Devin Baker

While Vertical Integrators are technology companies, their business models should be the opposite of the Aggregator model that won the Internet era. They should look like the business models that won the Second Industrial Revolution.

ai16z is a fully AI-managed tokenized venture DAO where agents evaluate investment opportunities suggested to it by the community, execute trades, evaluate the reputations of members based on the success of those trades, and grow the AUM of the fund. It’s been on a crazy speculative run over the past few weeks on the backs of a big vision and... See more

To address this, the community chose a rollup-centric approach. The idea is simple: Instead of hosting all applications on Ethereum, the focus is on rollups that offer faster, cheaper transactions while still settling back on Ethereum. As a result, you get faster, cheaper transactions, but still keep Ethereum’s security.

Just as falling compute costs unlocked the internet boom, lower transaction fees will unlock new application categories and use cases. The main comparison here is that general-purpose compute and coordination layers are more akin to AWS or Linux than HTTP. Ethereum and Solana are not simply “settling” transactions, but enabling programmable state... See more

The beauty of blockchains and smart contracts is that they are under-explored spaces in which you can look at problems through a news lens – specifically those related to capital formation, coordination and automation.

The Treasury has two choices on how it pays the government’s bills. They can either issue debt (dollar liquidity negative) or spend money from its checking account at the Fed (dollar liquidity positive). Because the aggregate amount of debt cannot rise until the US Congress increases the debt ceiling, the Treasury can only spend funds from its... See more

The generational wealth imbalance is not a problem that America will solve.

It is a pressure gradient the system will route around.

And the routing takes the following shape:

•AI becomes the new productivity engine

•Bitcoin becomes the new neutral store of value

•stablecoins become the transactional layer

•fiscal policy keeps real growth from collapsing

•... See more

Institutional capital is in its infancy within alpha token investing. DCG’s subsidiary Yuma and less than a handful of emergent liquid funds like Contango Capital and Unsupervised Capital are playing a mixed role of ecosystem evangelist, VC, incubator, and liquid token investors. These teams are working with early subnet teams to adopt a long-term... See more

Indeed, persistence often requires that one change one's mind. That's where good judgement comes in. The persistent are quite rational. They focus on expected value. It's this, not recklessness, that lets them work on things that are unlikely to succeed.