Friends don’t let friends immanentize the eschaton, and to help you avert the apocalypse, this is Colton from Hedgehog, the app that helps you buy baskets of cryptocurrency and automate your digital asset exposure wherever you custody funds.
This week, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin dropped a lengthy screed describing his hopes and fears for a world filled with AI, and expanded on how he sees cryptography as a complement to the technology. It’s a good overview, but it feels kinda empty, hand waving the structures of trust that allow us to rely on AIs to make decisions for us. It is not enough to have a layer of cryptography around the solution, but there must also be a layer of familiarization with the tools, middlemen, brands, and services that enable, guarantee, and resolve those structures of trust.
The nitty-gritty is always in the implementation:
The prodigal sons return
Well it turns out that FTX will in fact pay everyone back; but before you get your hopes up, everyone will get paid back sans the returns they would have seen between November 2022 and now. Better than nothing!
Similarly, Celsius will begin paying back its creditors to the tune of $3 billion, plus some shares in a mining company that they will be spinning up in hopes of recouping the remaining lost balance. You gotta love the degen spirit that causes a chapter 11 bankruptcy filing to rollover assets into a cryptocurrency mining enterprise. We are wishing all the creditors out there luck.
Speaking of DEGEN
Former Hedgehogian, Jacek, launched a memecoin, $DEGEN, earlier last month that has captured hearts and minds on web3 social platform, Warpcast, built on the Farcaster protocol. We’re proud of him for catching so much attention amid the launch of several competing tokens in the last year like $TOSHI, $WOWOW, $POINTS, $WEN, $WIF, $BONK, $CHONKY, $PEEP, and HarryPotterObamaSonic10Inu $BITCOIN, among others.
DEFINITELY DO NOT BUY ANY OF THESE TOKENS WITH THE EXPECTATION OF RETURN. As we saw a couple weeks ago from CoinGecko, the odds that these tokens make it are not good. While DOGE has shown surprising resilience after a decade of use, the number of dead derivative tokens that purported to compete are long. We’re certainly wishing Jacek luck to beat the odds.
And it only gets more complex
You may also want to check out this report on The State of Bridging from Coinbase Ventures. Given the proliferation of roll-ups, layer 2s, dappchains, modular chains, and other non-sense attempts to put a web3 spin on having a brand lock-in on your funds, bridges are emerging as an immensely important piece of infrastructure. Know them well!
What do you plan to use your AI assistant for? I’m hoping it’ll fit the world’s knowledge on a nice external harddrive in case of societal collapse.
Keep hedging,
— Colton