blessed matin,
happy 10th Birthday Ethereum!!! when a blockchain turns 10, it gets a magical sorting halo that determines its destiny ~ angel, fairy, or devil ~ but somehow yours just keeps blinking "CASINO" in neon letters. congrats on a decade of convincing humanity that money should require a hardware wallet, a computer science degree, a VPN, and emotional resilience. and yet, somehow along the way you've convinced the entire world that programmable money is actually a good idea, which is either the most democratizing force in financial history or most elaborate collective hallucination with really good branding (but honestly, it's working so who gives a fuck!!!!)
in other news, somewhere between pedro pascal treating his coworkers like emotional support animals and discovering that anxiety can apparently only be cured through unauthorized workplace massages, and sydney sweeney accidentally reigniting America's eugenic anxiety through a jean commercial that dared to mention her "great genes," we witnessed the spectacular implosion of tea dating advice, a women's safety app built by men that managed to expose 72,000 private user images because apparently their cybersecurity strategy was just crossing their fingers really, really hard. the app that promised to keep women safe from predatory men instead served up their government IDs, selfies, and private trauma dumps to the entire internet like a digital charcuterie board of female vulnerability. meanwhile, Katy Perry is reportedly seducing Justin Trudeau into a maple syrup-backed diplomatic incident, and a magnitude 8.8 earthquake just reminded the entire pacific rim that nature remains the ultimate disruptor.
and all of that to say, i write to you from the perpetual drizzle of berlin where im stationed for no defensible reason except that something about the concrete brutalism and techno makes life’s existential absurdity feel appropriately cinematic. the rain here falls with the teutonic persistence of privacy violation notifications, turning every cobblestone street into a mirror that reflects back your life choices. but isn't that exactly what we signed up for when we decided every tweet deserved its own derivatives market?
anywayssss, enjoy some mostly accurate reportings below
xx, c
The Ethereum Foundation just hired Binji away from Optimism, and his reasoning cuts deeper than typical career moves: "Honestly, it felt like coming home. No matter where I've worked, I've always been working for Ethereum. It's the reason I'm here. It's why I joined crypto. It's the root system. The soul." But the timing reveals something significant about the EF's evolving focus: they're doubling down on the application layer in ways they haven't before. While other ecosystems captured developer mindshare through aggressive outreach and consumer-focused initiatives, the EF has historically taken a more hands-off approach. Binji's hire signals a strategic shift he describes with characteristic directness: "Ethereum needs to be where the future is being built again. Not on the sidelines. At the center."
Binji's mission reveals how fundamentally the EF's approach is shifting. "My job is to find the people already building the future and help them choose Ethereum as their foundation," he explains, emphasizing that "the next wave won't come from a single killer app. It'll come from thousands of builders across disciplines who feel called to create something bigger than themselves." This represents a radical departure from the EF's historical hands-off approach. Instead of assuming great infra automatically attracts great apps, they're actively courting talent and creating support systems. The EF's first-ever founder-focused event and new app-focused team aren't just org changes; they're acknowledgments that dev experience and ecosystem nurturing matter as much as technical elegance.
When asked about Ethereum's supposed identity crisis, Binji's response reveals the mindset driving this transformation: "It's not an identity crisis. It's an identity emergence. When sentiment was low, people stepped the fuck up. That's what matters. Ethereum didn't lose itself. It found itself because people cared enough to drop their lives to ensure its success." His vision for driving adoption focuses on applications that "meet people where they are and give them more agency than they had before," specifically products that enhance existing online behavior by giving users ownership and upside in platforms that currently extract value from their participation.
Binji sees crypto's real potential in democratizing access to financial primitives that were previously gatekept. "The adoption of blockchains means previously gatekept liquidity is now accessible to be composed on by anyone, which can lead to people building novel experiences; for example: an app that auto invests on tokenized stocks based on a user's screentime," he explains, illustrating how familiar behaviors can unlock entirely new possibilities. His broader mission tackles a fundamental accessibility challenge: "What if the best Ethereum idea is stuck inside the mind of someone who thinks crypto is a scam? Or not for them? Or too complicated? We need to fix that and bring more people in." If Binji succeeds, Ethereum's next wave won't just be technically superior but will be built by a far more diverse set of creators who see crypto rails as the foundation for making "the internet feel fair again."
Shayne Coplan just did the full CNBC victory lap, explaining how Polymarket went from FBI raids to $112 million acquisitions in what feels like the fastest redemption arc in crypto history. "I'm from New York. I went to high school right here, and the mayor talking about our site is just incredible," he said, describing the surreal experience of watching Eric Adams casually drop "the Polymarket for this" during interviews. The company that became what Shayne calls "the Bloomberg terminal for reality" while locked out of the US market is now buying derivatives exchanges to get back home, and the cultural momentum they built from exile is paying off.
The acquisition of QCX isn't just about regulatory compliance, it's about infrastructure maturity. "When I get to meet these people, they say, oh, my God, Polymarket's amazing, but I wish we could trade on Polymarket. And, you know, ask and you shall receive, right?" They'd accidentally built the killer app for prediction markets without the plumbing to serve institutional demand. Now they can offer the full stack: retail users betting on political drama, institutions hedging geopolitical risk, and everyone in between using markets as information aggregation tools. Shayne's vision of "markets on everything" suddenly seems less like crypto idealism and more like inevitable financial evolution when you hear him talking about Middle East conflict prediction markets that move faster than news feeds.
What's fascinating is how they're positioning against traditional competition. While Kalshi spent years navigating US regulations to build a compliant prediction market, Polymarket built global cultural cache and is now buying their way back in with better technology and stronger network effects. They're not just competing on regulatory arbitrage anymore, they're competing on being the place where information becomes price discovery. The fact that they're already exploring launching their own stablecoin shows they understand they're not just building a betting platform, they're building financial infrastructure for a world where prediction markets become as normal as stock markets.
Anoushka's latest updates from Interface reveal how quickly platforms adapt when user behavior shifts. The team completely removed NFTs from both the feed and user profiles a few months ago, citing infra limitations and the brutal reality that "no one really cared anymore." Instead, Interface is doubling down on what's actually gaining traction: ERC20s and the social layer around trading them. Their new "Takes" feature lets users tag wallets and markets while sharing opinions that get reflected on price charts, with a copy-trading mechanism that pays the original poster swap fees when others follow their calls. As she explained, "All nft collecting seems to happen directly on platforms (e.g. rodeo) with embedded wallets, so it also kinda became too hard to track." Interface essentially became a victim of NFT infrastructure fragmentation rather than user preference.
The pivot to social trading feels perfectly timed as the market shifts toward creator and content coins. The concept is elegantly simple, as Anoushka puts it: "I know the creator/brand → they now have a coin → I buy their coin. Similar kind of hype wave as with clankers early on." What's most interesting is the behavioral shift she's observing: "We see some token creators starting to follow their holders, so going to the token page, opening the lists of holders and following people from there." It's not particularly shocking, but it shows how tokenization creates new forms of audience development that didn't exist before. Creators are reverse-engineering their communities from onchain data, turning wallet addresses into social connections.
This feels like a natural evolution for Interface, which has always been about making onchain activity more social. Moving from NFT discovery to token discovery with integrated trading opinions seems like following user demand rather than trying to force outdated behaviors. The emphasis on intentional, long-term investing over FOMO chasing suggests they're betting that sustainable creator economies require genuine conviction rather than pure speculation. When every creator has a coin and every opinion can be copy-traded, the lines between content creation, investing, and community building completely blur. Anoushka's casual acknowledgment that NFTs just stopped mattering feels refreshingly honest in an industry that often refuses to admit when narratives die.
ADIN just opened their Network Member waitlist to the public, and it's essentially venture scouting if venture scouts actually got compensated fairly for their work. The model is elegantly simple: Network Members submit promising startups, ADIN's five specialized venture agents analyze the deals and generate thorough memos (complete with valuation predictions, market maps, and MOIC/TAM analysis), then investors vote on what gets funded while their input trains the model. If a deal gets funded, whoever sourced it earns 10% of the upside. That's real venture economics for people who don't need to be on Sand Hill Road or have an MBA to participate in startup returns. Over 100 people have already joined: founders, operators, researchers, and terminally online scouts who finally get rewarded for seeing things early.
Aaron Wright, CEO of Tribute Labs (which built ADIN), frames this as venture's "moneyball moment" where AI and emerging tech like crypto change the rules for highest performance, similar to how quants transformed baseball. It's addressing the fundamental bottleneck in venture: deal discovery happens through networks, but most of the people with the best deal flow aren't the people with the capital. They're the extremely online people who get DMs from founders before the rest of the market but traditionally got zero upside for their insights. ADIN combines human taste with AI infra to create what they call "algorithmic venture": faster, more decentralized, and with better-aligned incentives. It's betting that the future of VC belongs to people who can feel cultural shifts before they hit trend reports, not just those who can write the biggest checks.
join the first autonomous venture fund: adin.online/waitlist
Jules, head of b2b marketing and growth at Zerion, has cracked the code on something most crypto companies struggle with: making technical infrastructure feel genuinely aspirational. Her philosophy is deceptively simple ~~~ "Brand is the moat" ~~~ but the execution reveals someone who understands that people don't just buy portfolio trackers, they buy into identities. The Zerion Beach House at EthCC generated 4,000+ social posts in seven days and 4x'd their mindshare, but Jules' secret weapon isn't budget or spectacle. It's curation. "Impact ≠ spend; impact = curation at the door," she explains. "The guest list is key!" Her approach treats every event like an obsessive dinner party where she controls themes, tableware, lighting, and most importantly, who sits next to whom. The result is what she calls "dinners, dance floors, and tablescapes" that create emotional connections through all five senses.
What makes Julie's approach fascinating is how she balances Zerion's technical reality (multi-chain portfolio tracking and trading interfaces) with the elevated lifestyle brand feeling their events create. Her background in fashion shows and she's been curating branded events and influencer packages for years before helping launch the first SheFi Summits. Now she's applying those same principles to crypto infrastructure, asking "What would be impossible here?" for each activation. Her dream event reveals the ambition: a seven-day, invite-only founders and builders residency on a remote island with hands-on prototyping, structured workshops, and daily wellness rituals. For founders on smaller budgets, her advice cuts through the noise: curate the right people, design one signature takeaway, state a sharp purpose and repeat it throughout. "Experiences are ads you can walk through," she says, and in a space where the bar for industry side events remains surprisingly low, Julie's treating every interaction like the masterpiece it could become.
Shayon Sengupta's "Publisher-Exchange" framework from Multicoin captures what's happening as crypto finally finds a consumer moment via Zora. His thesis centers on the "Attention Theory of Value" where asset pricing flows from the perceived time, energy, and money that communities devote to assets rather than traditional financial metrics. We're witnessing the collapse of the traditional media funnel where advertisers paid platforms to interrupt audiences into direct financial relationships between creators and consumers. Applications like Zora, Farcaster, and Paragraph are turning creative outputs into liquid assets that can be priced, traded, and speculated on in real-time. As Shayon puts in, this creates "publisher-exchanges" that blur the lines between content consumption and value exchange. The next big exchange might not look like Coinbase but perhaps rather like a social app where audiences can wager on the virality of upcoming creators' content.
The data backs up this shift dramatically. Dan Smith showed Zora recently hit a three-month high for posts with 54% coming from the app, while content and creator coins reached an all-time high aggregate FDV of $39 million. This isn't just speculative trading; it represents a fundamental inversion of risk models. Previously platforms extracted value from creators by providing "free" distribution while keeping advertising revenue, forcing creators to build massive audiences before seeing meaningful monetization. Now audiences directly absorb the risk of creator success by investing in tokens before knowing whether the creator will produce anything worthwhile. It's venture capital mechanics applied to every tweet, song, and essay, where consumption and speculation merge into a single action.
What makes this transition so compelling is how it fixes the broken incentive structures of web2 media. Instead of advertisers transacting with platforms as rent-seeking intermediaries, value flows directly to users through what Shayon calls "Direct Value Issuance." Rather than being farmed for attention while seeing none of the upside from that attention's financialization via display ads, users get direct exposure through earning and spending assets based on their attention patterns. Mason Nystrom shows how different interfaces (social apps, trading terminals, creator platforms) all plug into the same underlying market infrastructure, making every creative act both a piece of content and a financial instrument. We're moving from a world where creativity was insulated from direct market feedback to one where market forces become the primary creative signal.
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