I think one of the greatest psyops of the past years among “elite” circles was convincing a bunch of former management consultants and investment bankers at top MBA programs that buying and running small businesses was a good idea for them.

This is pretty major. The DOJ announced that line prosecutors should not press criminal charges for running an unlicensed money transmitter unless the person knew they had to register and willfully didn’t. This dramatically decreases the risk for novel products, networks, and

Notably, this policy change would make it so that situations like the Tornado Cash and Samourai unlicensed money transmitter charges won’t occur in the future.

So many folks don’t realize how big this is. In many ways this has been the number one concern/issue for crypto businesses over the last decade. In any other environment where macro isn’t shitting on us this is incredibly bullish and remains exceptionally bullish for builders.

Each time some new LLM model comes out, most recently o3 and o4-mini, I test it on some legal tasks to see how it does: analysis, drafting, etc. It’s always dogshit and often just (sometimes catastrophically) wrong. I’m starting to think it’s not the models’ reasoning per se

In Dubai this week for Token 2049. If you’re in town and want to meet up in person—reach out!

One of the most difficult issues re Samourai case from a legal perspective was that, imo, the indictment didn’t show that Samourai was a money transmitter. It made advising clients on products super difficult. Well, I guess FinCEN thought so too. Heinous behavior by DOJ.

The amount of times I’ve had to have this conversation with founders after the SEC’s guidance on memecoins. You can’t slap “memecoin” on a securities offering (raising funds for development and promising you’ll do stuff to make token price go up) and think you’re fine.

What policymakers and many lawyers fail to appreciate, but every dev will tell you—all databases can, and if potentially valuable, WILL be hacked. No way around it. KYC laws just create massive honeypots that puts users’ sensitive information at risk, potentially gravely so.

☠️ ☠️ ☠️

Me: *try to log off this hellscape app and TG for chunk of day for once to get deep work done* *get hit with client asking for analyses re their rights if Ripple or Coinbase buy Circle* Me: “ripple or CB buying…Circle? what the fuck are you talking about?” *gets hit with

Proud to have advised Uranium Digital in this deal and their venture round. I don’t think I can think of a better tokenization (okay fine, RWA) use case than bringing a commodity with an underdeveloped market—that will surely become more prominent in the future—onchain.

Yes. Actually helping to build an app really radicalized me against KYC data collection. If there’s valuable info, it’s only a matter of time before any database is exploited. KYC data collection regulations just create giant honey pots for bad actors.

Congrats to Asigna! As a user of their product, proud to have advised them in their venture fundraise. Nothing better than when you’re actually a user of your clients’ products.

Cant believe this needs to be said: Founders—don’t lie (like making stuff up) to potential investors. Generally, you want a good faith basis to any assertion you make to investors (so yes, your rosy projections are probably fine so long as they’re grounded in *something*).