0xsmac published Splitting Fives: The House Edge on Wonder. The core argument is that a world obsessed with optimizing only what's measurable ends up killing experimentation and creativity.

Take sports. After Moneyball, baseball converged on three "true outcomes" — strikeouts, walks, and home runs. The NBA followed the same path. Once analytics showed that three-pointers had higher expected value, every team adopted the same strategy. Each team's style and personality disappeared.

Film and music follow the same pattern. Most of the 2026 release slate consists of sequels and franchise entries. Streaming algorithms have standardized even song length and intro structure. When you reward measurable metrics — clicks, views, revenue — rational humans naturally optimize for them. A dominant meta forms, and pointless experimentation becomes increasingly expensive.

To be clear, the piece isn't arguing that optimization is inherently bad. But as everyone knows, genuinely new things are born when strange people pursue strange problems — and that's worth worrying about. 0xsmac prescribes three remedies: create "wide games" like poker where multiple strategies can win, intentionally do non-optimized things like aimless walks, and consume content based on personal taste rather than algorithmic feeds.

These days, as AI tools grow, optimizing and automating everything seems to be treated as a virtue. Perhaps even groups aiming for long-term innovation feel the same pressure. Whether it's FOMO or an inevitable trend is unclear, but pieces like this clearly carry meaning.

This piece covers the structural limitations of RWA looping and 3F's approach to solving them.

The concept of RWA looping is simple. Deposit a yield-bearing RWA at x%, borrow stablecoins at y%, buy more of the RWA, repeat. In theory, as long as x exceeds y, you can generate leveraged returns.

The problem is that DeFi moves at block speed, but RWAs don't.

With crypto-native leverage, a single flash loan handles borrowing, swapping, posting collateral, and looping within one block — and if it fails, the entire transaction reverts. RWAs break this completely.

Most tokenized funds settle on T+1 to T+3. At 80% LLTV, reaching the theoretical 5x max leverage requires 10–15 loops. Even with a T+1 asset, that's a minimum of 10–15 days; for T+3, it stretches to 30–45 days. A full month just to build the position. Unwinding takes just as long. When the essence of a yield strategy is time, 30 days of drag is a structural problem.

The incumbent approach internalizes this friction inside a single vault. Whether it's a curator-managed leverage vault or a yield-bearing stablecoin, one operator absorbs settlement delays, liquidity buffers, and collateral underwriting. It works, but the costs get passed on to LPs.

3F takes a different approach. Instead of hiding friction, it decomposes it. Each friction point becomes an independent function, and each function becomes a market. The key is the bridge facilitator — which eliminates looping entirely.

When a user wanting 5x leverage deposits $1M, bridge facilitators front the remaining $4M upfront. The full $5M is used to purchase the RWA in a single execution, and once collateral settles on-chain, it's refinanced through Morpho. Position construction time drops from N×T to just T. Unwinding works the same way. For bridge facilitators, the settlement waiting period becomes a short-duration yield opportunity.

Toby Shorin published an essay called Body Futurism. The core diagnosis is that American society is shifting away from software-centric utopias toward new political and social forms centered on the body.

Start with the phenomena. The rise of the Huberman Lab podcast, the mainstreaming of GLP-1 drugs, the seed oil debate, van der Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score holding its place as a perennial bestseller. TikTok and Reels have turned body practices — breathwork, tapping, trauma release stretching — into recombinant content. AI researchers are pivoting to GLP-1 and weightlifting. Masculinity (testosterone, jawlines) and femininity (Botox in your 30s) are being framed as economic necessities in what's become a "charisma economy."

Shorin traces the roots of this phenomenon to the serial collapse of software utopias. Crypto-anarchism in the 1990s, social media democratization in the 2000s, blockchain disintermediation in the 2010s. All promised disembodied spaces accessed through screens, and all ended as little more than narratives. Once the cloud utopias evaporated, people returned to the one thing they could actually control — their own bodies.

This is where "protocolism" gets interesting. The word "protocol" has shifted from meaning a technical standard to describing a body practice. Open-source rule sets like 75 Hard emerged and were commercialized through apps and coaching. Bryan Johnson's "Don't Die" movement is the prime example — a tracking-based longevity religion that looks like freedom but demands constant self-regulation.

But Shorin's real interest isn't trend analysis. It's body politics. The loneliness pandemic, toxic food systems, hormonal disruption, microplastics, declining sperm counts. Modern society is living through "the politics of a society convinced it is sick." Shorin frames this not as a simple crisis but as a precondition for transition. When existing systems — healthcare, food, public administration — are perceived as no longer taking care of people's bodies, people start taking care of themselves. Bodily autonomy rises in the space where institutional trust collapses.

Of course, "return to the body" has historically drifted in dangerous directions. What Shorin means by body futurism is the opposite — different bodies meeting and giving each other energy. The act of sweating together, crying together, colliding together as a new social form in itself.