Where Ideas Thrive

There’s a moment—fragile, luminous—when the world as it is trembles just enough to glimpse the world as it might be. That’s what this week at Edge Esmeralda felt like. Not just a gathering. Not a hackathon. Not a think tank retreat. But a living invocation. A prototype of a future we’ve nearly forgotten how to imagine. Out of that soil, something ancient-yet-new took root: the first seeds of the Second Foundation.For those of us following the arc of California’s civic imagination, there was a...

My original plan for a reconstructed lost story from the Epic Cycle was to self-publish it in the next six to nine months. But why wait? My revised plan is still to self-publish the book, but in the meantime, to drop a web serial edition that starts on Monday, June 2nd.

Chains need a thesis.A clear thesis unlocks clear product use cases.Use cases unlock direction. Direction drives momentum. @akshaybd’s talk on Internet Capital Markets really shifted my thinking around what’s possible to build on Solana. His idea of “universal basic ownership”—where anyone with internet access can own a stake in the economy—is powerful. That’s the promise. But we need to make it real and relatabl...

I got a notice in the mail this week for a public meeting related to Toronto's multiplex zoning by-law. Multiplexes are house-like buildings with two, three or four dwelling units. This housing type became newly permissible across the city in May 2023, but as part of the approval, the city was asked to keep an eye on things and report back on items that might need to be changed. What is now being proposed are amendments to this original by-law. One change is the introduction of the term "hous...

It's a jam packed release day for Coop Recs. With new tracks from legends like Disco Lines, Felly, San Holo, Swimming Paul and Devault alongside the debut of the anonymous artist Zoey808 - this is easily one of our most jam-packed Friday's in months. We're reaching a critical juncture at Coop Recs - we have no shortage of great music coming onto the platform. Our backlog of artists and song in the queue is growing by the day, and we're being extremely intention to keep the vibe super curated ...

Setting the StageThere’s a phrase we all love to repeat in crypto: “It’s still Day 1.” And sure, when it comes to the grand arc of this industry — the tech, the innovation, the vision — that statement is true. But for some of us? It’s not Day 1 anymore. It’s the 7th inning, and time is running out.What Went DownLately I’ve been thinking a lot about the difference between the funded and the freelancers in Web3.Yes, we’re still early. Yes, the future of crypto looks bright. But some of us are t...

Some quick points from what we're curious about this week: Farcaster choosing 10k pro subs...

We just launched a new feature on BP.fun called Streaks. This is a loyalty system created to reward consistency, track support behavior, and directly influence leaderboard rankings and jackpot rewards.Why Streaks MatterStreaks are one of the clearest signals of loyalty. They reflect how often you show up and support creators. Each day that you mint from a creator on BP.fun counts toward your streak. The longer your streak, the stronger your presence on the platform. Your streak now plays a ro...

e're reshaping the Base brand. Not from the top down, but from the ground up. With artists. With builders. With you. Now, we’re sharing the first step. We started with building blocks. Blank canvases. Pixels to push. We took the shape that holds all of those things—a square—and asked 10 artists to reimagine Base from their point of view. In the coming weeks, we’ll be sharing the progress, inspiration, and ideas behind what’s next. The first case study: Discovery, is now live...

Companies that build private goods have it easy. Issue stock, give investors voting rights if they want them, and everyone's aligned on the same page: make as much money as possible. But for organizations that build non-private goods, maximizing success can conflict with maximizing revenue—like when a sports team moves to a new city, seeking profit over community.Splitting the functions of governance + investmentA 2-token model solves this by splitting these functions:a governance token power...

Julie Stitzel—Senior Vice President of Policy for DCG—unpacks decentralized AI, how crypto ties in, and related policy considerations.

We're finding inspiration in this issue #247 of your weekly poetry shot

This week, the largest publicly traded company in Canada by market capitalization — the Royal Bank of Canada — told its employees to return to the office at least four days a week starting this fall (you know, once the summer is over). This is a first among Canada's largest banks, but it's still more timid than what US banks have been doing. JPMorgan Chase, for instance, asked its employees at the start of this year to return to the office 5 days a week. Goldman Sachs did the same way back in Ma

A Noice World, The Leaderboard, and Precoin

The SEC concluded that solo staking, self-custodial staking with a third party, and custodial staking are not securities transactions.

Something that’s been weighing on me for a while, on friendships that are here and then suddenly gone. B was my friend. In a way that a lot of other people weren’t. There was an in-between period after I came out as transgender in 2020 where I hung onto my natal last name, until fully deciding to embrace a new identity. B was one of a few relationships I made after I had fully embraced my new identity. I had just finished a bit of work for the Burning Man non-profit around the time B founded ...

Are you seeing the terms ‘loud’, ‘loudio’, or ‘$loud’ pop up in your X feed lately? Is your favorite mercenary content creator talking about a ‘Loud leaderboard’? Well get ready to mute those terms, or let the chaos of the Loud experiment commence!A small team introduced Loud, a tokenized attention experiment. We already have memecoins which are essentially tokenized attention, but this one is arguably a purer form of this.What is Loud?Earlier this week, 0x_ultra shared an overview of Loud an...

largely a fan of goodalexander’s digital figure hallucinations & entropy documentation, i depart from his thesis in what may be an unintended, yet implicit, assumption that the current generation of “public figures” is the final instantiation of this new archetype in digital markets (more figurative than literal). materially insignificant, potentially, across time they end up in completely different markets. no proclamations are being made on which thesis is superior or which future more like...

A few weeks ago I wrote a post outlining a Star Trek Vision for the US. More broadly speaking, I believe that an agenda like this should be the vision for the world. One of the many inspiring aspects of Star Trek, the original series, was humans collaborating across backgrounds including race, gender and nationality. I am now turning my initial outline into a series of posts that explores each of the bullet points in more detail, starting with "energy too cheap to meter" (to illustrate that a...

(Sorry for taking last week off. Someone exploded a car bomb nearby that shook my house and my psyche, and I responded by driving two hours away to run a half-marathon I hadn’t trained for. Today I’m making good on the technology note I promised a couple weeks ago, and including some other stuff I’d jotted down, as well as some newer stuff from the last few days, so this week’s edition is kind of a two-for-one Frankennewsletter that is stuffed with very non-AI, human goodness. Don’t thank me ...