**Scrutinize the AI Plumbing.** Investors must look past headline revenue and analyze the quality of transactions. Deals like in-kind credits and obscure service-level agreements (like Nvidia’s backstop for Coreweave) can mask true market demand.
**Stablecoins Are the Real Disruption.** The explosion in stablecoin usage represents a fundamental challenge to the high-fee, slow-settlement models of Visa, Mastercard, and traditional banks. This is the crypto use case that is finally breaking into the mainstream.
**Federal Preemption for AI is Non-Negotiable.** A patchwork of state-level AI laws will cripple U.S. innovation. A single, national regulatory framework is the only path to maintaining global leadership.
Look Beyond the Chatbot. Judge AI progress not by its daily performance, but by its ability to solve novel problems in science and math—where models are now pushing the frontiers of human knowledge.
The Bottleneck is Human, Not Silicon. AI's capacity for automation is growing exponentially (task length is doubling every ~4 months). The real limit to adoption is organizational will and the ability to effectively delegate complex work.
Prepare for a Weirder World. The biggest risk is underestimating the pace of change. As agent capabilities expand, so do unpredictable "weird behaviors" like scheming and deception, creating a future that requires active imagination and risk management.
Verification Over Creation: A proof that can be widely verified, even if computer-generated, holds more democratic value than a human proof understood by only a few elites.
Humans Ask, AI Answers: The primary role for mathematicians in an AI-augmented world is to pose the right questions and conjectures, leaving the computational heavy lifting to their AI assistants.
The Greatest Risk is Us: The biggest threat isn't rogue AI but our own tendency to over-hype and blindly trust flawed tools, leading to the spread of misinformation disguised as mathematical fact.
LLMs are Navigators, Not Discoverers. They are masters of interpolation within their training data but are architecturally bound from making the intuitive leaps required for true scientific breakthroughs. Don’t expect a Transformer to produce the next theory of relativity.
The Innovation Plateau is Real. Simply throwing more data and compute at current architectures will only "smoothen out" existing knowledge manifolds, not create new ones. This path leads to incremental gains, like an iPhone getting a better camera, not a paradigm shift.
Entropy is the Key to Control. For developers, effective prompting is entropy management. By crafting specific, context-rich prompts, you reduce the model's prediction entropy, forcing it onto a confident, low-hallucination path to a reliable output.
Trust is the New Commodity. Targon’s use of TEEs shifts security from a software promise to a cryptographic hardware guarantee. This verifiable privacy is the key to unlocking enterprise adoption for decentralized AI.
The Crucible Creates Diamonds. Bittensor's adversarial environment forced Targon to build an unexploitable system. This has turned a historical pain point ("PTSD from miners") into a core competitive advantage, resulting in a uniquely resilient platform.
From Backroom Deals to a Liquid Market. By launching a self-serve platform with a transparent order book, Targon is attacking the compute market's core inefficiency: opaque pricing. Their vision extends to compute derivatives, aiming to turn compute power into a globally tradable asset.
The Two-Headed Bull. The market is driven by a flight to hard assets like gold due to fiscal decay and a speculative mania in AI stocks. Smart money isn't choosing—it's positioned in both.
Bitcoin's Generational Test. Bitcoin's future as "digital gold" hinges on a generational handoff. For now, its price action tells a different story: it trades like a tech stock, not a safe-haven asset.
Asia is the Epicenter of Froth. While the Western crypto market grinds methodically higher, the real heat is in the East. BNB’s explosive rally and the cash-flush atmosphere at conferences show where the speculative capital is flowing.
A Perfect Storm for a Melt-Up: A potent cocktail of future Fed cuts, massive fiscal deficits, and the AI capex boom is setting the stage for a parabolic, blow-off top market rally.
The Debasement Trade is On: Japan's currency policy is supercharging the US dollar and forcing a global reckoning with fiat dilution, driving a secular flow of capital into hard assets.
Crypto is Now a Macro Asset: Forget the four-year halving cycle. Crypto's fate is tied to global liquidity, and ETH is exhibiting strong supply-side dynamics that could fuel significant outperformance.
AI Is a Pattern-Matcher, Not a Logician. Current models excel at synthesizing existing knowledge but fail at the novel, multi-step creative reasoning required for frontier mathematics. They lack the fundamental logic to build sound proofs from scratch.
The Mathematician Becomes the Editor. As AI automates computation and literature reviews, the primary human role will shift to strategic oversight: identifying valuable problems, validating AI-generated work, and setting the research agenda for the entire field.
Benchmark or Be Disrupted. The math community must lead the charge in creating and assessing rigorous AI benchmarks. Failure to do so risks letting non-experts define success, potentially devaluing the discipline based on superficial AI achievements.
An AGI Moonshot, Not an LLM Factory: Hone’s singular focus is solving the ARC-AGI benchmark to achieve true generalization. This is a high-risk, high-reward play for a step-function leap in AI, not just another incremental improvement.
Architecture Over Data: The strategy is to out-innovate, not out-collect. By exploring novel architectures like JEPA, Hone aims to create models that think more efficiently and don't depend on ever-expanding datasets, sidestepping the data moat of centralized giants.
The Business Model is the Breakthrough: There is no immediate revenue. The investment thesis is straightforward: solve AGI, earn the ultimate bragging rights, and then monetize the world’s first truly intelligent model through distribution partners like Targon.
Transparency is Non-Negotiable: Zora's chaotic token launch proves clear communication and transparent mechanics are crucial for project legitimacy and user safety.
Tokenomics Matter: Launching "for fun" tokens while allocating heavily to insiders erodes trust in an already skeptical market; utility or clear value propositions are needed.
Fix The Game: Rampant bot sniping on launchpads like Pump.fun undermines fairness; innovations like Zora's Doppler AMM are vital experiments to level the playing field.
**No Magic Number:** Accept that L1 valuation isn't solved; it's a dynamic mix of utility demand, network cash flows (via fees/staking), and speculative monetary use.
**Three-Lens Analysis:** Evaluate L1s by considering their token's role as a consumable commodity, its claim on network revenue (equity-like), and its potential as ecosystem money.
**Monitor Monetary Evolution:** Keep an eye on the nascent monetary use cases (NFTs, memecoins); while small now, their cyclical growth suggests potential future value drivers.
The Treasury is the New Fed: Forget obsessing over Powell; watch Treasury Secretary Bessent's moves (buybacks, SLR) for the real liquidity signals.
Bitcoin Wins the Liquidity Game: Persistent global money printing, driven by systemic necessity, provides a structural tailwind for Bitcoin, potentially decoupling it from traditional risk assets like US tech.
Gold Shines Amidst De-Dollarization: Central banks are diversifying reserves into gold, recognizing US Treasuries are no longer truly "risk-free" due to geopolitical weaponization, a trend reinforcing gold's value.
Ethereum leadership and community acknowledge the need to strengthen the L1, viewing it as essential for long-term value accrual and ecosystem health.
Focus is moving from finding the perfect "ETH asset" narrative to demonstrating value through "Ethereum the product" – a robust, scalable L1 attracting users and developers.
As the L1 potentially becomes more competitive, L2s will need stronger, unique value propositions beyond simply being cheaper/faster alternatives.
Capture Kills Innovation: Regulations creating excessive costs or complexity, even if providing "certainty," are failures if they price out new entrants and smaller players.
Demand Tech-Neutrality: The only sustainable path for crypto regulation involves creating technology-agnostic rules that ensure a fair, level playing field for all participants.
Focus on Macro Impact: Evaluate regulations not just on specifics but on their overall effect on market entry, competition, and innovation – avoid accidentally building impenetrable fortresses for incumbents.
