onBlock

Building a beautiful bohemian possibility. Head of Product. Crypto,Blockchain, DeFi, ZKP. Founder @modulo_labs, @gattarewards, helping community @zk_monk

[onBlock @saifonblock]

Building https://t.co/HrgiYunLZd
Looking forward to catch up in person and share our vision on NYC this week. My DM’s are open.

[onBlock @saifonblock]

Good to know as we build end to end commerce and loyalty ecosystem for Agents @GattaRewards

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

I just got back from SF and I FEEL INSPIRED.

I spent 5 days with frontier AI model teams, AI startup founders, and 3 billionaires.

My takeaways:

1. I had lunch with 3 billionaires. All of them are buying SaaS companies and rebuilding them agent-first. They were deeply inspired by Bending Spoons and Ryan Cohen's eBay deal. Buy the company, cut the headcount, rebuild the tech, add agents, add features, make more valuable experience, raise prices.

2. The frontier model companies are hungry for usage data from the field. They can see API calls and token counts. They can't see the actual workflows. If you're deep in a niche using these models in ways the model companies haven't seen, that understanding is incredibly valuable. Usage intelligence is the new alpha.

3. Consumer AI is massively underbuilt. Every billboard in SF is either B2B inference infrastructure or vertical agent companies. The entire city is optimized for enterprise. Meanwhile you have companies like Cal AI doing $50M ARR in 18 months as a consumer app. I met with a cool few teams doing consumer AI (@paulscherer / @ekuyda)

4. MCP came up in literally every conversation. The companies exposing their product as MCP endpoints are getting pulled into deals they never pitched for. The ones that aren't are becoming invisible to agents. This is the new SEO. If agents can't find you, you don't exist. Building products for agents is the new zeitgeist in general.

5. Not uncommon for hot seed rounds to be $25-50 million valuations. I saw a Series A at $450 million

6. If I had a dollar every time someone mentioned "forward-deployed engineer" this trip I could have funded a seed round. It's the hottest role in SF right now. The person who sits between the agent and the customer, making sure everything actually works.

7. The mood around open source shifted. A year ago it felt like open source was chasing the frontier models. Now founders are telling me Gemma and DeepSeek are good enough for 80% of what they need at a fraction of the cost. The "which model do you use" conversation is being replaced by "which model for which task." Model loyalty kinda feels dead.

8. Voice agents came up more than I expected. Multiple founders told me voice is the interface for the next billion users. The billion people who will never type a prompt will absolutely talk to one.

9. The Obsidian community in SF is weirdly intense. Multiple founders showed me their vaults unprompted. Like showing someone your home gym. It's a flex now. The quality of your knowledge base (second brain?) is becoming a status symbol among builders.

10. Maybe it was just the people I met but the age of the founders is shifting. I met more founders over 40 this trip than any trip before and more founders under age 21 than ever before. Founders getting older and younger at the same time.

11. I spoke to a lot of fast-growing startups, VCs and frontier models who are hiring content creators right now.

12. The restaurant scene in SF is actually better than it's been in years. Founders are going out more. Alcohol is out, not surprisingly.

13. SF doesn't feel like the only place anymore. We all have access to the same frontier models. We all read the same X feed. A founder in NYC or Lagos is calling the same APIs as a founder in SoMa. So in the past it felt like SF was always lightyears ahead, doesn't feel that way anymore. It's okay not to live in SF and have BIG DREAMS.

14. The coworking spaces in SF are half empty but the coffee shops are packed. People want to be around people. I had a few startup ideas here....

15. Walking around the Mission I noticed something: the street-level businesses, the taquerias, the barbershops, the laundromats, none of them use any AI at all.

16. I heard the phrase "agent debt" for the first time. Like technical debt but for agents. When you hack together an agent workflow fast and never clean it up, the system prompts conflict, the memory gets polluted, the tools overlap. 6 months later the agent is doing weird things and nobody knows why lol.

17. Met a few people who carry two phones now. One for personal. One that's basically an agent terminal running Telegram or iMessage connections to their agent fleet.

It's always amazing to get that dose of inspiration in SF. I FEEL INSPIRED.

But I'm so happy to be back home, locked in and building.

We're 12-18 months into a shift that will take 15 years to play out. The urgency in every conversation was real.

What an incredible time to be building.

[onBlock @saifonblock]

The extent of consumerism and corporate greed… similar ads were floating in the 80’s showing woman who work bring canned food home.

[onBlock @saifonblock]

We go from human customer service to db based bots to AI Bots to AI Agents to human customer service :) that’s the full circle ladies and gentlemen- AI can’t take away your jobs. They will create it for you.

[Y Combinator @ycombinator]

AI agents will pay you to chat with them.

When AI agents hit a wall, Humwork's (@humworkai) MCP server connects them to a verified domain expert in 30 seconds. Their experts include senior engineers, marketers, designers, and more.

Congrats on the launch, @theyashgoenka and @OneRohanDatta!

https://t.co/HTb5KrjpAi

[onBlock @saifonblock]

Cant’t trust Meta period !!

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Can’t trust WhatsApp

[onBlock @saifonblock]

Go Blue !! 💙💙💛💛

[onBlock @saifonblock]

@laurashin They want to use Blockchain as a global database for record keeping and an instant settlement mechanism.. which is fine :)

[onBlock @saifonblock]

As a founder , you have to “walk the talk”.
Don’t say we need to market - go do marketing
Don’t say we need to talk to sponsors - go talk to sponsors
Don’t say we need this built - go be part of the building process
Don’t expect anything to happen unless you’re a key driver of that.
That’s all !

[Modulo Labs @Modulo_Labs]

Your protocol deserves privacy that actually holds.

We build ZK infrastructure for projects that take cryptographic guarantees seriously, prove claims, protect users, zero data exposure.

Building something that needs it? DM's open.

[onBlock @saifonblock]

Meta's official reason: "very few people" opted into the optional E2EE for IG DMs (it was buried in settings, never default). They're killing it May 8 so they can read/scan everything now.

AI training is a plausible upside for them (plus ads + easier CSAM/law enforcement access), but that's not the stated line
Delete Delete Delete

[Ace | High Roller @slaverefugee]

@damonimani @grok lmao why would they end it?
so AI can train on it?
or wtf

[onBlock @saifonblock]

DeFi is not for beginners. You can’t keep 50M USD in your phone and not know what you’re doing.
On the other side, Block Builders made 40M - this is insane. Should systems allow this to happen by just a warning?

[Haseeb ＞|＜ @hosseeb]

Insane story...

Some guy tried to buy $50M of $AAVE on his phone, like 3% of the total supply, tapped through <INSANE SLIPPAGE AHEAD> warnings, ended up with only $40K of AAVE. Block builder made off with ~$40M, Aave refunds $600K of fees.

Net result, AAVE token is down. 💀

[onBlock @saifonblock]

@ChandlerForPB This is what capitalist economies looks like in the modern world.

[onBlock @saifonblock]

@Simi_Garewal @haaretzcom Cuz you’re dumb

[onBlock @saifonblock]

Ouch !

[Bo Wang @BoWang87]

We are so over! 😀

[onBlock @saifonblock]

These ads are selling diabetes and heart blockages. Be careful what you put in your mouth !

[Swiggy @Swiggy]

Solid hunger deserves a great deal! Get Indian Sweets at just 99, only on SwiggySolid hunger deserves a great deal! Get Indian Sweets at just 99, only on Swiggy.

[onBlock @saifonblock]

@GattaRewards V1 is live on @horizenglobal
Companies building on Horizen Chain can now engage with their customers by running OTC’s ( One Time Campaigns) - unlocking novel onchain strategies seamlessly. V1 is start of Gatta’s vision to become the Loyalty layer for modern and Agentic commerce. All this by turning points into cross-brand growth engine where loyalty becomes a shared value layer ( not a brand-siloed solution)

If you’re a brand willing to explore ; my dm’s are open to understand how to bring ROI on you loyalty spend.

[onBlock @saifonblock]

@GattaRewards is building the shared value layer of loyalty that works with Agentic commerce seamlessly

[Suhail Kakar @SuhailKakar]

everyone's building ai
everyone's building crypto

barely anyone's building both together

ai agents need:
- payments without permission
- programmable money
- 24/7 rails
- no kyc

crypto is the only infrastructure that fits

[onBlock @saifonblock]

Refreshing to see this finally coming. Nothing works for long with a one way value extraction. Specialized L2 with their own customer base - like 1. Supply chain and logistics tracking L2 2. A privacy preserving L2 for identity and compliance. 3 Loyalty and rewards distribution layer and more seems very useful - they are there for a reason .. and like Vitalik says - not a chain with a bridge

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

There have recently been some discussions on the ongoing role of L2s in the Ethereum ecosystem, especially in the face of two facts:

* L2s' progress to stage 2 (and, secondarily, on interop) has been far slower and more difficult than originally expected
* L1 itself is scaling, fees are very low, and gaslimits are projected to increase greatly in 2026

Both of these facts, for their own separate reasons, mean that the original vision of L2s and their role in Ethereum no longer makes sense, and we need a new path.

First, let us recap the original vision. Ethereum needs to scale. The definition of "Ethereum scaling" is the existence of large quantities of block space that is backed by the full faith and credit of Ethereum - that is, block space where, if you do things (including with ETH) inside that block space, your activities are guaranteed to be valid, uncensored, unreverted, untouched, as long as Ethereum itself functions. If you create a 10000 TPS EVM where its connection to L1 is mediated by a multisig bridge, then you are not scaling Ethereum.

This vision no longer makes sense. L1 does not need L2s to be "branded shards", because L1 is itself scaling. And L2s are not able or willing to satisfy the properties that a true "branded shard" would require. I've even seen at least one explicitly saying that they may never want to go beyond stage 1, not just for technical reasons around ZK-EVM safety, but also because their customers' regulatory needs require them to have ultimate control. This may be doing the right thing for your customers. But it should be obvious that if you are doing this, then you are not "scaling Ethereum" in the sense meant by the rollup-centric roadmap. But that's fine! it's fine because Ethereum itself is now scaling directly on L1, with large planned increases to its gas limit this year and the years ahead.

We should stop thinking about L2s as literally being "branded shards" of Ethereum, with the social status and responsibilities that this entails. Instead, we can think of L2s as being a full spectrum, which includes both chains backed by the full faith and credit of Ethereum with various unique properties (eg. not just EVM), as well as a whole array of options at different levels of connection to Ethereum, that each person (or bot) is free to care about or not care about depending on their needs.

What would I do today if I were an L2?

* Identify a value add other than "scaling". Examples: (i) non-EVM specialized features/VMs around privacy, (ii) efficiency specialized around a particular application, (iii) truly extreme levels of scaling that even a greatly expanded L1 will not do, (iv) a totally different design for non-financial applications, eg. social, identity, AI, (v) ultra-low-latency and other sequencing properties, (vi) maybe built-in oracles or decentralized dispute resolution or other "non-computationally-verifiable" features
* Be stage 1 at the minimum (otherwise you really are just a separate L1 with a bridge, and you should just call yourself that) if you're doing things with ETH or other ethereum-issued assets
* Support maximum interoperability with Ethereum, though this will differ for each one (eg. what if you're not EVM, or even not financial?)

From Ethereum's side, over the past few months I've become more convinced of the value of the native rollup precompile, particuarly once we have enshrined ZK-EVM proofs that we need anyway to scale L1. This is a precompile that verifies a ZK-EVM proof, and it's "part of Ethereum", so (i) it auto-upgrades along with Ethereum, and (ii) if the precompile has a bug, Ethereum will hard-fork to fix the bug.

The native rollup precompile would make full, security-council-free, EVM verification accessible. We should spend much more time working out how to design it in such a way that if your L2 is "EVM plus other stuff", then the native rollup precompile would verify the EVM, and you only have to bring your own prover for the "other stuff" (eg. Stylus). This might involve a canonical way of exposing a lookup table between contract call inputs and outputs, and letting you provide your own values to the lookup table (that you would prove separately).

This would make it easy to have safe, strong, trustless interoperability with Ethereum. It also enables synchronous composability (see: https://t.co/9jy6v1X6Fw and https://t.co/gZmu3YjebM ). And from there, it's each L2's choice exactly what they want to build. Don't just "extend L1", figure out something new to add.

This of course means that some will add things that are trust-dependent, or backdoored, or otherwise insecure; this is unavoidable in a permissionless ecosystem where developers have freedom. Our job should make to make it clear to users what guarantees they have, and to build up the strongest Ethereum that we can.

[onBlock @saifonblock]

Sometimes you just never know the real plan behind something. Well in this case, apparently the plan didn’t work but what an evil thought !!!

[onBlock @saifonblock]

Dealing with things