We are transitioning to an environment where users want to outsource and automate time-consuming yet complex tasks. Lower attention spans create opportunities for personalized autonomous agents that humans can utilize to delegate task execution. We've seen this already, where users have begun to transition away from numerous distinct websites and search queries for data in favor of text-prompted LLMs that provide a universal set of answers in one terminal. The natural next step is a locally-h...

Much of this piece is inspired by and, in part, a reflection of "SoK: Cross-Domain MEV" by Conor McMenamin. There is an obvious rise of shared sequencers, settlement layers, and superbuilders. This shift has brought the concept of cross-chain extractable value to the forefront, challenging us to quantify and mitigate its impact across multiple domains. I wanted to utilize this piece to document and discuss some key learning from Conor’s piece, “SoK: Cross-Domain MEV”. One of the most pressing...

Memetic frenzies seem to dominate the early adoption of any technology in this sector. And given a blockchain’s openness, each of these frenzies are usually attributed with a financial token that showcases their relative social value. It manifested early with memecoins tokenizing real-world events, internet memes, and other cultural trends. Now, early versions of AI agents represent an extension of memecoins as they have live capabilities and are also financialized for community involvement. ...

Thanks to the Placeholder investment team and Tim Robinson for the discussions here, our conversations inspired some of these takeaways. Programmable and verifiable on-chain actions should make applications easier, more intuitive, and safer to use for consumers since they remove any ambiguity that is associated with human middlemen. However, we consistently see the opposite result, as is evident by how infrastructure-heavy the industry is. The reason web3 is harder, less intuitive, and percei...

Thanks for the discussions Mario and Aadharsh, our conversations inspired some of these takeaways. There’s an interesting tug-of-war at play with privacy-first projects and optionally-private incumbents. By principle, blockchain infrastructure is designed to be public, but the limitations of this design principle when deploying applications has become glaring obvious. Hence, the reason for implementing privacy-enhancing technologies within the blockchain stack. On one side of this tug-of-war,...

Thanks for the context and discussion Brad, our conversation inspired some of these takeaways. By definition, DePIN is any coordination network that creates a buyer and seller market for some type of data. By that argument, a Layer 1 blockchain like Ethereum can be framed the same way, where sellers provide digital assets and on-chain services to buyers, who utilize this infrastructure and ETH to pay for these transactions. In this vein, the reason Ethereum has been incredibly successful is b...

We had a very interesting team research meeting last week centered on intellectualizing memecoins. We could very well be overthinking this framework, and in reality, memecoins exist as a 24/7 global casino, but it's an interesting exercise nevertheless. We were debating the extent to which memecoins actually represent something - a cultural artifact, a real-time event, a digital meme, etc. While some of us concluded that memecoins serve as a way for people to hold stake in an artifact they al...

Thanks for brunch Lincoln, our conversation inspired some of these research questions. A working mental mind-map of the competitive infrastructure landscape. There are a variety of options that builders have when launching an application. Each of these exist on a cross-sectional spectrum of Ecosystem Alignment & Composability, and Value Capture & Performance. While the debate around which set of solutions will win out is nuanced, a more logical conclusion is that there will exist an increasingly

I stumbled upon an interesting discussion over brunch and later on with the Placeholder team about stablecoins and what major American political parties think about them. Until centralized stablecoin issuers continue to dominate the stablecoin markets, why are they not being more aggressively welcomed by regulators? Major centralized stablecoin issuers (Tether and Circle) hold a decently large share of U.S. treasuries as collateral for their stablecoin issuing services. Demand for USD-denomin...