stephenk.eth

Corp Dev @Coinbase

[stephenk.eth @stephenk_11]

With the Merge behind us, ETH is set to become the greatest financial asset the world has ever seen.

To me, it's a no-brainer that every investor should have ETH in their portfolio.

In this 🧵, I'll compare ETH to major asset classes and make it clear why you need to hold

👇

[Antonio García Martínez (agm.eth) @antoniogm]

This is a good rumination on sudden wealth (as someone who's also seen its impacts firsthand), and the cast of characters rings very true.

You have the relentless striver who stays in the game out of competitive FOMO.

Money is what those without talent use to keep score. They'll keep futilely striving, and then disappear one day. Whatever.

The bigger pity is those (and there are a few) who go off to become artists or writers or some other thing, untethered to financial constraints.

Well, where are they?

Because we're not exactly seeing a cultural Renaissance from this massive wealth creation, as we saw in 16th-century Florence, or even the early 20-century US.

The only guy from the FB pre-IPO crop who did anything interesting with his life (far as I can tell) is someone who was hellbent on making it to the Olympics as an athlete (starting off as very much not an athlete), and he actually made it! I followed his arc, and it was incredible.

(Elon, on this of all days, is the exception that proves the rule here.)

But how about the rest?

SF is mostly an unchanged one-industry town, the same misgoverned mess that greeted me in '99, and that almost everyone in this cohort bails on. There are no great monuments or works of art or institutions dating from this period...other than venture funds producing more startups. SF will not reflect this time of glory like Amsterdam and Paris still embody their golden ages.

To invert the Churchillian phrase: never has so much been given to so few, who seemingly did so little with it.

[Brian Armstrong @brian_armstrong]

Now you can use your favorite AI agent to control your Coinbase account (or a sub-account), with Coinbase for Agents.

Here’s a quick demo on how to set it up and some of the cool things you can get your agent to do.

[Ash @Must_be_Ash]

https://t.co/qeyivElvJi

[Shan Aggarwal @ShanAggarwal]

https://t.co/RD4l3Da968

[Brian Armstrong @brian_armstrong]

A few good books worth reading:

- Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand - a classic that celebrates builders. Once you read it, you’ll notice the same characters and events taking place today.

- The Changing World Order by Ray Dalio - great for understanding how civilizations rise and fall and how crypto can help create better countries.

- From Third World to First by Lee Kuan Yu (founder of Singapore) - talks about building a new country, worth reading for understanding nation-building.

[Palantir @PalantirTech]

Because we get asked a lot.

The Technological Republic, in brief.

1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.

2. We must rebel against the tyranny of the apps. Is the iPhone our greatest creative if not crowning achievement as a civilization? The object has changed our lives, but it may also now be limiting and constraining our sense of the possible.

3. Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public.

4. The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.

5. The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.

6. National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.

7. If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it; and the same goes for software. We should as a country be capable of continuing a debate about the appropriateness of military action abroad while remaining unflinching in our commitment to those we have asked to step into harm’s way.

8. Public servants need not be our priests. Any business that compensated its employees in the way that the federal government compensates public servants would struggle to survive.

9. We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret.

10. The psychologization of modern politics is leading us astray. Those who look to the political arena to nourish their soul and sense of self, who rely too heavily on their internal life finding expression in people they may never meet, will be left disappointed.

11. Our society has grown too eager to hasten, and is often gleeful at, the demise of its enemies. The vanquishing of an opponent is a moment to pause, not rejoice.

12. The atomic age is ending. One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin.

13. No other country in the history of the world has advanced progressive values more than this one. The United States is far from perfect. But it is easy to forget how much more opportunity exists in this country for those who are not hereditary elites than in any other nation on the planet.

14. American power has made possible an extraordinarily long peace. Too many have forgotten or perhaps take for granted that nearly a century of some version of peace has prevailed in the world without a great power military conflict. At least three generations — billions of people and their children and now grandchildren — have never known a world war.

15. The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone. The defanging of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price. A similar and highly theatrical commitment to Japanese pacifism will, if maintained, also threaten to shift the balance of power in Asia.

16. We should applaud those who attempt to build where the market has failed to act. The culture almost snickers at Musk’s interest in grand narrative, as if billionaires ought to simply stay in their lane of enriching themselves . . . . Any curiosity or genuine interest in the value of what he has created is essentially dismissed, or perhaps lurks from beneath a thinly veiled scorn.

17. Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime. Many politicians across the United States have essentially shrugged when it comes to violent crime, abandoning any serious efforts to address the problem or take on any risk with their constituencies or donors in coming up with solutions and experiments in what should be a desperate bid to save lives.

18. The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service. The public arena—and the shallow and petty assaults against those who dare to do something other than enrich themselves—has become so unforgiving that the republic is left with a significant roster of ineffectual, empty vessels whose ambition one would forgive if there were any genuine belief structure lurking within.

19. The caution in public life that we unwittingly encourage is corrosive. Those who say nothing wrong often say nothing much at all.

20. The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. The elite’s intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim.

21. Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.

22. We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?

Excerpts from the #1 New York Times Bestseller The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, by Alexander C. Karp & Nicholas W. Zamiska

https://t.co/8igjazz1On

[Brian Armstrong @brian_armstrong]

Agentic commerce isn’t priced in yet. Machine-to-machine payments will increase demand for the digital dollar beyond current estimates.

The agentic economy could be larger than the human economy. We're building the infrastructure for both at Coinbase.

[Shan Aggarwal @ShanAggarwal]

five years ago, I was drafting @coinbase's S1 as we were getting ready to go public.

at the time we were a trading platform with a core belief: all asset classes would ultimately come onchain.

a lot has happened since then.

- we diversified. we built 12 product lines that generate >$100m in annualized revenue - custody, staking, stablecoins, derivatives, and more.
- we doubled down. we continued to invest in trading, and our crypto trading volume market share more than doubled in 2025.
- we drove @USDC growth. we co-founded USDC and helped turn stablecoins from a crypto-native tool into real payments infrastructure that's blossoming.

and that's just scratching the surface. coinbase is much more than an exchange -- we're a full stack financial platform for the future of finance. our belief that all asset classes will come onchain has only strengthened, and we're now well positioned to drive and capitalize on that shift.

five years in. and still way more to come.

[Brian Armstrong @brian_armstrong]

Every AI agent deserves a crypto wallet.

In fact, there will be more AI agents transacting online than humans very soon. x402 is the internet payments layer (which has been missing for the last 30 years), and will enable this.

The new x402 foundation will exist under the Linux Foundation, with @Coinbase, @Cloudflare and @Stripe as key contributors. Once all agents start transacting natively on the internet at scale, entirely new product and business opportunities will open up.

[Coinbase 🛡️ @coinbase]

https://t.co/mVRe3TMSyr

[Brian Armstrong @brian_armstrong]

@defyneric @privy_io @dynamic_xyz @thirdweb @crossmint @turnkeyhq @magic_labs @raincards @Stablecoin @KulipaXYZ @wirexapp @iron @BVNKFinance @SeismicSys @UmbraPrivacy Ideally, we should be able to get all of this on one platform. That’s what @CoinbaseDev is building 🙏

[J/\ck @JackSimison]

https://t.co/ZlJN24TMrO

[David | www.usd.ai @0xZergs]

This is also an extension of Antonio’s tweet abt a stablecoin that subsidizes Claude, but with extra steps:

(1) An agent pays the LLM because it needs tokens.

(2) The LLM pays the neocloud because it needs GPU-hours.

(3) The neocloud pays Wall Street because it needs to buy the GPU.

(4) So across the entire AI stack, cash flow keeps collapsing into the same underlying input: compute.

(5) If you trace the balance sheet and cash flow statement of each layer (Jensen’s 5 layer cake), most of the real economic weight is not in the app UI, not in the API wrapper, and not even in the model brand. It is in chips, power, and the financing needed to acquire them.

(6) That means AI is not just software. AI is financed industrial hardware presented as software.

(7) Chips do not merely have a sticker price. They have a financed price. They are purchased with debt, leased with spread, and rented with a required return embedded in every hour of usage.

(8) So the cost of compute is not just the cost of chips. It is the cost of chips plus the interest rate imposed on chips.

(9) In that sense, the GPU is not unlike the American home. “Willy Loman” is not governed by the nominal price of the house. He is governed by the mortgage rate on the house that he has to pay off for the American dream.

(10) The same is now true for AI. The system is not truly controlled by prompts or even model demand. It is controlled by the financing rate on the chips beneath every prompt.

(11) This is why 50 to 90% of the meaningful cost base in AI ends up being related to compute, capex, and the balance sheet burden of owning or renting that compute.

(12) Whoever reduces the cost of that bottleneck does not just win a feature war. They set the monetary standard for the whole stack.

(13) In the 1970s, the currency closest to oil had structural power because oil was the bottleneck asset for industrial civilization.

(14) In the 2020s, the currency closest to compute will have structural power because compute is the bottleneck asset for cognitive civilization.

(15) A country without oil in 1975 was handicapped in industry, logistics, and military capacity. A country without compute in 2025 is handicapped in intelligence, productivity, and economic growth.

(16) So the real question is not: what is the best payment rail for AI?

(17) The real question is: what monetary asset most effectively lowers the interest rate on compute?

So, the final solution:

The solution is not a stablecoin that merely pays for LLM credits.

It is not a stablecoin that merely settles GPU rent.

It is not a stablecoin whose only purpose is checkout, interchange, or machine to machine payment.

The final solution is a stablecoin that subsidizes compute at the level of interest rates.

Because that is where the true constraint lives.

An AI stablecoin should do 3 things:

(1) capture idle balances
(2) turn those balances into a lower cost of capital for compute
(3) pass that lower cost of capital through the stack as cheaper intelligence

In summary:

Not “pay with this protocol or coin.”

But “hold this coin, and the cost of thinking falls.”

The winning stablecoin is therefore not a payments company. It is a treasury and credit system for AI.

It gathers deposits like a bank, routes capital like a money market fund, finances chips like a mortgage market.

It lowers the financing burden on the bottleneck asset that every agent, model, and neocloud ultimately depends on.

That is why the prize is not LLM credits, and is why the prize is not GPU rental rebates.

Those are downstream symptoms.

The root variable is the interest rate on compute.

It always has been.

[Antonio García Martínez (agm.eth) @antoniogm]

https://t.co/EnnQK45zXe

[Antonio García Martínez (agm.eth) @antoniogm]

https://t.co/mGnSwWuvA0

[Coinbase 🛡️ @coinbase]

Introducing Coinbase Token Manager.

Streamline your token operations:
→ Automated vesting and lockups
→ Bulk distributions in one click
→ Tax withholding and document workflows

Giving you more time to focus on building.

[lincoln.base.eth @MurrLincoln]

Feels like we have all the lego bricks for the “onchain agentic economy stack” , but nobody’s put them together yet

ERC-8004 for identity/reputation

x402 for payments

XMTP for communication

ERC-8128/sign in with agents for auth

Wallet at the center

Only a matter of time

[jesse.base.eth @jessepollak]

no better time to build agents on @base

[Shan Aggarwal @ShanAggarwal]

https://t.co/Cj5bXXwMsH

[stephenk.eth @stephenk_11]

@Jack_Raines Duane Reade’s in NYC are inconvenience stores because of this