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“Missionaries build better products.”



— Jeff Bezos




Q: Do we need a new internet?



The business model that populated the world wide web with information was straightforward: create content, attract traffic, sell ads.



Now, however, you can often get better, aggregated information from a large language model, which sends a bot to visit those same websites on your behalf. 



Soon, most traffic on the web will be bots and therefore impervious to ads (and tragically uninterested in subscribing to newsletters).



This might break the web’s business model: The best search results now come from AI language models, but those AIs get their information from human-written content that may soon cease to exist if its creators can’t get paid.



(Side note: Please click the ads on this webpage.)



As more web traffic becomes "agentic" — i.e., automated, machine-based and impervious to monetization — the entire incentive structure for populating the web with information begins to unravel.



Ben Thompson, however, proposes an ambitious solution: Create an all-new web economy in which AI agents pay for the information they retrieve — with crypto!



Thompson believes it’s possible to “build an entirely new marketplace for content” but that this would require a new protocol layer that includes “a mechanism for payments via digital currency, i.e., stablecoins.” 



Unlike existing web protocols, this new protocol would allow language model providers like OpenAI to “build an auction mechanism that pays out content sources based on the frequency with which they are cited in AI answers.”



This, Thompson says, is the “best possible way to not only keep the web alive, but also in the process create better and more useful AI.”



Creating such an “agentic” version of the world wide web — with internet-native payments — is no small task,

Thursday Mailbag: Micropayments, digital value and mission-driven crypto

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As the Solana community descended on Pier 36 in New York for the Accelerate conference, the feeling in the air was one of reset expectations.



Propositions about Solana’s tech and investment prospects that seemed like consensus just six months ago have now gone out of style. 



For one, there’s the muted impact of Firedancer. The Jump-developed client was once spoken of in quasi-religious terms by Solana fans. The software’s launch was going to let Solana hit one million transactions per second — a nice and round, if meaningless, figure. 



A partial Firedancer implementation called Frankendancer is live but so far has struggled to gain adoption. Just 5% of Solana stake currently runs on the client. Firedancer is launching a stake delegation program similar to what the Solana Foundation offers for Agave, perhaps in hopes of growing its slice of the pie.



Jump’s head of R&D, Kevin Bowers, gave a talk to kick off Accelerate, but it was overshadowed by a talk from a different client developer: On Monday, Anza’s head of research Roger Wattenhofer gave a talk announcing Alpenglow, a major overhaul of Solana’s consensus protocol that could greatly reduce Solana’s latency. 



In short, some in Solana’s validator community are finding, to paraphrase Taylor Swift, that the client they’ve been dreaming of has been here the whole time — in Agave. 



I ran into Anza’s lead economist, Max Resnick, at Accelerate. He said the developer shop had to spend time pruning and ironing out bugs in the original Solana client’s code — longtime readers will remember last April, when it became difficult to land transactions on the network at all — before it could test out more frontier ideas like Alpenglow.



It also used to seem obvious to many in Solana-land that ETF approval was going to prove a major tailwind for the asset. That no longer seems to necessarily

Solana Accelerate Day 1: Time to challenge assumptions

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I’m old enough to remember when, just a few months ago, the Trump administration talked about cutting deficits to 3% of GDP.



Ever since the Liberation Day pivot, however, the Trump administration has 180’d on its goals and is now pushing a new way to manage the US debt situation: Run it hot. 



Oftentimes, the zeitgeist of a moment can easily be encapsulated by a meme: 







Last week, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent hinted at this pivot in a CNN interview:



“There is the potential growth of the debt, but what’s more important is we grow the economy faster. I inherited a 6.7% deficit as a percentage of GDP, and we’re trying to bring that down by decreasing spending, increasing revenue and [growing] the GDP faster than the debt.” 




We've inherited a 6.7% deficit-to-GDP, the highest outside war or recession.Our focus is to grow the economy faster than the debt, that’s how we will stabilize debt-to-GDP. pic.twitter.com/yblwrunO9t— Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent (@SecScottBessent) May 18, 2025




Read between the lines of Bessent’s quote and you realize the implications for owners of US Treasurys. 



Luke Gromen said it best:




When the US Treasury Secretary tells you holders of LT USTs are going to lose money on a real basis, you should believe him 👇 https://t.co/WTpwJzKqvd— Luke Gromen (@LukeGromen) May 18, 2025




This is financial repression in action: Grow the way out of an elevated debt/GDP ratio by making bonds yield less than the growth rate of the economy.



For example, if bond yields remain fixed at 4% but the economy grows at 6% nominally, you can outgrow the debt since the yield is fixed and will become less of a burden over time as higher revenues make it less burdensome. 



I'm sympathetic to the idea Bessent articulated during the interview: The White House wants to cut spending and increase revenues. However,

The strategic pivot from ‘austerity’ to ‘running it hot’

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Ember Sword, a crypto MMORPG in development, has been cancelled. They say it’s because the team couldn’t get more funding for the game.



Ember Sword once used Polygon, then the Immutable X chain, then Mantle, asking early NFT buyers to migrate their assets from chain to chain over the years.



“In today’s market,” the team wrote in a message, all that’s left of its now-wiped website, “we couldn’t find a path to keep building. Our journey, and the servers, will go offline.”







So how much funding did Ember Sword have? It’s unclear. Bright Star Studios, the team behind the game, raised $700,000 in 2020 and another $2 million in 2021 in publicly disclosed rounds, according to data from BlockchainGamer.biz and a press release. Before 2020, Bright Star was called So Couch Studios.



In 2021 — a peak time for NFTs more broadly — prospective Ember Sword players collectively pledged a total of $203 million in NFT land sales for the unreleased game. 



VentureBeat reported in 2023 that the game had over $18 million in funding from investors ($7.1 million) and land sales, not including the game’s 2023 “Alpha land sale.” 



As we’ve heard from some VCs recently, it’s not always a good idea to monetize your crypto game too early. 



It’s also difficult to know for certain how much money a studio has raised in total, as some blockchain partnerships and grant deals are not publicly disclosed.



Ember Sword had apparently been in development for over seven years, since 2018. The game only offered full early access in December 2024, though there have been some community opportunities to playtest earlier versions of the game since at least 2023. 



The game’s token, EMBER, deployed in mid-2024 and is now down over 99% from its all-time high that it saw at its launch.







Image: EMBER price over time.



The studio previously ditched Unity in

Crypto game Ember Sword shuts down after 7 years of development

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One of the longstanding complaints against Big Tech is that they “exploit” user data for their own profit.



In some sense, I guess that’s true. I’ve used Twitter for years, and was never paid a cent for giving up any information about my demographics and interests. 



But is that “exploitation?”



Sure, my data is valuable in hindsight. But billions of dollars in cloud infrastructure and data analytics had to be invested to turn it into something economically valuable that marketers want to buy.



InfoFi, short for “Information Finance,” is a niche sector in crypto looking to do something similar.



Is InfoFi an investable category? Consider Kaito, the leader in this space.



Kaito has two main products. Both of these products generate a substantial $33 million in annualized revenue, based on Dune.



The first is its data analytics platform, offering structured, sentiment analysis of public information. This is packaged as a monthly $833 subscription service that is sold to traders, AI agent companies and funds whose businesses depend on accurate sentiment tracking.



The second is a B2B service for crypto companies doing marketing. Dozens of prominent projects use Kaito for this purpose today.



The rough idea is this: Companies want to do marketing. Rather than the traditional top-down way of sponsoring events, media or paid influencers, Kaito offers an alternative way to incentivize bottom-up and organic content marketing.



Anyone can register on Kaito, start tweeting about a listed project on Twitter, and earn a share of these rewards. dYdX, for instance, is committing $50k a month in tokens for such a campaign with Kaito. 



The problem, of course, is that this opens the door to all manner of trolls and low-quality content.



That’s where Kaito’s proprietary AI tech comes in. It’s supposedly filtering out slop from genuinely thoughtful

Is InfoFi an investable sector? Crypto’s attempt to tokenize attention

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Today’s Bitcoin Pizza Day is shaping up to be a special one.Yes, it’s the first Pizza Day where the two pies in question are worth over $1 billion, but that’s not what I’m talking about here. 



No, sometime today, in the heart of New York City, in the back of a humble bar room, Laszlo Hanycez’s heroic contribution is going to be honored with something else — a simple metal plaque that represents his induction into the Bitcoin Hall of Fame.Officially launching at Pubkey Bar and Restaurant, it’s a small addition to the 500 or so Hall of Fames estimated to have been established globally. It may even seem an odd choice. I can’t imagine, for instance, that many early Bitcoiners were enamored with sports accolades. 



Yet, it’s a small reminder of something that gets lost in all the conversation around bitcoin’s march above $100,000 — that while bitcoin may be, objectively, the best store of value, value is itself subjective. As the Austrian economists learned (and fiat economists too often forget), it’s something we create and exchange through our actions.



So, I, for one, will be there to lend my support, because I value Laszlo’s sacrifice. Sure, he may have lost $1 billion, but he’s earned something far more: our respect and admiration for his intentions and his foresight. 



And for that, I can’t think of anyone better to be inducted into the Bitcoin Hall of Fame.



— Rizzo







On This Day



Bitcoin Pizza Day is really more of a Bitcoin Pizza Week.



It took four whole days for someone to take Laszlo Hanycez up on his offer of 10,000 BTC for two large pizzas.



“I like things like onions, peppers, sausage, mushrooms, tomatoes, pepperoni, etc.. just standard stuff no weird fish topping or anything like that. I also like regular cheese pizzas which may be cheaper to prepare or otherwise acquire,” he wrote on

Bitcoin celebrates Pizza Day with price record, Hall of Fame induction

As the world’s largest asset manager expands its crypto reach, its chief rival has thus far resisted entering the market.



BlackRock has added a layer of credibility to crypto for a segment of investors, given its management of $11.5 trillion in assets. The iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT), the fastest-growing ETF of all time, managed nearly $69 billion as of Wednesday. 



Yet Vanguard, with its roughly $10 trillion in assets under management, isn’t biting — even as major competitors continue to seek more entry points.   



Vanguard was not among the firms lining up to launch the first US spot bitcoin ETFs in January 2024. When those ETFs started trading, the company told Blockworks the funds would not be available for purchase on Vanguard’s brokerage platform. 



Roughly six months later, Vanguard similarly blocked the trading of ETFs holding ether.



Read more: Restricting access to growing bitcoin ETFs becoming ‘hard to justify’



Both times, a representative told Blockworks that crypto ETFs “do not align with our [offerings] focused on asset classes such as equities, bonds and cash, which Vanguard views as the building blocks of a well-balanced, long-term investment portfolio.”



They added: “We continuously evaluate our brokerage [offering] and evaluate new product entries to the market.”



A Vanguard spokesperson told Blockworks at the Exchange ETF conference in March that the firm’s view on crypto has not changed. Representatives at the company did not return Blockworks’ newest requests for further comment. 



Vanguard rivals flock to crypto



Executives at a number of traditional finance giants have historically been wary of bitcoin and the crypto space more broadly.



Vanguard founder John Bogle told people in 2017 to “avoid bitcoin like the plague.” BlackRock CEO Larry Fink once called bitcoin “an index of money laundering.” 



Fink’s view evolved as demand grew, with the BlackRock leader labeling bitcoin (after

As more TradFi giants flock to crypto, Vanguard stands apart

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Yesterday I had the opportunity to moderate a panel for American Banker’s virtual stablecoin summit.



Obviously, the audience that the panel catered to was more TradFi than crypto, but my panelists included a16z Crypto’s Sam Broner, EY’s Paul Brody, Halliday’s Griffin Dunaif and Superstate’s Robert Leshner, which meant we could cover a wide variety of topics. 



Anecdotally, one of my takeaways was that there’s a lot of interest and appetite for stablecoins. And the base level of knowledge is pretty high for folks who are presumably not crypto-native. One of the highlights for me was the infra talk, even if it’s not necessarily the most attractive topic.



But back to the panel itself: Brody, who’s EY’s global blockchain leader, told me that they’ve estimated that if they moved all of EY’s payments from the traditional systems to crypto rails, it would save them a $100 million a year. (He added that they can’t do that, because of regulations.) 



Even for EY, $100 million isn’t a small amount. 



Dunaif, at one point, also brought up that “the stablecoin moment” opens the door for “the Amazon Web Services moment” in finance. 



“I think one of the most exciting properties of a blockchain is that we’re making our commercial systems, our finance systems, look a lot more like data systems and traditional [software as a service] systems. So what that means is that value suddenly becomes a programming primitive, right? It’s in the runtime itself,” he explained.



So there’s the potential for a bank or a FinTech to offer a service akin to what AWS does for the cloud. 



“There’s probably not a whole lot of margins in just the stablecoin itself, but in the services you could add on top,” he added.



While I think the overall thought has been that stablecoin rails could clean up and simplify the preexisting system, Brody noted

Are stablecoins crypto's AWS moment?

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“The value of any stock, bond or business today is determined by the cash inflows and outflows … that can be expected to occur during the remaining life of the asset.”



— Warren Buffett




When Warren Buffett explained that the value of every stock, bond or business is a function of its future cash flows, he was paraphrasing John William Burr, who formally articulated the “discounted cash flow” (DCF) method of valuation in his 1938 book The Theory of Investment Value.



Burr didn’t invent the ideas behind his calculations, however.



The first recorded instance of discounting future cash flows to present value dates to 1773, when an engineer, Edward Smith, estimated the “present worth” of a coal mining operation based on its future stream of income. 



In fact, the logic of present value has been used even longer than that.



With the publication of his Liber Abaci in 1202, Leonardo Pisano (better known as Fibonacci) is credited as the “first to develop present value analysis for comparing the economic value of alternative contractual cash flows.”



823 years later, that’s still the best way to do it: Discounted cash flow is as close as you can get to a fundamental truth in the art of financial valuation.



It rarely feels that way, however, which is confusing — the best argument against DCF is that it doesn’t match our lived experience as investors.



Stocks, for example, trade up, down and all around for reasons that are entirely unrelated to future cash flows — even in hindsight, it’s impossible to discern any cash-flow logic in the price charts.



John Maynard Keynes is right to call stock market investing a “beauty contest” that’s unrelated to fundamentals — and there’s no disputing Robert Shiller’s findings that stock prices are far more volatile than can be explained by subsequent changes in dividend

Should crypto cash flows be discounted?

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Keep your hands and arms inside the rocket ship for the duration of our flight, ladies and gents.



Bitcoin surged to a new all-time high of $109,400 today, just nine days after the US and China reached a 90-day trade truce, cooling off global jitters. That's a rather major macro signal, yeah?



The sort of crypto bellwether that deserves front-row attention, especially because SOL has held steady across a choppy weekly chart instead of ripping in tandem. That says something about current flows and investor focus, methinks.



Solana's price is essentially unchanged on the week, sitting at $167.34 (-0.3%) with a volatile but range-bound seven-day chart.



BTC's breakout, meanwhile, caps a pretty remarkable macro pivot. Just six weeks ago, reciprocal tariff threats from el presidente de los Estados Unidos rattled the US equity markets. Now, with a temporary trade deal in effect, traditional markets are stabilizing and capital is flowing back into high-beta assets.



Bitcoin, the ultimate crypto liquidity sponge, has responded promptly, pushing past its December 2024 highs to confirm a fresh leg higher. But while the biggest of dogs rallies on macro clarity, Solana's setup remains more idiosyncratic. 



The network remains a hive of activity, with daily active addresses rebounding above five million, and over 30,000 new tokens launching per day. DEX volumes remain anchored by serious flows, with SOL-USDC still the top traded pair and Raydium and Jupiter handling the bulk of liquidity.



Meanwhile, liquid staking tokens like mSOL and jitoSOL continue gaining TVL, and reverted transactions (failed txs) — often seen as noise — are increasingly concentrated among mid-sized wallets. To my eyes, though, that's a decent sign of rising speculative experimentation rather than any dysfunction.



Staking yields on Solana remain high (7.82% APY), and over 65% of the supply is

Bitcoin hits all-time high while Solana holds steady

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US spot bitcoin ETFs notched combined net inflows of nearly $1 billion on Monday and Tuesday. 



As for the next crypto ETFs hitting the market, some launches are imminent. As in, this week. Others will take a while longer.



Volatility Shares is set to introduce two XRP futures ETFs on Thursday — a standard one and a version that offers 2x daily exposure.



The impending launches will follow Teucrium’s XRP futures ETF launch in April. That fund has ~$120 million in assets under management. Then, CME Group this week made XRP futures available for trading — with more than $19 million in notional volume traded the first day.



But as for spot products, the SEC said in a Tuesday filing that it wants more time to consider Grayscale’s proposed XRP ETF. This comes after the SEC last week delayed its decision on the firm’s planned solana ETF.



The SEC noted in a separate filing Tuesday that it “finds it appropriate to designate a longer period” to consider allowing Bitwise’s ether ETF to stake its ETH.



Industry watchers have expected these delays on additional spot crypto funds, as we’ve seen the SEC historically take the full 240 days it’s allotted to rule on a 19b-4 of this type.



As for changes to existing ETFs (i.e. permitting staking), SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce said in February “the commission may have to make progress on custody and other issues” first.  




Lotta questions. Replying here:The SEC *typically* takes the full time to respond to a 19b-4 filing. Almost all of these filings have final due dates in October. Early decisions would the action that's out of the norm. No matter how "Crypto-friendly" this SEC isThere's no…— James Seyffart (@JSeyff) May 20, 2025




So while the SEC could theoretically allow various proposed crypto ETFs to start trading at any time, investors might want to watch dates in July and October

As crypto ETF deadlines come and go, watch July and October

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It’s been an eventful day so far. 



Bitcoin hit a new record high of $109,888 this afternoon, right as a weak US 20-year Treasury auction sent stocks plummeting.



Yield on 20-year notes hit 5.1% after today’s sale showed weaker-than-expected demand. The 30-year also rose 11 basis points to surpass 5% yield. The yield on the 10-year moved higher to 4.6%. 



The auction results come days after Moody’s downgraded the US from a triple-A rating to Aa1 last week. Given the relatively quiet economic calendar this week, it’s not surprising that US equities moved so much on today’s auction. 



The S&P 500 slid 1.2% around 1 p.m. ET on the auction results, while the Nasdaq Composite shed 1.4%, erasing gains from earlier in the session. 



Bitcoin pulled back slightly after it approached $110,000, but was still up about 1% over 24 hours at 2 p.m. ET. 



What is surprising, though, is to see bitcoin — consistently trading like a risk asset this year — on the rise despite increasing bond yields. A sell-off in Treasury notes typically coincides with a risk-off sentiment. And today, BTC traded like a safe haven. 



Before you get too excited, Noelle Acheson, author of the Crypto is Macro Now newsletter, cautions against calling this a “decoupling.” I’d have to agree. 



“More likely, we’re seeing building concern about a bond market ‘event’ triggered by Japan,” she wrote today. “The yield on its 30- and 40-year government debt has shot up over the past few days, and is now at record highs.” 



Yields on Japanese 30-year bonds hit a new high of 3.2% during Asian trading on Wednesday, according to London Stock Exchange data. Japan’s 20-year auction on Tuesday showed the weakest demand for the offering in more than a decade.  



The bond moves imply the Japanese yen is gaining strength against the dollar, 10T Holdings founder Dan Tapiero