Following up on my blockchain demos on YouTube, (~3M views) I just published a new demo on Zero-Knowledge Proofs.

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes. From "Lost to the West" by Lars Brownworth.

There’s this new physical bitcoin that’s ripping. It’s called gold.

By the way, the reverse setup happens all the time - withdrawal transactions arrive over nights, weekends, and holidays while banks are closed - but I don’t think we’ve seen a redemption compelled when a chain goes down. I think it is reasonable to expect we will though.

Depending on the shape of the liveness issue, (size and permanence of the mempool) you would likely want to continuously rebroadcast the administrative transaction as well, opening up the opportunity to raise the fee over time.

Presumably the fee wouldn’t have to be astronomical because you can manually check every redemption request the chain finalized before the pause transaction finalized but the pause transaction could become the target of censorship so you wouldn’t want to YOLO a normal fee.

The issuer would be incentivized to either broadcast a blacklist transaction for the address or a global pause transaction if there might be more than one compelled withdrawal. The fee would be quite large to make sure the transaction went in as soon as liveness returned.

If a #stablecoin is on a blockchain that suffers a longterm liveness issue, would be redeemers might engage a court for a redemption even though they can’t surrender their tokens. The issuer would have to honor the request but would open themselves up to “double withdrawals”.

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Hot take: If you haven’t seen the Alien movies, watch Aliens before Alien because it is more fun not to really know what you are getting into when you go in with the Marines (which is what Aliens is about) because they didn’t know either. They find out as you do.

#tradfi is super anti-fragile.

Right now the agentic economy is facing a similar question. #AI agents aren’t going to open bank accounts - they will use internet native money. With #x402 there is a strong chance $USDC is the choice as well.

DeFi is denominated in dollars because of $USDC. When DeFi was starting up, there was a legitimate question if it would be denominated in ETH but @circle changed that with $USDC.

The Stablecoin End Run

First there were wrapped assets - like wrapped BTC (WBTC) - and then there were stablecoins - wrapped dollars - but now there’s a fight between the names real world assets (RWAs) and tokenized assets. Lots of different names for basically the same thing.

The job you hire blockchain technology for is neutrality.

I’m running open models through ollama locally on my Mac - the phone can’t be far behind.

Why doesn’t every Tesla come with Starlink?

$USDC AUM up 11% in the past month

Another post in our @mitdci stablecoin series: what's missing in the GENIUS Act? (I like the AI-generated graphic of a sad bill with a lot of holes) with @danaronoff, @Ashwanth_Samuel, and @anders94

The 4th blogpost from MIT DCI’s study of the financial and technical risks of stablecoins, by ⁦@Ashwanth_Samuel⁩ ⁦@anders94⁩ ⁦@neha⁩ and me. Final report to be published in December 2025.