Devin Baker

In fact, capital markets themselves are no longer systems for raising new capital, but have become vast mechanisms for refinancing these huge debts. This makes the balance sheet capacity of the financial sector, or ‘liquidity’, far more important than interest rates as a cycle determinant and it means that the business cycle increasingly hums along... See more

On the brighter side, by this point BTC and ETH are solidified. Similar to how FAANG stocks performed during the overall stock market drawdown in 2022-23, BTC and ETH are now relentlessly bid by younger generations who control an increasing share of global wealth. A lot of the reflexivity in crypto prices is now muted – at least for these two large... See more

The primary development of STPv2 is Tiers, which can be understood as the ability for creators to provide different offerings at different price-points.

For example, a subscriber to the $5 tier might only get access to Bob's newsletter, while a subscriber at the $10 tier gets access to Bob's newsletter and his private group chat. Creators can create... See more

While the tech, tech adjacent, oil and gas, commodities, food (real / hard assets and real production) etc kind of industries and surrounding industries plus the govt will continue to boom, the tech infrastructure will continue to reign supreme worldwide.

Let’s look at Solana validator economics here as an example just to get some order of magnitude ideas. Solana is more expensive for validators to run compared to most networks. The resource requirements are higher than average, but it’s certainly not as unattainable as is commonly believed. You can run a Solana validator full node for as low as $35... See more

However, L1 settlement alone is an incomplete picture of what the rollup-centric roadmap aims to accomplish. Ethereum also serves as an affordable settlement and DA layer for rollups. I see rollups (and their corresponding rollup platform à la Optimism Superchain and Arbitrum Orbit) as independent fiefdoms. Each platform will compete to give users... See more

Blackbird is the first app I’ve used that’s onchain but doesn’t feel like it is. It feels like a restaurant app. I use it to discover places to eat, and to earn loyalty for eating there. Starting today, I’ll be able to use it to pay my tab — automatically, without getting the check — using credit card, debit card, or Blackbird’s $FLY token.

In the skeuomorphic era, the design thinking is largely adapted from older domains. For example, the early web was mostly digital adaptations of pre-internet activities like letter writing and mail-order shopping. Websites back then were mostly read-only.

It took about a decade for technologists to start seriously exploring the idea that websites... See more