.

Quantum computing in 1994 was not a field. It was a rumor. A handful of theorists believed that computers built on quantum mechanical principles could solve certain problems exponentially faster than classical machines. Most of the scientific establishment considered them eccentric. There was no working quantum computer. There was no clear proof that one would ever matter. It was the kind of research that serious people called interesting and quietly avoided.

Shor was not avoiding it.

He had been thinking about a problem called the discrete logarithm, a mathematical operation that sits underneath several encryption schemes. Encryption works because certain mathematical operations are easy to perform in one direction and almost impossible to reverse. Multiply two enormous prime numbers together and you get a product in seconds. Start with the product and try to find the two original primes and a classical computer would take longer than the age of the universe. That asymmetry is the lock. Every bank transaction, every encrypted email, every password you have ever entered online is protected by some version of that lock.

Shor worked out a quantum algorithm for the discrete logarithm problem. He presented it at an internal Bell Labs seminar. The physicists in the room paid attention for the entire talk, which was unusual. The talk ended, and people started talking.

Then the telephone game started.

The discrete logarithm is used in some encryption systems, but not most. The dominant encryption standard protecting most of the world's sensitive data, RSA, is built on a different problem: prime factorization. As news of Shor's seminar spread through the halls of Bell Labs and then through the physics community, something got lost in translation. By the time the story reached physicists across the country four days later, the rumor was that Shor had solved factoring. He had not. He had solved something related but different.

Shor heard the rumor. And then, in four days, he made it true.

He sat down, looked at what he had already built, found the mathematical connection between the discrete logarithm and prime factorization, and extended his algorithm to cover both. The rumor had described something that did not exist. He built it to match the rumor before anyone found out it was wrong.

What he had now was a quantum algorithm that could factor enormous numbers exponentially faster than any classical computer. In practical terms, what that meant was this: if a quantum computer ever existed with enough stable qubits to run Shor's algorithm at scale, RSA encryption would be broken. Not weakened. Not compromised at the margins. Broken completely. Every message ever encrypted with RSA would be readable. Every private key ever generated would be derivable from the public key. Every lock built on the assumption that factoring is hard would unlock.

The paper went out. The reaction was not what most people imagine.

There was no press conference. No announcement. A 32-page technical paper appeared in the proceedings of a symposium on the foundations of computer science. Cryptographers read it and understood immediately what it meant. Intelligence agencies read it and understood immediately what it meant. Governments that had spent decades and billions of dollars building encryption infrastructure understood immediately what it meant.

None of them said much publicly. They started working.

The NSA gave Shor a Mathematics in Cryptology Award in 1995, one year after the paper came out. That is a fast turnaround for an award from an intelligence agency. The implication is that they read the paper and moved.

The problem was the machine. Shor's algorithm requires a quantum computer with enough fault-tolerant qubits to factor the kind of numbers used in real encryption, numbers with hundreds of digits. In 1994, no such machine existed. In 2001, IBM demonstrated Shor's algorithm on a 7-qubit quantum computer and used it to factor the number 15 into 3 and 5. That was the proof of concept. It was also a machine that required more infrastructure than most university labs own, running a calculation a fourth grader could do in their head.

The gap between that demonstration and a machine capable of breaking real encryption is enormous. The numbers involved in modern RSA encryption have hundreds of digits. Factoring them with Shor's algorithm would require a quantum computer with potentially millions of stable, error-corrected qubits. The best machines available today have thousands of qubits, most of them too noisy to use reliably for extended computation.

But the direction of progress is not ambiguous.

Every year, the machines get larger. Every year, error correction improves. Every year, the gap between what exists and what Shor's algorithm requires gets smaller. Nobody knows exactly when a machine capable of breaking RSA will exist. Estimates from serious researchers range from ten years to thirty. The NSA has said publicly that it believes the threat is real. NIST, the US standards body, spent years running a global competition to identify encryption algorithms that would survive a quantum computer, and in August 2024 published the first official post-quantum cryptography standards. Google has already integrated one of them into Chrome. Apple adopted another for iMessage. Signal switched to a hybrid post-quantum system in 2023.

All of that activity, every dollar of it, every hour of engineering, traces back to four pages Shor wrote in 1994.

The most interesting detail is the one Shor himself has repeated in multiple interviews. He compared the current scramble to build post-quantum cryptography to Y2K, the race to patch computer systems before the year 2000. He said the difference is that Y2K had a fixed deadline. The quantum threat has no deadline. Nobody knows when the dangerous machine will exist. And his warning was blunt: if you wait until it is obvious that a sufficiently powerful quantum computer is coming, you will already be too late. The migration of critical infrastructure to post-quantum standards takes years. The systems protecting financial markets, government communications, and military networks cannot be updated in an afternoon.

The race is not theoretical. It is happening right now, in every major government and every serious technology company on earth.

Shor is 65 years old. He still teaches at MIT. He did not build the machine. He wrote the paper that proved the machine would matter before anyone had built it. He won the Turing Award 27 years after the paper came out, which is either a sign that the committee moves slowly or a sign that the full weight of what he wrote is still arriving.

The most dangerous algorithm in the history of cryptography has never successfully been used against a real target.

Every system protecting your money, your messages, and your government's secrets is safe for exactly one reason. The computer that breaks them has not been finished yet.

[Watcher.Guru @WatcherGuru]

JUST IN: 🇺🇸 US national debt surpasses size of the entire United States GDP for first time since World War II.

[Charlie Hills @charliejhills]

Economists just published a mathematical proof of how AI breaks capitalism.

Not a warning. Not a forecast. A proof.

University of Pennsylvania + Boston University. March 2026. The paper is called “The AI Layoff Trap.”

Here’s the mechanism:

Every firm that automates captures the full cost savings. But the demand it destroys gets split across every competitor in the sector.

20 firms in a market. You automate. You keep 100% of the savings. You absorb 1/20th of the lost spending.

Do the math. Automating is always rational for every single firm, simultaneously.

That’s a Prisoner’s Dilemma.

The math shows firms get trapped in an automation arms race, cutting workers well past the point that’s optimal for anyone, including themselves.

They didn’t stop at identifying the problem. They ran every proposed solution through the model:

UBI. Capital taxes. Worker equity. Upskilling. Industry coordination agreements.

None of them work.

Only a Pigouvian automation tax corrects the distortion: a per-task levy that forces firms to price in the demand they’re destroying before they cut.

No government is doing this. No major economy is debating it seriously.

The numbers are already there. 100,000+ tech workers lost jobs in 2025, with AI cited as the primary driver in more than half of cases. Block cut nearly half its workforce in early 2026. Jack Dorsey said publicly that within a year, most companies would reach the same conclusion.

The wildest part? More competition makes it worse. Better AI makes it worse.

Even if every CEO knows exactly where this leads, knowing isn’t enough to stop it.

The economy produces everything. Sells it to nobody.

That’s the proof.

[Intercoin @IntercoinOrg]

Been saying this for years

[Elias @iam_elias1]

Two economists just published a mathematical proof that AI will destroy the economy.

Not might. Not could. Will — if nothing changes.

The paper is called "The AI Layoff Trap." Published March 2, 2026. Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Boston University. Peer reviewed. Mathematically modeled.
The conclusion is one sentence.
"At the limit, firms automate their way to boundless productivity and zero demand."

An economy that produces everything. And sells it to nobody.
Here is how you get there.
A company fires 500 workers and replaces them with AI. A competitor fires 700 to keep up. Another fires 1,000. Every company is behaving rationally. Every company is following the incentives correctly. And every company is building a trap for itself.

Because the workers who were fired were also customers.
When they lose their jobs faster than the economy can absorb them, they stop spending. Consumer demand falls. Companies respond by cutting costs — which means automating more workers — which means less spending — which means more falling demand — which means more automation.

The loop has no natural exit.
The researchers tested every proposed solution. Universal basic income. Capital income taxes. Worker equity participation. Upskilling programs. Corporate coordination agreements.
Every single one failed in the model.
The only intervention that worked: a Pigouvian automation tax — a per-task levy charged every time a company replaces a human with AI, forcing them to price in the demand they are destroying before they pull the trigger.

No government has implemented this. No major economy is seriously discussing it.
Meanwhile the numbers are already tracking the curve. 100,000 tech workers laid off in 2025. 92,000 more in the first months of 2026. Jack Dorsey fired half of Block's workforce and said publicly: "Within the next year, the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion."
Nobody is doing anything wrong. Companies are following their incentives perfectly. That is exactly the problem.

Rational behavior. At scale. Simultaneously. With no mechanism to stop it.
Two economists built the math. The math leads to one place.

Source: Falk & Tsoukalas · Wharton School + Boston University ·
https://t.co/4m8E9jQNYm

[Intercoin @IntercoinOrg]

Shareholders uber alles
Capital is about to defeat Labor

[Evan @StockMKTNewz]

Here is the letter Meta Platforms $META just sent to employees about the cutting laying off 10% of the workforce:

"Over the last few weeks we have been working on some changes to our organization that will result in us laying off around 10% of the company on May 20, and closing about 6,000 open roles. Normally, we would want to nail down more details before communicating about this broadly, but since this has leaked, I want to share what I can right now. I know this is unwelcome news and confirming this puts everyone in an uneasy state, but we feel this is the best path forward, given the circumstances.

We’re doing this as part of our continued effort to run the company more efficiently and to allow us to offset the other investments we’re making. This is not an easy tradeoff and it will mean letting go of people who have made meaningful contributions to Meta during their time here.

We will support those who are laid off with a generous severance package which, in the US, will include 16 weeks base pay plus two weeks for every year of employment. We will also cover the cost of COBRA health care coverage for US employees and their families for 18 months. Packages outside the US will be similar but vary by country, as will local timelines and processes. We will also offer career services to support people in finding another role, and immigration support for those who need it. We’ll share more of these details in a follow up post ahead of May 20.

For notifications, we will follow the same process we have before: on May 20, anyone who is impacted will receive an email to their work and personal accounts – please make sure your personal email is updated in Workday.

I know this leaves everyone with nearly a month of ambiguity which is incredibly unsettling. We will try to answer your questions here in the comments but as we’re still working through the details we aren’t able to share much more until later in May. Meanwhile, you can find more information on the People Portal which includes our standard FAQs and logistical details for layoffs."

[Bull Theory @BullTheoryio]

SAM BANKMAN FRIED PICKED EVERY WINNER OF THE 2020s AND HIS LAWYERS SOLD THEM ALL AT THE BOTTOM.

If the FTX estate hadn't panic-sold its assets during bankruptcy, SBF would be sitting on a $114 billion empire today. Instead, he is watching the greatest trades of the decade from a prison cell.

The data is almost impossible to believe:

- Anthropic: $82.3 billion (165x) SBF bought an 8% stake for $500M. The estate sold it for $1.3B in 2024. Today, that stake would be worth over $80B.

- SpaceX:$15 billion (75x) A massive stake liquidated early to pay creditors.

- Solana: $5.1 billion (27x) SBF was an early backer at $8. The estate offloaded a massive chunk at $64.

- Robinhood: $4.9 billion (8x)

- Genesis Digital: $3.5 billion (3x)

The Latest "Missed" Fortune: CURSOR

In 2022, Alameda Research wrote a tiny $200,000 check for a 5% stake in the AI startup Cursor. In April 2023, the bankruptcy estate sold that entire stake back for exactly what they paid: $200,000.

Yesterday, SpaceX announced a deal to buy Cursor for $60 billion.

That "worthless" 5% stake would be worth $3 billion today. That is a 15,000x return that vanished because the lawyers wanted a quick exit.

SBF was a genius at picking generational winners and a criminal at managing their money.

The lawyers recovered $18 billion for users. If they had just held, they would be sitting on $114 billion and the most valuable venture portfolio in history.

[Andrew Ettinger 🇺🇸 @ettinger]

Introducing USVC — a new fund from @AngelList, for individual investors, starting at $500.

One investment for exposure to private tech companies — from early-stage startups to companies scaling toward IPO.

→ https://t.co/mOTGAgfYFC

Venture capital funded the early stages of nearly every major tech company you use today.

But historically, most people couldn't invest until the IPO, when the early growth was already captured.

USVC is how you invest in venture capital.

The portfolio already includes xAI, Anthropic, OpenAI, Sierra, Vercel, Crusoe, and Legora.

USVC is the venture layer of your portfolio.

@ankurnagpal is leading USVC as GP / Portfolio Manager, @naval is the Chairman of Investment Committee, and @cyantist @ariellezuck and Jeff Fagnan are joining as advisors.

The future has shareholders. Become one of them.

[Crypto Tice @CryptoTice_]

Charles Schwab just went full crypto. 🚨

35,000,000 retail clients.
$12,000,000,000,000 in assets.

Direct Bitcoin and Ethereum trading.
Starting today.

No ETF wrapper. No middleman.
Just pure BTC and ETH through America's largest broker.

Coinbase didn't see this coming.
Robinhood didn't see this coming.

Wall Street's biggest retail platform just became a crypto exchange.

35 million Americans woke up with a crypto broker today.

They just don't know it yet.

[Intercoin @IntercoinOrg]

😂

[0xNobler @CryptoNobler]

🚨 BREAKING

BLACKROCK JUST WENT ALL-IN ON CRYPTO AT THE U.S. MARKET OPEN!

THEY BOUGHT OVER $450 MILLION IN BITCOIN AND ETHEREUM IN JUST 5 MINUTES AND KEEP ON BUYING EVEN MORE RIGHT NOW.

LOOKS LIKE THEY KNOW THE BOTTOM IS IN 👀

[Andrew Côté @Andercot]

Six years ago it we thought it'd take 10 million qubits to break any Bitcoin public key.

Four years ago it was 2 million qubits.

16 hours ago Google published a paper showing it can be done with 500,000 qubits in 20 minutes.

Race is on. Top prize?

$76 billion: Satoshi wallet

[Max @mreiffy]

Google is basically saying:

“We’ve cut the quantum resources needed to break Bitcoin’s encryption by 20x. We can now break it. We can prove it. We’re just not going to tell you how.

We’ve slowed down research to give crypto a chance. You have until 2029 to figure out a solution. Good luck.”

[Mike Katz @mikekatz29]

The SEC just released the most important piece of U.S. crypto regulatory guidance ever produced. 68 pages. 148 footnotes. A 5-category token taxonomy. Safe harbors for staking, mining, wrapping, and airdrops. And a separation doctrine that changes how every token deal gets structured.

Initial takeaways in this thread. Full analysis in my article below.

[SciTech Era @SciTechera]

🚨 BREAKING: Intel unveils “Heracles” chip that makes encrypted computing thousands of times faster.

Heracles is a new processor designed to dramatically accelerate Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), a technology that allows computers to perform calculations directly on encrypted data.

It's presented at the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference, the chip can verify encrypted queries in about 14 microseconds, compared with roughly 15 milliseconds on a standard Intel Xeon server CPU.

That’s a speed improvement of up to 5,000×.

Heracles includes 64 compute cores and high-bandwidth memory, specifically optimized for encrypted workloads used in cloud computing and AI.

Why this matters?
Fully Homomorphic Encryption has long been considered one of the “holy grails” of cybersecurity.

Normally, data must be decrypted before it can be processed, which creates a moment where sensitive information can potentially be exposed.

FHE changes that 👀!

With FHE, data can remain encrypted the entire time while still being analyzed or processed.

If hardware like Heracles makes this practical at scale, it could enable:

> Cloud services that analyze data without ever seeing it
> AI models trained on encrypted medical or financial data
> Secure collaboration between organizations without sharing raw data

In simple terms, Computers could use your data without ever actually seeing it.

[Brian Armstrong @brian_armstrong]

Very soon there are going to be more AI agents than humans making transactions.

They can’t open a bank account, but they can own a crypto wallet. Think about it.