bounjour/buongiorno,
every degenerate i know is in sweating in linens in cannes right now. its ethcc season, which means most crypto's most bloodthirsty BDs and well-traveled baddies (!!!) are once again gathered in a pastel splattered beach town designed for leisure, discussing the future of ethereum while day-drunk on rosé. i admire their commitment to the bit. nothing says anti-institutional movement like a panel on governance held in the former playground of grace kelly.
meanwhile, i’m in rome, where the bit has been running for over two thousand years. i've been basking in the ethereal beauty of it all: marble saints caught in ecstatic suspension, light pouring in like divine algorithm. michelangelo spent four years painting upside down like some kind of divine contortionist, creating a ceiling so pornographically beautiful that god himself probably gets stage fright. a celestial OnlyFans, if you will. imagine shipping that today.
I bring this up because tech sometimes feels like this. but instead of religious ecstasy rendered in stone, we have vibe coded apps and protocols shipped with zero documentation. But if you squint hard enough, the ambition is similar: build something transcendent out of deeply chaotic materials: trust, money, code, and pure delusional optimism. holy, in its own cursed way.
anyway, enjoy some mostly accurate reportings below
xx, c
robinhood's vlad tenev showed up to cannes in a white pinstripe suit looking like the main character he's always believed himself to be. but unlike most crypto conference theatrics, robinhood's "to catch a token" event actually delivered some pretty bullish updates. this wasn't another company dipping their toes in crypto waters; this was a full-stack bet on tokenizing everything that matters.
the announcements hit like a coordinated airstrike on tradfi assumptions. tokenized stocks and etfs for european users, starting with 200 names including apple and tesla, trading commission-free 24/7. but the added bonus was tokenizing private company shares for companies like spacex and openai, giving retail access to deals that have historically been locked behind institutional gates. this isn't just "crypto meets stocks," it's "crypto demolishes the artificial scarcity that keeps regular people out of the best investments."
what makes this genuinely disruptive rather than just novel is robinhood's commitment to owning the entire stack. they're launching their own layer 2 using arbitrum's tech, acquiring bitstamp for liquidity, and building seamless integration between crypto and traditional assets in one app. this solves the fundamental problem that's plagued every previous attempt at tokenized stocks: fragmented liquidity and clunky user experience.
the ethereum ecosystem quietly won here in ways that will ripple for years. arbitrum gets 10% of robinhood chain sequencer fees, existing defi protocols gain new sources of tvl, and the vision of permissionless composability suddenly looks less like ideology and more like inevitable infrastructure. perhaps we just got validation that every major financial institution will eventually want their own chain, built on ethereum rails.
but the most interesting dynamic is what this means for the artificial constraints that keep traditional markets closed 81% of the time. robinhood is betting that 24/7 price discovery isn't just a nice-to-have feature but a fundamental necessity. when spacex announces a breakthrough at 2am on sunday, why should you have to wait until monday morning to trade on that information? the tokenization isn't the point; the elimination of arbitrary temporal restrictions is.
the regulatory timing couldn't be better. vlad was refreshingly honest about how the previous administration's remote-first approach stifled progress: "it was hard to get a meeting. it's really hard to solve complex problems with multiple stakeholders remotely." the new administration's willingness to engage in person and move fast on crypto regulation has created an opening that robinhood is aggressively exploiting.
but the most interesting insight was his framing of the current moment as crypto finally moving beyond "bitcoin and memecoins" toward "things that are useful in the real world." this isn't the cypherpunk vision of pseudonymous trading; it's efficiency improvements for legacy systems that have been "cobbled together for literally decades."
whether this actually transforms finance or becomes an expensive experiment depends entirely on execution and regulatory evolution. but watching vlad explain how "anything that people want to trade, buy or sell and get liquidity on will likely find its way onchain" while maintaining that he's "not using the word blockchain or web3" suggests we might be witnessing crypto's mainstream breakthrough disguised as incremental improvement. sometimes the revolution happens so gradually that nobody notices until it's already over.
the ethereum foundation's token-phobia isn't just about regulatory caution, it's an existential crisis about what they want to be when they grow up.
ethereum was supposed to be the world computer, but somewhere along the way it became embarrassed by its own use cases. meanwhile, Solana embraced being the casino and is laughing all the way to the bank. Pump.fun alone has generated more genuine economic activity for Solana than most of Ethereum's "serious" DeFi protocols combined.
but here's the plot twist: Robinhood choosing Arbitrum for tokenized stocks is actually the biggest Ethereum win in years, and it happened precisely because of Ethereum's "boring" infrastructure obsession.
when a traditional finance giant needs to tokenize real-world assets and handle serious volume, they don't go to the memecoin casino. they go to the ecosystem that's spent years building rock-solid settlement, proven security, and institutional-grade tooling. solana gets the degens, but Ethereum gets the trillion-dollar traditional finance migration.
so Ethereum's conservatism isn't entirely wrong. they're playing a different game, building infrastructure for a financial system that needs to last decades, not pump for months. the problem is they've become so afraid of short-term degeneracy that they're missing how to bridge these worlds.
the platforms that figure out how to channel speculative energy toward productive ends will own the next decade. Ethereum doesn't need to become Solana. but it does need to stop acting like cultural adoption and institutional adoption are mutually exclusive.
Nicholas from Seed Club has spent the last few months quietly proving that the future of product development isn't about building the best product. It's about building where people already are. Crowdfund, a no-fee USDC crowdfunding protocol, hit #1 on Farcaster's mini-app rankings not because it reinvented crowdfunding, but because it understood something most builders miss: distribution beats features every time.
the insight sounds obvious until you see how few people actually execute on it. while most crypto teams obsess over tokenomics and technical architecture, Nicholas identified three ingredients already mixing in Farcaster's ecosystem:
social accounts building authentic relationships,
wallets attached to every account, and
mini-apps that deploy software directly into feeds.
put those together and crowdfunding becomes inevitable. it's not about building a better Kickstarter; it's about building where the community already trusts each other.
i sat down with nicholas to better understand why farcaster is the perfect petri dish for ambitious projects. check the interview here:
Inside Seed Club's experiment with Crowdfund, composable protocols, and why Farcaster might be the future of distribution-first software
1. the composability paradox
everyone talks about composability like it's always good, but Robinhood's success hints at something deeper: users don't actually want infinite optionality. they want the right amount of optionality within a controlled experience. the future isn't maximum composability, it's curated composability. apps will build their own chains not to escape composability, but to control which composability they expose.
2. speculation as social infrastructure
we're witnessing something profound: speculation evolving from zero-sum gambling into positive-sum coordination mechanisms. Ponder's social prediction games, Flaunch's revenue sharing, even Polymarket's information discover; they're all using financial incentives to solve coordination problems that pure social platforms couldn't crack. the insight isn't that "people like to gamble" ... it's that small financial stakes make people actually think before they engage.
3. the great unbundling of value capture
the app-chain trend isn't just about fees, it's about the realization that in crypto, value accrues to wherever economic activity happens, not where it settles. Ethereum thought being the settlement layer meant capturing the value. but settlement without activity is just expensive bookkeeping. the chains that generate the most economic activity, whether through memes, prediction markets, or 24/7 stock trading, will capture the most value, regardless of where transactions ultimately clear.
the pattern: we're moving from "build it and they will come" to "meet users where they are, then gradually introduce them to the weird stuff." the projects winning aren't the most crypto-native, they're the ones that use crypto to solve problems people already have, then leverage that foothold to unlock entirely new possibilities.
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