Recapping Day 3 of Permissionless IV

Stablecoin drivers, the SEC’s war on ETH, and how AI is driving crypto

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Permissionless IV by Ben Solomon for Blockworks

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Permissionless Day 3 concluded yesterday, and we’re back with some highlight quotes. In case you missed it, we also did a recap of Day 2 here.

What role will crypto play in working AI products?

Haseeb of Dragonfly Capital: “We all know the obvious answers which [are]: engineer, accountant, lawyer, girlfriend, maybe in reverse order.”

Casey Caruso of Topology cited brain models coming within the decade: “The long story short is that we don’t have enough data on neural activity to train a brain model today and one thing that crypto is really good at is incentivizing people to aggregate data, so I’m super convinced that there’s going to be a DePIN network to collect this data, and from there we’ll have a model that can actually unlock things like mind reading — as crazy as that sounds.”

Does this Bitcoin-treasury-strategy thing going on in TradFi actually have legs?

Thomas Lee CIO of FundStrat Capital is optimistic:

“Oil companies have historically traded on a premium to their proven reserves because of expectation of future reserves. ExxonMobil was in the top five largest stocks in the S&P 500 for 25 years from 1990-2015. Never valued on earnings but a price premium to its proven reserves. 

“[Strategy] will probably become the biggest stock in the US. It doesn’t make earnings — it’s valued purely on its price to bitcoin reserves.” 

Joe Lubin of Consensys on what motivated their lawsuit against the SEC:

The SEC “secretly decided to reclassify ether as a security…[and] tried to pin it on essentially people responsible for the Merge — on us as promoters, EIP writers, builders and Danny (Ryan)…When we saw that researchers were getting subpoenas, that’s when we decided to sue the SEC.” 

Felix Jauvin on the macro factors driving stablecoin hype:

“We’re going into this world now where fiscal deficits are increasing…The big question at hand is, who is to be the one buying this debt? There’s a very logical reasoning for why we’re seeing such a push for the GENIUS Act right now, because that is a huge unlock for US T-bills coming forth.”

Joe Cutler, Partner at Perkins Cole, lamenting the entry of institutions into crypto thus far:

Crypto was about “democratizing access to the control over value, and that’s not happening in the institutional rebuild. I worry about that. 

“The second thing is, it was also destined to sort of remake the value propositions of aggregation of wealth, money, power and control into a more balanced system than it was before, and I don’t see that happening either in the march towards institutional adoption… 

“I just hope that we get out the map once in a while and remind ourselves what country we’re in, not what road.”

Is JPMD a permissioned coin on a permissionless network?

Suresh Shetty CTO of Kinexys by JPMorgan: “I’d say JPMD is a deposit token that is going to connect to public chains of which its primary use cases are cross border payments and settlement of securities.”


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