I'll be in SF for Tech Week from Oct 3–18. If you're building or investing in AI, I'd love to grab coffee!
A bit about us: At @AppWorks, we've spent the last few years backing vertical AI across Asia and US, including medical AI, manufacturing AI, and AEC. Our LPs include Taiwan's leading manufacturers and financial institutions, along with sovereign capital from across Asia, such as Taiwan's NDF, Korea's KVIC, and Malaysia's Khazanah.
Where we can help:
• Insight into the Asian market landscape and go-to-market
• Introductions to Asian manufacturers
• A track record of helping portfolio companies build engineering hubs in Asia
If any of this sounds useful, my DMs are open!
📸 Took some of our founders hiking in Yangmingshan, just outside Taipei, and ran into these two cuties along the trail.
Polls, market surveys today are done by sampling a few hundred people and hoping the extrapolation holds, with weeks between the question and the answer.
Imagine a world where you can just... ask the whole "population" made up of agents that each carry their own persona, their own way of thinking, and influence each other the way actual customers gossip, panic, and pile on.
Been going down the rabbit hole of how these AI-simulated populations could actually predict collective human behavior, and where that turns into real commercial use cases. Wrote up the whole thing, the history behind it, who's paying for it, and where I think the hype gets ahead of itself.
If you're building something in this space, would love to chat!
my two cents re: $VVV
1. What $VVV Actually Is
Something @hosseeb said in his video got underweighted in all the noise. He's historically been a loud critic of crypto companies holding equity and tokens simultaneously, because of exactly this kind of incentive misalignment. And yet here he is, in the deal. His justification is worth taking seriously.
He's investing in Venice the AI company. $VVV, in his framing, is a computing power utility token — not a governance token. And honestly, that distinction does a lot of the explanatory work here.
$UNI, $HYPE — those are fundamentally equity-like instruments. Holding $UNI means you hold a fractional claim on the Uniswap protocol. Buyback-and-burn is semantically a dividend in a different wrapper. When Hyperliquid burns $HYPE, it functions like a company returning capital to shareholders.
$VVV is doing something structurally different. The core mechanism is: stake $VVV, mint $DIEM. $DIEM is a perpetual annuity token — hold one $DIEM, earn $1 in computing credits per day, with no expiry date. There's no equity in that. On Venice's balance sheet, $VVV is closer to deferred subscription revenue than to issued stock. The analogy that makes most sense to me is airline miles: a liability Venice has committed to honor in the form of future compute. When Venice does a "buyback," they're redeeming that liability. It's closer to an airline retiring frequent flyer obligations than to Apple buying back shares.
And what this whole episode really did was force a realization that was always there: people bought $VVV expecting to participate in Venice's upside as an AI company, but it was never that instrument.
2. Why the community has been on fire?
A large part of that, I think, comes down to context. The past year has not been kind to token holders. Across dozens of protocols, retail investors watched teams, VCs, and insiders extract value through token unlocks, treasury distributions, and equity rounds they had zero visibility into. The rage is accumulated. This deal brought the structural reality into the open, and people snapped.
And the structural reality is: in 99% of crypto deals, token holders have no formal protections. Token conveys no ownership, no voting rights on material corporate decisions, no priority claim on assets. Token holders sit at the junior-most tranche of the capital stack, and equity holders sit above them. What this deal did, more than anything, is make that visible in a way that couldn't be ignored.
Beyond that, there's a detail worth naming that I don't think got enough attention. Those 8-year token warrants are essentially free call options. In most primary crypto investments, token warrants are opt-in instruments acquired for nominal cost — sometimes $500, sometimes $1,000, sometimes nothing. Dragonfly invested in Venice the company and got the token upside (with both vested tokens and a call option) basically for free on top of it. To many they went in wanting equity and walked out with more than they appeared to be buying. Whether that's fair is a separate question, but it's part of why the whole thing looks the way it looks.
3. The Buyback Math Is Hard to Make Work
Venice has roughly $70M in ARR right now. Yeah, that can be true, and it's impressive. But math still gets uncomfortable.
The buyback mechanism is funded only by new subscriber revenue — every new subscriber, depending on their tier, routes a portion of their subscription fee into the buyback pool. Current annual buyback volume sits around $2–2.5M per year. Against a market cap of roughly $650M, that's a buyback multiple of around 220x.
Most equity investors start squinting when buyback yields fall below 2–3%. At 220x, the implied yield is under 0.4%. That's a tough number to hold.
One can argue, fairly, that Venice is growing fast and the buyback volume scales with subscriber growth. The team could also launch new products, new initiatives that change the math. Both are real possibilities. But because the buyback mechanism is specifically tied to new subscriber revenue, you're ultimately betting that subscriber growth continues at an aggressive rate, more or less indefinitely. And even then, the question is how much of any new value Venice creates flows to $VVV holders versus to the equity holders sitting above them in the stack.
4. Market is pricing it
So you have a utility token priced at 220x its annual buyback volume, in a structure where a senior tranche now exists and has every incentive to capture the equity upside of the business.
The mechanics of how $VVV works are interesting. The buyback math is what it is. But the question underneath all of it is simpler: when you hold the junior tranche, how much can you realistically expect to benefit from a company's growth — especially once someone senior shows up?
That's the question this whole dispute was really about. And it's one the crypto market is pricing right now.
Been going down rabbit holes outside crypto lately. The flavor industry was the first one that really got me.
Hope it's a good read
Ethereum is a casino, $ETH is the chip.
Nobody stops at the cashier thinking "let me stock up on chips for next time."
And you definitely don't hold onto them when you know for sure the slot machines will cost fewer chips tomorrow.
solana:So11111111111111111111111111111111111111112 LST YTD performance (in solana:So11111111111111111111111111111111111111112 term):
Jito: -30.5%
Marinade: -7.7%
bnSOL: -8.6%
Sanctum: +17.4%
Say less.
1/ What’s behind Sanctum’s market-defying resilience?
@SolanaFloor covers our $INF V2 upgrade, mobile app launch, and vision to build the prime desk of Solana:
solanafloor.com/news/sanctum…
Some thoughts on Jupiter Poker by @JupiterExchange
- Great product, but it's just the beginning of the industry trying to tokenize human capital.
- We've got so many more things to tokenize the make the most out of on-chain settlement.
On the latest of Clarity Act
Moving forward, stablecoins can't offers passive yields to holders, but yields based on "bona fide" transactions are allowed, similar to how credit card companies work.
I see this as a major win for distribution channels like $COIN, $HOOD.
These channels can easily create a funding rate arb position (delta-neutral), have agents to help users automatically do some transactions that have low tx costs, or directing users to some DeFi protocols as workarounds.
So 10 years in finally here we are.
Crypto is by far the best speculation infra in the world, but we just need to capture it before the window closes
