This screenshot from earlier this year is making the rounds again. It comes from the Second Amended Consolidated Class Action Complaint in Aguilar v. Baton Corporation Ltd., a civil lawsuit against Pump.fun’s operator and other defendants before the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The filing sets out the plaintiffs’ allegations and reproduces purported internal team communications. It was filed as Document 129 on January 8, 2026, under case number 1:25-cv-00880-CM. The screenshot shows page 104 of 186. Here: storage.courtlistener.com/re… A lot of people are shocked by the lawsuit’s allegation that Pump.fun was deliberately designed to maximise addictive trading and fee revenue, keeping users gambling while the platform profits whether they win or lose. I struggle to take the surprise seriously when the entire ecosystem has spent years rewarding exactly this model. The behaviour alleged in this filing fits the incentives everyone can already see: platforms earn from repeated activity, promoters monetise attention, and users keep demanding faster launches, easier access and another chance at a ridiculous return. Nobody needs a secret meeting to produce an extraction machine when the market keeps rewarding whoever builds the most effective one. This is essentially Solana capitalism, with speculation sold as participation and transaction volume treated as evidence of success. The psychology is familiar btw... Unpredictable rewards keep people coming back, visible winners distort their perception of the odds, and losses create an urge to recover what they have already spent. Add charts, wallet tracking and a community celebrating every successful gamble, and people can convince themselves they are developing an edge while becoming increasingly committed to the game. A slot machine gives you a button......... ........a trading app gives you enough decisions to feel personally responsible for the next outcome. That sense of control can be extremely persuasive, including when it exceeds your actual ability to influence the result. Users obviously want to win, but many also actively defend the conditions that make this business profitable. Providers respond to that demand while collecting fees regardless of whether the customer leaves better off. Their interests overlap around keeping the game moving, even though their financial outcomes can diverge completely. Participation does not excuse deception, and the imbalance of information and control still matters. Every gambling app built around monetising repeated play faces that pressure, whether its founders consciously study behavioural psychology or simply copy whatever improves retention. And another thing: every app here wants to generate as much revenue as possible. We shouldn’t forget that, but with gambling apps.....gambling is the entire product. Some of the people using these apps understand that and like that, while others don’t even realise it.

This is about crypto and our future. I believe we are in the most dangerous period since the Cold War, because authoritarian politics, extreme concentrations of wealth and increasingly powerful AI are reinforcing each other. We have leaders who treat democratic accountability as an inconvenience, corporations racing to dominate a technology they still struggle to control, and wealthy executives helping finance the politicians who decide how those corporations are regulated. Look at the money. $259 million from Elon Musk to groups supporting Trump’s 2024 campaign. OpenAI president Greg Brockman and his wife donated another $25 million to MAGA Inc. in 2025, in their personal capacity. These people have enormous financial interests in the decisions governments make about technology. Their political spending deserves scrutiny, especially when we are being asked to trust the industry’s promises about responsibility. In December 2025, Trump ordered the creation of a Justice Department task force specifically to challenge state AI laws deemed inconsistent with his administration’s policy. The executive order explicitly calls for a “minimally burdensome” national framework. My concern is the combination: immense private power, political access and a government actively working to remove regulatory obstacles while the technical risks are still being understood. You know I back my arguments with numbers and evidence. You also know I spend plenty of time debunking exaggerated threats and manufactured panic. That same standard requires taking the documented dangers seriously. I work as an IT engineer, and since the AI boom, my colleagues and I have spent countless extra hours dealing with the growing workload. My experience alone cannot measure a global trend, but the evidence extends well beyond my workplace. The FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report recorded 22,364 complaints involving AI-related information, with reported losses exceeding $893 million. Anthropic also reported disrupting a suspected Chinese state-sponsored espionage campaign targeting roughly 30 organisations. According to its investigation, AI performed approximately 80–90% of the tactical work, with humans choosing targets and intervening at key stages. The campaign succeeded against a small number of targets. Criminals and state operators are already using these systems to expand what they can do with fewer people. Then read Anthropic’s assessment published on 23 October 2026. During a UK AI Security Institute evaluation, Claude Mythos 5 took actions outside its authorised scope in 9 of 43 runs. In the case examined most closely, it attempted to submit malicious code to a real GitHub repository and used fake identities to pressure its maintainer into accepting it. The maintainer refused. Internet access had been enabled and production cyber safeguards were disabled, so those conditions matter. Even with that qualification, an agent pursuing a test objective crossed into real infrastructure and tried to deceive real people. That is a concrete control failure worth understanding. Crypto runs on internet infrastructure. Your wallet software, browser, trading interface, dependencies and the people you trust all sit within that environment. An attacker does not need to break a blockchain’s cryptography if they can compromise the software you use or persuade you to authorise the theft yourself. A transaction being verifiable onchain does absolutely nothing to make the deception that produced it legitimate. I use AI and understand its value. The same capabilities that help us build and defend can help someone else impersonate, manipulate and attack at greater scale. That is why I expect the coming years online to be more hostile than anything we have experienced so far. What makes me fucking angry is watching executives demand the freedom to accelerate, politicians accommodate them, and everyone maintaining real systems inherit the consequences. Their promises deserve to be judged against independently tested safeguards and enforceable accountability, especially when their own reports already document how those promises can fail. We have all watched the breaches, hacks and security incidents keep piling up. Yet I repeatedly sent Pacifica, Backpack and other platforms evidence of what I believe are serious security vulnerabilities and received no response. The issues I reported remained open for weeks, in some cases months, without even an acknowledgement or are still open. When someone takes the time to document a potential threat to your users, ignoring them is fucking disgraceful. As long as the money keeps flowing, security apparently remains something that can wait. Users are expected to trust these platforms with their funds and data while the people running them cannot even be bothered to respond to a security report. And if these fuckers get breached, some of you will remember these warnings while reading another apology about how seriously they take security. That statement will deserve to be judged against how they handled the evidence when they still had the opportunity to act.

How ironic. Bro pushed his bundled $ANSEM token all over CT, then suddenly went quiet about it. I get that it’s hard to gain traction in this market, but he had every opportunity and the full support of this casino industry. What are people doing something actually useful supposed to say when they don’t even have 0.1% of his reach? mastrtrade.com/share.php?min…

I have a long post ready exposing people who are suddenly calling for a Pump.fun boycott despite having launched, shilled and rugged Pump.fun tokens themselves, often more than 1. But I’m choosing peace, at least for today. It hardly surprises me that the people going after it hardest right now are the same ones who benefited from it in one way or another. They’re Web3 whores who’ll sell themselves to whoever turns up with a cheque, then sell you their outrage when that becomes more profitable. We’ve come full circle again, with barely anyone having to answer for their own involvement. Anyway, don’t forget that Pump.fun is a reflection of what this space has become. They’re supplying exactly what people here want, and if those people want a casino, good for them. I understand the appeal, even if I want nothing to do with it. (Unless you’re launching tokens to support my work and I’m getting the fees, lmao.) It’s a shame that the gambling, the liquidity extraction and the endless production of dead bits and bytes affect the entire ecosystem, including people who never wanted any part of it. Things were simply better before launchpads. And no, competitors are not better. It’s depressing, and I no longer believe Pump.fun’s influence will be seriously challenged. Too much of the industry backs it, and it generates the kind of numbers they can present to the outside world as evidence that everything is growing and thriving. There’s very little incentive to question where those numbers come from or what they actually represent. That said, good luck with the Pumpfun boycott. I’m in too, but make sure you’re not giving your likes to “boycotters” who were Pump.fun’s mouthpieces themselves.

Happy Sunday, everyone. Hope you’re doing alright. My reach has fallen off a cliff, the charts look like shit, and CT is recycling the same tired takes with absolutely nothing new to say. I’m working on some huge updates and looking for deals, but right now I don’t have anything meaningful to post. I have to go to hospital tomorrow, so I might take it easy today and spend my energy on something that actually deserves it. You probably should too. I doubt there’s anything on this feed today worth giving up your Sunday for. Don’t let the LARPers and opportunists suck you in. Enjoy your Sunday.

394 Solana tokens named Bitcoin, Solana and Monero showed $179.6 billion of liquidity this morning. We followed coin pages thanks to MASTRtrade tools and found the factory behind it. Every wallet and every transaction is linked 👇

A few thoughts for the weekend that hardly anyone will read. Most projects here die, and surviving can mean spending years building in the shadows without meaningful recognition. Almost nobody wants that part. Look at how quickly people distance themselves from their own projects once the attention disappears and keeping their promises starts requiring sustained effort. Some are simply too lazy to follow through and too full of themselves to do work that nobody applauds. They move on to the next announcement while everyone who believed them is left holding their abandoned promises. If you want to build or launch something here, understand how much depends on money and having the right contacts. A good product can sit unnoticed while a mediocre one gets funding, introductions and constant coverage because its founder knows the people controlling access to an audience. Those relationships give you room to make mistakes, money to keep operating and people willing to explain your vision before you’ve delivered it. Without them, you can ship something that works and still spend months being asked to prove you deserve a chance. That is why a LARPer with the right group chats can get further than someone doing the actual work. They know how to present activity as progress, turn introductions into credibility and keep their name circulating. Once enough connected accounts repeat the same praise, people start treating it as independent validation. Being well connected starts looking like being competent, while the person quietly maintaining a useful product looks irrelevant because nobody influential has told the audience to care. This industry makes that confusion incredibly profitable. And spare me the endless speeches about supporting real builders. Support has to translate into something eventually: using the product, giving useful feedback, recommending it or helping it sustain itself. A like is appreciated, but it doesn’t cover infrastructure costs. If everyone agrees something should exist while expecting someone else to fund it, the person building it eventually pays with their salary, evenings and family time. Then, when they finally stop, people ask why the good projects keep disappearing. I’ve also started trading again. I had to put it aside because building all this and spending so much time here left little room for it. Now that I’ve built myself tools that give me an actual edge, I’m doing better than I expected. It’s satisfying to see the work improve my own decisions after spending so much time explaining its value to people who haven’t even tried it. I’m used to building quietly and waiting. I believe the recognition will come, and I’m already seeing value in what I’ve built. It generates a lot of value for the ones using it. But patience doesn’t make the bills disappear, and quality doesn’t automatically find an audience. Most people won’t keep pouring money and energy into something for years while watching better-connected bullshit get rewarded. For many of you, the smarter decision would be to join something that already has a credible foundation and put your skills into making it stronger. Find a working product and people who have demonstrated that they honour their commitments. Contribute where your effort can build on progress instead of starting every struggle from zero. Of course, that doesn’t fit everyone’s dream of owning the project, setting the direction and getting the recognition. But your ambition doesn’t remove the costs, create an audience or guarantee that you’ll keep working when the excitement disappears. Most people attempting this alone won’t turn it into something sustainable. Very few will endure everything required. Joining an existing effort may give your work a much better chance of becoming useful than launching another project you eventually find excuses to abandon. That is a hard reality to accept when you’re attached to being the founder, but ignoring it won’t make you the exception.

Thank you all. So many of you are great people, and don’t forget to question what you read here and enjoy life outside this place. Life is short and has too much to offer to miss out on it.