Devin Baker

Ultimately, as I argue in this essay, these changes will increase the supply of fiat money and financial repression globally. These two things must happen because no US, EU, Chinese, or Japanese leaders wish to deleverage their system to bring it into a new sustainable equilibrium. Instead, they will print money and destroy the real purchasing... See more

We reduced inflation, but the token holders’ profit is unchanged. The only difference is that there is directionally less incentive to stake rather than hold idly (because the staking yield is reduced). On its own, PoS issuance is simply an internal tax which redistributes network ownership among token holder subsets to incentivize staking.

Finally, I want to double-click on a point we touched on earlier – new token issuance used for incentive programs. While we don’t see this on most of the major L1s (e.g., Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana), we do tend to see this at significant scale on L2s. Unlike L1s using issuance to incentivize token holders to stake rather than hold idly, these... See more

Gold historically was the underlying monetary system until recently. Modern tech is by far, more important than gold now, and isn’t essential currently for a reserve system, as tech is much more important to underpin an economic system. Institutions and govts will take tech over gold now .

Therefore, unless the US Fed restarts QE, the omens for Global Liquidity are not great. Does this mean that investors face a threatening financial crisis? We are not this downbeat simply because the heightened demands for debt refinancing that so offer trigger crises are unlikely to bite until 2026. However, a future threat remains, even if we are... See more

Resilience is sovereignty. Not sovereignty in the sense of lobbying to become a UN member state and shaking hands at Davos in two weeks, but sovereignty in the sense that people talk about "digital sovereignty" or "food sovereignty" - aggressively reducing your vulnerabilities to external dependencies that can be taken away from you on a whim. This... See more

You must believe in the human being, because the creativity of a company — Let’s say you have a company with 1,000 people. Maybe we were told that there are only two or three genius people in the 1,000. But I think that if you have 1,000 people, you have 1,000 geniuses. They’re just different kinds of genius and a different degree of intensity.

We... See more

In a traditional rollup, users send their transactions to a dedicated sequencer — essentially a single machine operated by the rollup team. This sequencer is responsible for collecting user transactions, determining their sequence, and packaging them into blocks that are posted on Ethereum.

Basically, what is human dignity made of? If we work together, say, and, even with one look, I make you understand that you are worth nothing and I look down on you, I have killed you. But if I give you regards and respect — out of esteem, responsibility is spawned. Then out of responsibility comes creativity, because every human being has an... See more