uddin

[Tulip King 🌷 @tulipking]

https://t.co/QwOFNAFy9R

[DonAlt @DonAlt]

This is such a 3d chess move

>Start illegal tariffs
>Companies bribe you for exemptions
>Companies relay costs to consumers by raising prices
>Tariffs get struck
>Companies get paid keep money & raised prices
>Trump & friends make billions
>Normal folk pay

Actually genius

[sui @birdabo]

PewDiePie, one of the biggest YouTubers in the world just dropped an important video.

he claims the algorithm is destroying your brain.

a guy once beloved by the algo that made him a millionaire is now going against it.

“the key is intent. if you go around your life not making your own choices, then who the heck are you?”

his secret fix?
> add friction to dopamine apps
> unfollow everyone
> kill reels (important)
> self host everything.
> block at DNS level.

this is a wake up call. no more autopilot scrolling. you either choose what goes in your brain or the algorithm chooses for you.

[Jake Scott, MD @jakescottMD]

This morning, the White House posted targeting footage with an explosion emoji and “No pause. No hesitation.” The gamification of war in real time. This afternoon, a SpongeBob meme celebrating bombing runs in Iran.

Over 1,000 people are dead. Kill footage as content wasn’t enough. Now it’s kill footage as comedy. This is a shitpost about war. The official account of the United States government is using a children’s cartoon character to celebrate bombing runs. And it normalizes escalation. People are dying. Children are dying. And these people find it entertaining.

[Will @WClemente]

https://t.co/mj9NTYKmDP

[Mippo 🟪 @MikeIppolito_]

Some thoughts on this market:

I think it's likely we're entering a full on crypto winter. I am also open to the idea that this bear will be as bad as 2022, perhaps as bad as 2019.

The short term reason for this is that the industry is in an air gap created by unsustainable valuations and regulation.

Historically, valuations in crypto have been driven by "the hot ball of money." Money comes in, and because it was literally illegal to generate value for tokens, revenue / cash flows were entirely disregarded.

Prices were set by the amount of capital x the supply of tokens in the hot narrative. The sexier and more risk on it was, the higher it went.

There are two things that are "different this time," which are both long term good but they're disrupting the way valuations were previously set.

The biggest difference is that it's clear that there will be a regulated path for crypto projects. We first saw this with GENIUS for stablecoins, and soon will for all tokens with CLARITY.

This is good, but it presents an obvious problem for protocols valued purely based on speculation. Once there is a regulated way to generate cash flows and not get thrown in jail, that is all the market will want.

So what is confusing many investors and founders right now is that fundamentals are growing, but tokens are still selling off.

This is because we're resetting how valuations will work, and the starting price for almost every project was way too high.

Additionally, crypto is getting absolutely mogged by AI. The last couple years of memecoin stupidity are catching up with us, and unfortunately, we didn't build anything useful.

All in all, my best guess is it'll be about 9-18 more months before things begin to get better.

[wishful_cynic @EvgenyGaevoy]

short thread of thoughts on where we are etc

[MilliΞ @llamaonthebrink]

I’m starting realize that Vitalik was miles ahead of the rest of the industry when he prophesied that highly financialized crypto products have a hard ceiling on value.

Everyone is bullish HYPE rn, and there’s probably good upside potential there for traders. But how much upside realistically?

Let’s say HL becomes wildly successful. It’s mcap would probably trade at some modest multiple of the NASDAQ (~$55B), for arguments sake, let’s say 3x.

That would translate to a hefty $165B dollar HYPE valuation. Thats about a 4-5x price increase from its current level. And that’s on the most optimistic scenario.

Or a more reasonable comparison would be to that of present day Robinhood (~$80B mcap), which is a mere 2x from HYPE’s current Val. Again, this is in a very optimistic scenario.

The reason for this capped upside is that financial applications are but a small part of societal utility. The largest companies in the world sell goods and services unrelated to finance.

Google - An internet and digital products conglomerate - nothing to do with finance

Nvidia - chipmaker - nothing to do with finance

Meta - social media monopoly - nothing to do with finance

Tesla - EV maker / robotics company - nothing to do with finance

SpaceX - aerospace company - nothing to do with finance

EliLilly - pharma company - nothing to do with finance

Apple - computer and smart phone producer - nothing to do with finance

The list goes on and on and on.

For crypto to level up from here, we need to begin building non-financial (or semi-financial) use cases that are enhanced by decentralization.

Money and Finance were the proof of concept for crypto, but we need to begin venturing outside of that bubble.

If you peer hard enough, you’ll realize that Vitalik was 1000% right when he said that indexing too much on finance will make crypto an ouroboros.

That’s not to say that DeFi is small potatoes.

Quite the contrary, I think DeFi will eventually enable finance to grow much larger than its present day size.

But that doesn’t mean it’s wise to make DeFi the only onchain use case.

The leap doesn’t have to be too foreign either, imo the crypto industry as a whole can grow big time simply by combining the best of what we have in DeFi right now to create semi-financial super apps.

The lowest hanging fruit here is decentralized social media with some financial gamification built in.

Other more futuristic applications that are far above my pay grade would be zk-proven LLMs that use crypto-economics for verifiable compute.

But we need to begin building in these directions.

Failing to do so means the upside for all of us will remain severely capped.

A 5x isn’t cool.

You know what’s cool? 500x.

The year of the tail eating snake is over.

The year of the conquering Horse is here.

Time for crypto to stop eating its own tail and begin conquering uncharted territory outside of money and finance.

[DonAlt @DonAlt]

Kinda crazy that all the conspiracies about the elite were actually true

Imagine the victory laps the conspiracy folks could take if they didn't pivot into supporting those exact pedo elites

[Horse @TheFlowHorse]

I never heard this until today but I think it is a really useful analogy. I think the original author was the CEO of Coca Cola.

Imagine life as a game in which you’re juggling five balls in the air. These balls represent the core elements of your life: Work, Family, Health, Friends, and Spirit.

Here’s the insight: Work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. You can recover. You can find another job, rebuild a business, or restart a project.

But the other four balls: Family, Health, Friends, and Spirit, are made of glass. If you drop one of these, it will be irrevocably scuffed, cracked, or even shattered. Some damage simply can’t be undone.

The analogy cuts through the noise of hustle culture by forcing a simple question: Which balls are you treating as rubber when they’re actually glass?

Many people invert the priority, they treat work like glass (terrified to drop it, sacrificing everything to keep it aloft) while treating health, relationships, and inner peace like rubber, assuming they’ll always bounce back. The reality is often the opposite. Careers are more resilient than we think; bodies, relationships, and peace of mind are more fragile.

I think it’s a useful mental model, especially for some people here chasing a dream in markets. The markets will always be there tomorrow, but many of the glass balls won’t last forever.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

@Kristennetten Of course.

They are trying to deflect responsibility to me from the truly guilty. I have NOT been to any of Epstein’s party, his plane or his island.

But many others have. Those who have committed serious crimes need to be prosecuted.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

What matters is not release of some subset of the Epstein files, but rather the prosecution of those who committed heinous crimes with Epstein.

When there is at least one arrest, some justice will have been done. If not, this is all performative. Nothing but a distraction.

[HealthRanger @HealthRanger]

ANALYSIS: It seems very clear now that Trump has lost control of his administration, and the DOJ is answering to Netanyahu who ordered the release of this latest batch of Epstein files – with Trump’s name NOT redacted – in making good on a blackmail threat being delivered when Trump recently refused to order the all-out military attack on Iran. But there’s more: Israeli-linked financial terrorists also likely engineered today’s selloffs of gold, silver and stocks, delivering a message to Trump: “Either do what we say, or we will crash your economy and destroy your presidency.”

Trump’s own DOJ has clearly turned against him, which means Pam Bondi is functioning exactly as Israel needs: The enforcer of Netanyahu’s will against America’s interests, forcing Trump’s hand to sacrifice U.S. military assets (and probably U.S. soldiers) in Israel’s bloodlust attempt to destroy Iran. Trump himself essentially admitted all this in a Truth Social post from July 16, 2025: “They created the Epstein Files, just like they created the FAKE Hillary Clinton/Christopher Steele Dossier that they used on me, and now my so-called 'friends' are playing right into their hands.”

Bottom line? Trump has lost control. Netanyahu is running America, the DOJ, the FBI and the entire Trump administration. Every single element of the federal government is now aimed at Trump with an assortment of threats to unleash mass chaos (economic, civil, geopolitical, etc.) unless Trump does Netanyahu’s bidding. What we saw today was just the “lashing out” of Israeli intelligence, flexing their control over information and financial markets, to send Trump a final warning message: Either wage full-scale war with Iran, or we’ll destroy your president and the U.S. economy with it.

In a way, it’s even worse than exploding pagers. But it’s the same mindset.

If Trump attacks Iran full force, Israel will make sure financial markets surge again next week, restoring the illusion of “wealth” and protecting Trump’s presidency (which is of course strongly tied to perceptions of economic strength).

If Trump refuses to attack Iran, then they’ll remove him from power with another round of damning document dumps (real, fake or otherwise) and install the next person in line (Vance?) who’s willing to be more obedient.

America is an occupied nation. The people we elect aren’t in charge at all.

[cami @camiinthisthang]

This isn’t about any one team or person in particular, but rather an observation about the state of the industry & value of tokens:

It’s becoming commonplace for teams to leave before vesting any tokens & it’s only going to accelerate from here when the opportunity cost of trading time for a token destined for zero continues to grow

What used to go to zero over months and years after TGE now happens in days

I think a lot of the top talent in crypto will either move to real businesses powered by crypto (token is not the product) or will leave crypto altogether

Two of my smartest friends in crypto are leaving this month & I don’t think they are the last

[Kun @0x_Kun]

It’s because gold buying is top down ie central banks and bitcoin is bottom up - top down is much larger at this point in time

Also btc is off the back of multi yr run up and gold had based for decades to this point and is having its time

to the point of China - China allows buying gold because you can keep it in your borders and maintain control so while it helps against debasement internally they can still restrict movement out - it’s not that Chinese as a people are against bitcoin

Gold supports the authoritarian axis and Bitcoin supports the freedom axis

ATM the west support for Bitcoin has been ideological limited to few countries but not yet supported by buying

[fejau @fejau_inc]

The reason gold is ripping and btc isn’t is because the debasement trade is more vibes and the real marginal mover here is china capital flight and Chinese aren’t interested in Bitcoin aka the American trump coin

Thank you for coming to my ted talk

[Simon @simononchain]

Bitcoin is getting brutally mogged by a narrative crisis it can't shake:

- Too political (Trump's pet asset)
- Too vulnerable (quantum risks)
- Not private enough (transparent ledger in a surveillance state)

Gold, meanwhile, just sits there being:

- Boring, tangible
- Politically neutral
- Free from any quantum risk

= actual flight to safety/debasement hedge

///

Over time these threats shouldn't be existential but they'll weigh for a while and have complicated the "Bitcoin Story".

The $1T to $10T journey will require institutional conviction at scale, which IMO - will not happen w/ narrative confusion.

BTC will needs to clearly win ONE dominant story:

- Quantum resistance is an upgrade cycle away (solvable)

- Trump association fades over time (if BSR happens it cuts both ways: supportive short-term but risks alienating other sovereigns + creates unwind risk under future admin. Conversation for another day.)

- Gold's scarcity story breaks down when space narrative grows --> asteroid mining, massive deposits on Mars, etc.

Right now, thought BTC remains in no man's land, not appealing to any core constituency.

- Sovereigns want gold
- Cypherpunks want privacy
- Institutions want quantum clarity

Eventually this snaps back, violently.

Maybe when gold's "physical scarcity" gets challenged or people remember why verifiable digital scarcity > "trust us there's no more gold anywhere."

Until then, not sure what catalyzes us out of this.

[Trita Parsi @tparsi]

WOW!!!

Never thought we would hear this level of honesty from a Western leader, and certainly not Canada, given the direction of Canada in the past 25 years. Canada's shift towards multialignment is quite clear - and this level of honesty from Carney on Western "fiction" about the old order will be warmly welcomed in much of the Global South:

"We knew that the story about the rules-based order was partially false... We knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused and the victim. This fiction was useful [because of the goods provided by American hegemony]... So we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals. And we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality. This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition... You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination."

[Santiago R Santos @santiagoroel]

Not many predictions, just a reiteration of a few core ideas:

> Stop trying to look into a crystal ball. Be present and understand what’s happening now. If you understand the present, you can see the future

> Markets are not cheap and there’s a lot of hype. Everyone’s high on techno optimism and confusing skepticism with pessimism. When things are priced to perfection it leads to disappointment (and capital destruction)

> You can’t escape mean reversion

> Crypto is in its adoption phase. 2025 was about legitimacy; 2026 is about exponential adoption - but not exponential prices

> Prices will lag adoption. The Nasdaq fell ~80% from its peak and took 15 years to recover, while internet users grew ~7x over the same period

> Crypto prices eventually recover once we have ~10x more active users (at least 500 million)

> We’re facing an affordability and loneliness crisis. Understand that, and clear themes and investable areas emerge

> Capital preservation is key. Wait for the fat pitch. It usually comes with forced sellers. That’s not today. People feel the pinch, but markets have delivered a phenomenal decade

> You don’t have to bet. You shouldn’t play every hand you’re dealt.

> Go deep on supply and demand dynamics. It’s surprising how few people can explain businesses through this lens. In crypto, we have an oversupply of blockspace and insufficient demand. Prices won’t break new all time highs until that happens

> Competition is for losers. Avoid highly competitive industries. Focus on niche areas, find PMF, and dominate. First-mover advantages are overrated. Read Zero to One

> “Commodity” products can still earn a premium. Anyone who disagrees hasn’t walked through a supermarket: it’s Tide, not detergent; Kleenex, not tissue

May 2026 be a great year for you all!