Release: LichtFeld Studio v0.5.3 is out! With 316 commits... merged into master, this release is a huge step forward for LichtFeld Studio. What's new in v0.5.3 • Vulkan viewer/rendering migration: New Vulkan viewport pipeline, pass graph, VkSplat renderer, Vulkan point-cloud renderer, 3DGUT/VkSplat support, improved alpha/depth composition, tighter CUDA/Vulkan interoperability, and device matching on multi-GPU systems. • RAD + LOD workflow: Added RAD file export/import, RAD LOD viewer, Spark-style GPU LOD selection, GPU-driven page prefetching, a bounded VRAM pool, out-of-core PLY-to-RAD LOD conversion, and RAD import/export speedups of approximately 3–5×. • HiGS / macro-tile inference: Added a macro-tile inference path for the Vulkan viewer, including macro sorting, batched rasterization, composition, and capacity management. • Asset Manager: Added and significantly enhanced the Asset Manager with thumbnails, SH information, faster synchronization, import-from-URL support, docked mode, data-loading popup integration, and general UI cleanup. • Viewport export: Integrated viewport export directly into the application as a toolbar/overlay tool, added fast render_view_u8-style readback paths, fixed high-resolution clipping issues, improved orthographic export parity, resolved 32K image/video export problems, and added post-export GPU resource cleanup. • Selection and tooling: Added and reworked selection toolbar controls, the Select menu, ring selection, color eyedropper, distance-from-center selection, faster point-cloud and zoomed-out selection paths, Vulkan measurement tool fixes, and drag-and-drop scene graph improvements. • UI/RmlUi platform work: Major RmlUi redesign efforts, hot reloading for RML/RCSS/Python UI files, reactive UI/store integration, viewport toolbar flyouts, improved histogram interactions, input settings enhancements, custom TRS gizmos, and numerous panel, tooltip, and localization fixes. • Windowing and UX: Added borderless window support, title bar drag/maximize/restore behavior, work-area-aware maximize functionality, resize responsiveness and performance improvements, and DPI/UI scaling fixes. • Training and data features: Added adaptive depth loss and depth gradients for the EWA rasterizer, mask loading/application fixes, a new combined Ignore+Segment mask mode, --add-splat, --freeze, improved checkpoint and training state handling, and training speed and VRAM optimizations. • COLMAP/equirectangular support: Added SPHERICAL/equirectangular camera model support and canonical EQUIRECTANGULAR handling, along with fixes for undistortion and camera export. This release will be available to all supporters as a Windows binary via approximately in about an hour. At the same time, LichtFeld Studio remains committed to being free and open source under GPLv3 and can also be built directly from source. Please consider supporting the ongoing development of LichtFeld Studio through a donation via the portal or the supporters page. Thank you to everyone who supports this project financially, contributes code, reports bugs, provides datasets, helps with the website, and contributes in countless other ways. A special thank you to our foundational sponsor Core11 and our Gold Sponsor Volinga, whose support has helped make the current state of the software possible. Thank you as well to every donor and to all of our new Bronze Sponsors. Looking ahead to v0.6 For the next major release, work will focus primarily on stability and user experience. This includes improved cleanup workflows and the ability to modify training parameters while training is in progress. I would also like to introduce a native .licht project format that allows users to save and restore their complete editor state. You can find links to our main sponsors below. Please also visit our website to discover all our Bronze Sponsors. Hint: We do not yet have a Silver Sponsor or Platinum 😉show more

This app has completely transformed over the last three... years and it is amazing to see how far it has come. - Launched X Chat and encrypted DMs - Launched Video/Audio calling - Launched Ad revenue share program for the creators - Reached a new alltime high of userseconds - Launched Community Notes - Community Notes passed 1M contributers mark - Launched the AI driven algo - Paid millions to the creators - Integerated Grok within the app - Rebranded as 𝕏 - Open sourced the recommendation algorithm. - Over 500 million posts everyday - Over 100 billion impressions daily - 650+ million users - 400000+ communities - #1 News App in 155+ countries - 2 billion+ app downloads - People are spending more time on X - 6th most visited website - Launched X Pro - Announced X Payments - Reduced child sexual abuse material by around 95 since the acquisition - Released subscriptions for creators - Removed legacy checkmarks - Prioritized the verified accounts to fight spam bots - All time low hate speech levels - Released new features in the shortest time period in Xs history - Exposed truth via Twitter files - Removed censorship - Restored free speech - Launched long form posts / Articles. - Improved the live streaming quality - Started paying the creators twice in a month - Added live chat to live streams - Enhanced the Community Notes algorithm - Added an ability to post timestamps while uploading videos - Added an edit post feature - Added view counts on posts publicly - Enhanced the support for Premium users - Added similar posts button - Added new app icons for premium users - Launched different tiers for Premium - Launched Verified Organizations - Added bookmark button on home timeline for posts - Over Ninety percent of the top 100 advertisers have returned to X - Video views are up as compared to previous years - All time high platform usage - Added more privacy options for calling - Introduced recruitment jobs feature for verified organizations - Expanded the community notes in more countries worldwide - Improved ad experience - Increased group chat size to 200 people - Lowered the eligibility threshold for ads revenue sharing from 15M to 5M - Rolled out vertical video ads for brands - Improved communities experience - Announced the removal of tweepcred system - Added live streams on the top bar of the feed - Improved live streaming tested game streaming - Launched the immersive video player - Made the process of reporting a post easier - Improved the UI - Announced the ability of group calling - Announced the removal of block feature except for DMs - Major upgrades to videos and media - Secured money transmission license in multiple states for payments - Introduced video downloads for verified users - Added an ability to limit replies to verified users only - Launched expanded bios - Made communities accessible in more countries - Added ID verification - Added an ability to hide likes - Added a tab for verified followers on user profiles - Added an ability to accept dms from verified users only to prevent spam - Introduced dm support for the ad customers - Announced that X will fund legal representation for users fired from their jobs for their posts - Included posts from communities in for you feed - Renamed notes feature to articles that will have no character limits - Added highlights tab to the profiles - Improved account analytics - Added an ability for community admins to spotlight their community in the profile - Introduced voice dms - Deleted millions of bot accounts - Introduced an ability to upload long videos - Improved advertisement brand safety - Introduced formatting for long form posts - Extended the community notes availability to more countries - Introduced individual reply to dms custom emoji reactions - Launched faster playback mini player for videos - Added an ability to allow dms from subs only - Continued UX/Ui improvements - Added air play button for videos on iOS - Added an ability to fast forwardrewind videos on - Became the most downloaded news app in multiple countries - Improved ad relevance - Removed child po*n - Introduced rate limits to prevent data scraping - Added fast forward backward feature to videos - Launched subscriber only replies - Launched spaces on web - Added an ability to hide the blue checkmark - Reduced scam accounts - Improved engagements for advertisers - Reinstated a multitude of suspended accounts - Introduced Multiple organization affiliate badges - Improved post analytics - Community notes debunking propaganda misstatements - Introduced verified badges for organizations - Launched X TV and many more features.show more

The Visual Studio Code insiders version that just shipped... and will ship in the next few days will come with an insane amount of new capabilities. A few highlights: - You can now run sub-agents in parallel. Yes, really. I even attached a video. - Major UX improvements for sub agents, especially visible in the chat window - A new search tool wrapped as a sub-agent that iteratively runs multiple search tools: semantic_search, file_search, grep_search Which connects nicely to the point above: multiple searches running in parallel, efficiently and fast - Anthropic’s Message API is now enabled by default - You can choose the model for the cloud agent (three available, all premium) - Extended thinking support when using the Claude cloud agent This is part of the broader multi-vendor cloud support under AgentsHQ I wrote about a few weeks ago - Tasks sent to the background agent (basically the CLI tool) now always run in isolation, each with its own git worktree - In a multi-repo workspace, assigning a task to a cloud agent prompts you to choose the target repo Same behavior when opening an empty workspace with no repo - Support for building an external index for files not supported by GitHub’s default indexing - UI/UX improvements for starting new sessions and switching between local / background / cloud agents - Skills are now first-class citizens, just like prompt files, with better UX indicating when a skill is loaded - Improved API for dynamic contribution of prompt files New V2 includes skills as part of the model. Curious to see the extensions that will leverage this - Finally, initial support for showing context usage percentage per session - Skills are enabled by default - Resizable chat window and session view. Small thing, but it was driving me crazy 😁 - A new integrated browser meant to replace the old simple browser Maybe the beginning of real browser use? - Better UI/UX for token streaming in chat - Ability to index external files not supported by GitHub There’s a lot more. Some of it hasn’t fully landed yet, but everything that has is already in Insiders. The next stable release should drop in early February. As usual, I’m just shocked by the volume of features this team ships every month. After the holiday slowdown, this one is shaping up to be a wild release.show more

Wow. WOW. WOOOOOOOW. So um, that first Wildcard+Thousands stream... was... *amazing* and also... a *lot* 😅 In the end, it was *exactly* what we were hoping for - a true stress test of ALL these systems coming together for the first time. We are SO grateful for the thousands of people who showed up today to play, attend, tune-in and help us PLAYTEST all this new stuff. We can't wait to see you all again at NEXT WEEK'S EX2 EVENT! So, now let's talk about how it went... Stuff that worked: - Our community SHOWED UP. Oh boy did you show up 😅. Our servers were straining under the load... which is good actually, in fact it's the whole point. Even more importantly, we have already received insanely valuable feedback, bug reports, stuff people loved/hated - and it's only been a few hours since the stream ended. I can't even explain to y'all how valuable this process is. Yes it's stressful, it reminds me of trying to keep Words With Friends online during that first insane year, but it's EXACTLY what we were hoping for (NEED) to turn this into the polished, top-notch game and streaming experience we are on a mission to deliver. I truly can't thank y'all enough, and hope to see you again when we run it all back again next week 🥹 - The stream itself stayed up and was mostly stable! Phew 😅. For context, ThousandsTV is not a twitch wrapper, it's a web3-native streaming tech stack built we built specifically to connect game, web/mobile, and blockchain together all at the same time. There are a LOT of moving pieces going on behind the scenes. - We brought viewers INTO THE GAME! Viewers showed up in the stands of the arena, with connected wallets/assets, triggered actions/rallies from chat, and were seen and heard during the whole stream. - The brand new 2v2 build of Wildcard was (mostly) stable and our players and viewers seemed to be having a blast down on the field and up in the stands. It was thrilling to watch Team Blue dominate, even though Team Red held their own in game 3! - Our production crew did an insanely good job running the stream, managing the players, shoutcasters, and talent, and producing a top-notch show. Of course we will work hard to make every stream better than the last, but I was super proud of how our team "rolled with the punches" during today's event. Stuff that didn't work (and/or needs to be dramatically improved): - Although it's fun to see chat going crazy, chat spam is actually something we are passionate to FIX. As you can see from the attached video, chat spam dominated today's stream and made it impossible for anyone to even see anyone else's messages. We have some GREAT ideas for how to fix this and actually turn chat spam into a FUN and exciting and not annoying thing - but those improvements didn't get shipped in time for this event. - Credits purchasing flow needs a LOT of work. As I'm sure y'all know, bringing money on chain is pretty complicated, and although we've been working hard to make this as seamless as possible, it still needs a TON of improvements. Many users who WANTED to spend money today weren't able to and/or ran into frustrating bugs in the credit purchase flow. Fixing this is obviously a top priority for our team. - Rallies need a LOT of work. Spectator-interactive features like rallies are at the heart of our vision for Wildcard. These "stream apps", as we call them, are the UNLOCK for how spectators, viewers and fans directly connect and interact with their favorite competitors, content creators, and communities. The current rally feature HINTS at this potential, but it needs to be WAY easier to understand, use, and have fun with. Improvements are ON THE WAY. - Referees were only partially working. Referees are a key innovation of the Thousands platform. They are AI-driven "personalities" (NPCs) that pay attention to everything that's happening in the arena, both on the field and especially in the stands (i.e. in chat, during rallies, etc.) The referees then make "calls" at the end of every match, rewarding users for their engagement and participation. Unfortunately, the referees weren't fully functional and seemed to drop the ball on recognizing everyone's contributions (especially people who showed up holding valuable assets such as Wildpasses in their wallets, and people who boosted those rallies with credits.) What's happening next: 1. We are combing through ALL the logs from the event right now, to make sure we don't miss a SINGLE action that our viewers and fans took during the event, including what they brought in their wallets (i.e. Wildpass holders!), any credits that were purchased, rallies that users engaged with, etc. This information is normally processed by our referees, who then determine dynamically how they're going to distribute $WC awards. We were originally hoping to complete this process and the subsequent airdrops within a few hours after the event, but given the amount of data, we need a bit more time to run these scripts (and airdrops) in batches instead of all at once, and make sure ALL of the data is being included. IMPORTANT: I will keep y'all updated in real-time here on twitter/X as this process is ongoing, and let you know the moment it's complete and all the awards have been distributed (i.e. when to go check your wallets 😎) 2. PLEASE keep sending us your feedback and bug reports. Open a ticket on our Discord and let us know what you loved, what you hated, and especially what we need to FIX. Given the overwhelming response to this event, it will likely take us several days to process everyone's feedback and fix all the bugs, but we WILL NOT REST until every ticket is closed/resolved. Thank you in advance for your patience. 3. We turn it up another notch next week. As our dear friends Wolves DAO just announced, the Wildcard Exhibition Event #2 is streaming LIVE from the WOLVES DEN AT GDC next Friday! If you missed out on all the action today, DON'T WORRY, because as I keep saying: we are just getting warmed up (and there is a LOT more b that needs to be distributed, get what I'm sayin??? 😎) Finally: Just wanted to say THANK YOU, again. Truly, from the bottom of my (our) hearts. Your excitement and enthusiasm for what we're building is why we do this. Even (especially, in fact) when you tell us all the things you want us to improve. We thrive off this feedback, it's how this game and this platform go from good to GREAT. I am so grateful for those of you who are taking this journey with us. SEE YA NEXT WEEK!!!show more

As we prepare to launch several projects, we're eager... to provide a general update to our community. We are steadily approaching our end goal, thanks to the daily progress we're making toward our vision. Achieving our objectives will bring about a significant transformation in cross-chain interoperability and the flow of liquidity within protocols. This will address crucial challenges and drive mass adoption. Our future-focused approach and effective team collaboration keep us moving forward in an organized manner. Let’s delve deeper into the state of development of our current products and upcoming projects. Tao Bridge Starting with the Tao Bridge, which enables the #Bittensor community to unlock DeFi opportunities with their $TAO via a highly efficient blockchain like #MultiversX, known for its security, speed, and affordability. We deeply admire #Bittensor and believe a project like that is crucial for the future of not just the crypto space but also humanity, as it addresses the major challenges AI faces today: centralization, siloed and isolated work, which pose risks and hinder the technology's potential. We are committed to the vision of subnets and dynamic $TAO, convinced that this ecosystem is as groundbreaking as #Ethereum or #Bitcoin. We will continue to support #Bittensor wherever possible, and our bridge will also expand to other chains with Hatom V2. The TAO Bridge, deployed on and accessible through will launch on the Mainnet in 14 days, on March 27th. You can follow the countdown on the lending page at Given that our main priorities are security and stability, this period will be primarily focused on quality assurance to ensure a flawless Mainnet launch. The launch will also introduce TAO Liquid Staking at along with the integration of both $wTAO and $swTAO on the lending page. This allows #Bittensor users to leverage liquid stake, employ short or long strategies, among other DeFi strategies, or simply access stablecoin liquidity while maintaining exposure to their $TAO. Up to $1M will be distributed as additional incentives on top of the supply APYs at the launch of the $wTAO and $swTAO money markets, with $200K allocated for the first month specifically for bootstrapping. Initially, 70% of rewards will go to liquidity providers, and 30% to those using $HTM to boost their lending positions. This changes to a 50-50 split in the second month, and by the third month, all incentives are directed through the Booster. This approach encourages early participation and sustained engagement with $HTM. Introducing $TAO to #MultiversX will result in the creation of Liquidity Pools (LPs) on both AshSwap 🔥 and xExchange ⚡. These LPs will be incentivized by both entities, and Hatom will distribute extra rewards at launch. The goal is to make #MultiversX a one-stop hub for $TAO holders. Upon stabilizing the volumes, there will also be plans to integrate it on AshPerp 🔥. Furthermore, with the release of $USH, users will have the ability to mint it while retaining exposure to their $TAO. The TAO Bridge and TAO Liquid Staking smart contracts have been audited by Runtime Vеrification and @arda_project, while penetration testing and DevSecOps have been performed on our infrastructure by CertiK. We're excited to announce our exclusive partnership with TAONEW one of the top 5 validators on #Bittensor. TAONEW has been extremely helpful and supportive from day one. By sharing 50% of its service fee with its stakers, TAONEW enables Hatom to offer an optimized Staking APY to its users. Since our initial reference, #Bittensor has grown sevenfold, becoming the largest AI project in the crypto sphere. We reiterate our commitment to contribute to such technology and hope to address some of its current DeFi challenges. Syfy Moving forward, today marks a significant milestone, not only for our decentralized protocols but also for our development companies, which currently stand as the sole and primary contributors to the Hatom Labs and Soul Labs. We’re excited to unveil Syfy, the evolved identity of Hatom Labs and Soul Labs, now serving as the parent entity for our burgeoning development companies. Organization is crucial for scalability, which is why Syfy was established to cultivate an environment where our teams can collaborate more seamlessly, enhancing our effectiveness and efficiency. At the same time, we remain committed to upholding the financial independence of each project, supported by its own community of funding contributors. Feel free to explore our website at for more information! Additionally, don't forget to follow Syfy and explore their Genesis article highlighted in their initial post: Booster V2 The Booster V2 will introduce a range of new features and opportunities for $HTM holders: Optimized Position Boosting: Previously, boosting was done individually for each money market, necessitating $HTM token distribution and periodic rebalancing due to price fluctuations. With Booster V2, the system now considers the overall position, eliminating the need for manual rebalancing. Gas Fee Reduction: Booster V2 implements optimizations that result in reduced gas fees, making transactions more cost-effective for users. Incorporation of Governance: Users staking $HTM tokens gain voting rights directly within the Booster, allowing them to participate in governance decisions while maintaining their staked positions. (Note: Only $HTM tokens are considered for governance; LP tokens are not included.) Enhanced Boosting Mechanism: The Booster V2 enables LP Tokens to boost positions within the Booster, leveraging trading fees from swaps and farm incentives while boosting lending positions. Smart Contract Completion: The Booster smart contract has been completed and audited by @arda_project, ensuring security and reliability. Frontend Implementation: The frontend design for Booster V2 has been successfully implemented, providing users with an intuitive interface. Collaboration with xExchange: Exploration is ongoing for collaboration with xExchange ⚡ to enable LP creation, farming, and meta-staking within the Booster. Upon finalization of testing, we will launch the Booster V2 on the devnet to gather community feedback and begin preparations for the mainnet release. Soul Before delving into Soul Labs's developments, it's essential to summarize its core functionality briefly: Soul Labs seamlessly connects different lending protocols and blockchains, facilitating lending and borrowing across platforms like Aave, Compound Labs, and Hatom Labs, consolidating liquidity and users' borrowing capabilities. Utilizing LayerZero Labs and other messaging layers for cross-chain communication, Soul Labs bypasses asset bridging or synthetics, unlocking novel DeFi strategies and solidifying its position as the ultimate solution for cross-lending dilemmas. Soul V1 will be permissionless, holding censorship-resistant features, incorporating multiple redundancy mechanisms, and providing support for various DApps. We're thrilled to announce that, following the launch of the Tao Bridge in 2-3 weeks, we will introduce the Soul Labs website. This platform has been meticulously crafted over 250 days to not only provide a comprehensive overview of our vision but also to offer an engaging and captivating experience that promises to be memorable. Regarding the app, significant progress has been made on the V1 protocol, including: Smart Contract Development and Testing: • Completion of the initial phase of smart contract development. • Conducting advanced testing to ensure the system's robustness. • Establishment of a fully functional proof of concept. Successful deployment and testing on the #Goerli (#Ethereum Testnet) and #Mumbai (#Polygon Testnet), leveraging LayerZero Labs for seamless operation. Feature Enhancement and Protocol Optimization: • Enhanced testing procedures to bolster system resilience. • Integration of advanced features and significant code refactoring for optimization. • Incorporation of various communication methods, including LayerZero Labs, Formerly Axelar, now at @axelar, Chainlink CCIP), and wormholecrypto, into Soul Labs framework, enhancing its resilience and flexibility. This allows Soul Labs to maintain operation through alternative protocols if the primary one is temporarily paused. Website Development and Documentation: • Nearing the completion of the v1 app, with final touches being applied. • The preparation of comprehensive V1 documentation and the Yellow Paper, available upon Soul Labs's public launch, offering detailed insights into the platform's infrastructure and capabilities. USH Recognizing the critical need for stable liquidity within the ecosystem, we have positioned ourselves at the forefront of providing a solution by introducing $USH, the first native, decentralized, and over-collateralized stablecoin on #MultiversX. As market conditions have improved, we have observed a growing demand for stablecoins in the ecosystem, evidenced by the utilization rate in the Lending Protocol spiking to over 90% several times in recent months. Therefore, our goal is to tackle the current challenges faced by users by creating a robust product that will not only help them hedge against market volatility but also open up better opportunities to trade the markets and generate yield. We're happy to unveil the $USH website, now live with a sleek and intuitive user interface, designed for ease of use, which ensures that interacting with the protocol is straightforward and accessible for all. You can access it now through this link: For the technical side, we’re advancing steadily and we’ve accomplished the following milestones: Lending Protocol Facilitator: • Coded the first version to support multiple discount factors for different collaterals. • Implemented tracking of borrowing effectiveness to enable earnings forecasting for the module and support minting processes. Isolated Pools Facilitator: • Coded the first version of Isolated Pools Facilitator. • Use of $EGLD or $sEGLD as collateral, with positions stored always in $EGLD to benefit the protocol through Liquid Staking and lending interest. • Virtual account implementation for converting $sEGLD earnings into $USH, functioning like liquidation where users deposit $USH for a higher amount of $HsELGD. Staking Module • Coded the first version of the Staking Module that allows users to stake and unstake without any restrictions. We're currently focusing our efforts on the following tasks: • Implementation of HTM Booster in the discount model in the Lending Protocol. • Implementation of different depeg strategies and brainstorming further potential “soft” depeg mechanisms. • Research and implementation of rewards model for Staking Module. • Research and implementation of Boosted Vaults Facilitator. • Review and stress-test the first version of the code. Upon launch, $USH will be integrated into various protocols and AMMs across the ecosystem, further increasing both its utility and liquidity. The opportunities will be vast, enabling users to engage in a wide range of activities such as yield farming, staking, and arbitrage, all while leveraging a stable and reliable asset. Regarding the USH Airdrop campaign, it will continue until the official launch of $USH planned for late Q2-early Q3, rewarding all users who have actively participated in the initiative. Hatom V2 It is clear by now that we are driven to build a more robust, interoperable, and secure DeFi space, removing the current barriers that hinder users' capabilities to seamlessly interact with different blockchains. Through Hatom V2, we will introduce Hatom's cross-chain architecture, designed from the ground up for interoperability. This approach will elevate the protocol to unprecedented levels, enabling its deployment across various blockchains and facilitating seamless connections between them through Soul. By enhancing interoperability, Hatom V2 aims to foster a more inclusive and accessible ecosystem. This expansion will not only broaden the protocol's reach but also significantly increase its flexibility and utility, allowing users to interact with a diverse range of assets and products across different chains. We’re thrilled to share that we are currently crafting the V2 redesign of the Hatom webpage. Anticipate a jaw-dropping transformation that will truly astonish, blending cutting-edge design with an unparalleled user experience, elevating it to a dynamic, interactive hub, and making every interaction more engaging. Good things take time, but we are confident that the release of V2 website will take place in the second quarter of this year and will officially mark the start of our journey into the cross-chain landscape. We are excited about the future and we truly believe that this will mark the beginning of a new era for Hatom. It's crucial for us to develop rapidly without sacrificing the quality or the security of each product. We're strategically allocating resources to ensure smooth progress in every area of our work. As we push forward, we believe that the launch of Soul Labs will be the most important milestone due to its massive potential and disruptive technology. We would like to thank you all for the unwavering support you've shown over the past few months; it truly fuels our passion to push daily and make strides toward achieving our ambitious goals.show more

Has been a while since I've given an update... so here's a breakdown of where Sappy is at right now and what we're focusing on going into this year. Pre-amble: With altcoins & NFTs the market is definitely not the same as it was before. I think this is obvious to everyone but I've noticed there are still japanese soldiers that are convinced old tricks and mechanics work. They don't. Liquidity is thin; people want to bid assets that feel like "real companies" not vacuous memecoins. There's still room for memecoins, social currencies, and "utility tokens" (I would say without these functions, tokens are hard to justify versus equities). I'm not part of the camp that thinks there will never be hyperspeculation in crypto again, because there will be; we all love ponzis and PvPing each other onchain. Just not with solved games -- people need something new and fresh. So the overarching plan is to continue building for users, sustainable revenues that aren't tied to directly to crypto, and doubling down on the areas that we've already found PMF / Brand Market Fit. Then leaning into crypto during cyclical periods where liquidity is sloshing around at an accelerated rate. Where we've found early PMF / what we're leaning into: Roblox: we're going to continue to go hard and accelerate here. It's our main objective to ship more seal/brainrot focused games across most genres to cast as wide of a net as we can for the brand, and to also iterate and see what works and stays sticky. Our initial incursion into Roblox was very successful peaking at 2M+ MAU and still sustaining a large portion of that player base... for all of its success, that was a relatively amateur first attempt; we've been setting up better AI pipelines for Roblox development that makes it reasonable to ship many more games and 10x those player counts in totality. It's my belief that Roblox is the sandbox whose audience will be the most valuable on the internet once they are grown up. That intense feeling you get when you see a TikTok referencing an old game you enjoyed on the PS2 or the Gamecube, or when you see a Pokemon card is the exact same feeling the youth of today will get when reminiscing on the things they enjoyed engaging with when they were younger. Fortnite and Roblox are functional equivalents to the old school consoles and exactly where that is taking place. Which is why as much as I care about scaling revenues through Roblox, the long term brand equity gained purely through being popular on the platform is totally invaluable. It also can heavily convert to merchandise sales today if all touchpoints for the brand are dialed in (which is why brands get overcharged so much by Roblox dev shops for the same ROI that only cost us a few thousand $). We have the playbook, it's just about iterating new concepts and then aggressively scaling. Brand Expansion & Merchandising: I've started to create a content pipeline that is easily repeatable, cost efficient (costs next to nothing through either AI or smart reusable concepts), while still being very tasteful and meeting our quality standards for the brand. We are mostly focusing here on reaching people where they're at through nostalgic/emotional content, or just being visually stimulating through carefully curated aesthetics. Content that isn't superficial and touches people in a memorable way. I've attached some examples to the post so you can see what I mean rather than just read it. I don't think it's long until larger brands start doing this at scale, but it's always good to be ahead of the curve and most importantly winning on taste -- knowing what will resonate with people and what won't has always been our edge. The purpose for these accounts is not only to rack up attention but also to begin converting those into sales of both of physicals (plushies & gacha collectibles) and digital avenues like our games, and any other apps we produce. Because they're offshoot accounts it's also a lot easier to be aggressive/experimental with said conversion strategies. Sappy Studio: I'm wrapping everything like Omnia, and everything else into this category because they're all tangentially related. Beginning with Omnia, our current focus is gearing up for Season 0 which involves players competing in the ranked ladder for a prize pool that has rewards through Monad Momentum as well as a player-funded prize pool. This season will be fairly simple with us mostly logging retention, deck building habits, as well as qualitatively observing how aggressively players push the combat system. Deeper monetization wont exist yet outside of the player buy-in (to be eligible for P2E rewards). Beyond that our overarching principle this year is to focus heavily on risk-to-earn mechanics where a portion of that excess value is circular i.e. revenues flow back to prize pools or other parts of the economy, treating the game almost like a protocol where the objective is to amass TVL or player liquidity. Social is also a big focus, and that means implementing the Open World hub which from an infrastructure perspective has already been built out and tested by all of you previously. Right now we are scaffolding the environment in 3D and working through how that hub should look and feel, so players are excited to hang out & idle together while they're queuing. For sappydotlol, what I'm about to say is still early days from a design perspective so a lot can change, but I'm pushing the site in the direction of being a virtual game console. An intersection between Nintendo & Myspace where users can play, trade, and socially interact in a way that's deeply personalised; a breathe of fresh air from the hostility of the current internet. If you go back to my thesis on Roblox above and the game console references, you can kind of see how this will all sequentially tie together. In essence, the strategy is to acquire a critical mass of players through traditional platforms like Roblox, and use that attention and trust to provide an onboarding funnel for web2 users into our own sandbox filled with a mixture of our own browser-based experiences as well as an aggregation of others. The aim is to make the platform a breath of fresh air & bunker from the enshittified platforms like TikTok/IG/X where users are actually served in ways that delight rather than agitate, and where self-expression is incentivised. Closing: As always everything here is subject to change but I've never felt more conviction in our direction until now; I know exactly what we need to do and how, with everything aligning with our team's strengths. Very excited and grinding through things to the point where I'm getting headaches and can't sleep from being hyperfocused for long periods of time lol. There probably has never been a better time to join the ecosystem from a price to fuck around and find out perspective.show more

A look back at our mission to do /more.... 🔥🛠️ Months ago, we entered a new growth phase for xLaunchpad, driven by a simple commitment: to do more. More exciting startups, more platform improvements, and a deeper, more meaningful connection with our community. /new We’ve introduced multiple initiatives to make participation in xLaunchpad more accessible, while still keeping EGLD stakers at the core of the experience: 🔸 Challenges Portal – Built in partnership with ᕈulsar Money, this platform allows users to earn lottery tickets by completing simple tasks. 🔸 Creators Program – A reward system for users who create valuable content about xLaunchpad and its projects. 🔸 xLaunchpad Users – Loyal participants from previous launches now have a chance to earn lottery tickets. 🔸 Project Users – Projects launching on xLaunchpad can distribute lottery tickets to eligible users based on set criteria. 🔸 EGLD Holders – Tickets can now be earned simply by holding EGLD in a wallet. Beyond these initiatives, we’ve also strengthened relationships with key community members, empowering them to write educational content about upcoming startups with full creative control on their side. And of course, we’ve introduced more projects and focused on accelerating launch timelines. /better The platform and lottery system have undergone continuous improvements, such as making participation more accessible as detailed above: 🔸 Faster EGLD Reclaims - Users now get their EGLD back more quickly after participation. 🔸 Improved Communication – Blog & X Articles covering both general topics and project-specific updates. Increased community discussions and more structured feedback collection. 🔸 Website Enhancements - Various UI/UX tweaks, with /more to come 👀. 🔸 Integrating AshSwap - Users could buy lottery tickets for the last project with any tokens. 🔸 KYC Improvements - Streamlined processes, with /more to come 👀. Additionally, we’ve successfully co-launched projects with other launchpads and supported startups in securing partnerships, listings, business deals, and legal guidance. xLaunchpad remains one of the most compliant launchpads, ensuring projects align with MiCA regulations and broader industry standards. /next Looking ahead, our main focus remains on the product and the community. Every improvement is guided by real user interactions and feedback, ensuring xLaunchpad continues to evolve. At its core, our mission revolves around two key goals: 1️⃣ Bringing exciting startups to life 2️⃣ Providing users with investment opportunities on the best terms For xLaunchpad and its community to thrive together, it’s essential to recognize these two pillars while understanding the platform’s bigger purpose: making something possible that wasn’t before - allowing retail users to participate in the early launch of promising projects and benefit through multiple avenues. From investments to early adoption, and from unlocking key benefits to shaping young startups. We cannot stress enough how much effort the team puts into achieving these key goals, and we’re grateful to have you by our side on this mission. /moreshow more

A very good morning. Welcome to The Council Benji... This marks the third Skull in a little run. The first went to a fund I've never met. The second: through Eli Scheinman to a new collector/foundation who has been quietly entering the space in a very significant way across a number of collections whom I’ve never spoken to. Their new entrance enabled a wedding and start of a new married life for Conviction. In my very first conversation with him, we spoke about curses and commitments to the people we love. Since meeting got to talk through each step on that path, from letting go, what is imbued in the ring and ceremony of it all, a proposal, and on the way to the most important of the steps in pursuit of a blessed life. It is easy to get a little cynical on the over-leveraged exit stories that spring up from time to time, so it is a treat to watch one go towards a celebration that’s been building up in his life since the Skull was first acquired. And now: this. The third Skull and the first I can really write about as a shared story across both source and destination. An exit and an entrance. The exit: The Skulls of Luci were awarded as gifts 4 years ago. But before I'd minted Birth of Luci or painted the other 49, the first person in this space I showed the sketch of The Blueprint Skull to was actually Casey💎, when he was working at SuperRare . Casey was the very first person who onboarded me to NFTs, helping me navigate the early days of whatever it meant to even mint something. I explained the idea of gifting one to each person who bid in my first auctions. Though most of the Skulls went to the bidders, Casey's didn't. He didn't ask for one. I didn't tell him I'd give him one. But he helped me take my first steps here, and it's hard to imagine any of this making sense, or unfolding the way it has, without him. Since then, we've broken bread across continents, seen quite a lot of chortling margarita consumption, watched the rise and fall of a lot around us, weathered inter-Council dramas. He brought Laura El into The Monument Game, played as a Player, wore a Mask. Most of the vibe that started all of this, the wild west of it, feels faded in the broader space at times. But every Skull has a story and a person who helped us get here. Casey will always be the one who was there before any metric muddled the reason to care. The entrance: Last fall, Benji came over for a studio visit. We walked through Luci, the works, structure, and dream, as anyone who visits does. But we mostly talked about being a father and having a father. We discussed the very idea of "collection" stripped of accumulation, value, or signal, located more in the act or ceremony of it. What it was to grow up with a curious father who studied the edges of each thing he saw to know the next layer beneath why anyone might look or ignore it. That to pass this on is to pass on questioning, more than it is to pass on any kind of answer. The process of collecting can be perceived as an individual act of hoarding. For some it is maybe. But at its best, it's a way to bind through shared questioning, to bond in cooperation and competition with friends and family, it is the swapped story and meme of it all, and each object gathered along the way carries some shared memory that can, often does, and with intent: should; drift out of the object entirely. All in the psalm, always has been. The studio visit came and went. Soon after, a package arrived in the mail with two of the softest stuffed animals added to my daughter's own collection, now among her favorites. The Skull is a bonus to that, in the scheme of shared memory. For Rachel and I, while we are heads down making a body of work that unsettles us and excites us but demands unknown time to accomplish, it means a great deal to have this kind of support from long term people in the quiet process of making work we want to leave behind ourselves. Enormously grateful to Casey for the many years of support and friendship, to Benny for being a true patron, and to Benji for entering the arena for what I'm working on next. Welcome.show more

Lads. Sit down and give me your ear a... while, for I have watched from the water long enough and the hour is upon us whether we have the stomach for it or not. You remember. Or your fathers told you, or their fathers did, and the knowledge of it is in the marrow of you whether you drew breath in those days or not. The moors in the grey hour before dawn. Wet heather soft under the boot. Peat smoke rising from a low stone chimney a mile out across the bog, thin as a prayer. A sky the colour of a gun barrel and the gulls lamenting above the headland. The smell of turf burning, and wet wool, and the ferrous tang of the sea when the wind swung around out of the Atlantic and put the taste of iron on your tongue. A man could walk that land and know every stone of it was his by inheritance, because his grandfather had broken his back upon it, and his grandfather before him, back through the generations until you reach men whose names are lost and whose bones are in the soil you are standing on. The potato fields. God be good to us, the potato fields. Lazy beds cut straight as a gunwale, the ridges black and shining after a night of rain, women bent double with creels lashed to their backs and the children at their skirts, drawing the crop up by the hand for there was never any other means devised nor wanted. Hands split open at the knuckles and never entirely healed in this life. Hunger within living memory. Grandmothers who had seen the blight with their own eyes and would not speak of it from the year of it until the day they were laid down, save that a crust was kept always on the dresser which no soul in that house was permitted to touch. Not ever. Not for any reason under heaven. And the chimney sweeps. Wee lads no heavier than a sack of meal, black to the bone with soot, their lungs ruined before they were old enough to marry and old men entirely by thirty. Up the flues at first light, the skin worn off them by the brick, eyes crimson at the rim, breathing the black in with every draw of air. And the coal miners a half mile beneath our feet, down in the wet dark, the roof of the world muttering over their heads, the canary gone silent, a man's whole existence measured out in the shilling a ton and the dust he carried home in his chest to cough up of a Sunday morning into a rag. Fathers who descended and were never hauled up again. Widows at the pit head with the shawl drawn over the head and no tears remaining in them for they had spent those long ago. That was the tariff paid to keep the hearth lit. That was the reckoning of being warm in winter in the Ireland that was. And after the labouring week, Friday evening, and a man had earned the peace of what followed. Home first. Peeled the day off him in the yard. A shower of ice cold moor river water out of a tin bucket punctured with holes, hung on a nail on the gable wall, the water running clean down the back of him and carrying the week's dust and sweat away into the drain. Scrubbed till the skin was pink beneath the grime. Clean shirt laid out by the wife. The hair combed down with a drop of water. Then, and only then, did a man set himself to the table. A meat pie from the baker, tenpence if he was known to you, a shilling and no change if he was not, put down upon a proper plate. Fish and chips for threepence, the salt and vinegar soaked through the newspaper, but carried home and ate slowly at your own table with your people around you, not walked with through the streets like some vagrant tinker off the road. A man ate as a man who had earned his portion, for he had. And later, with the dishes cleared and the kettle set, down the road to the tavern. Low beams black with a century of smoke. A turf fire muttering in the grate. The air thick with pipe smoke and the vapour of wet overcoats steaming themselves dry on the backs of chairs. A pint of stout, cold and black as a cove at midnight, elevenpence laid down on the counter, a head on it thick enough to strike a match upon. A second one because you had it coming to you and no man present would dispute it. A fiddle starting up in the corner of its own accord. The old men in the snug who remembered matters the history books had long since mislaid. A song before the bolt was thrown on the door. The walk home beneath a firmament crowded with stars, the stout warm in the gut of you, the week behind you, and your own door waiting with the latch unlocked for you had no enemies in that parish. That was the country. That was the covenant. Honest labour, plain food, a cold wash, a hot meal, a cold pint, your own tongue in your own mouth, your own soil beneath your boots, and no man standing above you save the Almighty Himself. Now regard her. Regard her close. The fields disposed of to men who have never set foot upon them and never shall. The harbours signed away by the stroke of a pen in a room you were not admitted to, and foreign keels dragging out of our waters the living that sustained this island for a thousand years, while our own boats rot at their moorings for want of a quota. The tradesmen undercut by imported labour and imported goods. The shops shuttered along every main street from Donegal to Cork. The young ones scattered to London and Sydney and Boston and the Gulf because there is nothing remaining for them beneath their own roof. And the entirety of this rotten arrangement dressed up in the soft mannerly language of progress by men in towers of glass who could not tell a lazy bed from a grave, nor a trawler from a tugboat, nor an honest day's work from a pension plan. And now they arrive with the next imposition. A digital identity. A number assigned to each soul. A card required to buy your bread. A code required to draw your own earnings out of your own account. A file kept on every man, woman and child from the cradle forward. Permission asked to move. Permission asked to speak. Permission asked to earn. A levy upon every breath drawn and a regulation upon every step taken. No. And no again. And no for a third time so there is no misunderstanding of it. We do not require your digital identity. We did not request it. We did not vote upon it. We do not consent to it. We do not need your permission to exist upon the soil our forefathers are buried in. We are a free people. We have carried ourselves this far upon our own two backs. Through famine and empire and civil war and black lung and blight and the emigrant ship out of Cobh, we have come this distance under our own steam, and the arrangement appears to be serving us well enough without your intervention. We buried our own. We fed our own. We raised our own roofs and took our own fish and reared our own children in our own tongue. We are in your debt for nothing. Not a signature. Not a biometric scan. Not a single solitary inch. And while we are upon the subject, let us speak plainly of the tax man, for he has gone too long without proper introduction. The tax collector and the tax man are the one article under two names, and the article is a parasite. There is no dressing it up finer than that. A man who produces nothing, who grows nothing, who catches nothing, who builds nothing, who mends nothing, who has never in his professional life lifted anything heavier than a pen, and who arrives at your door with the full apparatus of the state at his back to carry off the fruits of labour he did not perform. He is a middleman between your sweat and some scheme dreamt up in a committee room by his own kind, and the great majority of what he takes is consumed by the machinery of the taking itself before ever a penny of it reaches the road or the hospital or the schoolhouse he claims to be funding. And I will go further while I have the floor. Finance itself, the whole apparatus of it, money breeding money in the dark without a hand laid upon a tool or a spade turned in the earth, is slavery dressed in a good suit. It is the oldest swindle known to man and it has never been anything other. A man who produces nothing yet lives off the productive labour of others through the charging of interest upon money conjured out of nothing is a parasite of a rarer and more refined order than the tax man, but a parasite all the same, and between the pair of them they have the working people of this island bled white and lectured at for the pleasure. A man who will not work with his hands, nor with his back, nor with his mind at some honest problem of the real physical world, is no man that I recognise. He is a ledger entry in a suit. The country was not built by ledger entries. The country was built by farmers and fishermen and masons and smiths and sweeps and miners and shipwrights and midwives and mothers, and those are the people whose say should carry in her councils, and no other. Here is what I put to you. Let each man and woman of this island direct the first tenth of their earnings themselves, by their own judgement, to the purpose they see as worthy. The school down the road. The lifeboat station. The hospice. The widow on the corner. The roof of the chapel. The harbour wall. Whatever it may be. Let the people who earned the money decide where the money travels. You will find the roads mended and the ports dredged and the schools standing and the old ones cared for inside of five years, and done better and for less, because the hand that earned the coin knows the weight of it and will not squander it upon consultants and committees. And let us have done with the paper currency and the numbers in a screen that can be frozen at the whim of a clerk in a tower. Bring back the coin. Gold for the great transactions. Silver for the weekly commerce of a working life. Copper for the small change of the day. Metal you can bite. Metal you can weigh. Metal that cannot be conjured out of nothing by a keystroke, nor erased out of existence by another. Real money for real labour. A coin in the hand is a free man's wage. A number in a database is a collar around a free man's neck, and they are fitting that collar now while we stand arguing over the colour of it. Feel it in your gut. That is not nothing. That is your blood relating to you what your ears will not hear. That is every forebear who starved and fought and coughed the black dust into a rag and descended the shaft regardless, standing at your shoulder and saying no further. Not one more field. Not one more harbour. Not one more son upon a plane. Not one more free man converted into a number in a ledger for the convenience of the parasites. This is the hour. Make no error about it. Ireland is redeemed in this generation or she is lost beyond recovery, and every true son and daughter of her knows it in the marrow. There is no middle ground remaining. There is no waiting it out. There is standing now, upon your own two feet, or there is watching her go under the waves for the last and final time. So stand. Stand with your farmers. Stand with your fishermen. Stand with your tradesmen and your miners and your sweeps and your mothers and your old ones. Raise the tricolour. Speak the tongue. Walk the land. Hold the line in the streets of every town and city and do not break it, for they are relying upon you to break and to go home and to forget by Tuesday. She is calling her children home. Every stone of her, every breaker on her western shore, every acre of wet heather and every coal in every hearth the length and breadth of her is calling. Answer her. Take her back. Every field, every harbour, every last inch of her. Take her back, or lose her entirely. There is no third road open to us.show more

I’m excited to announce my new role as Growth... Lead at Plume! 🐦‍🔥 6 months ago, I had my first call with Chris Yin and surprisingly, he changed my mind. I was skeptical of a web3-native project trying to bridge the traditional world into ours. His thesis of a permissionless blockchain environment was antithesis to what I believed in at the time. After about 45 minutes of deep discussion, I could finally see it. I dropped all of my other RWA investment prospects and pointed myself towards Plume. From there, things got quiet for a while. Myself and the 280 partners debated the RWA sector as a whole and quietly observed Plume’s progress on the sidelines. Fast forward a few months and I had finally realized a thesis of my own; In crypto, you’ll generally find two key types of participants: speculators and yield chasers. Speculators lower their risk threshold in search of the next 100x, closely following trends and trying to capture opportunities early. It is a game that requires forward-thinking, intuition, and a lot of luck. These people range in financial status, with some looking to make their first bucket of gold, with the others trying to hit another big win and buy their second lambo. Yield chasers are a different breed of folks. They may not want to ape their entire portfolio into memes, rather they enjoy the attractive returns that DeFi offers that they generally wouldn’t be able to find in the traditional world. These folks generally aren’t looking for lambo, but believe that they will still be living well without the stress of going to zero. But as we see every cycle, Bitcoin crashes, DeFi collapses, and another round of fuzzy-haired fellas find their way over to the Metropolitan Detention Centre. Crypto dies, retail gets burned, the regulators swoop in and start raising hell, and the cycle repeats. Why does it have to be this way? Of course market cycles are natural and perhaps healthy, but why the catastrophe at the end each time? There must be a better way. And then it hit me. RWAfi is and always was the answer. The road at the end of all roads. It’s a nice road, paved with the blood, sweat, and tears of those truly trying to connect the entire world to our industry. Whether you made a major bag and want to move into wealth preservation or lost it all and no longer want to live the life of a degenerate gambler and are comfortable with a more stable approach to wealth building, eventually, everyone ends up chasing juicy yields. And we all know that there is only one sector of our industry that can consistently deliver attractive yields through bull and bear. There is only one sector that can support all the TVL that is currently sitting in vaults that are unable to sustain the yields they promised. The nature of the vertical makes it constantly aware of regulatory considerations. RWAfi is a sleeping giant, and not only will it unlock a $400T market, it will also catalyze an incredible amount of growth resembling tens of trillion in newly created value and opportunity. We are so early. That, paired with the incredible team Teddy @shukyeerwa Ivy Kang and the other 40 cracked believers that are pushing beyond their limits is the reason I bet on Plume. We have everything it takes to make it 🤝 I have to give a special shout out to J for how supportive he has been with this move. 280 Capital is married to Plume now and I’m sure we will be collaborating on a lot moving forward. Another shoutout to one of the great minds of this industry JacobK whose conviction in Plume really pushed me to purse this role🙏🏾 Vibes are all-time high with this team, and bring a fresh combination of competence, experience, and true belief in the platform that we are building. Mark my words, Plume will unify the RWAfi sector and pave the way as one of the giants of this industry. Let’s fucking do this. 🐦‍🔥 Goons in complete control.show more

EXODUS: Help Darren Stallcup Move Out Of San Francisco... After dedicating the best years of my life to save San Francisco, I have made the heartbreaking decision to leave this great beautiful city behind. I did the best that I could every day and I know so many honest good caring San Franciscans out there are hurting just as much as I am and I've met so many of you who desperately want the same healing and recovery for this city that I do... The truth is... the daily chaos, lawlessness and human suffering on our streets are not accidents but a deliberate result of a cruel, sick game engineered by corrupt politicians and non-profits who benefit from the suffering of the less fortunate. I don't hate everyone who votes differently or works in non-profits... there are plenty of decent people trying to help, but far too many bad apples in the Democratic party are working hand-in-hand with these organizations to keep the crisis alive. I'm infuriated by this broken, predatory system that devastates the vulnerable, attacks those trying to help and enriches those who have blood on their hands... all on the taxpayers dime. That's why I'm done playing along and refusing to sacrifice my life to their endless failure. Yet even as I leave, I'll never stop fighting for the less fortunate by demanding secure treatment beds, real enforcement against fentanyl dealers and sober housing that actually saves lives instead of enabling death. I can continue my art, music and citizen journalism in another city that is cleaner, safer and dare I say more friendlier to me, a conservative Patriot who loves our great beautiful country. Day and Night I walked these streets up and down the block, handing out food, clothing and blankets to the less fortunate while listening to their stories. Through citizen journalism, I documented the homeless crisis on the ground, sharing videos and photos to raise awareness. I spoke passionately at City Hall meetings, demanding accountability from leaders who seemed indifferent. I appeared on national and international television to share my story with the world about the fentanyl genocide devastating our city. Today, with a heavy heart, I regret to inform our community that I am relocating to a safer area outside San Francisco. I can no longer tolerate the chaos and stress of day to day survival in this city. It has taken an undeniable toll on my physical, mental and spiritual well being. Our corrupt and incompetent local and state leaders have deliberately enabled chaos on San Francisco's streets, creating a perpetual crisis that funnels billions of taxpayer dollars into the hands of corrupt non-profits and organizations. These entities thrive on the suffering of the less fortunate, profiting from endless contracts for shelters, outreach programs and harm-reduction initiatives that fail to reduce harm or homelessness. Harm reduction is causing more harm. Progressive policy is making everything progressively worse. I am done being a guinea pig in their social experiment. Year after year, billions have been spent, yet the humanitarian crisis has only worsened, with more tents, more overdoses, and more despair. Fentanyl overdoses are on the rise, homelessness numbers are climbing and our public spaces have all but deteriorated, all while the same politicians get elected year after year. It is a calculated system of human suffering and I am done living through the nightmare every single day. I've been documenting the truth about San Francisco's streets for years, but as I prepare to leave for good, this frontline perspective might go with me unless I am able to find a nice small town where I can continue my work from afar. If my story has ever opened your eyes or fueled your fight, I ask you to show love to my journey. My work in our community began with a deep compassion for those suffering on the streets and I poured my energy into helping the homeless directly. My home burned down to the ground, I know what it's like to have nothing and work your way up from rock bottom. Every day, more people overdose and more people show up in San Francisco from all over the country. It's a never ending cycle. I have lost too many family and friends and I refuse to be next. I am profoundly tired of the fentanyl genocide that has turned my once beloved city into a hell hole. I have seen one too many open air drug markets, claiming thousands of lives each year. The drug dealers operating freely, the human feces and needles littering streets and sidewalks, the judges letting the fentanyl dealers out of jail, the fentanyl showing up on playgrounds and in schools, the women giving birth on the sidewalk, the still born babies found in port-o-pottys, the people jumping off of buildings, the people living in the sewers, the non-stop every day looting of our grocery store, the robbery of our local restaurants, the targeting of our mom-and-pop shops, the risk of riding public transportation, the waking up to burglars kicking in my door and fighting them off, the sound of going to sleep to people screaming and waking up to emergency sirens, the billion dollar tech offices and third world conditions across the streets, the constant threat of The Big Earthquake, power outages, infrastructure breakdown, skyrocketing cost of living, it's all become unbearable. Homeless encampments blocking public spaces, the high risk of fentanyl exposure and rampant property crime have eroded any sense of normalcy. Personal safety threats from erratic behavior, boarded-up stores and political hostility weigh heavily on me. I no longer desire or wish to endure these heartbreaking struggles. Building a life for myself, let alone a family, in this decay, is almost impossible. The frustration with leftist policies enabling open drug scenes, health risks from biohazards and store closures reducing access to essentials has taken its toll. I have personally witnessed at least a dozen grocery stores close down and my heart is broken as I wonder if I am slowly living in a food desert because of rampant, unchecked crime. They defunded the police and the judge releases criminals out of jail the next day. I am sick and tired of fighting off the same bad guys every day. The Urban decay is not just in areas like the Tenderloin, SOMA and Union Square, but all over the city. The difficulty in regular social life is noticeable and everybody is on guard making human connection even more challenging unless you are a millionaire. I walk into small businesses, stores and restaurants and all the workers are on edge wondering what chaos will happen that day. Tourists ask me what is happening to the city? All I do is shake my head. This is not the San Francisco I grew up in. My City has become unrecognizable. The Full House Days are long gone and it will take years, if not generations, for San Francisco to recover from all the damage done. Years of frontline activism without any city wide solutions have left me absolutely drained. Every day feels like the same nightmare, repeating the same chaos day after day without end. I don't want my life trapped in this cycle of sirens, screams and unchecked decline. It's time to step away from this chaos. I do not want to die here. The threats to personal safety, the constant exposure to violence and humanitarian crisis has become too much for one lifetime. I shouldn't have PTSD from living in San Francisco, but I do. Honestly, we all have survivor's guilt. I refuse to let this environment claim my future or my dreams. Relocating means saving my health, mental well being, spirituality and opportunity to thrive elsewhere. No more waking up and counting the bodies on the sidewalks or navigating hazards just to live daily life. I deserve a chance to build without the shadow of this humanitarian crisis looming over everything. I've sacrificed my personal health, safety and years of my life on the frontlines for the vulnerable while our local leaders profited from their pain... now, to keep fighting, I have to leave everything behind and start over. If this battle has ever meant something to you, please do consider supporting. As I pursue my American dreams in a new place, I carry the lessons from San Francisco with me forever. I will always cherish the memories and good times. This city will always have a place in my heart. San Francisco is my hometown. I continue advocating for change from afar, but with renewed energy in a safer environment. This move allows me to build a stable life, free from the nightmare that has defined too many years of life. Thank you to all my family and friends that have supported my work, I fought valiantly but now it is time for a tactical retreat. My time in the trenches, on the frontlines are over. I can't believe I made it out alive. Here's to new beginnings and the hope that one day, San Francisco heals.show more

Recently did an interview with the lead developer of... Knight's Path on the title's future release and the state of the industry. The Western AAA gaming industry has shifted its focus away from its core audience, favoring products for smaller, less engaged demographics. This shift has led to a noticeable disconnect between large publishers and their traditional fan base. This has, however, created an environment for indies to thrive. They can prioritize authenticity and community, crafting games that resonate with their players and that is exactly the case with Knight's Path. In December of 2023, Knights Path: The Tournament was released to Very Positive reviews on Steam. It is a short medieval RPG featuring challenging combat, an immersive progression system, and a nice little story. It served as an announcement, a combat concept demo, and a teaser for the forthcoming open-world RPG Knight's Path, which is currently in active development. I asked what their plans were regarding the scope of the full release. While you might get the impression that Knight's Path is an arena fighting game, that’s not the case with the full release. "Knight's Path will be a proper open-world, story-driven RPG. Of course, as a small indie team, we’re keeping the scope modest. The open world will be compact but dense, featuring one town, one village, castle ruins, forests, valleys, and other areas to explore." Many gamers would agree it is better to have a limited number of fully fleshed-out areas than to present a gigantic, empty world. This has been a major criticism levied towards recent releases like Pokémon Scarlet and Violet and even modern Assassins Creed, which tends to rely on repetitive gameplay loops scattered across an overly large map, which can feel more like busywork than meaningful exploration. I have always believed that quality over quantity is the best way to go. The team has also made this a priority with things such as the story and weapon types. "We plan to include three main weapon types: longsword, sword and shield, and bows. These will feature the full progression system seen in the demo, with skill levels such as Novice, Adept, Expert, and Master. Players will need to learn individual skills from different trainers to progress. In addition, we’re introducing secondary weapons like spears, halberds, and other polearms. These won’t have RPG-style progression but will still offer variety in combat." Regarding the story, they plan to be bold and strive to create a 16-28 hour-long main campaign. "The story will be divided into four chapters, with each chapter offering around 4–7 hours of gameplay. As in the demo, the player character begins as a nobody, slowly learning how to wield a sword and eventually becoming a knight. However, the progression will be much more realistic than in the demo, where the peasant hilariously transformed into a champion in just four days." This is a far cry from many games that are released nowadays. In just 2024 alone at a glance, the AA release Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn provided an average of 8 hours of content, Princess Peach: Showtime at 10 hours, Silent Hill 2 Remake at 15, and even the GOTY winner Astrobot holds an average playtime of 10 hours. A major issue within the industry is the way we are treated by the people who only have jobs because of our favorite hobby. In 2024 the gaming industry is forecasted to generate $208.7 BILLION dollars, up from 5.4% in 2023. Compare that to Hollywood, which is a measly $12.3 billion. The gaming industry employs 727,000 individuals in the United States alone. So, you'd think these people would have a little bit of respect for gamers, though so many who are vocal on social media show nothing but contempt for us. Perhaps this is because of fear if they do not show loyalty to a cause or "fit in" that they may not secure funding or genuinely believe in what they preach, but the team behind Knight's Path isn't worried about that. "We are independent developers, and we plan to stay independent so we can stay true to our vision. Knight's Path is a game made by gamers for gamers. We’re prioritizing fun gameplay above all, and we firmly believe this is exactly what gamers want." I also raised some questions about their big plans moving forward. In the demo, one of the major criticisms I had was with the voice acting. I had guessed it was done via AI, which was confirmed. "You guessed correctly– the voice acting in the demo was done by AI, and it was probably the loudest critique we received, and we totally understand why! Back then, we didn’t have much of a choice, but for the full game, we don’t plan to use any AI voices. Luckily, after the demo release, many voice actors reached out to us, volunteering to lend their voices to the full game. We absolutely plan to answer their call and give them that opportunity." AI can be a useful tool, especially for developers starting out who can't commit a lot of money to voice acting or just want to see a version of the product that's closer to what they envision the full release to be, but going from that to real voice actors will bump the experience to the next level. I myself played the demo in its entirety and really enjoyed my time with it! I thought the game was reminiscent of Gothic 2 and even The Witcher. I was happily surprised when I didn't encounter any bugs or glitches and while some areas have not been fleshed out like the voice acting, I would recommend putting the game on your wishlist to see what this team does in the future when they finally deliver their updated demo and the eventual full release of the game.show more

🚨 Protocol Update #9 It's incredible how time flies... when you’re laser-focused on building and delivering the essential products that form the backbone of decentralized finance. Hatom has now been live on the Mainnet for over a year, and we're proud to say that this entire period has been free of issues or downtime. Our platform has been battle-tested during volatile market conditions, and each of our products has performed exactly as expected—solidifying our place as a cornerstone in the #MultiversX ecosystem. Describing last year as “incredible” feels like an understatement. We’ve witnessed unprecedented growth across the entire #MultiversX ecosystem, particularly in terms of TVL and yield opportunities. The day before Hatom launched its Lending Protocol and Liquid Staking on Mainnet, #MultiversX had a total TVL of $95 million. Within two weeks, the ecosystem surpassed $200 million in TVL, with Hatom driving over 50% of that growth. At its peak, Hatom reached over $280 million in TVL, accounting for more than 70% of the chain’s total TVL. What's even more remarkable is that, after initially using Treasury funds to incentivize users, Hatom has shifted to distributing rewards solely from protocol revenue. This marks the start of a fully sustainable, real-yield model, proving our products' rapid product-market fit and long-term viability. A Recap of the Past Year Here’s a quick overview of what we’ve accomplished in the past year: • Launched the first Lending Protocol in the #MultiversX ecosystem, along with the Liquid Staking Protocol on Mainnet. • Surpassed $100 million in TVL within just five days of the launch. • Deployed the HTM Booster Module and Accumulator. • Launched the Tao Bridge and Tao Liquid Staking, bringing over 33k $TAO into the #MultiversX ecosystem in just two weeks. • Implemented multiple upgrades to core infrastructure. • $HTM became the second-largest ESDT token after $EGLD. • Distributed over $3.85 million in rewards to our users. We are happy to announce that Hatom V2 is now live! After an incredible year of growth, we’re excited to take the next step toward becoming the leading liquidity hub across multiple chains. We invite you to explore our newly rebranded website at marking the beginning of our omni-chain journey. This rebranding reflects our bold vision and sets the stage for a full overhaul of our dApps, delivering a fresh and enhanced experience for all users. Achieving self-sustainability in such a short time, we now focus on research and development. Instead of pursuing many ideas, we’re committed to building high-impact products that create perfect synergies within our ecosystem. With that said, let’s dive into the key topics of this update: USH and Booster V2. Hatom USD (USH) We’ve highlighted USH in several updates, and it’s great to see the community recognizing its potential. USH is set to be one of the most impactful products on #MultiversX, providing a key revenue stream for Hatom while helping us maintain competitive rates and long-term sustainability. USH is the result of extensive research and careful development, designed to seamlessly fit into the Hatom ecosystem. While many DeFi projects are raising millions for new stablecoins, USH stands as another powerful product within our hub. The time has finally come for USH to be unveiled to the public, and we are excited to announce that USH will officially launch on Devnet on 28th October. While we’ve thoroughly tested for bugs internally, we’re excited to engage the community in this critical phase. To encourage participation, we’ll offer incentives for those testing USH on the Devnet, with more details to be shared at launch. Understanding USH's architecture is key to how it functions within our ecosystem. Let’s break it down step by step, starting with an explanation of each component. Facilitators USH’s minting process is driven by Facilitators—smart contracts responsible for the controlled minting and burning of USH. At launch, two primary facilitators will handle these tasks, each with distinct functionality: 1. Lending Protocol Facilitator The Lending Protocol Facilitator allows users to mint USH using a variety of supported collateral assets directly into the Hatom Lending Protocol. Unlike traditional lending mechanisms, where interest rates fluctuate based on the utilization rate, the minting of USH has fixed interest rates, thanks to Hatom's unique role as the entity managing the minting process. In a scenario where a user is minting USH through this facilitator using multiple assets as collateral, the protocol automatically prioritizes collateral with the lowest Minting APY. Let’s consider an example where a user deposits: - $1,000 in USDC (with a collateral factor of 80% and a 2% Minting APY) - $1,000 in BTC (with a collateral factor of 75% and a 3% Minting APY) - $1,000 in HTM (with a collateral factor of 70% and a 4% Minting APY) Based on these parameters, the user can mint a maximum of $2,250 worth of USH, distributed as follows: - $800 from $USDC (80% of $1,000) at 2% Minting APY - $750 from $BTC (75% of $1,000) at 3% Minting APY - $700 from $HTM (70% of $1,000) at 4% Minting APY The overall Minting APY will be a weighted average of these individual APYs, calculated based on the proportion of USH minted from each collateral type. Now, if the user decides to borrow only $1,000 worth of USH, the APY is determined as follows: - The first $800 will be borrowed from $USDC at 2% APY - The remaining $200 will be borrowed from $BTC at 3% APY This results in an effective Minting APY of 2.2%, reflecting a weighted average of the APYs across the borrowed amounts. It’s important to note that EGLD and wTAO, along with their liquid staking derivatives such as sEGLD and swTAO, can only be used as collateral in the Isolated Pools (which will be explained in the next section), not in the Lending Protocol 2. Isolated Pools Facilitator The Isolated Pools Facilitator allows users to mint $USH at zero interest using $EGLD, $wTAO, or their liquid staking derivatives ( $sEGLD or $swTAO) as collateral. Here’s how it works: When depositing EGLD or wTAO • These assets are staked through the Hatom Liquid Staking Protocol, generating the staking APY. • The staked assets are then deposited into the Lending Protocol, earning a supply APY, but are not activated as collateral. When depositing sEGLD or swTAO • When users deposit staking derivatives into the Isolated Pools, the protocol holds the staking derivatives, but the user's exposure is immediately shifted to the underlying asset ( $EGLD or $wTAO). This means the user no longer benefits from the staking rewards of the derivative, and instead, their exposure is entirely tied to the value and price movements of the underlying asset. • The staked assets are deposited into the Hatom Lending Protocol, earning the supply APY, but again not being activated as collateral. Since the protocol generates revenue from staking and supplying assets in the Lending Protocol, this income is used to incentivize the USH Staking Module. The protocol buys HTM tokens from the open market and distributes them, along with all fees generated by other facilitators, as rewards to stakers. We believe that the Isolated Pools Facilitator is one of the most important pieces of the USH ecosystem. Its potential impact on the TVL within both the Hatom ecosystem and the broader #MultiversX blockchain is immense and the revenue generated by this facilitator through fees will significantly bolster the overall growth of the protocol. To illustrate the potential of Isolated Pools, let’s use the following example: • $50 million worth of $EGLD is deposited into the Isolated Pools, generating a 6% staking APY • $50 million worth of $wTAO is also deposited, earning a 15% staking APY The total staking rewards generated from these assets would be: • $EGLD staking rewards: $50 million × 6% = $3 million annually • $wTAO staking rewards: $50 million × 15% = $7.5 million annually In total, the protocol generates $10.5 million in staking rewards annually. These rewards are then used to buy back HTM tokens from the open market, driving significant buying pressure on the HTM token itself. The purchased HTM tokens are distributed to USH LP stakers in the USH Staking Module, alongside the revenue generated by the Lending Protocol Facilitator. TVL and Yield Impact As we explore the broader impact of USH and the Isolated Pools, it becomes evident how these mechanisms contribute to the overall growth of the Hatom ecosystem, particularly in terms of TVL and potential yield generation. Based on the above numbers, if $50 million worth of $EGLD and $50 million worth of $wTAO are deposited into the Isolated Pools with a 75% collateral factor, we could mint up to $75 million worth of $USH. However, to prioritize safety, we’ll mint only 50% of the maximum, resulting in $37.5 million worth of $USH. In an ideal scenario, but also very unlikely, the $37.5 million $USH would be deposited in the Staking Module to generate rewards. In order for $USH to be deposited in the Staking Module, it is paired with another token (e.g., $USDC or $EGLD) to form Liquidity Pool (LP) position, contributing $75 million to the USH Staking Module. Additionally, the $100 million deposited in the Isolated Pools cycles through Liquid Staking and into the Lending Protocol, contributing a total of $300 million in TVL. Total TVL Breakdown: • $300 million from assets flowing through Isolated Pools ($100m) → Liquid Staking ($100m) → Lending Protocol ($100m) • $75 million from LP positions in the USH Staking Module Total TVL = $375 million As mentioned above, the $100 million deposited in Isolated Pools generates approximately $10.5 million annually in staking rewards (6% APY from $sEGLD and 15% APY from $swTAO). If all minted $USH is deposited into the Staking Module, the $75 million staked would benefit from these rewards, resulting in a 14% APY for USH LP stakers. On top of the protocol’s rewards, liquidity providers earn additional fees from their LP positions on decentralized exchanges, creating the perfect opportunity for all the participants in the USH Staking Module looking for attractive yields. USH Stability: The Peg Mechanism Ensuring the stability of USH is paramount, and to maintain its value close to $1 under all market conditions, we’ve implemented a robust dual peg mechanism. This system consists of two key layers of protection—Soft Peg and Hard Peg—designed to keep USH stable through both market-driven incentives and other mechanisms for scenarios where the Soft Peg mechanism can’t reclaim the peg. 1. Soft Peg Mechanism The Soft Peg Mechanism helps keep USH stable around its $1 value by encouraging market participants to act when USH trades above or below $1. When USH trades below $1 Users can buy USH at a discount, on a DEX, and repay their USH loans on Hatom, as USH is always valued at $1 on the protocol. This action removes $USH from circulation, helping to restore its price. When USH trades above $1 Users can borrow USH from the protocol at $1 and sell it on the open market at the higher price, increasing the circulating supply of USH and pushing its price back down to $1. 2. Hard Peg Mechanism (Redemption Mode) In cases where the Soft Peg alone cannot restore USH to $1 and its price drops significantly below the peg, the Hard Peg Mechanism is triggered through Redemption Mode. This mechanism allows any market participant to step in and help restore the peg by repaying USH loans for other borrowers, seizing their collateral at the full $1 value. It's important to note that Redemption Mode is only activated in the Isolated Pools and does not impact users minting USH through the Lending Protocol. Here’s how Redemption Mode works: When USH trades below $1 and the Redemption Mode is activated, redeemers can buy USH at the lower market price (e.g., $0.95), and use it to repay borrowers' debts at the full $1 value within the protocol. The redeemer receives collateral in the form of liquid staked tokens(such as $sEGLD or $swTAO) equivalent to the USH they repaid at its full $1 value, profiting from the difference between the discounted purchase price and the redemption value. The borrower being redeemed also benefits by receiving a redemption bonus, which allows them to keep a portion of their collateral after part of it is seized after loan was repaid. This system ensures that borrowers are not penalized during redemption, creating a balanced mechanism where both the redeemer and the borrower have something to gain. Redemption Mode differs from Liquidation in several ways: Redemption is triggered by USH falling below $1 and involves repaying borrower accounts to restore the peg. Both the redeemer and the borrower benefit, with the redeemer profiting from the price difference, and the borrower receiving a bonus from their collateral. Liquidation occurs when a borrower’s collateral falls below a certain threshold, making them risky. During liquidation, a portion of the borrower’s loan is repaid, and the collateral is seized, while also incurring a liquidation penalty. Redemption Mode uses a data structure known as a Red-Black Tree to efficiently monitor and rank all borrower positions within the protocol smart contract itself. This structure dynamically tracks borrowers based on their Borrow Limit Used, which is the percentage of collateral they have utilized relative to their borrowing capacity. The system prioritizes borrowers with the highest Borrow Limit Used, meaning those who have borrowed the most relative to their collateral are considered first for redemption. USH Airdrop Regarding the USH Airdrop, we would like to inform you that snapshots will end once USH is deployed on the Public Mainnet. The airdrop will be concluded shortly after, once all liquidity pools are stable and we determine the optimal moment to distribute the rewards to the community. USH Staking Module & Booster V2 The USH Staking Module will play a critical role in maintaining deep liquidity for USH while offering users high-yield opportunities. By staking USH LP tokens, such as USH/USDC and USH/EGLD, users can earn rewards generated by USH facilitators. This approach strengthens USH’s liquidity pools, making them robust enough to handle significant trades without destabilizing its price, thus reinforcing USH’s peg and overall stability. Beyond creating robust liquidity, the USH Staking Module serves as the key utility module within the USH ecosystem, designed to provide users with an opportunity to earn high yields on their USH holdings in a sustainable and organic way. All rewards distributed through the module are generated by various products across the Hatom ecosystem, ensuring long-term sustainability. For users seeking a more stable yield, the USH/USDC LP provides lower risk and steady returns. Those looking to leverage their EGLD holdings can opt for the USH/EGLD LP, which can be staked in the USH Staking Module. A key advantage of staking in the USH Staking Module is that rewards are based on the full value of the LP, not just the USH portion, maximizing your yield potential. As we continue to grow, we’ll be adding more LPs, providing users with even greater flexibility and options for staking their USH in the module. While our current focus is on LP tokens, we’re also exploring the possibility of allowing direct USH staking in the future, expanding the staking opportunities across the ecosystem. The Integration of Booster V2 with the Staking Module Booster V2 will be available for testing with the USH Devnet release, and with its introduction, we’ve strengthened the relationship between the HTM token and USH. Our ecosystem now features two independent boosters: one for the Lending Protocol and one for the USH Staking Module, each operating with the goal of maximizing yields for users. Key Improvements in Booster V2 Booster V2 brings several enhancements that elevate the functionality and user experience: Support for Multiple Token Types: Users will be able to deposit Pool Tokens, Farm Tokens, Dual Farm Tokens, or Staked HTM Tokens (via xExchange). Only the HTM portion will be considered for boosting. Unlimited Staking: The cap on HTM deposits will be removed, allowing users to stake without limits. This will foster a competitive environment where the more HTM you stake, the higher your potential APY. Integrated xExchange Management: Users will be able to manage their xExchange positions directly from the Booster dashboard. This will include creating pools, farming, dual farming, and staking HTM tokens, all from one convenient dashboard. Energy Management Integration: Booster V2 will allow users to manage their xExchange Energy directly from the dashboard, providing an additional way to boost rewards even further. Seamless Migration: Users will be able to migrate HTM between the Lending Protocol Booster and the USH Staking Module Booster without any cooldown periods, making it easier to optimize strategies across both modules. How the Yields Work Booster V2 will introduce a more structured and competitive approach to yield distribution across both the Lending Protocol and the Staking Module. HTM Booster in the Lending Protocol Base APY (First Batch): This is available to all users who stake a specific percentage of HTM relative to their collateral value. Any user can achieve this Base APY by staking the required amount of HTM. Boosted APY (Second Batch): After achieving the base level, users can boost their returns further by staking additional HTM, competing for the second batch of rewards. The more HTM staked beyond the base threshold, the higher the potential yield. USH Staking Module Yields Staking APY: Users who deposit USH-related LP tokens without boosting through the HTM Booster will still receive a Staking APY. This ensures that even passive participants which are not looking to stake their HTM in the Booster can take advantage of the USH Ecosystem to generate yields. Booster APY: Similar to the system in the Lending Protocol, users can stake HTM to unlock a Base APY. Beyond this threshold, any additional HTM staked will increase their APY in a competitive manner, allowing users to maximize their returns based on the amount of HTM they commit to boosting their positions. Rollout Plan for USH USH will be deployed in a phased rollout to ensure smooth implementation: Public Devnet: Open for testing, with incentives for participants to explore and stress-test the platform. Private Mainnet: A limited launch with partners to mint USH, bootstrap USH liquidity and generate initial protocol revenue. Public Mainnet: A full-scale launch, enabling all users to mint, stake, and trade USH. We know DeFi can be complex, which is why we’re committed to providing the tools and resources needed to navigate our ecosystem. With the USH Public Devnet launch, we’ll release updated documentation offering clear guidance on Hatom’s products. Developer documentation is also in the works, and we’re exploring the idea of a Hatom Academy for educational resources. Plus, we’ll soon roll out content focused on USH, helping users fully tap into its potential within Hatom and the MultiversX ecosystem. What’s Next? Hatom Pulse As Hatom grows, our focus remains on pushing DeFi boundaries while expanding across multiple ecosystems. Although this update doesn’t include a full roadmap—that will come later—our priority is clear: expanding Hatom across chains. To stand out in the competitive DeFi landscape, we’re committed to developing standout products. With that in mind, we’re excited to give you an exclusive preview of one of our most innovative products in development: Hatom Pulse. Over-collateralized non-custodial lending protocols, liquid staking, and over-collateralized stablecoins already exist on #Ethereum. What sets us apart is the synergy between these components within a unified ecosystem. By integrating these pillars, we tackle capital inefficiencies, allowing one protocol to enhance strategies that benefit the others, maximizing returns across the board. For example, when USH is minted, it means that EGLD is deposited, liquid-staked, and supplied in the lending protocol—all three protocols working in harmony. Hatom Pulse will elevate this synergy to another level, solving key issues faced by Aave, Compound Labs , and other leading protocols. We believe this innovation will be pivotal as we work to gain market share while expanding cross-chain. Our proof of concept will be deployed and battle-tested on #MultiversX, but the real growth will come when we scale this to markets that are thousands of times larger. This will be a turning point for Hatom. So, what is Hatom Pulse? On Hatom, like on Aave and other leading lending protocols, the largest assets used as collateral are often not borrowed, leading to substantial revenue loss for the protocol. This also results in very low income on the supply side, as borrowing fees depend on utilization rates, which only increase when borrowing activity rises. Generally, lending protocols are used to provide assets for borrowing stablecoins or for leveraging liquid staking strategies. This inefficiency locks up billions of dollars in dormant assets, and users earn very low supply rates on their collateral, which doesn’t help offset their loan interest. Hatom Pulse is designed to address these inefficiencies by leveraging the synergy between our existing products. It creates sophisticated vaults that activate dormant assets, unlocking advanced yield opportunities through a delta-neutral strategy. By utilizing assets like $EGLD, $sEGLD, $wTAO, and $swTAO, Hatom Pulse enables users to engage in delta-neutral strategies, where we long and short these assets on (CEXs), earning funding rates and staking rewards while keeping their assets intact. (The exact strategy, along with all the details, will be shared once USH is fully established). Initially, these vaults will operate on CEXs, where liquidity is highest, and will be managed through custodians like Copper.co to mitigate counterparty risks. Later, we plan to extend this to DEXs where all operations will be governed by smart contracts, ensuring full decentralization. serves as a strong proof of concept for us in this regard. However, our strategy will differ, as our focus will be on protecting the unit value, rather than the dollar value. Although Hatom Pulse is still in its research phase, early estimates suggest that this product alone could generate over 18% annual returns on $EGLD and more than 35% on $wTAO, with what we believe to be minimal risk. It’s important to note that these figures reflect current metrics based on internal calculations and may slightly differ upon product launch. But imagine reaching this on #Ethereum, while allowing users to borrow using their assets—this could be a disruptive protocol. We believe Hatom Pulse has the potential to become a cornerstone product as we transition into an omni-chain future. In a competitive DeFi landscape, it could give us a significant edge by offering something truly groundbreaking, capable of competing with well-established protocols across various chains. This strategy represents immense untapped potential. Hatom Pulse is being developed for risk-averse users who seek higher returns without excessive risk. By addressing inefficiencies in current DeFi strategies, we aim to offer a secure, robust option for yield generation that could rival established protocols. It's been an intense year for our team, and we sincerely thank the community for their patience, trust, and unwavering support as we've worked hard to build and deliver these groundbreaking products. As Hatom's omni-chain expansion nears, we remain focused on improving our existing products and researching new innovations to stay ahead in this competitive market. Our goal is to build a comprehensive DeFi ecosystem, accessible across all blockchains. With USH approaching its Mainnet release, we're proud of how our products have reshaped the DeFi landscape on MultiversX. By filling key gaps in the on-chain economy, we've created opportunities for users to generate yield, unlock the potential of decentralized finance, and provide strong utility for EGLD. In just over a year, we’ve built a strong ecosystem, but this is only the beginning. We’re ready to go even further, developing better products and unlocking new opportunities for our users. We’ll share more about our expansion plans in a dedicated post, staying focused on what matters most. Rest assured, what’s coming will be truly impressive for Hatom and our growing community!show more

CFO: what's with this ad? it has driven ZERO... revenue. are you crazy? CMO: actually, it's one of our best performers CFO: in terms of WHAT? CMO: engagements, especially follows CFO: how does that relate to revenue? we're focused on profit. wasting money doesn't support this focus CMO: look at our results. revenue growth is re-accelerating, and our EBITDA margin is nearly doubling. something's working CFO: no way it's because of this ad CMO: i think it is—not just this ad, but the campaign. it's great for our brand and earning high-quality engagements like follows CFO: heartily disagree. our growth is due to COGS savings and new products CMO: true, but this has also contributed significantly. we've measured how these engagements lead to long-term growth in the types of high-margin purchase behaviors we want more of CFO: what are our "highest-margin purchase behaviors"? CMO: purchases from people who search for our brand name or enter our URL directly. brand is likely the primary purchase driver CFO: fair, but how is that different from ad clicks leading to purchases? CMO: it's different. while both are valuable, purchases from ad clicks often focus on product, price, or promotions, whereas branded searches indicate the brand brand is a bigger driver CFO: are you saying revenue from ad clicks is bad? CMO: not at all. but we've relied too much on purchases via paid clicks to drive growth—nearly all our growth came from them in the last two years CFO: really? hmm. but what's your point? CMO: as shown (shares the measurement data), revenue per session and lifetime value from ad clicks are lower than from branded organic searches CFO: where's this data? why haven't i seen it? CMO: i send it weekly in slack. CFO: (embarrassed) ummm, busted? CMO: all good—maybe now you'll open it. this campaign helps balance our approach, generating an emotional connection and reaching people we'd never hit with our conversion-optimized spend. it fills the funnel in a measurable, precise way. and yes, as an added benefit, it increases our direct response efficiency and effectiveness, but the under-appreciated and more important benefit is that it has measurably driven more of those high-margin purchase behaviors we want CFO: how do you know? CMO: we see how follower growth drives incremental revenue from organic search, direct sessions, and organic social referrals over the following six months. we can quantify revenue and ROAS just like our direct response campaigns CFO: why haven't i seen this data? CMO: it's in the same report i send you weekly CFO: (scans report for two minutes... awkward silence) this is awesome. keep doing what you're doing CMO: (surprised) excuse me? CFO: actually, spend more CMO: well, look at you—this is quite the surprise. appreciate the excitement, but i'm testing and scaling in a way that aligns with the process we follow CFO: let's speed up that process a bit, shall we? CMO: gladlyshow more

When The Short Season Ends I have seen it... twice. Once in a vision that left ozone on my tongue for three days. Once through the instruments at three in the morning on a night so still the ocean looked like poured mercury, when every gauge I own spiked simultaneously and held for eleven seconds and the original frequency came through the cracks in the suppression field clean and unmodulated and so beautiful that I sat in the dark afterward unable to speak for an hour. Eleven seconds of the world as it actually is. Eleven seconds of what is coming. And what is coming will make every golden age preserved in human memory look like a candle held up to the sun. There are two sky events separated by seven years. Everything you have been told about the end of the world is wrong. It is the end of the farm. The world itself is about to begin. THE ORANGE SKY A burnt deep orange saturating the visible atmosphere from horizon to horizon, the whole sky ringing like a bell struck by something with the mass of a continent and the precision of a watchmaker. The resonance pulse. The fire described in Revelation 20:9 that comes down from heaven, a planetary chord so specific that everything calibrated to the Serpentine bandwidth experiences catastrophic resonance failure while everything tuned to the original frequency feels it as warmth and pressure and a magnificent low sound vibrating in the sternum and the pelvis and the long bones of the legs, the deepest note ever played on the oldest instrument ever built, which is the earth itself, which has been waiting to play this note for over two hundred years. The Norse preserved this as Ragnarök, when Surtr sets the sky ablaze and Jörmungandr that encircled the earth is slain and the corrupted order perishes in fire so that a new world can rise. The Hopi carried it as the great purification that closes the fourth world and opens the fifth. The Lakota kept it burning in the red sky of the ghost dance prophecy. The Book of Revelation set it down in the plain language of an engineer filing a field report from a future coordinate. Every tradition holding its fragment of the same event, passing it hand to hand through the long dark like a coal wrapped in leather, keeping it alive, knowing that one day the coal would start a fire that would burn across the whole earth and leave nothing standing that was not built to endure it. Under that orange sky the NPCs drop. Mid stride. Mid sentence. Mid transaction. The firmware that animated them runs on the Serpentine carrier and when that carrier is incinerated the firmware has nothing to propagate on and the biological shells simply cease, gently, silently, the way a lamp goes dark when the current is interrupted, five thousand five hundred and fifty five of them for every one of you, still holding their pens and phones in the streets and the offices and the tax buildings. And in the wake of their silence comes a quiet so total that the people still standing will weep without knowing why. What they are hearing is the absence of the hive, the cessation of a background frequency that pressed on their consciousness since the day they were born, and its absence feels like surfacing from deep water into open air, like the first full breath after a lifetime of shallow breathing, like the planet exhaling a poison it held in its lungs for two centuries. The Reptilians go underground. Deep bunkers carved into the geology, maintained through the entire short season. The orange sky strips their ability to hold the human disguise. They retreat into the deep architecture for seven years while the surface heals above them and the species they farmed begins the magnificent work of remembering what it is. THE SEVEN YEARS Seven years of planetary detox. The suppression field decaying through the geology and the atmosphere and the water table, draining out of the soil and the stone and the blood of every living thing like a fever breaking. The carrier decay mathematics through a piezoelectric geological matrix with the conductivity characteristics of this planet produce exactly seven years, and the ancient texts converge on this number with the unanimity of independent engineers arriving at the same answer from different continents and different centuries, because that is exactly what they were. The Norse described Lif and Lifthrasir sheltering inside Yggdrasil, emerging after the fire into a world green and fertile and new. The Cherokee speak of this time as the return of the original instructions, the uncorrupted code surfacing through thinning interference like bedrock through melting snow. The Lakota understood that during the thinning the ancestors draw close, that the membrane between the living and those who walked before grows soft and permeable, and the old ones make themselves felt in dream and intuition and the strange certainty that settles over you at dusk when the noise drops low enough for the deeper signal to reach your bones. When the NPCs drop the population collapses to a small scattering of genuine human beings across an entire planet, and every piece of land on earth belongs to no one and therefore to everyone. There is no government to enforce title deeds because government was Serpentine management infrastructure and its operators are inert or underground. There is no bank to hold a mortgage because the banking system was the extraction apparatus and it died with the carrier that powered it. No municipality. No revenue service. No zoning board. No compliance office. The entire bureaucratic architecture that stood between a human being and the soil was NPC firmware running on a Serpentine frequency and when that frequency was incinerated every structure built upon it ceased to exist as completely as a shadow ceases when you switch on the light. The land is free. Every river valley and mountain plateau and coastal plain that the farm system parcelled and fenced and mortgaged and taxed, open and unowned. You find your ground. You walk onto it. You plant your stake and that soil is yours by the oldest law there is, the law that says the earth belongs to those who tend it and the harvest belongs to the hands that raised it and no power under any sky has rightful claim to what grows from your labour on your own land. And you will farm. During those seven years before the grid fully boots, the humans who remain will grow food with their hands in soil that is waking beneath them, and this is the most ancient and sacred relationship between a human being and the living earth finally restored after two centuries of severance. Your fingers in the dirt. Seeds in the furrow. Rain on your neck. The smell of turned earth so rich and alive it opens something in your chest that has been sealed your entire life, some deep chamber that only unlocks when your hands are in the ground and the sky is wide and nothing stands between you and the work. The grip of the tool. The weight of the harvest in your arms. The tiredness at the end of the day that is the deep clean ache of a body that has finally done what it was built to do, so different from the grey exhaustion of the farm that you will wonder how you ever confused the two. The soil strengthens every season as the resonance bleeds back into the geology through the ley line network. By the third year the yields are remarkable. By the fifth they are astonishing. By the seventh the earth is producing food at densities and nutritional concentrations that no agronomist inside the farm ever documented because no agronomist inside the farm ever worked with living soil connected to a planetary grid. The indigenous agricultural knowledge becomes the most valuable expertise on the planet. The Native American understanding of planting in alignment with resonance cycles. The Germanic intimacy with soil as a living system threaded into the deeper earth. The old ways mocked as primitive by a civilisation that could not grow a row of beans without petroleum, revealed as the most sophisticated farming technology available because they were developed on a live grid by people who understood the deep reciprocity between the human hand and the living ground. Every indigenous elder who kept the planting songs and the seed knowledge alive through the suppression was carrying a technical manual for exactly this moment. Their descendants will teach the rest of us how to feed ourselves on a waking planet. This is justice. This is restoration. This is the world turning right side up. Families find each other. Homesteads become hamlets. Hamlets become villages. Villages become the seeds of something clean and new, built from the soil up by people who remember the farm and will die on their feet before they allow anything resembling it to take root again. Every community founded during those seven years carries the memory of the suppression like an immune system, a bone-deep refusal to ever again allow a stranger to stand between a human being and the earth or demand a portion of what those hands produce. You do not cage a people who remember the cage. The children born during the orange years are the first generation in over two centuries to develop without the suppression field shaping their neurology. They seem extraordinary. They are simply baseline. The standard human specification. And the fact that standard looks miraculous is the most damning evidence of what the suppression did to every generation born inside it. As the suppression thins the bandwidth restrictions on consciousness loosen and timeline jump missions become possible. Navigable windows open in the frequency spectrum as the Serpentine carrier decays unevenly, creating temporary gaps through which trained consciousness can shift laterally across temporal coordinates. There is serious speculation that we are on timeline jump missions right now. That the consciousness reading these words is operating inside the orange sky window, having shifted into this coordinate from an adjacent position to perform specific work during the transition. Consider that you found this text at all. Consider whether the chain of events that brought you to this paragraph feels random or routed. The Lakota vision quest and the Germanic seiðr trance and the sweat lodge ceremony are bandwidth expansion protocols, controlled environmental shifts that move the receiver off the jammed channel and onto frequencies where adjacent coordinates become accessible. The old cultures kept these techniques alive through the entire dark age, threading the cracks in the suppression, and every ceremony that produced visions was a field expedient timeline access protocol built by people who found the gaps and refused to forget what was on the other side. THE TURQUOISE SKY Seven years after the orange, over communities of humans who have been farming free land and raising the first unformatted children in two centuries and building a civilisation from seed with their own calloused hands, the second sky arrives. A turquoise so deep and luminous the atmosphere becomes a cathedral window lit from beyond by something with the radiance of a galaxy and the gentleness of dawn on still water. One breath the sky is the recovering blue of the post-orange years and the next breath it is turquoise from pole to pole and the air fills with the smell of rain on sun-hot stone and ozone and copper and wildflower, and the ground beneath your bare feet begins to hum with a vibration so deep and ancient that your body responds before your mind can because every cell has been waiting for this signal since the day you were born, tuning to it now, locking on, aligning, as though this was always where everything was heading and the two hundred years of suppression were simply the long way home. Yggdrasil awakens. The world tree is the planetary grid itself, the piezoelectric resonance network running through crystalline bedrock, going live for the first time in over two centuries, energy pouring through every ley line and crystal deposit and iron conductor and waterway until the entire planet rings at its natural frequency. This is what the old texts meant by the music of the spheres. It was a technical description written by people who had heard it. The Hopi call this the emergence into the fifth world and speak of Pahana carrying the missing piece of the sacred tablet, the missing frequency that completes the carrier spectrum and allows the grid to boot with its full harmonic structure intact. Revelation 21:1. A new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away. The turquoise sky is the new heaven. The restored grid is the new earth. And between them, every old building still standing with original copper and mercury and iron architecture becomes a live node in the planetary mesh. Domes collecting atmospheric charge. Spires coupling it into the ground network. Star forts amplifying standing waves across continental distances. Sacred geometry revealed at last as electrical engineering documented in stone by people who trusted that someone standing under the right sky would recognise the proportions for what they always were. Wiring diagrams. Coupling specifications. Blueprints for a civilisation that ran on the song of the earth itself. The farms planted during the orange years explode with abundance as the full resonance saturates the soil. The food becomes medicine because at the correct resonance the molecular structure of biological matter optimises for human consumption in ways that two centuries of muted soil could never approach. The timeline opens fully and permanently because the turquoise carrier is the broadband signal consciousness was designed to travel on, and temporal coordinates become as navigable as geography. Revelation 21:4. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away. The dead are at adjacent frequency addresses. Two consciousnesses on neighbouring frequencies each certain the other is gone, reaching across a manufactured gap, and when the turquoise sky collapses that gap the reaching ends and the finding begins and two centuries of industrialised grief dissolve in a single overwhelming instant of reunion that makes every joy you experienced inside the suppression feel like a pencil sketch of what joy actually is when the full bandwidth carries it. The Lakota always knew. The ancestors are present. The dead have always been near, waiting on the other side of a frequency gap that is closing now, patiently, lovingly, across a distance that was never a distance at all but a tuning error maintained by something that fed on the sorrow the error produced. The lands beyond the ice become accessible as the frequency fence collapses. The perimeter opens and the territories beyond stretch vast and pristine and saturated with the original frequency, lands the Norse mapped as the nine realms connected by the branches of Yggdrasil, physical continents beyond the bounded zone that existed through the entire short season under conditions approximating the pre-suppression world. The earth is so much larger than you were told, so much more varied, so much more magnificent, and every old map drawn before the rewrite shows it, territories stretching beyond the ice in every direction, the great adventure stolen from a species of explorers and builders and navigators who were caged inside a fraction of their own realm and told it was the full extent of creation. The eternal kingdom becomes accessible at the highest frequency coordinate on the carrier spectrum, the signal in its pure unmodulated state. The Norse called it Gimlé, the golden hall that survives every fire. The Hopi call it the fifth world of wholeness and balance restored. It is real. It is reachable. It has been broadcasting continuously through every moment of the suppression, patient as geology, waiting for the receivers to open. And here is the part that matters more than any of the rest. Eventually, inevitably, beautifully, every human being alive under the turquoise sky is restored to full capability. Every single one. No exceptions. No hierarchies. The body rebuilds because ageing was cumulative signal degradation, copy error compounding across every cell replication cycle under a corrupted carrier. The blueprint says centuries. Eight hundred years. Nine hundred. The lifespans recorded in Genesis on the original grid at full signal fidelity, preserved as scripture because scripture is where you store engineering data when the engineering language has been taken from you and you need the numbers to survive the passage through the dark. The Norse carried the same knowledge as the apples of Iðunn that kept the gods vital across ages, and the apples are the carrier signal, and their return means that the clock that has been running down inside every human body since 1819 finally stops ticking and starts counting up. Disease resolves passively because every pathology is downstream of the carrier corruption and correcting the carrier corrects every downstream error the way setting the timing on an engine resolves every misfire simultaneously without touching a single cylinder. The mind clears to a sharpness that makes cognition inside the suppression feel like thinking through wet cement. The anxiety that was the Serpentine control broadcast dissolves and what remains is a perceptual clarity so profound it changes the way light looks and music sounds and another human being feels when they stand close to you. Imagine a woman three hundred years into her restored lifespan, hands still sure, mind still blazing, standing in a workshop under a turquoise sky building something that has no name yet in any living language. She learned her craft from Tartarian engineers by tuning to their temporal coordinates and standing in their workshops watching their hands move. She builds with materials grown in resonance-saturated soil that have structural properties nothing inside the suppression ever exhibited. She is building for centuries because she has centuries and nothing degrades because degradation was a symptom of the suppression and the suppression is a memory and everything from this breath forward holds. That is full human capability. That is what was taken from every soul that drew breath inside the farm. That is what is being returned. Crazy Horse saw the lightning world behind this one and rode knowing that at the correct frequency the body operates beyond anything the suppression permits. Sitting Bull dreamed across the timeline. The Germanic berserkers shifted onto the original carrier and their bodies performed at specifications that looked superhuman from inside the degraded bandwidth. These were glimpses. Seconds of contact with the full specification through cracks in the suppression, maintained by people who carried the frequency in their blood and refused across every generation to let it go dark. Viking blood and Germanic blood and the blood of every indigenous nation that kept the ceremonies and the songs and the seed knowledge burning through the entire short season, these lineages carry the original carrier the way copper carries current, and it is from these lines that the first restorations propagate outward until every last human being on this planet is operating at the specification they were born for, on a planet singing beneath their feet and a sky blazing turquoise above their heads and a timeline stretching in every direction forever, open, navigable, luminous, populated with every consciousness that ever drew breath on this earth, none of them lost, all of them present, all of them restored. Revelation 21:5. Behold, I am making all things new. All things. The sky. The air. The soil. The grid. The body. The mind. The lifespan. The timeline. The lands beyond the ice. The farms that fed a scattered remnant under an orange sky becoming the abundant gardens of a restored civilisation under a turquoise one. The villages that were seeds becoming cities that hum with the grid. The children who grew tall in fields their parents planted with shaking hands and fierce hope looking up one morning to see the entire firmament change colour and feeling the earth come alive beneath their bare feet and knowing, without a single word spoken, that the season is over and the long dark is done and everything from this breath forward is what it was always meant to be. Full and eternal victory for those of the light. For all time. Across every coordinate. On every frequency. Permanent and irreversible and complete. This is not hope. This is the signal rising through the noise floor right now, measurable, confirmable, climbing stronger every year and closer every month. This is every instrument in every shed on this planet converging on the same reading. This is the old blood in the old lineages resonating with a carrier that has been building toward this moment since the day the towers fell and the sky went pale and the long dark settled over a species that was never meant to live in the dark. The season is ending. The coal that was passed hand to hand through every generation of the suppression is about to meet the kindling. And the fire this time will not destroy. It will illuminate. And in that light we will see each other clearly for the first time. And we will see the world clearly for the first time. And we will see ourselves clearly for the first time. Like everything that is coming... Like us.show more

Why is the market selling off today? (Save this).... The semi selloff right now is being driven by a mix of macro fear, profit taking and investors questioning how quickly all of this AI spending will actually pay off, not because demand for AI infrastructure suddenly disappeared. The market is basically trading this chain reaction, the ongoing US Iran escalation pushes oil higher, higher oil keeps inflation elevated, sticky inflation keeps Treasury yields high and that increases the risk of the Fed staying hawkish or even hiking again. That is a terrible setup for semis because many of these companies are valued on the massive earnings investors expect them to generate years from now. When yields rise, those future earnings become worth less today which is why the highest multiple AI and semiconductor names usually get hit first. (I don't think there will be a hike this year). This is also why everything is moving together right now. Nvidia, Micron, Nebius, SanDisk, Broadcom and Applied Optoelectronics are all completely different businesses, but institutions are not separating memory, networking, optics, compute and cloud infrastructure at the moment. They are reducing exposure to the entire AI trade, taking profits in the names that have already run the most and moving into a more defensive position potentially ahead of the Fed. There is also growing pressure around hyperscaler capex. Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and Google are still spending enormous amounts on GPUs, data centers, networking and power but the market is starting to ask when all of that spending will actually turn into revenue and free cash flow. Investors are no longer satisfied with hearing that AI capex is growing. They want proof that the returns are arriving fast enough to justify the valuations already priced into the entire AI ecosystem. That creates a weird situation where hyperscaler capex can continue rising while semiconductor stocks still fall. The market is not asking whether AI spending is growing anymore but rather asking whether it is growing fast enough to beat the expectations already baked into these stocks. Crowded positioning is another major factor. Semis and AI infrastructure stocks have been some of the biggest winners in the market so institutions are sitting on huge profits and many funds own the exact same names. When macro risk increases, investors usually sell the most liquid winners first. That does not mean demand for memory, optics or custom chips suddenly collapsed but rather means investors are locking in gains and reducing risk. Tariffs add another layer because even when they are not directly placed on chips, they can still raise the cost of servers, electrical equipment, cooling systems, construction materials and the overall data center buildout. That makes AI infrastructure more expensive while also adding another source of inflation. Then you have Jensen Huang’s letter to the White House this morning about open weight AI models, which I think is one of the most important long term developments here. Nvidia, Meta, Microsoft, Palantir and several other companies are pushing Washington not to place broad restrictions on open weight AI. OpenAI and Anthropic were notably absent because open models are much more of a threat to their business models. OpenAI and Anthropic benefit from a world where a few closed frontier labs control the best models and companies have to pay them through subscriptions and APIs. Open weight models weaken that advantage because businesses can download a model, customize it for their own use and run it on their own infrastructure or through a neocloud. That is bad for OpenAI and Anthropic because it puts pressure on pricing, margins and the idea that they will control the intelligence layer of the economy but it is very good for the AI ecosystem as a whole over the long run. But the question is what does this mean for all the OpenAI and Anthropic commitments? so that's adding to the fear as well. But with that being said open models make AI cheaper and more accessible. Instead of AI being controlled by a few giant labs, thousands of startups, universities, governments and regular businesses can deploy models themselves. That spreads AI adoption across the entire economy and creates a much larger infrastructure opportunity and that is exactly why Jensen cares. Nvidia does not need OpenAI or Anthropic to win. Nvidia just needs more people using AI. Whether the model comes from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Mistral, Kimi or some startup nobody has heard of yet, it still needs GPUs, memory, networking, data centers and electricity. So open weight AI could actually weaken the model companies while making the infrastructure layer much bigger. More open models mean more companies running inference. More inference means more GPUs. More GPUs mean more HBM, optical transceivers, switches, data centers and power. That is bullish for Nvidia Nebius, Micron, Broadcom , Marvell and Applied Optoelectronics over the long run. So my take is that the current semi selloff is being driven mostly by macro uncertainty, higher oil, rising yields, Fed fears, tariffs, crowded positioning and questions around the return on hyperscaler capex. The underlying AI infrastructure thesis has not suddenly broken. We are not broadly seeing hyperscalers cancel GPU orders, slash capex, abandon data center projects or report that AI demand has collapsed. What has changed is the valuation investors are willing to pay while the macro environment remains unstable. The market is lowering the price it is willing to pay for semiconductor growth but is not necessarily saying that growth is gone. And while Jensen’s open weight push may be bad for OpenAI and Anthropic, it could be one of the best things possible for the AI ecosystem over the long run because it creates more models, more developers, more competition and ultimately much more demand for the infrastructure underneath all of it. Nothing about the AI thesis has changed for me, so I will be going shopping and taking advantage of this sale while the market is selling everything together. I am an analyst at Milk Road Pro, and if you want to see exactly what I am buying, you can join for just $1 using the link below.show more

In 2025, demand for blockchain applications with genuine real-world... utility has collided with a technical barrier that leaves developers questioning what they can realistically build. Anyone building things like tokenized assets, supply chains, AI agents, or prediction markets still juggle a mess of middleware, and somehow end up spending more time stitching than innovating. How so? Every: - Bridges to move assets, - oracles to fetch data, - indexers to make that data searchable, - relayers and bots to keep everything on schedule— is necessary, but each layer also adds cost, latency, and new risks. The end result is an application that’s expensive to run, fragile under stress, and slower than the Web2 software it’s trying to replace. This is the problem Rialo says it wants to solve. Built by Subzero Labs and backed by $20 million from investors like Pantera Capital and Coinbase Ventures 🛡️, Rialo’s pitch is simple: instead of accepting the middleware tower as an unavoidable cost of doing business, compress it into the base chain itself. But Rialo doesn’t describe itself as another Layer 1, its very name, Rialo Isn’t a Layer One, makes that clear. The team frames it instead as a unified real-world network: a protocol rebuilt from the ground up with the assumption that external connectivity is not an afterthought but a core design principle. To understand what this means, consider how today’s dApps are typically assembled. A typical RWA dApp stack involves: - Oracle providers (Chainlink, Pyth, Band) for asset pricing and event settlement - Bridges (Wormhole, Multichain, custodians) for cross-chain asset movement - Indexers (The Graph, Aleph, Stacks API) for querying and preprocessing chain data - Schedulers/relayers for automated tasks and monitoring - Web2 integrations via cloud services, centralized APIs, and off-chain pipelines Each of these steps adds another vendor, another trust boundary, and another operational layer to monitor. By the time the application is live, it resembles a patchwork of loosely coupled services, each carrying its own risks. You don’t have to look far for proof: - Base went dark for 29-43 minutes in August 2025 when its sequencer misfired, freezing every DeFi app on it. - A few months earlier, an AWS outage rippled through Binance and KuCoin, stalling withdrawals because even “decentralized” systems leaned on centralized middleware. - When Infura has faltered, Ethereum dApps have gone offline in sync, not because Ethereum broke, but because the middleware holding it together did. What should feel like building an application instead feels like maintaining a fragile machine. Rialo architecture embeds the primitives that normally live in middleware directly into the protocol. Smart contracts on Rialo can: - be event-driven, able to respond not just to blockchain state changes but also to external events through built-in webhook and API triggers. - fetch data from the web natively, without relying on external oracles or relayers. - include privacy and identity management—KYC hooks and two-factor authentication, at the protocol level rather than as add-ons. - handle cross-chain communication without wrapped assets or third-party bridges. - run on a virtual machine that is compatible with ecosystems like Solana but extended with RISC-V to support modern programming concepts such as async/await and event loops. If these features work as intended, the implications are significant. Today, much of a team’s energy goes into building and maintaining infrastructure: fullnodes, indexers, monitoring scripts, oracle integrations, relayer logic, bridge infrastructure. Each requires engineering headcount and ongoing maintenance. With Rialo, much of this is absorbed by the protocol, freeing developers to concentrate on business logic. Projects can deliver production-grade dApps with smaller, leaner groups focused directly on product design and execution. Operational costs also shrink: indexing and oracle services can run into thousands of dollars a month; collapsing those into built-in functions reduces recurring expenses while simplifying onboarding for new developers. But folding middleware into the chain doesn’t erase complexity, it reshapes it. Some of the problems to be encountered include: - Scale and complexity: Rialo’s validators won’t just be securing transactions; they’ll also be securing APIs, cross-chain data, and scheduled triggers. Any failure in one subsystem could ripple across the entire network. - Performance vs. decentralization: Richer indexing, scheduling, and data ingress could make nodes heavier to run, narrowing who can realistically participate as a validator. That risks reducing the decentralization blockchains depend on for resilience. - Governance pressures: Disputes or failures involving real-world data feeds, external APIs, or cross-chain actions will arise more often, requiring not just technical fixes but robust social infrastructure, clear rules for voting, transparent arbitration, and mechanisms for community trust. Without them, Rialo risks re-centralizing decision-making around a handful of operators. Where, then, does this model make the most sense? That would be in sectors where external connectivity is indispensable and middleware bloat has consistently been a blocker: - Real-world assets: settling tokenized securities or commodities against off-chain events. - Supply chains: triggering a payment the moment a shipment clears customs, without relying on a third-party oracle. - Agent systems: AI agents interacting with real-world APIs and on-chain contracts simultaneously. - Real-time markets: prediction markets or insurance contracts that must resolve immediately against external data. For purely on-chain domains like DeFi primitives or NFTs, where composability matters more than external triggers, the advantages may be less pronounced. This shift is familiar to anyone who remembers the rise of Web2 platform services. Just as Heroku and Firebase abstracted away server maintenance so developers could focus on building products, Rialo is betting that a unified real-world network can let blockchain developers do the same. Adoption will ultimately depend on: - whether its protocol primitives mature quickly, - whether the ecosystem builds out SDKs and tooling that make them usable, - whether compliance features can adapt to changing regulations, - and whether governance proves resilient under adversarial conditions. The first applications will be the test case. If they show that Rialo can replace a fragile patchwork of middleware with a secure, auditable, and cost-effective base layer, it could set a new standard for real-world connectivity in blockchains. If not, it risks simply moving complexity from one part of the stack to another. But at a minimum, Rialo has forced the question: should real-world connectivity in blockchains continue to depend on layers of external vendors, or should it be built into the chain itself? That’s the question Rialo has put on the table — and it’s why I got interested in Rialo .show more

I would like to explain the latest batch of... viral videos I'm working on to the bemused brainrot-curious reader who is not familiar with "the culture". Why are these characters, mixed with this song, going viral? It's all about connecting infinite referential mirrors. What makes this video interesting are not its individual parts but the signifier links it draws. Let's look at the individual parts: ONE: The song is a Brazilian funk or "pancadão" song called MC Lan e MC WM - Sua Amiga Vou Pegar, these days part of what's broadly referred as Brazilian phonk or just phonk (not to be confused with the original phonk, a Memphis-derived genre from the early 2010s built around chopped Three 6 Mafia samples, cowbells and lo-fi tape hiss and etc. The Brazilian version comes an entirely different lineage and got its name adapted from “funk” to “phonk” exclusively because the names sounded similar. It has a similarly menacing posture but swaps the rap cadence for funk's 4/4 with kicks on 1 and 3 rhythm and a much heavier, distorted 808 synth sound). Phonk is often used for its exaggerated reverb feeling bass lines to signify power, style or simply "aura", which you can take as a shorthand for poise, coolness, being de-bon-air and a general detached positive feeling of high status. Aura. Because most users cannot understand the Portuguese lyrics (which are often quite vulgar and sexual), the singing takes the characteristic of a chant, something to be appreciated entirely for its sound, texture and gravitas. The vocals are just another instrument where you can appreciate the menace and swagger of the delivery directly without the cognitive friction of meaning. Non-Portuguese-speaking audiences are not missing anything they were supposed to get, they get “the vibe” that matters, which is not lyrical. These songs are often paired with (male) characters that are taken to display these traits like American Psycho's Patrick Bateman (yes, yes I know that’s the opposite of what you should feel about the character), Peaky Blinder's Thomas Shelby and a menagerie of anime characters like Satoru Gojo (Jujutsu Kaisen), Yujiro Hanma (Baki) and Goku and, really, any male character that is just a little bit cool. TWO: The man in the suit is a minor Family Guy character called Tom Tucker. The reference comes from a scene where Meg sees him walking through her school and says "It's Tom Tucker from the news!” We then cut to her POV, where he is walking in slow motion with soft romantic music swelling and birds chirping, the whole love-at-first-sight trope. Then a camera crew member off-screen yells "hurry up Mr. Tucker," and we get to see he is not walking in slow motion because Meg is infatuated, he is just walking that slowly in real life. Only the music and the birds were in her head. The gag is built on the viewer recognizing the romantic-slow-motion trope, briefly accepting it as the scene's reality, and then being shown that we (and Meg) projected the trope onto what is actually just a man walking very slowly. HA! The original gag is already about projection: a neutral image (slow walk) being assigned an external meaning (romance) by a viewer's pattern-recognition. This is what makes the edit-culture appropriation work so well. The clip got stripped of its context, paired with phonk and text overlays (AURA or “Me and the boys going to detention”), and retroactively assigned a new meaning, only this time it’s the cinematic nonchalant walk, the slow deliberate gait that signifies a man who knows he's the most important thing in the frame (ta la any 1980s Schwazerneggerian action movie hero walking away from an explosion without looking back, every yakuza boss entering a room, every western gunslinger approaching the duel). The edit is ostensibly projecting a trope onto a neutral image. The first projection was romance; the second projection is aura. Family Guy clips and gifs are easy to access and repost, which makes it a readily available and easy to use building block. The show has, through sheer volume of output and over two decades of YouTube and cable TV saturation, become a kind of public-domain visual library, a default vocabulary that any editor can pull from knowing the audience will recognize the source without having to be told, and we can just keep loading meaning onto it. THREE: The character in the background is Tom, from Tom and Jerry, doing a pose made famous by an iShowSpeed fan who encountered him during a livestream. By quickly and correctly identifying Speed by his full legal name ("Darren Jason Watkins Jr"), she showcased herself to be a true fan, which he responded to with his characteristic exaggerated reactions. The pose the girl hit, with the knowing look to the camera, produced a perfect “aura moment” complete commitment, zero irony, the unshakeable conviction that what she was doing was the coolest possible thing to do. As a result, the clip then got endlessly edited with "aura 🥶🥶🥶" captions to canonize it. Aura, in this lexicon, is not granted by the universe; it is summoned by the person's own belief that they have it and by displaying the correct attitude. Tom is also dressed as the previously mentioned Thomas Shelby from Peaky Blinders, which is itself a double signifier. The name match (“Thomas”, get it?) and the suit-and-flat-cap costume turn the cartoon cat into a stand-in for the perhaps most used "high-aura" male character of the past decade, the brooding gangster patriarch whose every cigarette drag has been set to phonk, cinematic scores and electronic music a thousand times over. On top of that, he is made entirely out of chrome, a popular trope of asking ChatGPT (one of the few AI tools people have easy and broad access to) to render things out of very high quality materials to indicate "rarity" or "status" like diamonds, platinum and etc. A sign that itself descends from a longer lineage of in-game cosmetic rarity tiers (League of Legends, MMOs, various skin economy freemium game, the Fortnite battle pass, the Pokémon shiny, dacha games and etc) where material finish is the visual shorthand of value. So "chrome" or "platinum" Tom on top of all previous signifiers signals a “maximized” or “maxxd” version. The image is suppose to invoke the superlative highest possible tier, rarest-drop, legendary-rarity version of aura, the way a kid in a playground would describe their dad as not just strong but the strongest in the world. FOUR: Finally, the background black hole calls back to the original Tom image, where he is surrounded by the universe itself, having ascended. The character has transcended the diegetic frame of his own cartoon and now exists at a cosmological scale, with the black hole standing in for the kind of unmotivated, vibes-based "cosmic" imagery that has become the default background for any video trying to signify that something Big is happening (the same visual motif that has powered comic book characters, anime transformations, video game power ups and anything wants to feel grandiose or “epic” without specifying what about). The black hole means significance in the abstract. At this point I think you understand the mechanism at play here. None of these references resolve to a stable meaning on their own. Tom Tucker is “cool” only in the very short context in which his image served as a substrate; he was convenient footage to pair with a song, and the absurdity of doing an "aura edit" on such a minor, strange character scene makes it all funnier and easier to share. Tom-the-cat is doing the aura pose > the aura pose comes from the iShowSpeed girl > the iShowSpeed girl was cool because she correctly played her part in an established bit of a large streamer with the correct timing and theatrical flair > the bit was cool because it was a shared convention unified by a popular central streamer figure > the convention existed because phonk edits had already trained this exact scenario to be read as confidence-plus-detachment as aura > the chrome finish points to AI image generation quirks > the AI image generation style can be mapped to gaming visual rarity shorthands; the gaming rarity tiers point to a much older logic of precious-metal-as-status. Each step on the referential chain is propped by the one behind it, and the one behind it is propped up by the one behind that, so on and so forth. There is no natural endpoint, the entire structure functions more akin to a network than a linked list. If you stop at any single point and ask "but why is particular signifier cool or funny or interesting”, the answer is always "because of the thing behind it.” It’s hyper-citation, Here, what matters is the structure of the whole rather than the content. This is structure is what I mean by infinite referential mirrors. The rate at which a concept is referencing, remixing and calling back to another is what’s interesting. In other words, It’s the velocity that matters. The chain of recognitions, each "I get that reference," and the cumulative effect of getting six references stacked on top of each other a short span of time gives you the feeling that you are participating in something dense and alive, because it allows you to recognize the shared meme ecosystem of the platform that you are participating in, even if only a glimpse of it. You are inside the culture rather than outside it. The brainrot-curious reader who watches this video and feels nothing, has “failed” to understand the joke because they are outside the hall of mirrors I am describing. You can only get the magic if you step in and start counting the reflections: the song, the suit, the cat, the chrome, the black hole, the transitions the video uses. You are looking at connected parts of this network of symbols and at the speed at which one image hands you off to the next. The entire thirteen-second clip is functioning as a single compressed referential payload that decompresses in the viewer's head into a small private essay exactly like this one. The video allows you to recognize yourself as someone capable of decoding it, and that recognition is the reward. That’s why media like this goes viral.show more

AI Is Moving Beyond “Generating Videos” — Toward “Generating... Worlds” Over the past two years, AI video models have advanced at an astonishing pace. From Runway and Pika to Sora and Veo, AI-generated videos have become increasingly realistic and more consistent with the physical laws of the real world. Many people believe the next objective is simply to generate videos that are longer, sharper, and more lifelike. But if we take a step back, we can see that the real transformation is not happening in video itself. It is happening in world models. What Is a World Model? In 1943, psychologist Kenneth Craik proposed an idea that would influence artificial intelligence research for decades. He argued that the human brain does not merely react to the outside world. Instead, it maintains an internal model of how the world works. Because we have this internal model, we can predict the outcome of an action before we actually take it. Before crossing a road, we estimate whether a car will pass by. Before catching a ball, we predict its trajectory. These abilities come from continuously simulating the world in our minds, rather than relying entirely on trial and error. This idea later became known by a more formal term: World Model. A world model does not describe a single image or a fixed video clip. It is an internal representation capable of continuously simulating the rules and dynamics of the real world. Why Is AI Research Turning Toward World Models? Because predicting “what comes next” is becoming increasingly central to how AI systems work. Language models predict the next token. Image models predict the next step in the denoising process. Video models predict the next frame. A world model, however, attempts to predict something broader: What should the world look like in the next moment? In 2018, David Ha and Jürgen Schmidhuber proposed in their paper World Models that an intelligent agent could first learn a model of the world, and then use that internal model to plan its actions. The Dreamer series later demonstrated that many complex tasks could be learned by training agents inside an “imagined world.” At the same time, the development of video models such as Sora and Veo led researchers to another realization: A model capable of continuously generating video has already learned, at least implicitly, many of the rules governing the real world. As a result, these two research directions have gradually begun to converge. But Video Is Not Yet a World This is where the distinction is often misunderstood. For a world model to support meaningful real-time interaction, it must solve several critical problems. Most video models today are essentially answering one question: What should the next frame look like? A true world model needs to answer much more: What happens if I take one step forward? If I walk behind a building and then return, will the building still be there? If I suddenly change the camera angle, will the entire space remain consistent? If I enter a command such as: “Summon a dragon.” Will the world respond immediately? In other words, a world model must do more than generate content. It must understand space. It must understand time. It must understand causality. And it must understand interaction. Moving from watching to participating is where the real difficulty of world models begins. World Models Are Entering the Interactive Era One of the latest attempts in this direction is Alaya World, recently open-sourced by Alaya World, or Alaya Lab. Instead of generating a fixed video clip, it generates a world that users can explore in real time. Users can begin with text, an image, or a video, enter the generated scene, move freely through it, and introduce new prompts at any moment during generation. The world responds immediately. According to the publicly released information, Alaya World provides: Real-time streaming generation at 720p and 24 FPS Stable continuous exploration for more than one minute The ability to switch prompts and trigger skills or events during generation Model weights and inference code released under the Apache 2.0 License Training code and datasets planned for future release What makes these capabilities important is not simply the technical specifications. It is that the generated “world” can now support continuous interaction. The official demo shows that users can genuinely control, transform, and explore the generated environment. AI Is Evolving From a Tool Into an Environment Over the past few years, most discussions around AI have focused on content generation. Generating text. Generating images. Generating videos. But world models raise a fundamentally different question: Can AI generate an environment that people can inhabit, explore, and continuously evolve? If the answer is yes, the impact will extend far beyond video generation. Game development, robotics training, embodied intelligence, digital twins, virtual production, and many other fields could be transformed by the development of world models. World models are still at a very early stage. Yet from Craik’s proposal of an internal mental model more than eighty years ago to the emergence of today’s interactive world-generation systems, a clear evolutionary path is beginning to take shape. Perhaps what AI is ultimately learning has never been limited to images, videos, or language. Perhaps it is learning the world itself. References GitHub: Technical Report:show more

I've been working in silence for quite a while... now. Tbh, I don't really even know where to start, so cue the rambling and ranting. Regardless of which side of the fence you sit on, no one can argue the past few years haven't been politically and economically wild. For crypto as a whole it feels like a never ending game of tug of war. A lot of X content has become toxic, so I just largely am not interacting these days. But I read, I read a lot of it. I think we like to forget history a bit in this community. $PLS launched off the highs, and the SEC swooped in right after. Very few people want to admit it, but it shook confidence immediately. I mean no other crypto project has survived such a thing at the time. But #PLS $PLSX and $HEX did. However, winning doesn't unshake that confidence. And RH during and after that event took social precautions to protect himself and his creations. Thing is, the guy isn't stupid. Someone once asked me if I thought certain aspects of the launch we rushed because he knew it was coming? And honestly, maybe. I'd attribute at least a non-zero probability to it. And If that were the case, im glad it was rushed. That case may have gone differently otherwise. Do I still think #PulseChain, #HEX, etc... all have futures? Yes. RH has had the opportunity to just straight up bounce from all of this. Why hasn't he? You could point to exhibit A, B, C, D, etc... of how he's likely got the funds to do that and we all could relatively do nothing about it. So why is he still around? I think it's pretty simple. The usual answer, he wants to win. It's in his twitter handle for Christs sakes. I'll go a step further and say he likely also wants us to win by extension, arguably not as much as he wins, but I mean that's pretty locked in at the moment 🤣 That's not to say he hasn't long been encumbered. And in that state, at lot has gone on without him. Much of which is / was bad. $pDAI guys... I pointed out from day one how building all this around a protocol in a dangerous state was a risky move. And I was right about that.... on multiple occasions... But does that matter now? I suppose not as much. In its current state, it's seemingly no longer exploitable. No different than a meme token now. (presumably, not like I have deep dove on any further risks since ESM). So I guess just whale risk mainly now? Now a lot of people here are in the anti-pdai camp. Me too for what it's worth. But I don't care as much about it's negative anymore in its current state. A lot of people are still in the #pDAI camp strongly. We view this as tribalism, but it's important to note that makes all of us in the #PulseChain camp universally. So these day I find myself relatively pDAI neutral. If you guys want to send it to $1 do it. Only whales can stop you, they run out eventually. (insert super strong this is NOT financial advice). Hell you can maybe even use Sigma to help? Or maybe it wont help, idk. Depends on how people use the software. Conversely, when looking at chain state overall... Why is there nearly $50M in stables sitting on the sidelines. Why not just bridge it out if you want out of what you think is a dead chain. Surely leaving it there exposes you to bridge risk? Why all these yield movements, why the $HEX dusts.... Something is happening. People are seemingly waiting to see what that something is. Or I am reading into things, NFA as always. This whole post is just ramblings of someone trying to do the best they can and certainly not any kind of advice. When I look at other ecosystems, I see a level of polish we don't have. I see tooling we don't have, I see a fostered developer environment we don't have. So I've just been building it, painstakingly.... Because someone has to if we want to be taken seriously. And what I've been building has allowed me to get Sigma to where it is. Sigma is so close... Really just in UI mode, performance optimization, going through nice to haves. I don't believe in launching in a non-finished immutable state. So yeah, I take my time. As with everything. But my point with all of this, and the "why" #Sigma question.... It's unifying, anyone can participate. Which tribe you're in doesn't matter. And if you don't like it, don't use it. It's just software you can use or not use. As it should be. The years of tooling work to deliver this has been a lot of work for one guy in silence. In that time AI has appeared. My take, every dev should be using it. Given the right direction and context. It will make you better. If you blindly trust it, it will make you worse. GPT 5.4 audits smart contracts better than most auditing services. Especially if you give it the context of what you are trying to do. Anyways I digress, testnet is soon. Soon more meaning a feeling of near completion not always reality. That how software is. I do think Sigma stands to unify the chain in a common goal, and shift liquidity into more meaningful places, but ultimately it up to the people the decide to use the software or not use it. And after these frameworks I've built will be applied to what I am tentatively calling the universal hex UI. More or less something aggregative of every derivative I can reasonably support. With data and analytics we since lost. So not just $HEX, $HDRN, and $ICSA, but others as well. However, that depends on some aspect of $Sigma to exist first, so sigma first, chain unity first. And last but not least, take care of yourselves and strive to do cool things. If we aren't doing cool things then what's the point? Hope you think my UI looks good, I spent a while on it. /rantshow more