Jeff drank a bit too much of his own Kool-Aid in this recent Odd Lots clip. I think it's important to clear up a distinction that makes all the difference. Democratizing access to wealth creation is NOT the same as democratizing access to speculation. Many of us genuinely want broader participation in attractive investment opportunities. The growing wealth inequality produced by the current system is tearing at the seams of society, something I've spoken about many times. But let's be clear: listing pre-IPO perpetual futures does absolutely nothing to democratize the wealth being created in private markets. I've seen this misleading narrative pushed repeatedly by perp DEXs lately, and it needs to be called out. A pre-IPO perp creates ZERO underlying wealth. It's a zero-sum contract before costs, and negative-sum after them. No capital flows to the company. No ownership changes hands. No new economic opportunity is created. Every long has a short. There is no free lunch in simply going long something before its IPO, and funding costs can even determine the outcome more than any price moves. TRADING access is NOT INVESTING access. In fact, in many ways pre-IPO perps are almost the antithesis of democratized access: They create the illusion of participation in private-market wealth creation, while actually offering retail a speculative instrument whose mechanics they are often poorly equipped to understand. The result is a playground for the FEW sophisticated traders who understand funding, oracle design, and liquidation mechanics to extract value from the MANY who don't. To give credit where it's due, Robinhood's efforts toward sourcing actual employee shares, placing them into SPVs, and tokenizing genuine spot ownership are much closer to meaningful democratization. That can unlock real economic value by allowing employees to exchange some of their expected upside for liquidity, while giving new investors actual economic exposure. A legitimate financial trade-off, without the funding-rate and liquidation shenanigans. I'm strongly aligned with expanding access to investment opportunities. And I believe advances in AI and blockchain can dramatically lower the barriers to discovering, structuring, and distributing them. But let's not BS ourselves that launching another zero-sum casino contract is moving the needle on wealth inequality. What would actually move the needle is bringing real capital formation and ownership onchain. Giving investors access to productive, illiquid assets like data centers, GPUs, and select startup investing, where capital can actually finance growth and share in the resulting value creation. These opportunities are harder to structure, underwrite, and bring to market, and we haven't seen many compelling implementations onchain yet. Hopefully this will change soon and, as the industry matures, we can direct more of our energy toward actually expanding access to wealth creation. Clip below. Was glad to see @tracyalloway push back on this framing, and to Jeff's credit, after this he does seem to walk back his original position somewhat.

Pasta of the fucking YEAR !! WE SHALL NOT DECIST!!