Scott Onder

Venture investing in climate | AI | crypto in emerging markets - open source, decentralized AI, DeFi, last-mile consumer apps, privacy & mobile wallets

[Scott Onder @ScottOnder]

Crypto enabled digital wallets are helping aid move where banks can’t operate. Built by @HesabPay_ in Afghanistan, this approach is supporting cash assistance in Syria after years of war and sanctions.
https://t.co/M8EQxHdLrE

[Sriram Krishnan @sriramk]

just to state the obvious: think there's a collison course between those who believe research and science should be open and those who believe we are in an accelerating singularity curve.

I have many smart friends who have believed both for a while but seeing more and more their realization that these beliefs will be in conflict.

I for one believe that America and the west needs open and distributed access to research and computation and sharing of ideas at all times.

[Péter Szilágyi @peter_szilagyi]

The scary part about Anthorpic's Fable nerf is not that it refuses to answer biology or cryptography. It's that it foreshadows what's coming. A world where a couple companies decide what you can and cannot do. They're building a new ruling class and you're not in it...

[Jen Zhu @jenzhuscott]

Transformative capabilities like AI need to reflect the beautiful diversity of the entire humanity. It needs to be accessible & affordable by all. Over concentration of power is the biggest risk in AI. It reflects the owners’ values & preferences, and the humanity pays rent at a price the owner decides and the values/priorities the owners hold, while sacrificing your data and privacy, eventually, your digital sovereignty.

Open Sourced/ Open Weight AI is more important than ever.

[neira @borjaneira_]

The stablecoin on/off-ramp must be understood as a dealer function situated at the boundary between two monetary hierarchies.

Stablecoins compress the transport of money: they reduce latency, intermediaries, reconciliation, and settlement frictions within the tokenized domain. However, they do not eliminate the scarcity of local convertibility. Instead, they displace it toward the edges.

Consequently, the ramp spread is the compressed price of an entire stack of constraints: fiat liquidity, banking access, inventory, compliance, fraud, regulation, FX scarcity, balance sheet capacity, and the cost of offloading positions into deeper layers of liquidity.

In the traditional system, these costs are distributed across correspondent banks, FX desks, domestic rails, payment intermediaries, and nostro/vostro structures. In the stablecoin model, many of these frictions condense into a single quote: the price at which local currency can be converted into tokenized dollars, or tokenized dollars into local currency, with size, speed, and certainty of execution.

This price is a form of jurisdictional basis. It does not merely measure the cost of moving money; it measures the difficulty of crossing a monetary border. In liquid, open jurisdictions, this basis will tend to compress due to competition. In jurisdictions with capital controls, dollar scarcity, inflation, banking fragility, or regulatory risk, the spread may persist because it essentially prices sovereignty, balance sheet capacity, and access.

Thus, stablecoins may commoditize global settlement, but they make local convertibility more valuable. They decentralize transport, yet they can recentralize economic rent at the points of entry and exit.

What this allows is that, provided the players operating these tolls are ultra-efficient, the aggregate cost of the overall structure could be driven down.

Therefore, the structural business is not simply moving stablecoins. It is market-making across incompatible monetary systems. The winner here will be whoever controls the scarce constraint within each respective corridor: licensing, banking access, local liquidity, distribution, compliance, or balance sheet capacity.

Stablecoins compress settlement. Ramps price convertibility. The spread is the market price of crossing monetary jurisdictions.

[IC3 @initc3org]

https://t.co/JZ8k7zkU1U

[Gavin Baker @GavinSBaker]

Quite a week for open-source AI. Especially American open-source. Nemotron 3 Ultra is the most important release in quite some time. And some really cool RL and fine-tuning work from Harvey.

[Matthew Prince 🌥 @eastdakota]

Welp, that happened faster than I predicted. Thought it would be end of 2027, then early 2027, but agentic traffic growing so fast that bots have now passed human traffic online for the first time in the Internet's history. https://t.co/2zX5bHdhsa

[Jake Brukhman @jbrukh]

As of today, there’s essentially 5 companies who have successfully completed meaningful SOTA moving decentralized *pretraining* runs:

- @PrimeIntellect (10B INTELLECT-1, Oct 24)
- @Pluralis (7.5B Node0, Oct 25; 8B Agora launch, May 26)
- @NousResearch (40B Consilience, May 25)
- @covenant_ai (Coventant-72B, Mar 26)
- @MacrocosmosAI (Orion-100B, June 26)

In October ‘24, I thought we would enter a decentralized AI training race. I think that’s gearing up now.

[Christian Catalini @ccatalini]

Every big payments innovation was really a liability innovation. BankAmericard, PayPal, Amazon — someone agreed to take on risk others couldn't, and owned the rents for decades. The same prize is sitting unclaimed in agentic payments...

[Bill Gurley @bgurley]

Quick summary of what is happening with LLM model companies in China. 1) There is more VC $ available for open-weights than you think, 2) they are generating real revenue (as did open-source sw/saas companies in the West).

https://t.co/vluRvWJsId

[Nathan @proofofnathan]

Plasma One is already the fastest stablecoin neobank to hit $1m in weekly volume. We will also be the fastest to $10m, $100m and $1b.

P1 is hitting new records for active users and spenders every single day. And we are barely getting started.

June will mark the end of the beginning.

What we have planned for our brand and growth is going to pull more people into Plasma One and stablecoins than anyone is expecting.

So enjoy the early numbers. The early growth. The early experiments.

It is still day one for P1.

[NVIDIA AI @NVIDIAAI]

We're adopting the Linux Foundation’s OpenMDW framework across our open model families.

This helps make open model licensing simpler and more consistent at scale.

A single legal framework across models, code, documentation, and data helps reduce friction for developers and enterprises building with open source.

[martin_casado @martin_casado]

Can someone explain to me how open source models can keep up if ...
- pre-training isn't saturated
- it costs $2-4B to train a current gen model
- distillation is increasingly hard as access to the most powerful models gets blocked ..

?

[Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp]

One of the most important and under appreciated trends in the world right now.

1. 100s of billions of dollars will soon be available to solve big problems (making the world resilient to ASI, ending factory farming, etc).
2. The projects and organizations which will turn billions of 2027/28 dollars into impact need to be started NOW.
3. We need really talented people to start and run and work for these new projects. What @nanransohoff calls general managers, who feel personally resposible for solving one of the world’s important problems.

What is especially scarce are detailed visions about what making AI go well looks like. These will help inform what problems these new projects ought to work on.

[Nan Ransohoff @nanransohoff]

New blog post: The third wave of American philanthropy

Hundreds of billions of dollars in new philanthropic capital will soon become liquid. The OpenAI Foundation holds 26% of OpenAI, worth about $220B at today’s valuation. Anthropic’s seven co-founders have pledged to give away 80% of their wealth and have instituted the most aggressive donor matching program for employees in tech history.

How much does this all add up to? And how meaningful is that in the context of philanthropy today?

I was doing some simple napkin math to wrap my head around the scale of what’s coming, and radicalized myself in the process. I had dramatically underappreciated the scale of the philanthropic capital that’s about to become available and the corresponding gap in talent and organizations that will be needed to make the most of it.

This piece aims to directionally sketch the scale of what’s coming, the gap in operational capacity needed to absorb it, and what we can do to fill it.

(Link to full post in reply)

[Scott Onder @ScottOnder]

2/2
Technology adoption cycles are compressing - what once took decades now happens in months or even weeks

When tradfi starts repeating a thesis, it means any differentiated insight is already gone

So edge moves from “seeing it first” to executing faster than everyone else

[Scott Onder @ScottOnder]

With Larry Fink now talking about futures markets for compute, frontier ideas are mainstreaming faster than ever:

In Oct, GPU futures felt like an early startup/market-structure concept

By May, the world’s largest asset manager is saying compute could become a tradable mkt🧵

[Scott Onder @ScottOnder]

“The market for GPUs could become bigger than oil.”
—The largest commodity market on the planet.

I’m fascinated that Don Wilson is building a futures market around GPUs. And he thinks all assets will be tokenized in 5 years…

[NVIDIA AI @NVIDIAAI]

@xeophon @arcee_ai Open > closed

[Scott Onder @ScottOnder]

2/ That is where value starts to shift away from the incumbent.

Look for proprietary chokepoints, high switching costs, broad pain across an industry, strong developer or academic interest, a need for interoperability, and a neutral foundation that can host the alternative.

[Scott Onder @ScottOnder]

1/ Open source strategy tends to appear when the same pattern shows up:

- A powerful incumbent controls a layer everyone depends on.
- That layer becomes a chokepoint.
- A coalition of everyone hurt by that chokepoint has an incentive to make the layer open.

[Bill Gurley @bgurley]

A new @bgurley blog post!

I have been thinking about how sophisticated executives are using open source in super creative ways. Started writing this three years ago. Excited to finish it up and publish it! And with the new @p3institute brand.

https://t.co/W84vODq1ME