Oliver Zerhusen

web3 growth & adoption | prev: @graphprotocol

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[Oliver Zerhusen @OliverZerhusen]

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[Pikaro @pikarogames]

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[Pikaro @pikarogames]

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[Oliver Zerhusen @OliverZerhusen]

@rennaestubbs Ever heard Nadal, Djokovic, Federer or Serena complain about a mat?

Zverev cites the balls: you call them excuses. You cite the carpet: PLEASE DEAR GOD.

Make that make sense!

[Walker⚡️ @WalkerAmerica]

Isn’t it funny that all the people working around the clock FOR FREE to do security audits on hundreds of Bitcoin projects are the same people BIP110ers have been calling scammers, spammers, grifters, shitcoiners, liars, pedos, etc for months?

Isn’t it funny that there are no BIP110ers on the red team?

Isn’t it funny that the people who are *actually* saving the Bitcoin ecosystem have been constantly slandered and vilified by the people who *claim* they are “saving bitcoin”?

Isn’t it funny??

Shoutout to @callebtc, @Rob1Ham and the many other red teamers who for some inexplicable reason are saving bitcoin even though they’re shitcoin spammer scammers.

We may never know their true motivations…

[Oliver Zerhusen @OliverZerhusen]

Me!
Genesis - Land of Confusion (Official Music Video) https://t.co/YSHXiXRuue via @YouTube

[Oliver Zerhusen @OliverZerhusen]

My heart broke yesterday with news that my closest friend Jim unexpectedly passed away. He introduced me to web3, mentored me through it and kept me in this space with his inspiration.

Jim was dedicated to making this world better through the mission of web3. He worked tirelessly at @jimwavefive, but he understood something most people miss: technology means nothing without people. In a space where connections often feel transactional, Jim made himself available to anyone who needed him. He had a rare gift—he could see the best in someone and make them feel like that quality mattered. He made everyone in the room feel important.

Jim never gave up on you. When you hit the roughest patch where most others walk away, Jim did the opposite. He showed up. He always saw your human side and would never judge someone by the worst moment of their life. I will always remember you, brother.

My thoughts are with Jim's family and my heart goes out to them. RIP. You deserved so much more time and you will be missed greatly 💜

[Brian Armstrong @brian_armstrong]

After reviewing the Senate Banking draft text over the last 48hrs, Coinbase unfortunately can’t support the bill as written.

There are too many issues, including:

- A defacto ban on tokenized equities
- DeFi prohibitions, giving the government unlimited access to your financial records and removing your right to privacy
- Erosion of the CFTC’s authority, stifling innovation and making it subservient to the SEC
- Draft amendments that would kill rewards on stablecoins, allowing banks to ban their competition

We appreciate all the hard work by members of the Senate to reach a bi-partisan outcome, but this version would be materially worse than the current status quo. We’d rather have no bill than a bad bill. Hopefully we can all get to a better draft.

We'll keep fighting for all Americans and for economic freedom. Crypto needs to be treated on a level playing field with the rest of financial services so we can build this industry in a safe and trusted way in America.

[Jim | Wavefive 🌊 ⛛ @jimwavefive]

Update: a long night working on @graphprotocol but we got everything allocated again with Horizon allocations.

Horizon requires us to update our cuts but we can't do that yet so you'll see 100% cuts right now but we will not close any allocations until we can update it.

We will be setting the reward cut to 20% and the query fee cut to 50%. The reward cut is higher than where we were, but necessary for the long term feasibility of our Indexing operation in current market conditions.

I fully understand if any Delegator chooses to leave and would absolutely welcome it if it means you move to a smaller Indexer that's been a long term Graph Indexer - feel free to DM me if you want recommendations of an indie Indexer that deserves your delegation.

You'll likely find that 20% is reasonable versus other Indexers as dedicated to Indexing as we are.

[Blockchain Association @BlockchainAssn]

A reminder of why working towards pro-crypto, pro-developer policies is so important. It matters for the future of digital assets in America, it matters for the future of our privacy protections, and it matters for the future of people's lives.

A message from @rstormsf.

[The White Whale @WhiteWhaleLabs]

The article is slickly written, but the thesis collapses under its own weight. It argues Bitcoin was merely a battering ram in a regulatory war, and now that the war is “over,” capital is abandoning it. That’s a poetic narrative, but it ignores how capital, technology, human incentives, and geopolitics actually work.

Bitcoin didn’t just exist to break down a wall. It evolved into the first globally neutral, counterparty-free asset. Calling it obsolete because regulators finally modernized their rails is like saying cars became irrelevant when Uber launched. Bitcoin’s origin story doesn’t confine its long-term purpose.

The writer’s core assumption is that tokenized assets will replace “Magic Internet Money.” Sure, tokenized assets will explode in volume. But tokenized AAPL is still subject to issuers, jurisdictions, custodians, rehypothecation, and political pressure. Tokenized gold is only as safe as the vault and the government overseeing it. Tokenized USD is still a claim on a melting ice cube. These aren’t substitutes for Bitcoin, they’re digitized versions of the same fragile structures Bitcoin was designed to hedge against.

His UX argument - that Bitcoin failed because retail wallets are clumsy - is a category error. Retail UX has nothing to do with settlement value. Large pools of global capital use Bitcoin because it’s stable, predictable, unseizable, and censorship-free. It doesn’t matter that someone once fumbled a QR code in Prague. Bitcoin’s settlement guarantees are why the largest asset manager on earth launched an ETF for it - and not for ATOM.

The “stagnation” argument is also backwards. Bitcoin ossified because it reached the point where change itself is risk. When you are positioning to store wealth for decades, predictable monetary policy and protocol stability are features, not failures. Ethereum reinvents itself like a new startup every season. Solana pushes patches like a gaming company. Hyperliquid iterates nonstop. Bitcoin behaves like digital granite, which is exactly why institutions trust it.

The writer cherry-picks a four-year window to claim Bitcoin underperformed the Nasdaq. That’s not structural decay. It’s a cycle. Other cycles saw Bitcoin outperform every asset on earth. And today’s buyer base - institutions, sovereign entities, ETFs - is far more durable than a wave of early technologists cashing out to pay mortgages and school fees. People selling Bitcoin to live their lives isn’t proof of Bitcoin’s decline. It’s proof Bitcoin became real money.

The idea that “people don’t want irreversible money” sounds sensible until you’ve lived somewhere with capital controls or authoritarian overreach. Billions of people absolutely do want money that can’t be frozen, reversed, or reclassified with the flip of a minister’s pen. Tokenized assets will be great when times are calm. When things break - and they will - tokenized claims behave like everything else: halted, frozen, reversed, censored, taxed, or seized. Bitcoin is the constant in a world of variables.

And that brings us to the author’s fatal flaw: he assumes the current regulatory peace is permanent. History, geopolitics, and human nature laugh at that. Bitcoin doesn’t exist for the world we have on a good day. It exists for the world we get on a bad one. Even if every asset becomes tokenized, even if banks integrate stablecoins, even if rails modernize globally, the need for a politically neutral, strictly finite, seizure-resistant settlement network does not disappear. It becomes more important as everything else becomes more digitized, centralized, and censorable.

This article isn’t an analysis. It’s simply a wish that the world has solved systemic risk forever. Bitcoin isn’t a battering ram; it’s a lifeboat. And lifeboats don’t get discarded because the sea looks calm this morning.

🫡 From the depths —
The White Whale 🐋

[The White Whale @WhiteWhaleLabs]

I spent the entire weekend arguing with people who genuinely believe an airliner - full of human beings - should be allowed to crash into a mountain because of a temporary GPS outage.

Their logic was basically:

“Those are the risks of flying.”
“They chose to get on the plane.”
“They should’ve driven instead.”
“If the navigation system fails, well…that’s life.”

And I’m sitting there thinking:

We’re really defending a world where a third-party outage means hundreds of passengers just…die?

No redundancy, no backup instruments, no failsafe logic?

Just a fatalistic shrug and a “should’ve managed your risk better”?

But hey - the airliner didn't go out of business at least!

Aviation didn’t become safer because passengers learned to cope with broken systems - it became safer because the systems were upgraded. Aircraft manufacturers didn't wait for government oversight to try to make a safer airplane.

Even so, there are still real risks with flying. Crashes do happen. A flight in rural Alaska with your pilot cousin is inherently more risky than a flight on Delta. The point is not to eliminate risk all together - that's impossible. Humans take calculated risks every day of their lives. Sometimes they pay the price for those risks. The goal is simply to eliminate single points of failures that should never exist in the first place - especially in a world that claims "decentralization"

As builders, that should be our responsibility.

If your entire flight path depends on a single external feed not malfunctioning, that’s not decentralization.

And the people saying “that’s just how flying works” aren’t being stoic; they’re being historically illiterate.

Every mature industry on earth - aviation, energy grids, stock markets, banking, healthcare - all built real safeguards after catastrophic failures, not before.

But we keep reenacting the same disasters while gathering around to look at the wreckage. Because let’s be honest: this industry doesn’t fear plane crashes - it enjoys watching them.

🫡 From the depths —
The White Whale 🐋

[Scott Johnsson @SGJohnsson]

Oct 8 - Senate Dems circulate market structure outline
Oct 9 - Outline leaks revealing immensely antagonistic positioning toward DeFi (worse than Gensler era), surprising many
Since - Trump disapproval and Dem House control chances significantly increase. Window for legislation significantly cut short by shutdown.

How do you discount the revelation that we could see a return of a major crackdown within a few years, for an asset class that lives and dies by political risk?

A lot.

Focus on legislation. Focus on convincing Dems their starting position is a liability.

[RYAN SEAN ADAMS @RyanSAdams]

Well as long as we're all coming out, i'll add mine.

In 2019 before Bankless, I had a tiny proof of stake company called Mythos - just me and one employee, self funded.

We launched a staking service on the Cosmos network, it was early days, we were learning but I hoped to expand to other proof of stake networks.

Until I got a nasty gram from the SEC - full discovery for Mythos - they wanted all documents, all code, all financials - justification documents - many tens of thousands in legal fees and weeks of my time.

You have to send the information they demand (or face charges) then hope they don't use the information against you to drop more charges.

Complete chilling effect - was a staking service illegal in the U.S? No answers. It just depended if they wanted to prosecute me or not. Mob behavior.

I didn't have the resources to fight the U.S. gov. So i shut things down in 2020 and started Bankless with @TrustlessState.

I never heard back from the SEC.

Shot first, ask questions later - wrek anyone too small to fight. Make sure they're all too fearful to speak publicly.

This is why crypto people hate that regime.

[nic carter @nic_carter]

I keep seeing takes like this and I basically agree. if you want volatility go trade publicly traded quantum sh*tters.

but it also conveys a deeper truth. crypto is boring because so many of the open questions have been answered. will stablecoins be allowed? yes. will we be banned? no. will we all go to jail for writing software? no. will we be incorporated into tradfi? yes. can tokens have cashflows and not be securities? apparently.

these uncertainties and changing realities on the ground were what drove so much of the historical volatility. there are still some unanswered questions, particularly around cash-flowing pseudoequity tokens, but we will probably get answers to those in the coming years.

today crypto has been largely derisked as a technological substrate which means it's not just the domain of startups but also large corporates which are now capturing value from using these tools. you don't have to be a "crypto native" early believer to build in crypto either. you can be an accomplished web2 guy or payments guy and build with off the shelf tools that work. all of this means that crypto natives no longer control the narrative, there's more serious businesses (which don't require tokens), there's less chaos, the whole space has matured significantly.

this was inevitable if we got our way. incorporation into wall street, financialization, bitcoin as acceptable collateral for large banks, regulatory clarity, etc, these are the hallmarks of an industry that WON. but at the same time, maturation and clarity means less uncertainty and excitement, by definition.

winning means the inherent volatility in the space is highly reduced! this applies to both startups and the underlying assets themselves.

this doesn't mean that you can't win by building in crypto or trading, but we're just in a completely different environment now. the "crypto ecology" doesn't reward unhinged risk takers as much as it did in say 2017 because the variable that counts isn't "willingness to take risk" but rather "ability to generate consumer value". previously, your willingness to skirt regulation and build regardless of consequences was a huge source of competitive advantage. today this isn't true since regulators have codified so much. previously, betting that crypto and tradfi would converge was another source of edge. once they actually did converge, it's just a historical fact, not a useful belief. i can go on.

none of this meant to be a shot at will by the way just using this sentiment as a jumping off point.

so if you're sad that volatility has been dampened smile through the tears. it means we won.

[Steve McGuire @sfmcguire79]

Ezra Klein on those who were “infuriated” that he said Charlie Kirk was doing politics “the right way” and said “we can oppose political violence without whitewashing this guy.”

“It is too little to just say we oppose political violence.”

“We have to be able to see that the bullet that tore into him was an act of violence against us all.”

[Charles Guillemet @P3b7_]

🚨 There’s a large-scale supply chain attack in progress: the NPM account of a reputable developer has been compromised. The affected packages have already been downloaded over 1 billion times, meaning the entire JavaScript ecosystem may be at risk.

The malicious payload works by silently swapping crypto addresses on the fly to steal funds.

If you use a hardware wallet, pay attention to every transaction before signing and you're safe.

If you don’t use a hardware wallet, refrain from making any on-chain transactions for now.

It’s still unclear whether the attacker is also stealing seeds from software wallets directly at this stage.

Excellent report here: https://t.co/5CtiZJHYsN

[Omid Malekan @malekanoms]

With all due respect to Matt, the notion that Tempo will in any way be neutral is a fantasy.

First, the very fact the he is billed as the "project lead" while sitting on the board of Stripe, a corporation who is clearly central to this effort, and being a GP at a VC firm that will likely be heavily invested in it, is a problem. That screams "not neutral."

(counterintuitively, the better Matt is at being project lead, the less neutral the chain will be).

Second, he is conflating the chain being permissionless with it being public. Public means "anyone can transact or issue on it" and permissionless means anyone can be a validator. As stated by Matt, Tempo will start as a permissioned chain.

A permissioned chain will never be public.

To wit: will North Korea be able to freely issue tokens on Tempo? What if Do Kwon decides to launch an algorithmic stablecoin on there from jail? And then Putin says "we will route payments for our sanctioned oil being sold on the black market via stablecoins on Tempo"?

Will the permissioned, known, and regulated corporations who run the validators be OK with all of this? Will the general council of Visa declare "Yes: we are clearly violating many US Federal laws and risk losing or licenses and possibly going to jail, but the docs said Tempo is a public blockchain, so we will process all of these transactions?"

I don't think so. As I argued yesterday, permissioned networks do not provide validators the plausible deniability required for a chain to be neutral:

https://t.co/hBgm1SjR1O

Third, no permissioned network has ever successfully transitioned to being permissionless. Hyperliquid is trying, but they have a long way to go, and are a special use case because it's mostly an app-chain, one whose primary margin asset still remains "elsewhere", something that might be OK for perps but not for payments.

Tempo will have an even harder time transitioning, because per the announcement, there is heavy involvement from various payments incumbents, most of all Stripe.

To believe that the network can transition to permissionless is to believe that corporations that accrued hundreds of billions of dollars in value over recent decades by owning a network will now launch a new network that they own (cause it's permissioned) but then magically decide to give all the power and profits that come with it away, quite possibly to competitors that will try to destroy their incumbent businesses.

That is highly unlikely. As @ccatalini pointed out yesterday, even Libra's original plans to someday decentralize nwere pushed to the back burner rather quickly. And Facebook did not have an incumbent payment business to protect. Stripe, Visa, Nubank, etc etc all do.

Y'all really think they'll give it away?

This has never happened before in the history of shared corporate infrastructure - which is what Tempo will be on day one.

Every other shared corporate infra (Visa, Mastercard, CME, NASDAQ, SWIFT, The Clearing House, etc etc) has gone in the opposite direction - it has centralized power and become more permissioned and censorable over time.

This is literally why Satoshi invented Bitcoin.

And I say this not as an ideological opposition to Tempo, but as an observation of what will be debated in the conference rooms of every potential issuer, user, etc etc.

Y'all really think Mastercard will jump all over a permissioned network controlled by Stripe and Visa?

Or Amazon or Walmart - fresh off their endless lawsuits against Visa and Mastercard for being oligopolies?

Lastly, It's hard enough to bootstrap a PoS chain from scratch because of the "rich get richer" problem of staking. Ethereum is still the only PoS chain that's achieved a diverse token-holder set that can deem it "a neutral L1." It got there by :

a)having a tiny premine by modern standards and b)being PoW for years.

Tempo will start with a massively concentrated token holder set and permissioned validator set. To argue it'll easily become neutral is to make a whole bunch of assumptions that are contrary to the ideals and lived experience of this industry.

[Austin Campbell @austincampbell]

This sort of post is why I started the newsletter.

@krogoff is actually a solid economist on areas where he has personal knowledge, but he also may be the single worst situated person in the entire world to understand the value of Bitcoin.

Why do I say this?

He's in America. He's at Harvard. He's rich. He's part of a politically favored class. He lives in the country with the reserve currency, and has easy access to that and banks. Our country has rule of law and things work (mostly - at least compared to many others).

Why would he need USD stablecoins or Bitcoin, on a day to day basis? The reality is he doesn't. The marginal value of these things to Ken Rogoff is, essentially, zero.

But where he talks about the "grey market" or "sensible crypto regulation" is where things go off the rails.

Which grey market does he mean? International wire transfers, where you can wait 5 days, turn out to have paid multiple percentage points after FX, and then have your wire rejected half the time (just ask @malekanoms)? Maybe he means the grey market where women in Afghanistan are supposed to put their money in the bank so the Taliban can confiscate it because they aren't supposed to have independent accounts and that is seen as a good thing to happen, as our Harvard economist appears to be implying? Maybe he meant leaving the citizens of Venezuela locked in with the government inflating away the value of their currency on a minute by minute basis and impoverishing the whole country, and that providing them a way out is, of course, facilitating a grey market and not good regulatory policy?

This is the sort of incredibly privileged Western viewpoint on crypto that is just so very tiresome. There's nothing smart about this. There's nothing useful about this. It's a statement of "I got mine so we're locking the door behind us, fuck the poors" when presented in such arrogant fashion.

And yet people can't understand why the anti-crypto army was so repulsive to voters, especially minorities (hint: who did banks used to abuse in comically racist fashion?) and immigrants.