Nine Years in Crypto

Three Things #198: February 8, 2026

It’s raining, but I feel amazing. Better than ever. What a time to be alive, and a builder!

This is my last week at NEAR Foundation. As I’ve been reflecting on my time at NEAR, my work on House of Stake, and all of the other things I’ve worked on these last nine years in the industry, I’ve realized that this is the first time in nine years when I don’t know what I’m going to do next. I’m pleasantly surprised by this feeling. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt this way, and I didn’t realize how much I’ve missed it.

I’ll save the long-winded explanation of my departure for another time, but for now suffice it to say that it’s just time for a break. Being part of NEAR and working on House of Stake has been an incredible privilege. It’s been exciting, and it’s been quite rewarding. I’ve met incredible people and learned a ton over the past year. I worked with an outstanding team to launch House of Stake a few months ago, and with the MPC signer project that’s underway, HoS is off to a great start creating real value for the NEAR ecosystem. It’s as good a time as any to take a step back and hand off the project to more capable hands than mine.

I can’t help but also mention the obvious fact that the world is changing faster than it ever has in my lifetime, thanks to AI technology. Things we all took for granted just a few short months ago, like the fact that vibe coding isn’t for serious projects, are completely different today, and literally each new day brings new possibilities. We have to revisit all of our old assumptions.

I feel like a kid in a candy shop. It’s hard to describe this feeling to those who aren’t developers and haven’t tried using the latest AI coding assistants, but take my word for it: I feel like I have superpowers and everything and anything feels possible.

I’ve been doing my best to keep up with these new developments for the past year or two, but with the burden of a busy full time day job, plus parenting, travel, etc., it’s been utterly impossible. I’m very excited to dig more deeply into everything that’s going on in AI, to get back to building, and to share everything I learn here. Stay tuned!

There are also personal reasons it’s a good time to take a break. We’re a few days away from welcoming our second child into the world, which is as good a reason as any to take a short break.

For those who may be wondering, I have no idea what I plan to work on next, and I don’t plan to decide soon, although past experience shows that something may nevertheless find me. For the foreseeable future I plan to focus completely on family plus getting caught up with, and building using, the latest AI tools and technologies. If you’re working on something similar, feel free to reach out.

Incidentally, you may have noticed by now that I am, once again, way behind in posting updates here. Rest assured that I’ve continued to write, and now have no less than ten posts queued up here, but with everything else that’s been going on I haven’t been able to get them across the finish line. AI may or may not also make that process easier, soon, so with any luck I should be able to get caught up here in the coming days.

As always, thank you for reading and for your continued support on this journey.

Here’s what’s on my mind as this transition plays out.

Thing #1: Winner 🏁

When I tell friends about the transition, the number one question I get is, Are you planning to stay in the crypto industry? I find this question especially revealing on the part of the questioner! The crypto industry is in a very strange place at the moment and we’re in a moment of reckoning, although this literally happens every market cycle. I’m unconvinced that this time is any different.

Across the board, pretty much all tokens, even the few decent ones like NEAR, have been performing abysmally. Meme coins seem to finally be dead for good (good riddance). New projects have pretty much stopped launching. Even the OG coins, like bitcoins and ether, are in the gutter, and Bitcoin has proven that it’s not a hedge against inflation, instability, or pretty much anything else, at least in the short term. Where do we go from here? And how do we maintain faith in light of all of this disappointment and FUD?

Short answer: stop paying so much attention to price action. Yes, I understand that to many people cryptocurrencies and blockchains are investments first and foremost, but they’ve always been more than that to me. That hasn’t changed. They stand for something bigger than price—at least, the good ones do.

At times like these I like to remember that, when I started, bitcoin was something like $1000 and ETH was under $100. We’ve come a long way since then. I’ve never been in it for the short term—I’ve been totally consistent about that over the years—and I haven’t changed my mind at all about the long term, transformative potential of these technologies and these ideas. We’re much closer to this today than we’ve ever been in crypto’s journey.

Bitcoin has already had a massive impact, much bigger than I ever dreamed it would. Fortune 500 companies, banks, and nation states hold it on their balance sheets in increasing numbers. Every major bank, brokerage, and degen trading platform in the world now supports crypto or is in the process of adding it. Bitcoin has begun to seriously challenge gold as a store of value (although for all its flaws gold has proven remarkably resilient, and probably will for some time).

Even more importantly, derivative technologies, most obviously stable coins, have found clear product market fit and have already had a positive impact on the lives of many millions of people around the world. Wherever people are unbanked or debanked, wherever they face inflationary pressure from their local currency or are simply subject to corrupt, incompetent monetary policy, they now have a way out. The importance of that cannot be underplayed.

No, crypto tech doesn’t have the same wow factor as AI, that much is clear by now. And the world is paying much more attention to AI than to crypto in this moment, for good reason. But crypto and AI are a marriage made in heaven, and what’s good for one is good for the other.

Bitcoin will continue to be volatile for a while, but what hasn’t changed is why we started, or what’s possible. Far more is possible today than ever before. The future is bright. And now is a great time to pause and remember why you started. I’m reflecting on what the future might look like, and on how we get there.

Thing #2: Confident 🎯

As I contemplate what comes next, dedicating myself full time to AI is increasingly appealing. The technology is novel and exciting. Looking at AI tech today, diving in, building, understanding how it works, etc., I feel the way I did when I read my first crypto whitepaper nearly ten years ago. I feel the way I did when I first got my hands on a programming book 30-odd years ago. I feel like the world is my oyster, like I can create amazing things with hardly any limits.

Simply put, I want to work on the thing—the technology—that’s going to have the biggest positive impact on the lives of the largest number of people. It’s still unclear what the long term impact of AI will be, and how positive it will be, but at this moment I feel quite optimistic about it. Crypto will doubtless also have a big positive impact over the long run, but if you forced me to choose today, I’d say that AI is more likely to have a bigger, more positive impact (although, as I said a moment ago, the sweet spot is ultimately going to be the intersection of these two, to the point that I don’t even think it makes sense to speak of one and not the other).

I suspect there’s a ton of people out there doing similar math today, and arriving at similar conclusions. Some of these are retail investors, figuring out where to place their next bet: meme coins are out, AI stonks are in. Some are people looking for a job, looking for the next challenge, debating which industry to join, which skills to learn, etc. Some are night and weekend warriors, debating what to work on for their next side project. At this moment, the collective consciousness, the zeitgeist, is increasingly turning towards AI for good reasons. Every dollar that a degen puts into $NVDA or uranium is a dollar that isn’t flowing into crypto (and in all likelihood, looking at the markets lately, is flowing out of crypto).

We’re not talking about this as much as we should be, but this is probably a big part of the reason the crypto industry and market are in such a funk right now. Even in the best of times crypto struggled with product market fit, mainstream recognition, and adoption for a host of reasons, some deserved, some that aren’t our fault. As a result the industry has always operated with a talent shortage. Even the best crypto projects and organizations I know struggle to attract world class talent. Today, increasingly, they also struggle to retain it. The shortage has become even more acute since AI has sucked up so much attention, talent, and investment, and the trend will probably continue for quite some time.

But even as we acknowledge this reality, even as we see the crypto market struggling, I think it’s really important to remember that what’s happening actually has very little to do with crypto, and everything to do with AI. What’s happening today isn’t happening so much because of what crypto isn’t. It’s happening because of what AI is: a fantastically useful technology that’s finally hit its stride and quickly found product market fit. That’s a good thing, even when viewed from the crypto stance.

Remember that AI and crypto aren’t mutually exclusive. In fact, they’re mutually reinforcing, which means that what’s good for AI is good for crypto. That may be hard to see or hard to believe given that, at the moment, attention, talent, and capital are all scarce. It may feel zero sum, but that’s only true in the short term. I’m absolutely confident that, in a few years, crypto and AI will enter into a positive feedback loop that will unlock enormous value and opportunity. I don’t think there’s so much reason for concern among cryptoniks. Everything is going to be just fine.

Of course, a hedging strategy is always a good idea, and I’d recommend that everyone, not just crypto folks, invest some time getting caught up with all things AI. It’s fairly certain at this point that this year is going to be the first really big year of AI. It’s good to stay on top of what’s coming, to know what’s possible, etc.

There are a lot of ways in which crypto can and should do better, but the fact that AI is sucking all the oxygen out of the air at the moment doesn’t mean that there’s anything inherently wrong with crypto. Crypto should confidently keep doing what crypto is best at, which incidentally has little to no overlap with the things that AI is good at. It’ll pay off in the end.

Thing #3: Unimaginable 😶‍🌫

My father was born in 1923. At the time radio was brand new, television didn’t exist, and commercial flight wasn’t an option (he immigrated to the USA on a boat, like millions of migrants before him). Automobiles and electric elevators were new. The list of transformative technologies he saw arise in his lifetime is breathtaking. Television. Global travel. Air conditioning. Computing, the Internet, and mobile. The world he was born into no longer exists. It’s impossible to exaggerate the degree to which the world changed in the nearly hundred years he was alive.

Change never felt that rapid during my lifetime. Maybe I was just young and naive. Maybe there was a decade or two when progress wasn’t quite as rapid as it had been. I felt for a long time like I wouldn’t see even a fraction of the change that my dad saw in his lifetime.

I now see how wrong I was. Today, it’s totally obvious that the world is changing more rapidly than it ever has before. It’s impossible not to invoke that famous Lenin quote: “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.” There have been a lot of decade-long weeks lately.

The AI transformation is just beginning, and yet I already see how rapidly things are changing. It was easy to sort of ignore this change for a while, until it wasn’t anymore. I’m feeling its presence in a big way in my own life, and I’m not even close to an early adopter of most of these technologies. I’m belatedly getting caught up, but I’m already too late to be a pioneer, which puts me squarely in the early mainstream.

Things that felt difficult now feel easy—many of them. And things that felt impossible now feel possible. Again, I can’t overemphasize what a big deal that is. And we’re just getting started.

I’m already beginning to feel like this is bigger than the revolutions that came before, e.g., cloud, mobile, and the Internet. It’s definitely on the same level as the invention and dissemination of computing itself, if not bigger. A year or two ago that felt like overblown prognostication, like Cassandra warning of things to come. A year or two ago, I wasn’t really listening. Now it feels prescient.

The point is: it’s very difficult to plan for the future given how rapidly things are changing. But, dismal politicians and geopolitical instability aside, the change is mostly positive, and I’ve never felt more opportunity in my life or in my career. I feel incredibly optimistic about what the future holds. It feels like we need to rebuild, reinvent, and reimagine large swaths of computing. We need to rethink many of the ways we collaborate and communicate. Lots of the systems we use today are broken and disappointing in some big ways, so I’m extremely optimistic that we’ll end up in a better place after this.

I can’t imagine a better opportunity to take some time off, reflect, figure out where this is all going, and to begin building something big. When in doubt, I start building, and that usually works out pretty well for me. This time will be no exception.

I love crypto. I still believe in its ideals, and in the values and ideals that got me into this space. But we also have to accept that the world is changing, and that the opportunity set today is not what it was nearly ten years ago. I’m reflecting deeply on this, and will share more thoughts here as my own thoughts progress.