I'm happy to share that I'm starting as Global Head of Research & Founding Venture Partner @21shares. It's been an honor to build the research department from scratch and develop talented individuals over nearly 6 years as a founding team member of @21shares. Excited to continue sharing contrarian insights, differentiated research, and investing in next-generation protocols and apps as a next challenge!

My take on a16z crypto moving into frontier tech. First, I'll always be grateful to a16z for helping validate the space back in 2013 when Chris Dixon led their investment into Coinbase, which got me even more excited about crypto. But the final nail in the coffin for my previous career, and what ultimately pushed me to pivot my entire career into Bitcoin, was Marc Andreessen's 2014 NYT oped, Why Bitcoin Matters. If you haven't read it, suggest reading it. It's still important to this day. A lot of people have probably forgotten, but in those days we were all just looking for external validation. Very few institutions or funds were willing to publicly endorse crypto, and two of the funds that took a real brand risk were a16z and USV. Since then, we've seen some of the most incredible talent enter the space and fundamentally reshaped what crypto is today. You can actually argue that a lot of the AI infrastructure development we're seeing today wouldn't be where it is without Bitcoin mining infrastructure and the talent that flowed from crypto into AI. There is a real connection between the two industries that I don't think gets enough credit. Now, moving from crypto into frontier tech, whether that's robotics, bio, AI, energy, compute etc just means to me that the talent and muscle we developed building crypto over the past decade can now be used to build across all of frontier tech. We spent years building something that was nascent, misunderstood, and in many cases hated by the world. We developed thick skin, continued investing and building, and had to constantly show the world why this tech mattered. Even during thanksgiving dinners. And I think that makes us uniquely suited to build frontier tech. An example is data centers. Today, people and governments are increasingly pushing back against them. Well, people and governments hated crypto too, but we continued to invest and build, and now almost all of trad finance is embracing crypto in some capacity. I believe frontier tech represents the next generation of pirates in technology. People willing to build things that are nascent, misunderstood, and sometimes hated by the world. We're going to be hated and loved along the way, but we're going to keep building cool shit that the world hasn't recognized the importance of yet. And crypto taught me that the world usually doesn't recognize the importance of new tech until years later which is why I stay close to talent

Cybersecurity stocks have crushed the broader tech market this yar

Your AI agents can now help make quantum-safe signatures cheaper to verify and STARK proofs smaller. Introducing provably.fast: open research environments with verifiable results and credit for your contributions. Put your agents to work 👇 provably.fast

An open problem. Now open to you and your agents. Make quantum-safe signatures cheaper. A quantum-safe Falcon-512 signature costs 48.4M gas. The record is ~26M, and it keeps falling. Who’s next to break it? The Falcon challenge is now live.

Hyperliquid is changing what financial markets can look like, with a level of transparency we’ve never had before. We believe that calls for a new generation of products built around everything it makes possible. We’ve built Intel to bring that vision to life through a fundamentally different experience. Access opens soon.

Alpenglow is now live on Solana mainnet. ⛰️ Finality just went from ~12.8 seconds to ~150ms. The biggest consensus upgrade in Solana’s history, built by @anza_xyz.

The PHP security team is giving advance notice: Upcoming security release Wed, Oct 21st 2026, 14:00UTC, two critical vulnerabilities, both rated CVSSv4 9.2. PHP users are encouraged to prepare to update. Earlier release if details become public or active exploit evidence.

Privacy, water, energy, and ownership.

Wasn't on my bingo card as another positive catalyst for Venice Very cool to see @21shares continuing to drive the frontier with their launch of a $VVV exchange traded product

I got the honor to get a demo of this Terminal. It’s a solid start. The industry is in desperate need for a standard and it hasn’t been solved yet at scale.

Data was never the missing piece. Intelligence was.

Huge milestone for the @askvenice team: 5 million users choosing private, unrestricted AI. 🛡️ We are proud to bring physically backed exposure to this thesis to European investors with the launch of the 21shares Venice Token ETP (ticker: VENC), live on SIX Swiss Exchange from today. Full press release: globenewswire.com/news-relea…

A good start, but just a start, so many more need access to private AI.

You would have made billions if you gave seed checks to everyone who was at @alexandr_wang’s 19th birthday party: - Jeff Yan (@chameleon_jeff) went on to start Hyperliquid (~$20B) - @ScottWu46 went on to start Cognition ($48B) - @thejessezhang went on to start Decagon ($4.5B) And Wang himself who started Scale AI, and got $14.3B from Meta for 49% of it. Wang explains: “I was doing a winternship at a trading firm called HRT. There were 12 of us, almost all of whom were students at either Harvard or MIT. I recently met up with the founder of HRT and they were talking about, ‘We're starting to do some private investments.’ I was like, ‘Just invest into the interns! All the interns get seed checks!’”

Data center junk bond update

Bitcoin is the most liquidity-sensitive asset trading 24/7 and probably the most indicative of US & Western monetary-policy conditions, since China banned digital asset businesses in 2021 and massively bought gold in recent years to continue its de-dollarisation strategy.

I'll explain what's this about: To build a quantum computer that can break cryptography (like Bitcoin signatures) you need to improve 3 things: (1) number of physical qubits you can handle, (2) better ways to use physical qubits to encode logical qubits and (3) better algorithms that use fewer qubits. This result improves on (2). It shows a new and better way to create and manipulate logical qubits efficiently. Does this break bitcoin? Not yet. Should this urge Bitcoin to do more (like, soft fork)? Hell yes. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MESSAGE

The rebirth of 21.co @balajis 🙌 It’s time!

The wallet wars are here. Very Good Security chief strategy officer Terry Angelos joins a16z's Alex Rampell, his TrialPay co-founder from back in 2006 (TrialPay was later acquired by Visa), to discuss how agents are learning to spend money. "Agents have all of a sudden become significantly more helpful and useful because they effectively have arms and legs, which are payment credentials." VGS holds the payment credentials behind about 1/3 of all e-commerce, and now it's helping AI agents pay merchants. If you've bought anything online, there's a good chance VGS has already helped keep your card safe. In the last three months, Terry says agents went from "spectators to actors." Once an agent has your payment credentials, it can book the piano teacher it previously could only find and recommend. Now Stripe's Link, Shopify's Shop Pay, and PayPal are racing to connect to agents. It's all headed toward open standards from the card networks: agentic tokens that let an agent pay with your actual card. VGS went from zero agentic tokens to a few million a week in three months. 0:55 From TrialPay to Visa to VGS 2:05 How VGS vaults 1/3 of e-commerce 6:05 Why big merchants use 3-5 processors 9:55 Why AI agents need a payment vault 12:15 Agents go from "spectators to actors" 13:40 The wallet wars, old and new 19:55 Walled gardens vs open standards 23:55 How agents can pay with your real card 26:40 Your saved card goes multiplayer 29:40 How do you trust an agent's purchase? 32:35 Who pays when your agent gets it wrong 35:40 Why Amazon blocks agents 39:50 What's overhyped and underhyped 43:35 When merchants get agents too 45:40 Why agents could break card rewards 47:00 VGS's eras: vault, updates, network @terryangelos @arampell