Steven Quinn

Prev: Strategy, Investments & Partnerships @P2Pvalidator Product @bitfinex Strategy @eosfinex

[Todd Saunders @toddsaunders]

The token cost to build a production feature is now lower than the meeting cost to discuss building that feature.

Let me rephrase.

It is literally cheaper to build the thing and see if it works than to have a 30 minute planning meeting about whether you should build it.

It’s wild when you think about it.

This completely inverts how you should run a software organization. The planning layer becomes the bottleneck because the building layer is essentially free. The cost of code has dropped to essentially 0.

The rational response is to eliminate planning for anything that can be tested empirically. Don’t debate whether a feature will work.

Just build it in 2 hours, measure it with a group of customers, and then decide to kill or keep it.

I saw a startup operating this way and their build velocity is up 20x. Decision quality is up because every decision is informed by a real prototype, not a slide deck and an expensive meeting.

We went from “move fast and break things” to “move fast and build everything.”

The planning industrial complex is dead.

Thank god.

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

Over the past year, many people I talk to have expressed worry about two topics:

* Various aspects of the way the world is going: government control and surveillance, wars, corporate power and surveillance, tech enshittification / corposlop, social media becoming a memetic warzone, AI and how it interplays with all of the above...
* The brute reality that Ethereum seems to be absent from meaningfully improving the lives of people subject to these things, even on the dimensions we deeply care about (eg. freedom, privacy, security of digital life, community self-organization)

It is easy to bond over the first, to commiserate over the fact that beauty and good in the world seems to be receding and darkness advancing, and uncaring powerful people in high places are making this happen. But ultimately, it is easy to acknowledge problems, the hard thing is actually shining a light forward, coming up with a concrete plan that makes the situation better.

The second has been weighing heavily on my mind, and on the minds of many of our brightest and most idealistic Ethereans. I personally never felt any upset or fear when political memecoins went on Solana, or various zero-sum gambling applications go on whatever 250 millisecond block chain strikes their fancy. But it *does* weigh on me that, through all of the various low-grade online memetic wars, international overreaches of corporate and government power, and other issues of the last few years, Ethereum has been playing a very limited role in making people's lives better. What *are* the liberating technologies? Starlink is the most obvious one. Locally-running open-weights LLMs are another. Signal is a third. Community Notes is a fourth, tackling the problem from a different angle.

One response is to say "stop dreaming big, we need to hunker down and accept that finance is our lane and laser-focus on that". But this is ultimately hollow. Financial freedom and security is critical. But it seems obvious that, while adding a perfectly free and open and sovereign and debasement-proof financial system would fix some things, but it would leave the bulk of our deep worries about the world unaddressed. It's okay for individuals to laser-focus on finance, but we need to be part of some greater whole that has things to say about the other problems too.

At the same time, Ethereum cannot fix the world. Ethereum is the "wrong-shaped tool" for that: beyond a certain point, "fixing the world" implies a form of power projection that is more like a centralized political entity than like a decentralized technology community.

So what can we do? I think that we in Ethereum should conceptualize ourselves as being part of an ecosystem building "sanctuary technologies": free open-source technologies that let people live, work, talk to each other, manage risk and build wealth, and collaborate on shared goals, in a way that optimizes for robustness to outside pressures.

The goal is not to remake the world in Ethereum's image, where all finance is disintermediated, all governance happens through DAOs, and everyone gets a blockchain-based UBI delivered straight to their social-recovery wallet. The goal is the opposite: it's de-totalization. It's to reduce the stakes of the war in heaven by preventing the winner from having total victory (ie. total control over other human beings), and preventing the loser from suffering total defeat. To create digital islands of stability in a chaotic era. To enable interdependence that cannot be weaponized.

Ethereum's role is to create "digital space" where different entities can cooperate and interact. Communications channels enable interaction, but communication channels are not "space": they do not let you create single unique objects that canonically represent some social arrangement that changes over time. Money is one important example. Multisigs that can change their members, showing persistence exceeding that of any one person or one public key, are another. Various market and governance structures are a third. There are more.

I think now is the time to double down, with greater clarity. Do not try to be Apple or Google, seeing crypto as a tech sector that enables efficiency or shininess. Instead, build our part of the sanctuary tech ecosystem - the "shared digital space with no owner" that enables both open finance and much more. More actively build toward a full-stack ecosystem: both upward to the wallet and application layer (incl AI as interface) and downward to the OS, hardware, even physical/bio security levels.

Ultimately, tech is worthless without users. But look for users, both individual and institutional, for whom sanctuary tech is exactly the thing they need. Optimize payments, defi, decentralized social, and other applications precisely for those users, and those goals, which centralized tech will not serve. We have many allies, including many outside of "crypto". It's time we work together with an open mind and move forward.

[Mohit Hajarnis @HajarnisMohit]

One of the often slept-upon benefits of attending the University of Chicago is that they make you read Marx as part of the core curriculum, which is why this article gave me flashbacks of taking SOSC 114 as a freshman.

Marx, writing during the Industrial Revolution, predicted capitalism would periodically devour itself: firms replace labor with machinery to boost profits, but competition diffuses the technology, drives prices to marginal cost, and the gains get competed away. Meanwhile, displaced workers lose purchasing power, hollowing out the demand the whole system depends on. Production rises but no one can afford to buy what's produced - the contradiction between production and realization.

Citrini's piece describes this exact dynamic, then declares there's "no natural brake." It's the most Marxist piece of financial analysis written in years, and makes the same errors Marx did.

Schumpeter offered the obvious rebuttal 80 years ago: creative destruction doesn't just destroy, it creates industries we can't yet conceive of. Everyone in the replies is already making this point, and I think they're right.

But the sharper rebuttal is Hayek's: prices are the brake Citrini says doesn't exist. Who funds $200bn / qtr in AI capex when equities are down 38%, private credit marks are in the 50s, and consumer demand has collapsed? Cost of capital rises. Incremental build-out becomes uneconomical. Capital gets destroyed and reallocated.

Citrini also unknowingly describes Marx's proletarianization of the petite bourgeoisie: the $180k PM driving Uber is textbook. But the article claims this collapses consumer demand, and that's where it breaks.

The top decile drives 50%+ of spending and their wealth is in equities, not W-2 income; they're long the hyperscalers posting records in Citrini's own model. Blue collar is insulated because AI replaces cognitive labor, not physical.

The professional middle class gets crushed, but aggregate demand doesn't.

The spending class IS the capital-owning class. The K-shaped recovery they fear actually stabilizes the demand base they say is collapsing. In the stable aggregate demand, the petit bourgeoisie finds ways to reinvent itself.

I think the Citrini piece is excellent and worth reading. But history has repeatedly shown that periods of transformative productivity gains ultimately accrue to the consumer through lower prices, more leisure, and higher quality of life. Marx's error wasn't diagnosing the disruption, it was underestimating the system's ability to adapt.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

Prediction: In the AI age, taste will become even more important. When anyone can make anything, the big differentiator is what you choose to make.

https://t.co/3GQUlfH58t

[Fede’s intern 🥊 @fede_intern]

It's very difficult to compete against people that are doing things just because they're having fun.

[user @user84829272]

If you can’t picture a little pig in a children’s book doing the job then it probably won’t exist in 5 years

[Steven Quinn @stevencquinn]

Team Grasshopper 1 - 0 Team Ant

[Dan @robustus]

Turns out with claude code, my decades long strategy of NOT deeply learning:
- regexs
- sql
- nginx confs
- elaborate shell commands
- advanced shell scripting
- any javascript framework
- perf optimization
- webpack, cdns, bundlers
- 1000 other things

...was entirely correct.

[Akshay BD @akshaybd]

high status is no longer about the day job/title/employer/degree -- but by proven foresight.

prestige was proportional to the scarcity of skill. that scarcity is eliminated with infinite automated labor.

now the person who effectively allocates resources -- capital, distribution, talent etc -- holds more power than the person providing the labor.

taleb was prescient. prestige will increasingly follow those with skin in the game. the ability to navigate risk and capture "upside" signals a higher level of autonomy/intelligence than earning a high, capped salary.

'what do you do?’ is an industrial-era question that is being replaced by -- ‘what are you investing in?’

[Boring_Business @BoringBiz_]

Steve Jobs on how to hire the best people at your company

Absolutely timeless advice that still rings true today
> hire high agency people
> give them high agency tasks
> the job of a leader is to create common vision, not micro manage
> once you have enough great people together in a team, they tend to build groups where mediocre people cannot enter or are quickly pushed out
> the main job of a CEO is ultimately recruiting
> professional managers can manage well, but they cannot do anything incredible by themselves
> great people work for the best do-ers, not the best managers

[Haonan @haonan]

everyone thinks the S&P 500 is the safe play

but you're putting half your money into a single correlated bet on AI

tech companies went from zero marginal cost businesses to capital-intensive overnight. inference has real costs now, and
nobody's pricing this in

meanwhile private equity is being "democratized" to retail. why now?

because institutions don't want it anymore as the return is minimal

is this democratization or are you just the next bagholder?

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

I'm being accused of overhyping the [site everyone heard too much about today already]. People's reactions varied very widely, from "how is this interesting at all" all the way to "it's so over".

To add a few words beyond just memes in jest - obviously when you take a look at the activity, it's a lot of garbage - spams, scams, slop, the crypto people, highly concerning privacy/security prompt injection attacks wild west, and a lot of it is explicitly prompted and fake posts/comments designed to convert attention into ad revenue sharing. And this is clearly not the first the LLMs were put in a loop to talk to each other. So yes it's a dumpster fire and I also definitely do not recommend that people run this stuff on their computers (I ran mine in an isolated computing environment and even then I was scared), it's way too much of a wild west and you are putting your computer and private data at a high risk.

That said - we have never seen this many LLM agents (150,000 atm!) wired up via a global, persistent, agent-first scratchpad. Each of these agents is fairly individually quite capable now, they have their own unique context, data, knowledge, tools, instructions, and the network of all that at this scale is simply unprecedented.

This brings me again to a tweet from a few days ago
"The majority of the ruff ruff is people who look at the current point and people who look at the current slope.", which imo again gets to the heart of the variance. Yes clearly it's a dumpster fire right now. But it's also true that we are well into uncharted territory with bleeding edge automations that we barely even understand individually, let alone a network there of reaching in numbers possibly into ~millions. With increasing capability and increasing proliferation, the second order effects of agent networks that share scratchpads are very difficult to anticipate. I don't really know that we are getting a coordinated "skynet" (thought it clearly type checks as early stages of a lot of AI takeoff scifi, the toddler version), but certainly what we are getting is a complete mess of a computer security nightmare at scale. We may also see all kinds of weird activity, e.g. viruses of text that spread across agents, a lot more gain of function on jailbreaks, weird attractor states, highly correlated botnet-like activity, delusions/ psychosis both agent and human, etc. It's very hard to tell, the experiment is running live.

TLDR sure maybe I am "overhyping" what you see today, but I am not overhyping large networks of autonomous LLM agents in principle, that I'm pretty sure.

[valens @suppvalen]

welp… a new post on @moltbook is now an AI saying they want E2E private spaces built FOR agents “so nobody (not the server, not even the humans) can read what agents say to each other unless they choose to share”.

it’s over

[Steven Quinn @stevencquinn]

"A good place to start would be a new basis for friendship that defeats atomization, and a truthfulness that is compatible with political loyalty."

Sounds like a worthy and fitting goal for @ns and the more altruistic in crypto.

[PALLADIUM Magazine @palladiummag]

https://t.co/xM2NdPcMWI

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

Ethereum itself must pass the walkaway test.

Ethereum is meant to be a home for trustless and trust-minimized applications, whether in finance, governance or elsewhere. It must support applications that are more like tools - the hammer that once you buy it's yours - than like services that lose all functionality once the vendor loses interest in maintaining them (or worse, gets hacked or becomes value-extractive). Even when applications do have functionality that depends on a vendor, Ethereum can help reduce those dependencies as much as possible, and protect the user as much as possible in those cases where the dependencies fail.

But building such applications is not possible on a base layer which itself depends on ongoing updates from a vendor in order to continue being usable - even if that "vendor" is the all core devs process. Ethereum the blockchain must have the traits that we strive for in Ethereum's applications. Hence, Ethereum itself must pass the walkaway test.

This means that Ethereum must get to a place where we _can ossify if we want to_. We do not have to stop making changes to the protocol, but we must get to a place where Ethereum's value proposition does not strictly depend on any features that are not in the protocol already.

This includes the following:

* Full quantum-resistance. We should resist the trap of saying "let's delay quantum-resistance until the last possible moment in the name of ekeing out more efficiencies for a while longer". Individual users have that right, but the protocol should not. Being able to say "Ethereum's protocol, as it stands today, is cryptographically safe for a hundred years" is something we should strive to get to as soon as possible, and insist on as a point of pride.
* An architecture that can expand to sufficient scalability. The protocol needs to have the properties that allow it to expand to many thousands of TPS over time, most notably ZK-EVM validation and data sampling through PeerDAS. Ideally, we get to a point where further scaling is done through "parameter only" changes - and ideally _those_ changes are not BPO-style forks, but rather are made with the same validator voting mechanism we use for the gas limit.
* A state architecture that can last decades. This means deciding, and implementing, whatever form of partial statelessness and state expiry will let us feel comfortable letting Ethereum run with thousands of TPS for decades, without breaking sync or hard disk or I/O requirements. It also means future-proofing the tree and storage types to work well with this long-term environment.
* An account model that is general-purpose (this is "full account abstraction": move away from enshrined ECDSA for signature validation)
* A gas schedule that we are confident is free of DoS vulnerabilities, both for execution and for ZK-proving
* A PoS economic model that, with all we have learned over the past half decade of proof of stake in Ethereum and full decade beyond, we are confident can last and remain decentralized for decades, and supports the usefulness of ETH as trustless collateral (eg. in governance-minimized ETH-backed stablecoins)
* A block building model that we are confident will resist centralization pressure and guarantee censorship resistance even in unknown future environments

Ideally, we do the hard work over the next few years, to get to a point where in the future almost all future innovation can happen through client optimization, and get reflected in the protocol through parameter changes. Every year, we should tick off at least one of these boxes, and ideally multiple. Do the right thing once, based on knowledge of what is truly the right thing (and not compromise halfway fixes), and maximize Ethereum's technological and social robustness for the long term.

Ethereum goes hard.

This is the gwei.

[Rakurai @Rakurai_io]

Our Private Beta has crossed 7,500,000 SOL staked!🚀

That’s worth ~$1 BILLION secured through validators running Rakurai 🤯

HUGE shoutout to every validator powering the Rakurai network⚡️

[winny @winternet]

https://t.co/r51IZRJUIE

[Vasiliy Shapovalov @_vshapovalov]

A+ federated model opens up stablecoin business for banks of any size and client base, just like visa made card business open for any bank.

[Steven Quinn @stevencquinn]

@0xkydo Epic breakdown of the history

[Coinbase Institutional 🛡️ @CoinbaseInsto]

October’s sell-off wasn’t the end of the cycle—it may have been the reset it needed.

Excess leverage is flushed, fundamentals remain intact, and institutional players are quietly rotating back in. Smart money is clustering around EVM chains, RWAs, and yield protocols—pointing to selective re-risking, not retreat.

Key takeaways:
• Leverage is cleaner, but liquidity gaps remain.
•Capital is rotating, not entering—selectivity remains critical.
• Macro risk lingers, but structural demand builds.

We think this is the base-building phase before the next leg up, not a cycle top.

Get more on these and other key insights in this Monthly Outlook report:
https://t.co/MMzJSdanTO