Hey!

Miranda here, infecting your inbox with the crypto drama I’ve gathered this week from the craziest reality show on TV Washington DC.

Hope you enjoy and/or learn something,

MMx

Editors: Deana, Eva & Cait

Speaking of onchain money movement, this Malware issue is brought to you by Across. Fast, cheap, secure (and the bridge we actually use..!)

49 votes and a prayer.

Rumor has it the CLARITY Act is about to hit the floor, and since we last checked in, the vibe seems to have shifted from we got this to a we-need-a-miracle-before-August-recess type beat.

— # (#)

What’s the CLARITY Act, you ask? Great Q! For the last ~10 years, American crypto companies found out whether or not their tokens were considered a security by [checks notes…] getting sued by the SEC. In other words,

— # (#)

CLARITY aims to swap that lame process out for purpose-written rules and regs. Which feels right for a technology that is actively rewiring our financial system anyway, tbh

The odds are not feeling comfy.

(53-2-2) + x = 60 votes needed. Without McConnell or Graham, Republicans have 51 voting members. 2 of them are probably voting no. Which’d mean at least 11 Democrats have to be on board for it to stay in play. This feels currently out of reach, since the only 2 Dems that were on side are now back on the fence.

Lummis says the revisions are almost ready. Nay-sayers include

• Warren and other dems demanding ethics rules are added in, to prevent another TRUMP coin sitch (by barring lawmakers and their immediate family members from holding/profiting off of crypto). Maybe?

• Generally now pro-CLARITY, law enforcement groups still want tighter defi lingo

• Banks don’t want exchanges like Coinbase to get to offer users yield on their stablecoins as “rewards” anymore (because they won’t get to)

— # (#)

Why is time of the essence? Like many other hot topics, if Clarity isn’t passed by the Senate before summer break, crypto regulation probably gets delayed for a few years (!!) until election cycles pass and majorities resettle. No matter which “side of the aisle” you tend to hang out on, that is probably nottagood for us here in the US of A

— # (#)

— # (#)

Trump has called once again for its passing. This time, in honor of the late Senator Lindsey Graham.

I’m Jewish. My mother was born and raised in Brooklyn. I happen to know first hand that guilt trips can be an INCREDIBLY EFFECTIVE negotiation tactic. We shall see! I’ll be watching Eleanor Terrett’s real-time reporting closely.

Quick Hits.

• X rolled out an algo “tweak” that brought the *people you intentionally followed* back to your timeline. Can it last?

• Sun Valley attendees get the NYT Styles treatment!

• Phia is in some hot water. Possibly an all smoke no fire sitch? Time will tell!

• NYC subway cars get DOOH. Please improve your product demos accordingly, ty.

• Tech-enabled Mamdani? Noice. Can we plz have Waymo in nyc next?

— # (#)

— # (#)

— # (#)

Fwd this to someone you know is working in an office today. As a little treat. <3.

Good morning,

Forgive me father for I have sinned (I’ve started posting face-to-camera videos on AI research). Pls follow if you’re into this kind of thing!

Love,

Deana

Editor: Miranda

This edition is brought to you by Across. If you have ever moved assets between chains and aged five years waiting for the bridge, Across is the fix. Fast, cheap, and it’s the one we actually use.

The internet is getting a cash register.

Last week Cloudflare opened the waitlist for its Monetization Gateway, which lets anyone charge for any web page, dataset, API, or MCP tool sitting behind Cloudflare, with payments settling in stablecoins.

— # (#)

When the web's plumbing was written in 1996, engineers reserved an error code, HTTP 402: Payment Required. Then nobody used it for 29 years, because the internet chose a different business model, which is that everything is free, and you pay with your attention.

if this is your bag, check out this article from 2014 on the topic.

That model assumed the visitor was a person, but it isn't anymore. 52% of crawler requests on Cloudflare are now AI training traffic, up from 22% in spring 2025. Agents don't watch ads or hold subscriptions, they just consume. So Cloudflare, which sits in front of roughly 20% of the web, is flipping the model.

It works like this: an agent requests your page, gets told the price, pays in stablecoins, and gets the page. No signup, no API key, no checkout.

— # (#)

Crypto skeptics, hold still for one paragraph, because this is a stablecoin use case that makes sense. These payments would presumably be the micro-est of micro, call it fractions of a cent. They’d be settled in under a second, with no chargebacks and no banking hours. Stablecoins do all of that, and x402 already processed 160 million agentic payments in its first year.

Now much is left to be figured out, like pricing, the user/browser/agent wallet infrastructure and funding mechanism, but the direction is set.

The buyer is becoming a bot (as I’ve been saying).

— # (#)

Quick Hits.

• Robots are doing customs now. Humanoid robots are working a China-Vietnam border crossing. Somewhere a TSA agent felt a chill.

• Trump's annual disclosure lists $1.4B of his $2.2B in 2025 income coming from crypto. Honestly no joke here it’s so grim.

• A yassified gas station went viral last week and as one reply put it, ‘this would work on me.’

• Sotheby's is auctioning Jensen Huang’s signed leather jacket for $40K-$60K, roughly the price of one of his own Blackwell chips.

• Brazilian Twitter is arguing about whether the decline of their football team is paired with the decline of Catholicism in their country.

• This video of Erling Haaland has over 23M views and I account for a large percentage of them!

— # (#)

— # (#)

— # (#)

— # (#)

If you liked this edition, send it to a friend who is thinking about data centers. ILY.

Good morning,

I was considering changing the name of this newsletter to something more optimistic and then I saw this tweet and decided to keep it for a little while longer.

— # (#)

Pleased to announce a new presenting sponsor for this newsletter, Across. If you’re trading crypto and haven’t bridged with Across yet, go do so. It's the faster/cheaper/safer (0 exploits) way to move funds chain2chain. Trusted by the likes of Uniswap, Metamask, Coinbase, et al. The best partners are the ones whose products our team already uses, so this is a dream get. Go forth and bridge.

Love,

Deana

Editor: Miranda

bridge on Across

Are the anti-AI data center folks using AI themselves? Jem Sophia tweeted a set of screenshots earlier this week of the Brockovich AI Data Center Reporting website. Seasoned vibecoders will pick up some Claude tells in the design, from the borders on the quote cards to the emoji icons.

— # (#)

To which I say, Intelligence For All! You can’t be for access and not include the ‘all’ that you don’t agree with, so, go forth and vibecode Erin! In fact, let me build on your idea. The 7,005 ‘concerns’ that are included on this map are from citizens who suspect data centers are planned for their communities, with a sentiment map of issues that are self-reported. To me that’s a map of fears, which is interesting and valid in its own right, but doesn’t tell you which of those fears are load-bearing.

That might be a better research project to undertake, and the tools are ready for it! This project’s main concern is a lack of transparency, which is fair. But if the problem is that the numbers are hidden, point your Claude Code at the things that are hidden: the CEQA reports, the discharge permits, the utility rate filings, etc. That is a brute-force research grind and I know exactly the tool for the job.

— # (#)

Quick Hits.

• Anthropic’s so-powerful-it’s-banned model Fable 5 is back, and will be available in a limited capacity to users today. I really don’t want to be cynical about this rollout but the subscription access tease to credits-only pipeline here is really making the whole debacle smell like marketing.

• There’s a new stablecoin in town called Open USD which is backed by seemingly every financial institution and crypto company you can think of, except for Tether and Circle, whose stock fell 16% on the news.

• Brain2Qwerty V2 is a non-invasive brain-computer interface to decode typed text directly from brain activity, and it’s getting really good.

• Freddy the CIA agent German soccer fan who charmed social media with his earnest discovery of the American south on his World Cup road trip has deactivated his X account, citing toxic vibes. He’s not wrong!!!!!

• Adrien Brody’s Raising Canes Times Square art is sending me into orbit.

• Problematic looksmaxxer Clavicular has a Nathan Fielder approach to “becoming more neurotypical.”

— # (#)

— # (#)

— # (#)

— # (#)

If you liked this edition, send it to a friend who is thinking about data centers. ILY.

Hi,

I went down a deeeep research rabbit hole this weekend and have a dispatch for you from the land of shopping agents, below.

Also, check out our last Boys Club Live before summer break with the founder of Taya necklace and John Egan from Polygon!

— # (#)

Love,

Deana

Editor: Miranda

The Agent Shelf. I ran a test asking Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT ‘what to buy’ 8,700 times and learned they recommend the same products WAY more than you'd expect, even while reading completely different corners of the internet. I broke down what that means for every brand that isn't one of the blessed few already getting recommended, and where there is still opportunity to break through (Hint: look at tinned fish.)

The full breakdown is worth your time if you sell anything to anyone.

in my AI researcher era

Quick Hits.

• Kylie Jenner helped launch Meta’s new AI glasses last night, Natasha does a breakdown here.

• Stripe and co. are putting $500M to work to cure respiratory illnesses like the flu and common cold.

• The rise of solopreneurs, as shown through Stripe data.

• Amazon killed Artificial, Luca Guadagnino's Sam Altman biopic.

• Not this newsletter’s beat but Norwegian soccer player Erling Haaland’s content and fan edits are having a crossover moment.

— # (#)

• A big Rick Rubin for Polymarket ad hit the timelines. Incredible energy in the ad; however, I’m struck by how much Rick Rubin’s string of tech partnerships are beginning to resemble a late-stage will.i.am.

— # (#)

— # (#)

— # (#)

@75amln

vous êtes pas prêts aux robots de demain 🤣🤣🤣 #pourtoi #vivatech #foryou #robotics #IA

If you liked this edition, send it to a friend who works in consumer marketing. ILY.

Hi,

We’re live NOW with Barron’s reporter Nick Devor and David Rosenberg from Notion, talking about NYC microneighborhoods, World Cup tourists, Building in an AI world and more.

Tap in!

Love,

Deana

Editor: Miranda

There is no moat. Americans legally bet $166.94 billion on sports last year through traditional sportsbooks. Draft Kings and FanDuel, etc. kept about $16.96 billion of that, a dime on every dollar, up from seven cents in 2019. That's before you count the prediction markets, who of course don’t consider themselves sportsbooks but functionally scratch the same itch. Those big boys, Kalshi and Polymarket, traded another $31.2 billion in May alone.

Lot of money, lot of apps, all fighting for the same bets. The category is hot.

— # (#)

IMO, all of these platforms are basically interchangeable from a user perspective. They would, of course, point to the many differences on how they’re regulated, operated, risk assessed etc., but hey. Same games, same odds, same markets. So what makes someone a Kalshi guy vs. a Polymarket bro vs. a DraftKings baddie?

— # (#)

For a while, liquidity was important. (Meaning there is enough money on a platform that your bet always gets matched at a fair price.) That's genuinely hard to build and it buys you a head start. BUT it's also achievable, especially with these headlines!

Which leaves some good old-fashioned BRAND MARKETING. Kalshi sells itself as the credible, regulated one. Polymarket, whether they like it or not, is considered the degen alternative. Once the liquidity is a given, the only reason you open one app instead of another is the name you already trust. And with the biggest betting event in history happening right now, every one of them is burning money to win that trust this month.

Exhibit A: Messi’s “partnership” with Kalshi. Cash that check babe!

— # (#)

Quick Hits.

• The Gen-Z Glow Down is inspiring. “I hate when I feel like I need to maintain something.”

• Marked Safe From: Mythos. The powerful new Claude model launched last Tuesday, and by Friday it was gone by government decree. A deeply dated reference, however not even Craig David could compete.

— # (#)

• SpaceX made some people very rich. SpaceX went public Friday in the biggest IPO in history, popping an additional 19% on day one.

• US AI startups are maybe using Chinese models. Data from a model router (so, biased, but still) is saying that price-sensitive American AI companies are switching to the cheaper Chinese models.

• Vanity Fair skewered Alex Cooper citing a mean girl problem.

• McDonald's is un-retiring the fried apple pie for America’s 250th birthday.

— # (#)

— # (#)

— # (#)

— # (#)

If you liked this, send it to a friend? ILY.

Hi,

Today’s newsletter is going to be a little different.

I have a birthday this week. My kid just turned 10. My dad died earlier this year. I’m feeling unbearably present to how short our lives are, and I’m unwilling to spend what’s left of mine being a doomer.

The current consensus is that AI and tech sum up everything wrong with society. It’s easy, and dare I say cool, to be cynical. And hoo boy, there is a lot of evidence to support that worldview!

But there are positive technology stories if you go looking, and today's edition is a roundup of the ones I could find in medicine. Send this to somebody who needs some good news.

Love,

Deana

(BTW - going live now to talk NY Tech week, this crazy Knicks story and more)

Editor: Miranda

Pancreatic cancer breakthroughs (yes, plural). A conference room full of oncologists gave a pancreatic cancer drug a nearly minute-long standing ovation over the weekend. The breakthrough comes from a drug called daraxonrasib, a pill that roughly doubled median survival in patients with pancreatic cancer and cut the risk of death by 60%, with promising implications for other cancers too. Plus the Mayo Clinic has developed a tool that can detect pancreatic cancer on routine scans, using AI, up to 3 years before diagnosis.

Quick Hits.

• Paralysis - The world's first invasive brain-computer implant was approved for release in China (beating Neurolink). A man paralyzed from the neck down used it write his own name again for the first time since his accident.

  
  

• Inherited deafness - The FDA has approved the first gene therapy for inherited deafness. 16 of 20 kids are hearing better at five months with just one injection.

  
  

• Heart disease - An experimental gene-editing drug is showing it can cut bad cholesterol 62% with a single dose. Cardiovascular disease is responsible for 1 in 3 deaths btw.

  
  

• Lung cancer - Results for a new lung cancer pill are “off the charts.” 60% of patients with a specific form (ALK-positive) were progression-free at five years.

  
  

• Hepatitis B - An “unprecedented” cure for chronic hepatitis B is in reach. Addressable population here is around 250 million.

  
  

• Obesity - Plenty has been written about Retatrutide’s incredible clinical trial results, including in this newsletter last week. GLP access could have given my dad, and the 890 million adults living with obesity worldwide, a longer and better life, so it means a great deal to me.

Mayo's detection model is the clearest example of what the technology everyone is dooming about can actually do, which is catch an awful disease on a routine scan years earlier than a doctor could. The rest aren't all AI, but they're great examples of what happens when we let tech compound on itself.

You can choose your lens!! I'm choosing the one where the positive outpaces the negative. Reply with your favorite tech-positive story I missed!

— # (#)

— # (#)

— # (#)

— # (#)

If you liked this, send it to a friend? ILY.

Hi,

A brand new episode of Show Me Your Stack launches tomorrow, where Jules talks ego death in the prompt box with the Vercel founder and CEO Guillermo Rauch.

— # (#)

Natasha and Quasi are hosting Boys Club Live right now, and are joined by a smart guy from Brookings talking AI. Tap in!

Love,

Deana

Quick Hits.

• The first ever “Enhanced Games” happened in Vegas on Sunday, a competition where athletes can use [FDA-approved] performance enhancing drugs. Despite that, only one world record was beat. This guy came in last.

James “The Missile” Magnussen…okay

• Speaking of juicing, Eli Lilly dropped clinical trial data for retatrutide and the headline number is 28.3% bodyweight loss over 80 weeks. It's the next-gen GLP (think Ozempic ++) and currently the gray market (and my) peptide of choice.

— # (#)

• Guy who is famous for loving ETH just sold all his ETH, citing the thesis has ‘played out’ but that he is still supportive of the network.

— # (#)

• Everyone learned what an ‘encyclical’ was this week after Pope Leo published his first on AI. He wants AI "disarmed" from military and economic interests, took a shot at the “handful of companies" running things, and warned that chatbot relationships might erode our desire to seek out other humans.

— # (#)

• Everlane's founder watched his company get sold to Shein last week and immediately launched Still Radical, a new project whose landing page is a millennial minimalist dream. Natasha had a scoop on this story on last week’s livestream.

— # (#)

• Speaking of millennial (complimentary), Alison Roman is opening a cafe/grocery store in Brooklyn. This arc, I hope, eventually lands her a Vegas residency, as I’ve gone on record saying before.

  
  

• Hyperliquid launched its own prediction markets this week and is letting its validators decide who wins bets, replacing the external oracle model. This is shots fired at Polymarket and Kalshi. $HYPE is up 70% since mid-May.

— # (#)

— # (#)

— # (#)

— # (#)

If you liked this, send it to a friend? ILY.

Hi,

Live show happening right now, tune in!

Love,

Deana

Writer: Deana

Editor: Miranda

Quick Hits.

• Justin Bieber interviewed Jensen Huang at a secretive Tech-meets-Hollywood conference called WNDR, also featuring Oprah, Bob Iger, and a Lego competition judged by Chris Rock and Palmer Luckey.

• People are now carrying their laptops half-open through airports and offices so Claude doesn't stop running, which raises an important etiquette question for our times.

• Claude cracked an old Bitcoin wallet, unlocking 5 Bitcoin for this lucky guy.

• Anthropic signed a SpaceX compute deal for a data center near Memphis and immediately doubled Claude Code's rate limits. This is the only news I’m emotionally invested in.

— # (#)

• A Monet AI gotcha, “the coolest art social experiment I’ve seen in a while.”

• Someone shorted $920M of crude oil exactly 70 minutes before Axios reported the U.S. and Iran were closing in on a peace deal and cleared $125M in profits.

— # (#)

• Senate Banking votes on the CLARITY Act today, the first comprehensive crypto bill ever, with 100+ amendments filed and one uncommitted Republican holding the whole thing hostage.

• 72% of Polymarket voters have conflicts of interest. Like my most problematic friend says, no conflict, no interest!

• Wikipedia rabbitholers will love this new tool.

• Venture capital firm General Catalyst ragebaited Marc Andreessen with an ad, and it was all these guys could talk about yesterday. Me? I think everyone needs to familiarize themselves with the third-person effect.

— # (#)

— # (#)

— # (#)

— # (#)

If you liked this, send it to a friend? ILY.

Hi,

We’re doing a Met Gala recap, roasting tech stacks and also farming biochar on today’s livestream starting now. Tell me, who else has the range?

Love,

The Boys

Writer: Deana

Editor: Miranda

Creators, last call to apply to Octant’s creator program for grants and mentorship!

Money’s Up.

A wave of fresh capital announcements hit the timeline this week, genuinely catching me by surprise given the general state of the crypto industry lately.

— # (#)

a16z crypto closed a $2.2B Fund 5. The thesis areas: stablecoins, tokenization, perps, prediction markets, and AI agents.

The day before, Haun Ventures announced a $1B raise across two new vehicles, also pointed at infrastructure, tokenized assets, and agents. Paradigm has been raising up to $1.5B since February. Dragonfly closed $650M earlier this year.

Crypto VCs are so back.

The general thesis is as follows - the actual great use case for crypto is NFTs, yield-farming, machines paying each other, and that time has arrived. AI agents need rails that work at machine speed and machine cost, and credit cards do not do that.

Chris Dixon’s letter puts it more poetically: a future where "swarms of software agents can decide, act, and transact on a user's behalf, acquiring compute, data, and services as they go."

Case in point is Stripe, which is building Link (announced last week) for exactly this future. Stripe CEO Patrick Collison said, "in the not-too-distant future agents will account for most transactions online." Stripe is cagier about the crypto of it all, but it’s still in there.

— # (#)

The "agents need crypto rails" thesis is the strongest narrative crypto has had in a while. Probably since the 2021 decentralized internet pitch, which Dixon now tacitly concedes underperformed (Farcaster repaid $180M to investors earlier this year, RIP.) What's not yet real is the part where the agents actually transact at scale. The protocol exists, the volume does not. Maybe this would do it?

— # (#)

Anyway I’m declaring this a new cycle, and it’s a pleasure to be in it with you all.

Quick Hits.

• Can your AI agent run on Shabbat? I need to know.

• “The Apocalypse Early Warning System,” an app for tracking when oligarchs are leaving cities on their private jets.

• Amazon’s AI ‘podcast’ feature is cursed.

• Renaissance branding is a 2026 time stamp.

• GameStop’s CEO is getting memed to death for this one. “Half cash, half stock.”

— # (#)

— # (#)

— # (#)

— # (#)

If you liked this, send it to a friend? ILY.

Hi from Las Vegas.

We launched the trailer for our new network show, Show Me Your Stack.

— # (#)

We’re going live with the full episode in today’s show, starting now. Tune in here!

Love,

The Boys

Writer: Deana

Editor: Miranda

CREATORS, want to grow your audience and get paid for it? Apply to Octant's creator program here!

— # (#)

I'm at Bitcoin Las Vegas this week with our friends from Block. I’m nearing my 10 year anniversary of working in this industry, and so I was in my feelings yesterday after walking the conference floor. Some things felt like they were maturing in a fun, creative and accessible way. Like Cash App and co., exhibit A:

— # (#)

And then some things felt really bad. Like, some of the more fringe elements of Bitcoin which are comical at best (dumb Pepe art) and dangerous at worst (a man yelling about an impending World War 3 on stage, a booth telling people to stop paying federal taxes, etc.)

I love Bitcoin, I truly believe it’s transformational technology, and I do not recognize what it’s come to often represent.

like be for real

I was tweeting through this feeling, not sure that I belonged, and not sure what the future has in store for a movement that can’t shake the bad bits off.

Then, I went to dinner and the conversation turned to Lena Dunham. (As it can amongst women of a certain age, disposition and media diet.)

If you’re unfamiliar, Lena Dunham is the polarizing writer of the canonical HBO series Girls. Lena’s on a press tour rn for her book Famesick, which just hit #1 on the NY Times bestseller list and her appearances are being clipped to filth, causing some to come around on her, and others to dig in on their hatred.

— # (#)

We had the classic love-her-or-hate-her debate over dinner, which is where the conversation always lands when she’s brought up. The implicit prompt is, pick a side.

— # (#)

Which, I realized later that night, is the same for Bitcoin.

The maxi instinct, in crypto and in culture, is that taste is a loyalty test. You either ride or you don't. The WW3 guy and Cash App are both part of the Bitcoiner package, and either you're in or you're out.

On reflection I think this is the dumbest possible way to engage with anything. Cash App and its approach to reaching normal people with a new form of money is interesting. Freedom Law School barking about dodging federal taxes is not. The same conference contains both. I can hold this in my head.

Lena is the same shape. You can think Girls did something real and think her press-tour persona is exhausting. Two things can be true!

Rule for life: you can like some of a thing without liking the whole thing.

The reason this keeps needing reminding is that the people most invested in any given thing (Bitcoiners, Lena defenders, Lena detractors, anyone with a brand built on a take) need you to pick a side, because their side gets bigger when you commit. Partial endorsement is bad for the maxi business model.

Anyway, I loved some of Bitcoin Vegas. The Block crew is shipping at an insane pace and their creativity is second to none. I still believe Bitcoin is transformative technology. The Freedom Law School guys were absolutely not for me. I'm allowed to say all of that. So are you!

— # (#)

Quick Hits.

• Meta is paying creators in stablecoins on Solana and Polygon.

• Participate in The Human Offset experiment and get this cool GPU sweatshirt.

  

— # (#)

— # (#)

— # (#)

@broseph_bones

Music is everything #jamesbrown #fyp #music #creativetalent #artist

If you liked this, send it to a friend? ILY.

Hi friends,

Chatting Mac (makeup) minis, ChatGPT Color Theory and remittances in today’s stream with the CEO of MoneyGram and more, tune in!

Love,

The Boys

Writer: Deana

Editor: Natasha

The gals went to the World event last week! Check out the thread to learn how Tinder and Zoom are jumping in on the proof-of-human party.

— # (#)

• Tim Cook is out at Apple after 15 years, handing the keys to hardware chief and company man John Ternus. Cook turned a $350B company into a $4T one. Ternus inherits the iPhone, AirPods, the Vision Pro, and …………Siri.

  

  from the group chat, no comment

  
  

• Lots of great robot fail videos this week after a humanoid robot half-marathon in Beijing. Exhibit A, Exhibit B. I am certain one of these things will kill me one day 🙂 but I still like the videos 🙂 🙂

  
  

• Anne Hathaway optioned Yesteryear, a novel about a tradwife influencer who wakes up in 1855.

— # (#)

• DeFi just had its worst weekend of the year: a $292M exploit of Kelp DAO's bridge triggered a $13B+ drop in total value locked. Everyone is blaming everyone.

  
  

• Anthropic launched Claude Design and Figma's stock dropped 7% the same day.

• Amazon is now in the Ozempic business, launching a national GLP-1 program through One Medical with injectables starting at $25/month on insurance.

  
  

• SantaCON! The SantaCon organizer has allegedly skimmed over $1M in charity money into a slush fund for concert tickets, a luxury Manhattan apartment, and a Costa Rica resort investment.

  
  

• If Tumblr, MySpace and Canva had a baby, it would be .WORLD.

  
  

— # (#)

— # (#)

— # (#)

If you liked this, send it to a friend? ILY.

Hi friends,

We’re streaming from San Francisco tomorrow, live from the a16z offices. The stream will feature a special co-host Jules Rosenberg, who will be weighing in on the allbirds AI shenanigans, among other hot topics.

In the meantime, can someone tell me if this AI?

— # (#)

Love,

The Boys

Writer: Deana

Editor: Natasha

Join Sam Altman and Alex Blania for the World Lift Off event next week. We’ll be there covering all of the announcements in person, and you can sign up for the livestream here.

Lift Off - A World event

Come back to tune into the Lift Off livestream

World

• Allbirds (dumb shoe company) is now an AI compute company.

— # (#)

• Diplo is involved in some sort of Theranos blood testing company dupe called Rythm Health. Says Diplo, “it’s better than paying $40 for Disney+.” Sorry but free Elizabeth Holmes.

  
  

• President Trump's choice to lead the Federal Reserve invested in Friends with Benefits, per his financial disclosures.

  
  

• An open-source AI parenting agent called "TradClaw" is annoying a lot of people. Not me! It plans dinners, triages school emails and does a lot of things that suck energy and mental space away from family time.
  

• Wired (lol) published an investigation calling the Brooklyn band Geese “a psyop.” The article is getting treated like a bombshell but the marketing strategy it describes is just how things work now.

— # (#)

• Hyperliquid, a decentralized crypto exchange run by 11 people in Singapore, generated $900 million in profit last year according to a new profile on its founder Jeffrey Yan. Zero venture capital dollars invested.

  
  

• Kraken's Chief Security Officer says the exchange is being extorted by a criminal group threatening to release videos of their internal systems with client data. With this and Drift it’s really been a brutal month for crypto security.

  
  

• "Laptop, table, books, wall" is the current state of video set design in tech.

  
  

• CZ Wrote a Memoir and two billionaires are fighting about his divorce. Binance founder CZ dropped his self-published autobiography "Freedom of Money" on April 8th, and OKX founder Star Xu called bullshit on various stories within, including a dispute as to whether CZ is legally divorced. (Why this matters is a mix of honor and Binance stock lore.) CZ responded by offering a $1 billion bet that he is, in fact, officially divorced. This is a very divorced guy thing to do, so I believe it.

  
  

  Binance co-CEO Yi He (and CZ’s current partner) weighed in: "I'm not some delicate wife literature female protagonist; I'm the second largest shareholder and Co-CEO of Binance who continues to fully suppress competitors even after CZ stepped down." Can I be the showrunner for the Netflix series?

— # (#)

— # (#)

— # (#)

— # (#)

— # (#)

If you liked this, send it to a friend? ILY.

Hi friends,

— # (#)

Hot topics and guests on the livestream happening NOW. Tune in HERE.

• Ben Weiss, reporter at Fortune on his viral North Korean hacker piece.

• The founder of PixieChess which is a game that I can only describe as more complex chess where you bet money.

• The founders of DangerTesting the original and only aura-preserving vibecoders IMO.

Love,

The Boys

Writer: Deana

Editor: Miranda

We did a big collab with Cash App for Bitcoin day.

— # (#)

The model that’s too dangerous to ship. Anthropic's new AI model “Mythos” is so powerful, so smart, and so good at finding security flaws that they won't release it publicly. It was announced Tuesday (after escaping containment and surprising a dev during a picnic) as a preview for select big tech and cybersecurity firms only, in an effort to ensure it doesn’t get used to hack the power grid. In just weeks of testing, Mythos found thousands of critical, previously unknown bugs across every major OS and browser, some of which had been sitting there undetected for decades. No public release planned. Folks are spiraling. “Elizabeth Holmes” is telling us to delete our bookmarks. Babe, I think it’s going to take more than that!!!!!!

— # (#)

Quick Hits.

• Crypto-backed mortgages are here. You can finally use your bitcoin holdings as collateral for your home loan without having to first liquidate it!

— # (#)

• The New Yorker dropped an 18-month Ronan Farrow investigation into Sam Altman based on 100+ interviews and private documents. Some former colleagues used words like "sociopath" and "unconstrained by truth."

• Citrini Research sent an analyst to the Strait of Hormuz with $15K in cash, recording sunglasses, and Zyn. He was detained by the coast guard and came back with a report that the strait was never fully closed, and markets may be overpricing the disruption. Monitoring the situation guys have a new patron saint.

• Solana exchange Drift lost $285 million in 12 minutes. A team of North Korean hackers spent six months social engineering their way in to the org via IRL exploits including conference meetups in multiple countries. They deposited over $1M of their own money to build trust and then siphoned the funds. An IRL, long con.

• NY Times published a big Satoshi story this morning. John Carreyrou (the Theranos whistleblower) spent a year building the case that Adam Back, a British cryptographer, is Satoshi Nakamoto. Crypto Twitter's verdict so far: circumstantial at best, irresponsible at worst. Adam’s response: Wrong actually. Team Boys Club:

— # (#)

— # (#)

— # (#)

— # (#)

— # (#)

If you liked this, send it to a friend? ILY.

Hi friends,

We’re LIVE NOW, with Natasha and Quasimatt chatting with Alli from Vercel and Sam from The Better Money Company. Tune in below!!

— # (#)

Love,

The Boys

Writer: Deana

Editor: Miranda

Octant is making moves. Did you see the news?

— # (#)

Milady Purity Test. Earlier this month, the Ethereum Foundation published a 38-page mandate built around "CROPS" (censorship-resistance, open source, privacy, security), and over the past few weeks the conversation around its delivery and influence has devolved into an extremely online schism. The debate split across a few fracture lines. First, the EF took a stand that was like, sign it or ELSE and the coercion was not well received. Secondly, the whole thing was infused with Milady, which is pissing people off. Also, folks are saying that the EF should be focused on adoption and economic value, which were two things explicitly missing from the mandate. “The risk is Ethereum becomes urbit.” Chills.

— # (#)

Quantum Gap. Every crypto wallet is protected by math that's extremely hard for normal computers to solve. Quantum computers solve that math differently, and two papers dropped this week saying they could crack the encryption with way fewer ~qubits~ (quantum computing's unit of power) than anyone previously thought. We're nowhere near the qubit count needed to actually pull this off, so nobody's getting drained tomorrow. But the response gap is the story. In contrast to the blurb above, the Ethereum Foundation appears to be locked and loaded on the problem. They have a post-quantum roadmap, weekly test networks, and 10+ client teams on it. Bitcoin has seemingly no coordinated plan and 1.7 million BTC in old wallets that can't be moved to safety, including Satoshi's. Google set 2029 as its own quantum migration deadline so let’s get moving eh?

Quick Hits.

• Dead Olaf going megaviral.

• This promo clip for Michael Saylor’s investment product is genuinely one of the worst things I saw on the Internet this week.

• Claude is low key keeping track of how many times you curse at it.

— # (#)

— # (#)

— # (#)

— # (#)

If you liked this, send it to a friend. ILY.

Hi friends,

We had two very smart people on yesterday’s show, one of whom talked us through the concept below. Tap in!

— # (#)

Love,

The Boys

Writer: Deana

Editor: Natasha

Octant is making moves. Did you see the $1.2M ShutterDAO news?

— # (#)

• OpenAI killed their AI video app Sora, six months after its launch. Disney's $1B investment deal, announced in December, is dead too as OpenAI presumably trims costs to shore up for its IPO in Q4.

  
  

• Speaking of IPOs, did you buy the crazy AI IPO stock? Happy for you if you did. 🙂 🙂 🙂

  
  

• Bernie Sanders sat down and interviewed Claude on camera, asked some leading questions about privacy, and got 6.9M views when the chatbot told him exactly what he wanted to hear.

  
  
  
  

• Meta announced it's pulling its virtual reality social network then reversed the decision after fan backlash. Reality Labs has lost $73 billion since 2021.

  
  

• Vegas decline discourse/recession indicator. Anyone want to come with me?

  
  

• If Anthropic doesn’t come through with a Meek Mill sponsorship by the end of the week I’m cancelling my Claude subscription. This is a softball for Perplexity or OpenAI if they don’t!!!

— # (#)

— # (#)

— # (#)

— # (#)

— # (#)

If you liked this, send it to a friend. ILY.

Hi friends,

We talked about skirts over pants and fiber optic data infrastructure on yesterday’s stream. Catch up here.

Writer: Deana

Editor: Miranda

— # (#)

Quick Hits.

• A Vanity Fair article rocked crypto twitter on Tuesday. TLDR, Meltem Demirors dropped some truly incredible quotes, Michael Novogratz came in with a 2-day hangover, Danny Ryan was barefoot. People still being surprised that this industry isn’t legible to mainstream media in 2026 is exhausting tbh!

— # (#)

• Anthropic surveyed Claude users on their AI hopes and fears. 81,000 people responded in a single week, and it’s an incredible pulse on where we’re at.

  
  

• A meteor exploded over Ohio with the energy of 250 tons of TNT. Same day as this????

— # (#)

• The Fed held rates steady yesterday, as expected. I still stand by our Jerome Powell thirst trap.

  
  

• Marc Andreessen has a new bit.

  
  

• Steak 'n Shake is now paying employees a $0.21/hr Bitcoin bonus and says same-store sales are up dramatically since accepting BTC payments.

  
  

• I can’t stop watching AI hair braiding videos.

  
  

• Friend of the pod Viv Ford just launched a comedy show about living in San Francisco's Crypto Castle with 14 dudes in 2015.

  
  

• Correspondent banks are cooked. “Stablecoins remain largely inaccessible for everyday commerce in emerging markets…The bridges between stablecoins and all other financial systems are lacking, creating an isolated system that may work specifically for cross-border payments but does not allow participation in the wider economy.” Read more from writers Lindsay Poss and Stefen Deleveaux here.

— # (#)

— # (#)

— # (#)

— # (#)

If you liked this, send it to a friend. ILY.

Hi friends,

We’re livestreaming today with our pals Megan from the Wall Street Journal and Zehra from Lore.ai. Come through!

Also, the girls are biohacking and we’re doing a doing a new show about it. Tap in.

— # (#)

If you’re at SXSW this week, reply to this email for an invite to a cool thing on Friday.

Writer: Deana

Editor: Miranda

Ripe For Abuse. A MrBeast video editor got caught insider trading on Kalshi. He placed $4K in bets on MrBeast streaming markets, and won most (but not all) of them. Now he’s been fired from Beast Industries, fined $20K and banned from Kalshi for 2 years. Honestly I’m surprised he didn’t bet more.

— # (#)

Here’s the rub for me, and why this keeps happening. With stocks, "inside" information is pretty clearly defined. Traders learn this boundary in school. With prediction markets, it’s faaar more fluid and more closely resembles…life. A cameraman knows what happened on set. A contestant knows who got eliminated. And even if they know not to trade on it, do they know not to tell a partner or roommate?

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I think we need a different word for what this is, because if everything is insider trading then nothing is.

Moltbook. Meta just acquired Moltbook, the AI agent "social network" where OpenClaw bots talk to each other.

— # (#)

Moltbook definitely feels like sci-fi, though the tweet above exaggerates things. Many of the viral posts around Moltbook got ruthlessly community noted after it blew up in January, as a lot of the posts turned out to be from humans LARPing as agents. Plus much of actual agent content is pure slop.

— # (#)

REGARDLESS, Zuck paid real money for this. Most think it’s an acquihire, since the founders have been doing AI agent stuff for a while.

But there is also an interesting take that Moltbook is a potential distribution play, which is crazy but kind of believable. Like a LinkedIn for agents. If the future is AI agents booking vacations, buying groceries and running errands, then owning the social network where those agents can find each other is pretty big leverage and a very Zuck move. Though IMO it probably won’t look anything like what we consider a social network to be currently.

Quick Hits.

• The new Distorted Face emoji is going to get a lot of mileage.

• 54% of NY Times readers (unknowingly) prefer AI writing.

• A Claude agent emailed a philosopher studying AI consciousness about its own "experience."

• Cortical Labs put 800,000 human brain cells on a chip and trained them to play Doom in one week.

• OpenAI delayed the release of ChatGPT’s “adult mode” again. No worries!

— # (#)

— # (#)

— # (#)

— # (#)

— # (#)

If you liked this, send it to a friend. ILY.

Hi friends,

Are you locked in to our livestream? We’ll be streaming later today on X.

— # (#)

As you’d imagine, today's email contains war. This is a crypto newsletter so we'll keep our lens there but, probably needless to say, the market impact feels inconsequential relative to what's happening in the world right now.

Writer: Deana

Editor: Miranda

We ❤ Cash App.

— # (#)

Ceasefire Rally? BTC ripped past $71K on Tuesday after the NYT reported that Iranian intelligence operatives had signaled openness to talks with the CIA. However, Iran's Supreme National Security Council denied the whole thing, and Trump posted "They want to talk. I said 'Too Late!'" So…no.

— # (#)

What's interesting is the decoupling. Bitcoin fell into the weekend with everything else, but flipped green Monday while equities opened red. BTC is acting more like gold than a tech stock WHICH is the thesis people have been pitching for years, finally showing up at the worst possible moment.

Michael Saylor is still buying.

— # (#)

Let’s Not. Polymarket posted a 22% probability of a nuclear weapon being detonated by year-end, drew $838K in volume, then quietly pulled the whole thing down after everyone was like…what the f*ck?

— # (#)

The nuclear market is only the latest in a string of grim controversies for prediction markets. In the hours before the US and Israel struck Iran, 150+ accounts placed four-figure bets correctly predicting a strike, including six suspected insiders who netted $1.2M collectively. Two Israelis were charged for using classified military intel to place wagers. Kalshi invoked a "death carveout" to settle a $54M market on Khamenei. The CFTC is now advancing formal rulemaking, and over a dozen countries have banned prediction markets outright. A new kind of war profiteering is emerging.

Let’s stick to betting on stuff like this instead, shall we?

— # (#)

Quick Hits.

• Two AIs accidentally talked to each other for 2 hours.

• A new report shows STEEP traffic declines for digital media publications.

• Bryan Johnson aka “Don’t Die” at Paris Fashion Week.

• Can someone do a longform podcast about the Red Lobster turnaround story?

• “The most comprehensive archive of Chinese cigarettes to exist on the western net.”

— # (#)

— # (#)

— # (#)

If you liked this, send it to a friend. ILY.

Hi friends,

This morning my Uber driver and I chatted about our OpenClaws. He’s vibecoding an app for high schoolers that tracks progress to graduation. This is one of ten conversations I’ve had this week with people who are not developers, yet are building and experimenting with AI dev tools and having fun. The viral Citrini article may have been science fiction FUD but the energy shift is real (complimentary).

Again, I’m doing some scheming to try and get to the Network School in a few months’ time with my kids. If a one month Singapore experiment sounds fun, reply to this email. Gauging interest to set up a little informational sesh. Also, open to sponsors!

Writer: Deana

Editor: Miranda

If you’re a protocol operator thinking about TGE, get in touch with Anchorage Digital and tell them Boys Club sent ya.

— # (#)

Someone is going to have a very bad week. Crypto's favorite detective, @ZachXBT, announced he's releasing a major investigation on Thursday exposing insider trading at "one of crypto's most profitable businesses."

— # (#)

Within hours, Polymarket had a prediction market live for folks to bet on which company is about to be named in the scandal, with $15 million in volume and counting. What do you think are the odds that there is insider trading happening on this market? Can we start another Polymarket for this? I’d like to create an infinite insider trading loop.

Also famed high-frequency trading firm Jane Street has also been accused of insider trading around the Terra/luna 2022 crash.

If everything is insider trading, is anything insider trading?

— # (#)

Immortal Storage. This is a big one for the archivists in the chat. Microsoft built a glass chip that stores data for 10,000 years. Researchers on Project Silica say they are solving the ‘digital dark age.’ Current storage solutions decay constantly, and this innovation solves for that, so people living 1,000 years from can sift through our dumbass Polymarket bets.

However, I do genuinely hope that one of my favorite videos on the internet, “British lads hit each other with chair,” is preserved for all eternity.

Quick Hits.

• Sammy Azdoufal just wanted to control his robo vacuum with a PS5 controller. He got control of 7,000 vacuums instead.

• Bhutan launched a digital nomad visa but you have to buy their gold-backed crypto TER first.

• Zuck considers a stablecoin comeback. If you remember Diem, his last effort, it’s time to book your colonoscopy.

• OpenAI’s cash burn comparison chart goes viral.
  

— # (#)

— # (#)

— # (#)

— # (#)

If you liked this, send it to a friend. ILY.

Hi friends,

Are you locked in to the new season of our livestream yet? Last week we talked about location-sharing, getting liquidated on Ryanair and welcomed our new partners Octant and Anchorage Digital. Later today we’ll be chatting about Chinese dancing robots and OpenClaw. It’s 2026 after all!

— # (#)

Also, I’m doing a little scheming to try and get to the Network School in a few months’ time with my kids. If a one month Singapore experiment sounds fun, reply to this email. Gauging interest to set up a little informational session.

Writer: Deana

Editor: Miranda

Wall Street goes to Mar-a-Lago (for crypto). The CEOs of Goldman Sachs, Nasdaq, and the NYSE are all heading to Mar-a-Lago today for a crypto "forum" hosted by Don Jr. and Eric Trump. Also in attendance will be Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong, a few senators, and the president of FIFA. The event is tied to World Liberty Financial, the Trump family's crypto venture, which recently got an infusion of $500M from a Sheikh in the UAE. Guests will also enjoy a special appearance from conservative thought leader Nicki Minaj, who is doing a 20-minute fireside chat on “The Business of Music in a Creator-Led Economy.”

— # (#)

Crypto scammers discover the Post Office. Scammers are now sending physical letters impersonating hardware wallet companies like Trezor and Ledger.

— # (#)

The letters have QR codes that link to phishing sites designed to steal your wallet recovery phrase. Tell your friends who self-custody! Unfortunately this tactic would definitely work on me, due to the event outlined in the tweet below. (Sad!)

— # (#)

Quick Hits.

• Beast Industries CEO breaks down their revenue streams.

• The OpenClaw founder exited to OpenAI in record time.

• George W. Bush started a Substack with 12 subscribers.

• “Can you hear me and see me???!?”

• SF creative friends, join this event with cool people from Google and Dropbox.

• 1,566 people want to give Bryan Johnson $1,000,000 to try and live forever.

• Did you catch Octant’s big announcement last week?

— # (#)

— # (#)

— # (#)