When
@brian_armstrong
and I started
@coinbase
in 2012, a
#bitcoin
was worth $6 and only known by a few nerds on the internet.
#bitcoin
was the crazy idea that the world could have a digital money for everyone.
@coinbase
had one mission: to make crypto easy to use.
Virgil Abloh was a pioneer in music, art, and fashion. Most people don't know he was also ahead of the curve on Web3.
Shared with permission from his team, here is an early iteration of a DAO he envisioned.
One thing most people don't fully grasp: it takes years, often decades, to go from a new infrastructure-level technology breakthrough (like crypto) to a vibrant ecosystem of mainstream applications.
Crypto has become a huge part of top US universities. Of the top 10:
- 4 have dedicated crypto centers (Stanford, MIT, Columbia, Princeton)
- Almost all have dedicated classes, which in some cases are the most popular at the school
- Almost all have dedicated student groups
Blockchains are similar to the invention of mechanical time. Both create global standards which allow levels of coordination previously “not just impossible, but unimaginable”:
Update: My role at Paradigm will be shifting from Managing Partner to General Partner. I’ll continue to work with our investing & research teams, work with portfolio companies, and fight for good crypto policy, while focusing less on the day to day management of the firm. I look
.
@kanyewest
is a Series A venture capitalist of music. Takes risk on early trends.
@Drake
is a growth investor. Takes trends that have clear product/market fit and pushes them mainstream.
Books should be structured as expandable trees.
One paragraph summary of each chapter, expandable into summaries of component points/stories, expandable into the full text.
Can read the whole book in 5 minutes or 5 hours.
Ripple declares itself "a better alternative to Bitcoin" and Bitcoin and Ether "Chinese-controlled" in a last ditch effort to save themselves. Have you no modesty
@Ripple
? No shame?
Injecting human brain cells into rats causes them to "take over" the rat brains and improve their memory. In this study, rats with human glial (precursor brain) cells were able to navigate a maze over twice as fast.
Genetic engineering
2019: It’s inhumane to edit embryos
2049: It’s inhumane to *not* edit embryos to eliminate disease, give larger mental faculties for a richer world experience, etc
The first time I met Balaji, he showed up to the Coinbase office (apartment) in the rain wearing ripped sweatpants and shoes with holes. But the content was mind blowing.
@balajis
is one of the great minds of our generation, and consistently provides a glimpse into the future.
Tough to understand how to regulate something you're not allowed to use.
Imagine if everyone at the Department of Transportation weren't allowed to use cars.
DeFi is the new financial system.
It is the "internet of money". It is open and permissionless.
It is built from the ground up by entrepreneurs around the globe.
It is the new frontier where 2 people in a garage can change the world.
This was to be Virgil's first NFT, “Self Portrait”. It is his envisioned DAO smashing through the Louvre, representing Web3 smashing the barriers to entry for all creators.
Uploading it here for anyone to right-click save, as he would have wanted. RIP Virgil.
Digital items had value in the past because a platform (a video game, Instagram, etc) gave them value.
What if NFTs work the other way around? What if value accrues around digital items first and platforms are built out around them second?
🤯 Wow,
@UniswapProtocol
24hr trading volume is higher than
@coinbase
for the first time ever
🦄 Uniswap: $426M
🏦 Coinbase: $348M
Hard to express with how crazy this is.
How does crypto get to 1 billion users?
One simple theory: Games with crypto-based money or items get popular. A few grow to tens or hundreds of millions of users. Getting a wallet is just part of the game.
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Crack-Up”, 1936
Crypto will produce more innovation in governance and economics than the “real world” for the foreseeable future. And within crypto, most of it will start in games.
Turns out the number of people interested in art/culture (basically everyone) is much larger than the number of people interested in digital money/finance
And crypto is just getting started. We are ~1% into the most important technology of the coming decades.
Crypto will redefine money and information, the two fundamental ways the world coordinates.
Crypto wallets are on a path to become the container for everything in your digital life, which is increasingly just "your life". To bring billions more people into crypto, we need wallets like
@phantom
that are simple, powerful, and secure.
We are also excited to announce our $109M Series B led by
@paradigm
! Thanks to the 2M+ MAU in our community, Phantom has an opportunity to become the mainstream, user-friendly gateway to Web3.
Serving at the
@SECGov
for two years has been an honor.
We’ve filed 1,500 enforcement actions & overseen tens of thousands of registrants.
We’ve proposed rules to make our markets more efficient, competitive, transparent, resilient—and worthy of the public’s trust.
More 🎥👇
Abridged internet breakthroughs timeline, for perspective:
1969: ARPANET
1982: TCP/IP
1993: HTML
1990-1994: Web browsers
1994-1998: Search engines
1999: SaaS
2003-2004: Social media
1999-2007: Mobile
2009-present: Crypto
We're 28-53 years in, depending on your start date.
Since anyone can own a piece of crypto infrastructure, people are paying attention much earlier in its development than prior infrastructure-level technologies. This is a double-edged sword, and we're seeing the pros and cons of this dynamic play out in real time.
I feel honored to be a small part of this journey which will transform society for the better. I salute all the crypto builders exploring this fertile and critically important frontier. And I look forward to seeing what we all create together.
One thing that really bothered me as a young founder: at some point I was told it was impolite to give “seasoned executives” brainteasers in interviews.
Early experiments in people selling equity in themselves are happening on Ethereum.
Nascent today, especially from a legal/regulatory POV, but a glimpse into the future.
Over time, crypto grew, and so did the company. A simple
#Bitcoin
wallet evolved into individual and institutional products to support a blossoming cryptoeconomy. 2 nerds who met on the internet (yes,
@brian_armstrong
and I met on
@reddit
) turned into a company of 1000+.
Since the founding of Coinbase back in 2012 we have taken a long-term view. I knew we needed to embrace compliance to become a generational company that stood the test of time. We got the licenses, hired the compliance and legal teams, and made it clear our brand was about trust
Crypto media's magic moment will not be when a top existing artist adopts it, but when a new artist uses it to break through in a way that wasn't previously possible
More obvious today than ever that NFTs will mainstream crypto.
All of these consumer brands spinning up a "metaverse division" will realize metaverse == Web3 and bring their billions of consumers to crypto in the process.
The golden age of DAOs is on the horizon.
Previously just a cool concept, they now solve a burning need, as protocols with clear product/market fit become community owned.
@GaryGensler
@SECGov
Making number of enforcement actions the Commission's primary success metric is bizarre and has high potential for perverse incentives.
I think this is true to a degree which few realize. Everyone needs to feel a sense of purpose through their own perception of their hero’s journey, and issues/conflicts will be manufactured to fill that vacuum if they don't otherwise exist.
There is a strong tendency towards skeuomorphic ideas at the beginning of any new technology. Humans reason by analogy and we only know what we have seen in the past. This leads to horse drawn cars, film for recording plays, telephones for relaying morse code, etc.
Yet crypto kept building.
@ethereum
came on the scene and showed that crypto native applications were possible, opening up a whole new world of possibilities.
Walked past a fire station in NYC this morning - fireman talking, one says “we’re a society in decline”. Ask him about it (and get a tour of the station in the process) - they’re all dismayed about this cop that got shot in NYC last week in a routine traffic stop, killer had 20
You Can’t Regulate What You Don’t Understand:
A great post from
@AlexanderGrieve
on why crypto policymaking and regulation is structurally challenged because most government (SEC included) employees can't own it, plus some ideas on how to fix it.