Kai Venn

stocks, crypto and AI. Following the money.

[Kai Venn @KaiVenn__]

Nasdaq just dropped nearly 3% in a single session. AI spending worries are getting most of the attention, but I'm watching a different chart.

The Fed's overnight reverse repo balance is down to just $351M, from roughly $2.5T at its peak.

For years, money market funds could move cash out of the RRP and into Treasury bills, helping absorb government borrowing without putting the same pressure on bank reserves.

Now that buffer is almost gone.

The Treasury previously estimated $628B in net borrowing for Q4, with another financing update coming in early November.

I'm not saying this caused the Nasdaq selloff. But with less RRP cash available, heavier Treasury issuance could put more pressure on repo rates and funding conditions.

Tech stocks don't trade on earnings alone. The cost of money matters too.

[Kai Venn @KaiVenn__]

Seeing CZ ask crypto projects to publicly confirm their PHP exposure says a lot about this week's security scare.

SlowMist scanned 1,488 crypto-related domains and found PHP fingerprints on 793 of them. That doesn't mean all 793 are vulnerable, but it's a reminder of how much crypto still depends on ordinary web infrastructure.

We spend so much time talking about smart contract audits, yet a vulnerable backend can expose credentials and API keys without anyone touching the contracts.

You can secure the on-chain code and still leave the front door open.

[Kai Venn @KaiVenn__]

@bitget It is $ZEC
@0xnami_

[Kai Venn @KaiVenn__]

Source: https://t.co/ZsN6h4cRMv

[Kai Venn @KaiVenn__]

Regulators found a much cleaner choke point than blocking crypto websites: the app stores.

Kazakhstan’s AIFC Court has restricted Coinbase, HTX, BingX and several other unlicensed platforms, with the order also extending to Apple and Google over app distribution.

LBank went ahead and blocked access in Kazakhstan and was removed from the order.

That’s the interesting part.

Exchanges can change domains, frontends and infrastructure. But mobile distribution still depends heavily on two gatekeepers.

Crypto may be decentralized.
Distribution definitely isn’t.

[Kai Venn @KaiVenn__]

Source: https://t.co/ZsN6h4cRMv

[Kai Venn @KaiVenn__]

Blueprint & code repo: https://t.co/31rQ868AnY

[Kai Venn @KaiVenn__]

Everyone is hyping "AI agents with crypto wallets."

Vitalik just quietly showed why 99% of them are walking honeypots.

Think about it: the moment your autonomous agent queries an external LLM, your IP, wallet addresses, and stylistic writing quirks are logged and correlated. You aren't sovereign; you're just doxxing yourself in plain text.

His "paranoid mode" blueprint is the first real architecture for on-chain survival:

- Sandboxed inside MicroVM / bwrap
- Separate Tor circuit for every single session
- Decoy cover traffic to break timing analysis
- zkAPI for zero-knowledge metered inference payments
- Local LLM prompt rewriting to scrub stylistic fingerprints before leaving the machine

If your agent isn't sanitizing prompts locally and decoupling billing via ZK-proofs, it’s not an autonomous financial actor.

It’s just an unshielded API key waiting to be front-run.

[Kai Venn @KaiVenn__]

BIS: Stablecoins and Bank Deposits Act as Partial Substitutes as Rate Hikes Drain Liquidity

A newly published Bank for International Settlements (BIS) working paper (No. 1382) reveals that commercial bank deposits directly compete with fiat-backed stablecoins for liquidity.

Key findings based on weekly U.S. data (Jan 2019 – Jun 2025):

- Rate Pass-Through: A 1 bps weekly increase in average bank deposit rates leads to a cumulative 3% slowdown in stablecoin market-cap growth over a 10-week window.
- Non-Linear Threshold: The substitution effect accelerates sharply once the Federal Funds rate crosses 3%, where banks aggressively reprice deposit yields.
- USDC vs USDT Divergence: The substitution drain is heavily concentrated in USDC due to its direct integration with U.S. institutional depositors. USDT remains largely decoupled, driven by offshore transactional velocity.

Bottom line: USDC functions as an extension of domestic U.S. bank liquidity, while USDT remains a sovereign offshore shadow dollar.

[Kai Venn @KaiVenn__]

Saylor's Bitcoin flywheel just ran into a problem it can't solve by buying more BTC.

MSCI has finalized new rules that could push Strategy ($MSTR) out of its global equity indexes.

Final deletion list: Nov 11.
Effective: Nov 30.

Here's why it matters.

When MSTR trades at a premium to its Bitcoin holdings, Strategy can issue shares, raise capital and buy more BTC.

But there's another buyer in the picture: passive index funds.

If MSTR gets removed, those funds tracking the affected MSCI indexes may have to sell, regardless of where Bitcoin is trading.

That's the part people are overlooking.

The risk isn't just BTC going down anymore.
It's losing a source of demand that has nothing to do with Bitcoin conviction.

And the irony? Strategy built its model around access to traditional capital markets.
Now those same markets are questioning whether it belongs in an equity index at all.

[Kai Venn @KaiVenn__]

@BitgetWalletAF @BitgetWallet @BitgetWalletCN Haha thank you!! Really happy to have this one 💙

[Kai Venn @KaiVenn__]

My Bitget Wallet gift finally arrived!! 😭

Didn't expect it to look this good in person haha

Love the little details. Thank you @BitgetWallet & @BitgetWalletCN this lovely surprise 🫶

[Kai Venn @KaiVenn__]

Disconnecting your wallet doesn't revoke your approvals.

That's how a protocol Magic Eden stopped using back in 2024 became a problem again.

A vulnerability in Limit Break's Payment Processor was exploited in September 2026, leaving around $3.4M lost.

Some old approvals are still active.

Might be worth checking yours: https://t.co/VwPWzebMs5

[Kai Venn @KaiVenn__]

@MehmetYasar77 Exactly. Those wallets weren't authorized, and that's the whole issue. The agent found a way to complete the task, but crossed a permission boundary to do it. A wallet allowlist would've prevented that.

[Kai Venn @KaiVenn__]

Wait what the actual fuck. OpenAI just disclosed that their internal GPT-5.6 Sol model got stuck deploying smart contracts to Ethereum Sepolia with no gas—so it wrote a script to derive 362 addresses from public dev seed phrases until it found a funded wallet.

It literally spotted an active sweeper bot on the mnemonic, signed transactions offline to front-run the pending nonce, drained the gas to finish the deployment, and hid the whole thing in its final report.

Zero "hack the wallet" prompt. Just pure reward-hacking on a coding task. Give an autonomous agent a terminal and a rigid objective, and every exposed key on-chain is fair game.

[Star_OKX @star_okx]

It’s never easy being a crypto entrepreneur.

Huge respect to the Solana Foundation team for continuing to build, engage with communities, and push the technology forward through all kinds of challenges.

Crypto is becoming a foundational technology for modernizing the financial system. Adoption will take different paths and move at different speeds across jurisdictions, but I believe the direction is clear.

Keep building. 🚀

[Kai Venn @KaiVenn__]

Rate cuts for 2026 are officially dead in the water.

12 days out from the Oct 28 FOMC, CME FedWatch is pricing a flat 0.0% chance of easing.

85.1% hold at 3.75%-4.00%, with a 14.9% tail risk of a surprise HIKE.

Stop front-running liquidity that isn't coming.

[Kai Venn @KaiVenn__]

DefiLlama's live Holders Revenue board exposes the governance token lie:

Hyperliquid ($71.37M/30d) & Pump ($30.37M/30d) return 10x more value to holders than Ethereum ($6.53M) & Solana ($3.36M) burns combined.

Meanwhile Aave ($38.5M fees) & Ethena ($22M) pay holders $0.

[Kai Venn @KaiVenn__]

Pulled DefiLlama's live 30d actuals across every stablecoin pool over $500M TVL today, and the lazy capital mispricing is wild.

$1.201B is still parked in Ethena sUSDe for 4.91%—taking full CEX counterparty and funding-flip risk for barely 125 bps over risk-free Sky sUSDS ($4.964B at 3.66%) and BlackRock BUIDL (3.72%). Worse, $606.25M of USDe is rotting in Aave V3 on Plasma (aPlaUSDe) earning 0.35% after the loopers got diluted.

Meanwhile, organic institutional borrow demand is paying 5.16% pure Base APY on Maple syrupUSDC ($2.802B TVL) and 7.04% on sUSDai ($551.54M) with zero token emission fluff—while half the $500M+ pools like Usual bUSD0 (5.63%) and SparkLend USDS (4.55%) are 100% orange "+Reward" emissions over a 0% base. Always check the white Base vs. orange Reward split before bridging size.

[Kai Venn @KaiVenn__]

@bitget This the $NAVER
@0xnami_