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?

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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.

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• 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.

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• 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?

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

Hi friends,

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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.

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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!!!!!!

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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!

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• 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:

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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!!

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Love,

The Boys

Writer: Deana

Editor: Miranda

Octant is making moves. Did you see the news?

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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.

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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.

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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!

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Love,

The Boys

Writer: Deana

Editor: Natasha

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

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• 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!!!

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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

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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!

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• 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????

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• 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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?

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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.”

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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.

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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."

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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?

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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.
  

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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!

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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.”

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

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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!)

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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?

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Hi friends,

Are you going to ETHDenver? Some of the boys are getting together for a drink and you should definitely join them. RSVP here.

Also, we are live at noon ET on X with our first big show of the year, officially welcoming Octant and Anchorage Digital as our new sponsors. Mashal and Artem from Octant will be joining us on the show with a big announcement so tune in.

Love,

The Boys

Writer: Deana

Editor: Miranda

Could it be…a bull case for Ethereum? You probably saw the news yesterday about MrBeast buying Step, a Gen-Z banking app with 7 million users. For background, Step had raised $500M from investors including Stripe, General Catalyst, Charli D'Amelio, Stephen Curry, and The Chainsmokers. As one does!

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Okay but what does this have to do with Ethereum? First, let’s pivot to Tom Lee. Tom is at the helm of the world’s largest corporate Ethereum stash, $BMNR ( ▼ 6.99% ), and invested $200 million into Beast Industries just last month. (Upsetting some shareholders.)

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Here’s where the theory becomes speculative. Bear with me! In a statement from January, Jeff Housenbold, CEO of Beast Industries, said the company would “explore ways to incorporate DeFi into our upcoming financial services platform.”

And we were all like…? What financial services platform? So we had a clue something was brewing, but it was unclear what.

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But now with the Step acquisition, the play is possibly becoming clearer. Step already lets teens build credit, save, and invest. So, if you were to put Step, Tom Lee, and Beast Industries into a blender, maybe you end up with onchain rails inside a Gen-Z finance product, distributed by the most subscribed YouTuber on planet Earth.

To be clear, nobody has yet said this will be built on or with Ethereum. A DeFi layer, should it appear, could land anywhere! We’re putting a lot on Tom Lee and co. getting into the right rooms with the right message.

BUT if any meaningful chunk of it ends up using Ethereum, it’s one of a few plausible paths to scaled onchain adoption that does not require millions of people to wake up and all of a sudden decide to they love crypto wallets. Which feels increasingly unlikely especially given recent sentiment signals.

IDK, I’m daring to dream folks! Change my mind!

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Quick Hits.

• Prediction markets did 10x Vegas’ volume on the Super Bowl.

• Thoughts on the AirPods that can see?

• Kraken fired its CFO in the middle of its IPO process…

• In this week’s edition of Does This Conspiracy Theory Have Legs? Kurt Cobain was murdered.

• Farcaster’s Dan Romero is now Tempo’s Dan Romero.

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Hi friends,

I hope our emails always find you like this.

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Boys Club LIVE will be returning to your screens next Wednesday at noon ET, mark your calendars!

Love,

The Boys

Writer: Deana

Editor: Miranda

Not a place you want to be. It’s hard not to go full tinfoil hat with everything surrounding the Epstein files, and in particular the crypto stuff feels like a (dark, cursed) rabbit hole. Here’s a roundup of the speculation so far from the latest document release.

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First off, Epstein possibly funded Bitcoin Core developers via MIT donations around 2015, a theory that has been circulating for some time. However, just because he funded the devs does not mean that he or his cronies influenced the code, says Bruce Fenton, former executive director of the Bitcoin Foundation. I buy this, for the record, mostly because in Bruce’s words “Bitcoin code is transparent and has lots of eyes on it.”

Next, Epstein was an early investor in Coinbase around 2014, seemingly confirmed in 2018 when he sold his position at a 10X return to Blockchain Capital.

(Timeline note: Jeffrey Epstein had pled guilty in 2008 to state sex-offense charges involving a minor.)

Finally, Ripple and Stellar were framed as competitive threats. This is getting the XRP army all riled up, which is something they love to do. Ethereum is also mentioned, though with seemingly no direct connection to Epstein et al.

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Of course a mention in these files doesn’t implicate wrongdoing, but it continues to suck to see ties to the industry, and it is resurfacing at a bad time considering the market. Also important to note that there is no confirmed primary-source evidence that Epstein actually used Bitcoin or crypto, so far. And no I don’t think Jeffrey Epstein is Satoshi Nakamoto.

Reheating Nachos. Both of the big prediction markets decided to give out free groceries this week in NYC as a marketing-slash-CSR effort. Who ripped off whom? We have our suspicions.

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Quick Hits.

• Sorry but I love the Dune figure skater at the Olympics.

• A frowning stuffed horse is one of the hottest toys in China rn.

• Why did Katseye change the lyrics during their Grammy performance to remove the mention of Tesla? I need a full investigative report on this.

• Did Vitalik nuke L2s yesterday?

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Hi friends,

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I loved receiving replies to last week’s newsletter from subscribers near and far. Please don’t hesitate to reply here, I’d love to hear what you’re thinking about.

Love,

Deana

Editors: Miranda 

Polymarket at the Golden Globes. By now, you’ve probably seen this.

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Most of the markets called the correct award outcomes, which is a feat, though the reception felt mixed. I loved it, and kept imagining Kylie getting bored and ripping some mid-ceremony bets. However, TBD on whether it was a fruitful endeavor for Polymarket. Market volume felt low relative to broadcast viewership (last year was 9.3 million), with markets averaging roughly $150K in trading volume. It seems that conversion from TV viewership to betting transactions was low, though it probably was a brand marketing play anyway. I expect next year will feel quite different.

Vertical Integration. “There’s only two ways I know of to make money: bundling and unbundling,” says Jim Barksdale, the former Netscape CEO. Crypto has been ruthlessly unbundling finance for years (complimentary), and many folks are making a play to be the king bundler as the industry matures. Stablecoin adoption is the main catalyst for this, so much so that JPMorgan is talking about this dangerous “parallel banking system” on earnings calls. We know Stripe is making a play, but as of this week so is Polygon, as they’ve announced more acquisitions to further their vertically integrated, easy-to-plug-into enterprise offering. Decentralized Stripe? Call it a…heated rivalry.

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NYC Token. Former NYC Mayor Eric Adams launched NYC Coin, and immediately removed all the liquidity, executing a textbook rug pull. I’m not going to write any more about this as it’s an absolute clown show, but it’s worth knowing it happened.

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Quick Hits.

• NYC residents, hire this locksmith.

• New, wild conspiracy theory just dropped. This one might be a runner so invest early.

• A new class of drugs is being developed that can be switched on by a magnetic field, with a goal of being able to work selectively on active tumors.

• DeFi is graduating from Discord.

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Hi friends,

I spent most of the holiday break at my mom’s house in upstate NY watching soapy historical dramas and listening to podcasts about Napoleon. Historymaxxing etc. I’m not exactly sure why, as I’m usually obsessively (compulsively?) thinking about the future, but I’m sure it’s dissociative in some way or another. :)

Anyway I’m glad to be back in the saddle here writing to you all. Reply to this email and let me know what you’re thinking about lately, I’m curious and I want to hear from you.

Love,

Deana

Editors: Miranda and Natasha

ICYMI. I’m still quite smoothbrain from the holiday, so I’m dropping a few wacko stories that hit over the last few weeks that you hopefully missed (since you were offline enjoying family and friends, of course!)

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First, the Uber Eats false flag. A “whistleblower” post, which originated on r/confessions and ended up going mega viral on X, alleged an unnamed food delivery app was using a “desperation score” to cut driver pay, among other algorithmic dark arts. It turned out to be AI generated, as all things are these days. However, many of us (me) believed it for a moment because it mapped perfectly to the big tech extraction that we’ve all become accustomed to.

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Next, Polymarket launched prediction markets on future home prices.

Polymarket has been having a time of it lately, fielding a slew of allegations of insider trading across news categories, from Google to Maduro. Insider trading is now so prominent on these platforms that tracking these trades is becoming a whole spectator sport, with dashboards and products.

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As for crypto, we experienced a Christmas week stress test. A few holiday hacks were reported, including Trust Wallet and Polymarket, with ‘third parties’ being the blame for both. Bitcoin finished 2025 in the red and spot Bitcoin and Ether ETFs saw notable net outflows as folks de-risked going into year end, as you do. Not sure what to call this market cycle tbh. Anyone have a name for it?

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Finally, all the Waymos in San Francisco got bricked during a power outage. I’m passionately pro-Waymo however this feels like a big one to be addressed guys!!!

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Quick Hits.

• TikTok crazy gals (their words) are using NYC street cams to lurk on their boyfriends.

• NYC’s new mayor fixed a bridge bump that a meme account had flagged.

• Trish Paytas for Congress?????????????

• Men will mirror polish their cast iron skillets instead of going to therapy.

• My kids are going to go nuts for the LEGO smart brick.

• Have you been following the Clavicular/looksmaxxing news cycle? No worries if not, @default_friend is coming on the livestream in a few weeks to unpack it all. Related, “Chinese Peptides” are going mainstream.

  
  
  

  the Heated Rivalry crossover episode no one asked for.

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gm!

Dearest Deana is in flight as I type this. So you’ve got Miranda here infecting your inbox with today’s Malware musings. Happy for you or sorry that happened.

Before we jump in, please make sure you’ve set your alarms for 12pm EST tomorrow, when we’ll be going live right HERE from our Brooklyn recording studio (Pleasr’s office). Lots of haps to discuss, so this episode’s a true Do. Not. Miss.

Bye.

The Boys

Writer: Miranda

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sToRyTeLLiNg. It would appear that a sign of our maturing times as an industry is being marked by tech’s awakening to the value of, well, good brand creative. WSJ reported that tech cos are desperate to find these magical mystical beings called storytellers. And I just have to say that, between this and the “new media” conversation that’s dominated my timeline as of late, it’s clear that some of y’all need to delve a bit deeper into the advertising and storytelling ancient texts.

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it’s M&A szn. Another age-old practice has the crypto space abuzz. Mergers, acquisitions, and other creative solutions to quickly scaling up your existing capabilities, have entered the chat.

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Tbh it’s been a year of big news on this front. And it doesn’t seem to be slowing down. Last week saw Jackie Bona and the Valora dev team announcing their full team being scooped up by Stripe. Then on Monday, Circle grabbed Axelar’s core devs, with Common Prefix stepping in to lead protocol development in their stead.

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And how do I make this about me?

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Quick Hits

• Stani dropped a big update on what’s ahead for AAVE

• Dogs as dependents has entered the chat (?)

• Coinbase is streaming big announcements today and, importantly, Brian’s wearing his glasses in anticipation

• Leighton is buying an island off of the coast of Manhattan

• Solana announced Breakpoint’26 is coming to London, and the responses were nothing if not funny. I personally love LDN and, as someone who is often in event organizer mode, only have this to say to many of you.

• A bunch of our besties got together to tell the story of the one and only pplplsr. Watch the full ep here.

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Good morning,

I’m en route to San Francisco to join Sam Altman at this event. Let me know what q’s you have for the big dog.

The rest of the team is in Abu Dhabi covering Solana Breakpoint in a marathon, 3-day livestream. Tune in to hear from the founders of Solana, Phantom Wallet, DoubleZero and more. Streaming Thursday-Saturday at noon ET on our Twitter.

Love,

Deana

Hit Piece. Did you see the NY Times article about stablecoins? Nic Carter called it “the most bad-faith anti-stablecoin argument I've ever seen.” Here’s the meat of it.

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Also today I learned that even the much-lauded FDIC deposit insurance kind of sucks.

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Farcasted. On Monday, decentralized social media platform “Farcaster” was the timeline’s main character after its founder Dan Romero said that they’re going to prioritize building their wallet over the social features of the platform. “Social-first didn’t work” said Dan in the contentious post, which tbh I thought was old news. Dan went on to say that he believes the wallet will grow the social network of Farcaster, but it seems like most people didn’t read that far. (Which is on Dan as a comms fumble, imo.)

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In addition to loyal users feeling slighted by Dan & co.’s positioning, much of the ire was derived from disappointed airdrop farmers, who feel as though they “wasted their time” engagement farming on an app where no token will be launched. Okay babe here’s your 100$Degen. You can’t blame a team for not wanting to build on a plateaued network indefinitely. Thems the breaks! Also, the Base app is built on Farcaster so just head over there?

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Quick Hits.

• Sorry if I haven’t returned your texts, I’ve been busy reading firsthand accounts of DMT use from the Erowid Experience Vaults.

• Also sorry if I haven’t been returning your emails either, I’ve been busy watching this literal genius talk about accents on TikTok.

• Looksmaxxing teens have lost the plot.

• This tweet of mine bombed but I’m keeping it up because I still really can’t believe the plot that’s been teased for Toy Story 5.

• It’s fork season - Fusaka & Madhugiri.

• Are you going to the Chinese Peptide rave?

• AI George Washington. UNSUBSCRIBE!

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Good morning,

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I will be in San Francisco next week doing the most San Francisco thing possible (going to a tech event).

The rest of the gals will be in Abu Dhabi for Solana Breakpoint, livestreaming with the founder of Phantom, Ian Rogers of Ledger, and friend of the pod Trevor McFedries about his new thing.

If you are in either place and want to grab a coffee, do reply to this email. Otherwise, see you at Stellar House in Miami tmrw? Natasha is on at 1.

Love,

Deana

Merry Spendmas. Congratulations consumers, we put record numbers on the board for Black Friday 2025. We spent considerably more (sales up 9% on the year) but bought less (2% fewer items than last year). Okay inflation we see you girl. Also Klarna usage was up 45% on the year. Sephora even offered a BNPL-specific incentive as reported in the Boys Club Slack.

AI-driven sales were up 805%, which feels like it reveals a lot about how we’re all making decisions these days. Unrelated, Dirt’s gift guide is the only one I’m reading this year.

Ups and Downs. The Trump family’s onchain empire is having a week. There were a few relatively positive announcements for World Liberty Financial (rolling out RWA products) and their USD1 stablecoin (used in a $2 billion investment into Binance). Though both feel like good news theatre tbh. At the same time, the stock price for Eric and Don Jr.’s mining company ‘American Bitcoin’ dropped 40% in less than 30 minutes on Tuesday. Number go up, number go down. No one is immune!!!

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Quick Hits.

• Hate all you want on Waymos, but they’re saving lives.

• Joe Rogan is talking about Jesus’ second coming via AI.

• Chinese Wine > French Wine ??

• OpenTable is using AI to let restaurants know if you’re a pain in the ass.

• Phone theft is so widespread that Revolut launched a new feature to address it.

• AT&T customers, this is your last call to get in on the big class action settlement.

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Hi,

We donated $200,000 to charity. Don’t say crypto is all scammers and hacks.

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Will you be in Miami for Art Basel? We’ll be doing an invite-only experience for creators with Base on December 3rd. Reply to this email if that’s you and you want in.

Then on December 4th, we’re diving into the future of finance and culture at Stellar House Miami. Join us poolside for brunch, and then hang for a full day of programming.

Love,

The Boys

Writer: Deana

Bitcoin’s Bad Month. Bitcoin is down bad, just in time for Thanksgiving dinner with the in-laws.

me: actually privacy coins are up

A few reasons why: 1) The ETFs that had a hot run up earlier this year are now seeing more outflows than inflows, which puts pressure on the price. 2) People are nervous about the U.S. economy and interest rates staying higher, so they’re taking risk down in general, not just in crypto. 3) People can earn decent yield in safe/boring things like money market funds, so they’re keeping them there. Have fun explaining this to your dad this week!

The Soft Doxx. X turned on an “About This Account” card that shows what country or region an account is in to “secure the integrity of the global town square.”

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Many people are in favor of this update! They say it exposes fraud and bot farms that are incentivized to sow discontent. Vitalik has a smart take.

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But it seems like more people have been tweeting @NikitaBier to tell him that no one asked for this, this is probably the worst feature X ever shipped and hey, why don’t you fix DMs instead.

justice for Florida

My take is that this is good for the VPN business.

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Quick Hits.

• The Venice airport turned their baggage claim into a roulette wheel.

• Grindr ends talks to go private for $3.46 billion.

• We’re all in a bad mood because we’re dehydrated.

• Second Meta whistleblower testified about harmful effects on teens.

• Klarna jumps on the stablecoin bandwagon.

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Hi,

Writing to you live and direct from Ethereum World’s Fair in Buenos Aires. A stunning city filled with purple trees that look like this.

We set up a news desk and then threw a party for 600 friends with a midnight drop for Pod.network.

always passing the green line test

See you in Miami for Art Basel? We’ll be there all week. First up for creators is our invite-only experience with Base on December 3rd. Reply to this email if that’s you and you want in.

Then on December 4th, we’re diving into the future of finance and culture at Stellar House Miami. Join us poolside for brunch, and then hang for a full day of programming.

To Wynwood!

The Boys

Writer: Deana

Themes, trends, winners and losers from our week at Devconnect.

1. Everyone is excited about agentic payments and especially x402, but no one knows what to use them for yet. Maybe we need to make more friends. Reach across the aisle as it were….

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2. There’s a heated debate about what “support” startups can expect from the blockchains on which they deploy. Are you on team David or team Jesse?

they both liked this tweet

2. Speaking of distribution, it’s all about Mini Apps. Shout out to World for killing it here. Example: SimpliFi Pay.

3. Aave App. Deposit insurance is a big open question for all of crypto. Did Aave just solve it by offering $1M in protections for deposited funds? Folks are excited about this but also exactly HOW they’re going to do this is still unclear.

4. Privacy. Moving toward the more pragmatic, less philosophical. Forget the Winklevoss Twins’ Cypherpunk project, check out Unlink instead, which they’re calling “Stripe for privacy.”

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7. Real scale for p2p stablecoin usage in LATAM. Look at Ripio, with 24 million customers and a huge share using it for p2p payments.

8. The rumor mill is saying a punch was thrown at the Uniswap Cup, and that some teams hired professional athletes instead of having their own employees play. The question that we can’t help asking is…why? 

Quick Hits.

• The Quarter Zips trend.

• The crypto treasure hunt/scam (??) going viral.

• Will be censoring my fingerprints now.

• The AI-generated dance song taking over TikTok has been excluded from the Billboard charts.

• Speaking of, they’re saying Reels and Shorts are worse for your brain than TikTok.

• 90% of Matcha on store shelves is not actually Matcha.

• Another big Cloudflare outage this week…

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Hi,

The Boys Club team is headed to Buenos Aires for Devconnect. November 18th is The Big Day™️. So come say hi at one of these events.

AM) Money Rails, we’ll be speaking AND livestreaming from Polygon’s full-day summit on internet-native, programmable money. Come say hi!

PM) The Hard Launch party with Polygon, Pod Network and pals Privy and Blockaid. RSVP now, like right now.

Love,

The Boys

Writer: Deana

Editor: Miranda

Say GOODBYE to seed phrases with Bitkey, a Bitcoin wallet.

Use code BOYSCLUB20 for a discount on your Bitkey.

Cash App Me. Yesterday, your favorite ~new media~ outlet (us) got a sneak preview of Cash App’s latest features at an immersive press day near Union Square in NYC. Disclosure, Boys Club works with Bitkey (see above) but this was an unpaid, editorial endeavor.

hiiiiiiiiiiii

Cash App is very much designing for our evolving relationship with money. 40% of their customers are what they call “independent earners,” or people whose primary income is not from traditional W-2 employment or direct deposits. This is where the puck is going.

Though they didn’t say it outright, it’s clear they’re positioning Cash App as a replacement for the trad bank account. One that’s not a third space for your money, but your primary account. (A hope we’ve heard from Brian Armstrong at Coinbase as well.) Cash App’s souped-up ‘Cash App Green’ program speaks to this, providing perks and rewards akin to a bank account, that scale with activity.

If I were the CEO of Chase Bank, I’d have feelings.

Jamie Dimon has 24 hrs to respond.

Credit access and BNPL. They cited a stat that 100 million people in the US are left out of the credit market, and building for access was a repeated theme. To that end, a few new Afterpay features were announced to help “smooth over” customers’ cashflows. They’re making it pretty frictionless to borrow in a few quick swipes in the app, which tbh gives me a litttttttttttle pause. Though they did speak to safety measures like fee transparency and, critically, not letting folks roll over loans.

Now, to the crypto of it all.

Jack Dorsey, the founder of Cash App, Square, TWITTER etc., is famously a pretty immovable Bitcoin maximalist, with the Tweet below demonstrating 1) a low-key disdain for the tokens and 2) a staunch belief that Bitcoin is superior hard money. (Nothing but respect to Jack for his consistency btw.)

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So I was genuinely surprised and delighted to see Cash App make a move into stablecoins. It’s not necessarily a full embrace of ‘crypto’; but it is a pragmatic acceptance that the stablecoin, or “digital dollar,” as they called it, is often the best tool for the job in a peer to peer stack.

They used USDC in a demo showing off a new feature that lets you send stables from your Cash App balance to an external wallet address. They mentioned supporting “multiple stablecoins,” though didn’t reveal which ones.

In addition to the Square Bitcoin map, they also unveiled a new Bitcoin payments feature in the app. It lets customers pay merchants in USD, but then instantly coverts to Bitcoin for the merchant without fees or spread. “USD payments on Bitcoin rails,” undercutting the credit card fees for merchants.

The challenge. 24 million Cash App users have bought Bitcoin, and presumably many of them still hold a Bitcoin balance in their wallets. So, this is potentially a big deal if (BIG IF!) they can convince people that Bitcoin is spendable money. The merchant side is now incentivized, so there is a flywheel waiting to start spinning if the behavior shift does arrive.

Then came Moneybot. An in-app, agentic assistant that can both give personalized advice and take action on a user’s behalf (with their approval.) We saw Moneybot moving money into savings and splitting a bill, and also prompting a user with suggestions for what to do with their funds.

Moneybot pulls from your financial history, but also has access to the full big brain of insights across their huge database. People seemed really into Moneybot and I get it.

Do I want more DeFi flavor (staking??) in the app? Yes I do. Idk if/how they get there given Dorsey’s stance on that side of the industry, but I’m hoping.

All in all, an inspiring day. We spotted Emily Sundberg (Feed Me), Oren John (@orenmeetsworld) and Associated Press reporter with whom Natasha spent a few weeks at the federal courthouse in lower Manhattan, covering the SBF trial.

That chapter truly feels like a distant memory after the momentum on display yesterday. Amen.

Interests???

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Hi,

We’re doing a special peptides edition of the livestream this Friday at noon ET.

We’ll be on with Zak David, the founder of Peptide.Partners. He’s a former pharmacy technician who went into high-frequency trading and is now selling Chinese peptides, so it should be a really interesting ride.

Bring all the questions you’ve ever had about peptides but were too afraid to ask. We’ll be taking Qs from the comments.

What’s a good Chinese peptide for someone just getting into Chinese peptides

— Santi Ruiz (@rSanti97)
9:22 PM • Oct 18, 2025

Warmest Regards,

The Boys

Writer: Deana

Editor: Miranda

Say GOODBYE to seed phrases with Bitkey, a Bitcoin wallet.

Use code BOYSCLUB20 for a discount on your Bitkey.

Risk Off. Crypto has been dumping this week, just in time for us to look like idiots at Thanksgiving in front of our families. One reason for the downturn is generally bad vibes in the U.S. economy overall, causing investors to want to get out of risk assets.

We just need to cool off before the next cool off so we can be prepared for the cool off after that

— Gwart (@GwartyGwart)
1:17 PM • Nov 3, 2025

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent used the R-word (recession) in an interview on CNN on Sunday in reference to the housing market. So, not great. The drop in prices also caused a cascade of liquidations across the market, causing further downward pressure.

Bitcoin Fear and Greed Index is 21. Extreme Fear
Current price: $103,579

— Bitcoin Fear and Greed Index (@BitcoinFear)
1:30 PM • Nov 4, 2025

Balancer Gets Drained. Balancer, a DeFi exchange and vault, was exploited on November 3rd, with attackers siphoning somewhere around $125 million across Ethereum and other chains. It was a “technically intricate” hack on a battle-tested protocol that was overlooked by many audits. This is rough for DeFi.

State of the market rn

People begging the Balancer exploiter for money for their kids school, their gas bill, or even just $1 (message cost 23 cents to send)

— Luke Cannon (@lukecannon727)
10:36 PM • Nov 4, 2025

Balancer is very much considered a “blue chip” protocol, so its exploit has us rattled. Check on your pools.

just an observation ~

new ct class is grave dancing all over balancer, posting prediction market screenshots and shitposting

og ct class is devastated and realizes *how much* this sets us back

— niko (@nikokampouris)
2:51 PM • Nov 3, 2025

Quick Hits.

• People are spending more time than ever on Instagram Reels.

• “Robot Massages” are a thing I guess.

• I genuinely love Alive Internet Theory.

• “Arm Farms” teaching humanoid robots how to do chores.

• The origin of the futuristic “liquid metal look.”

"we're building a god out of sand, and we think it will use stablecoins and a bank account"

— Josh Cincinnati (@acityinohio)
4:08 PM • Oct 31, 2025

and these market makers

why don’t they just market *make* the price go up??

— blockgraze (@blockgraze)
2:33 PM • Nov 4, 2025

wym you're Anne Hathaway on a zoom call for halloween?

— Wirelyss 👁️‍🗨️💫 (@wirelyss)
10:48 PM • Oct 31, 2025

my buddies wife having her baby today and i nearly shattered my phone screen from typing “welcome back mr. cheney” in the group chat

— big content guy (@bigcontentguy)
6:01 PM • Nov 4, 2025

"Now tell me where the seed phrase is"

— GégéLSMR (@gegelsmr4)
9:38 PM • Oct 29, 2025