PaperImperium

What’s new in DeFi and CeFi that I might have missed?
Can be a complete product or even just a feature. (Just… no announcements of a Uniswap hook that recreates Old Tech from more than half a decade ago 🤪)
Shill me your interesting new projects, products, & features

This would be one of the more exotic things I’ve seen onchain if it launches next year. Catastrophe bonds probably appeal to options sellers willing to hold someone else’s tail risk for a premium.

AI may roll really well on INT, but the WIS score is still on par with an undergraduate.
For senior folks with accumulated experience, that’s fine. But it does make me wonder how my kids are supposed to build but that wisdom score - good judgement is hard to teach

Thinking about the news OpenAI is taking in $20b less than previously thought, I wonder if this ends up like 23andMe where it goes bankrupt and then all that personal data people shared with them is for sale.
Just something to consider.

Ever wonder where a crypto lies in the evolutionary tree of money?
USD stablecoins are evolution’s favored child - the product of thousands of years of natural selection. And Bitcoin and ETH are the first new major currency families in 500 years.
I mapped all currencies in use today back to their ancestors (and traced some extinct lineages).
Nearly all descend from the first coin struck in Lydia ~630 BC.
~15 descend from India, through the rupee.
The Siamese tical and (rebooted) Cambodian riel each have a single descendant.
The US dollar - originally 371.25 grains of silver - hangs off a long,

Whatever your opinion about this federal college loan underwriting decision, it doesn’t bode well for reforming much larger government spending programs.
Just looking at the immediate response, it seems is very much focused on values and politics vs underwriting creditworthiness

Huh? First people are out here mooning over Whop asking people to be financial drop shippers, and now speculating on “an agentic bank run”.
Banks have a huge bundle of services like bill pay and overdraft protection and custody to build the customer relationship beyond interest rate sensitivity.
High yield checking is already a thing and there are already services like Wealthfront’s automated savings that manage sweeping funds between high yield accounts - which usually have balance caps or are introductory rates.
I thought we all worked in fintech, guys. Do we all understand so little about

My neighbor three doors down the street died. Nice lady, always walked her dog and we’d wave at each other. No spouse or kids, apparently.
Her siblings put everything in the house up for sale. I went in, looking for bookshelves - my kids and I prefer sliced trees, even as my wife prefers glass rectangles, to read from.
One of the items that caught my eye was a gazetteer. You don’t see these much anymore, but it’s a paper book of every single road in a state.
Doing archaeology for a decade, even post smarty pants phones, we used these as the canonical record of random county roads.
I don’t know

Everyone is so worried about misaligned AI, like scheming eunuch advisors who are more competent than you have never existed. It’s even called the principal-agent problem, for heaven’s sakes

Central bank nerds out there: So with yen again hanging around where the last intervention was, do we think they sell some Treasuries to finance that intervention?
Will Fed come in with big swap lines or other help? Or is someone’s paper getting sold (and if so, US or clever ways to make the net sales fall on EU again)

Discounted cash flow

I still remember being perplexed and dismayed on a call with a major crypto founder in 2023 as they made 30 people watch them type into the regular ChatGPT UI and ask, “uh… does anyone here know Python?” It was painful.
The big plan was to turn the protocol over to AI governance.
Now it’s 2026 and AI will email the FBI without your permission or hack a company that then has to be bought by a friendly to avoid lawsuits.
I wonder if that call would still be held today. Probably a coin flip.

So are any of these crypto neobanks actually making money? Every one I look into seems to be loss making based on reasonable net interchange assumptions, except for ones that convinced someone else’s balance sheet to fund the incentives.
Or for those like @mikulaja with an educated view of neobanks more broadly, is anyone under $1b assets making money?

S&P buying @OpenZeppelin

Higher rates: good for stablecoins, bad for yieldcoins