building and investing // prev. @hiframework // long tough-minded optimists
SF
Joined January 2012
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Brandon Potts retweeted
Stablecoin-backed cards make make global balances instantly usable at 100M+ businesses. We're looking forward to working with @plasma to advance the space.
We're bringing together Stripe's fiat and crypto infrastructure to make it easier for businesses to build stablecoin-backed cards that work across currencies and markets.
More on what we're building with @Plasma,
Brandon Potts retweeted
Update from Scott Aaronson: Some AI companies are now using their latest internal models to take a run at breaking 'important cryptographic protocols and primitives.'
He also adds this, to which I agree:
'Also noteworthy is the striking under-representation of cryptographic breakthroughs among the 722 mathematical results OpenAI published. I've witnessed first-hand the US government censoring academic quantum cryptanalysis results. Backroom interventionism is my base case.'
Things are probably further along than it seems. This is true in many areas right now. There are also persistent rumors that the OpenAI math release yesterday was only the first batch of three.
Brandon Potts retweeted
We at @hiFramework are thrilled to triple down on @MeckaAI. Their execution has been nothing short of flawless and it still feels like day one.
If you’re looking to join one of the fastest growing startups ever, they’re hiring 🚀
Brandon Potts retweeted
rogue agents and prompt injection are currently considered the biggest unresolved threat in security.
picture this: you ask claude code to review a PR, the agent reads a compromised package and gets tricked to exfiltrate your environment keys.
we are building cyber defense to solve this exact kind of problems. Clarion can ingest any kind of telemetry, integrate with platforms, triage and resolve issues at machine speed.
in this example Clarion is set up to ingest agent telemetry. the developer was using Claude Code and a prompt injection made the agent post his AWS keys to a remote attacker server. the attacker then logged into his AWS account using that same key.
Clarion is able to correlate actions across different environments and take action. here it detected the exfiltration via Claude telemetry, confirmed the abuse by correlating CloudTrail with auth from a differnet IP, contained the host using CrowdStrike Falcon, blocked the attacker address and escalated the issue.
all this in ~6 minutes. a human operator alone would have not found out in weeks.
Brandon Potts retweeted
If I was a major AI lab I would be gobbling up security firms like peas at a farm stand.
Brandon Potts retweeted
1/ Today, @m_mosier_ @malekanoms & I are sharing a new paper: "The Compatibility of Financial Integrity With Permissionless Networks". Institutions say BSA & sanctions laws prevent use of these networks. We debunk this & provide a path forward. 🧵 papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.…
Brandon Potts retweeted
this wild defcon talk is finally out
researchers created a fake defi startup, hired lazarus it workers, put them into a sandbox and recorded their tooling, workflows, and faces from inside the operation
starts at 5:46:09
youtube.com/live/_uYQr8hfpbI…
Brandon Potts retweeted
Wake up babe the new @WhiteHouse cyber privateering construct just dropped whitehouse.gov/presidential-…
Brandon Potts retweeted
We spent years finding vulnerabilities before attackers did. That was the easy part.
Teams already know what's broken. Nobody has the bandwidth to close it.
Today we raised $16.5M to make Cantina the security workforce for your security workforce. cantina.review/next-chapter-…
Brandon Potts retweeted
The 3 minute talk I gave at @Stanford AI Cybersecurity conference.
If you want to know what the data is telling us about the direction of AI Cybersecurity tooling, check this out, maybe you'll learn something : )
Had to hand draw these graphs because slides weren't allowed.
Brandon Potts retweeted
Open USD is the new standard for global stablecoins, now coming to Plasma.
The stablecoin backed by Visa and Mastercard, launching on the chain built for stablecoin payments.
Introducing Open USD: a stablecoin built for the internet economy, designed by the businesses growing it.
joinopenstandard.com/blog/in…
Brandon Potts retweeted
1/ Today in @FortuneMagazine:
Framework Ventures has raised $400 Million for our 4th fund, FVIV.
We believe the future is being built at the intersection of blockchain, AI, robotics, energy, and fintech.
🧵👇
Brandon Potts retweeted
We are thrilled to lead back-to-back financings into @MeckaAI to build infrastructure for robots to learn about the world and deploy reliably.
Mecka is the fastest-growing revenue company we've ever invested in and is still accelerating.
Thrilled to deepen our partnership with @joshavata @jasontheutopian and the entire Mecka team.
Today @MeckaAI is announcing $60M in funding to become the data and deployment layer for physical AI
This raise will allow us to scale our data infrastructure, invest into new verticals, and deploy robots into the real world
Brandon Potts retweeted
Or go to the Presidio, jump in the ocean, get a coffee at The Mill, watch sunset at Twin Peaks, ride a bike anywhere, see live music, eat a burrito, take a grass nap in GG Park, have beer at The Page, watch the Bay Bridge lights, wander Chinatown, wander Ferry building, run across GG Bridge, walk Fort Funston, eat the best meal of your life with friends…drive any direction for 2hrs. And be deeply grateful for the heavenscape you live in.
The vibes in SF feel pretty frenetic right now. The divide in outcomes is the worst I've ever seen.
Over the last 5yrs, a group of ~10k people - employees at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Nvidia, Meta TBD, founders - have hit retirement wealth of well above $20M (back of the envelope AI estimation).
Everyone outside that group feels like they can work their well-paying (but <$500k) job for their whole life and never get there.
Worse yet, layoffs are in full swing. Many software engineers feel like their life's skill is no longer useful. The day to day role of most jobs has changed overnight with AI.
As a result,
1. The corporate ladder looks like the wrong building to climb.
Everyone's trying to align with a new set of career "paths": should I be a founder? Is it too late to join Anthropic / OpenAI? should I get into AI? what company stock will 10x next? People are demanding higher salaries and switching jobs more and more.
2. There’s a deep malaise about work (and its future).
Why even work at all for “peanuts”? Will my job even exist in a few years? Many feel helpless. You hear the “permanent underclass” conversation a lot, esp from young people. It's hard to focus on doing good work when you think "man, if I joined Anthropic 2yrs ago, I could retire"
3. The mid to late middle managers feel paralyzed.
Many have families and don't feel like they have the energy or network to just "start a company". They don't particularly have any AI skills. They see the writing on the wall: middle management is being hollowed out in many companies.
4. The rich aren’t particularly happy either.
No one is shedding tears for them (and rightfully so). But those who have "made it" experience a profound lack of purpose too. Some have gone from <$150k to >$50M in a few years with no ramp. It flips your life plans upside down. For some, comparison is the thief of joy. For some, they escape to NYC to "live life". For others still, they start companies "just cuz", often to win status points. They never imagined that by age 30, they'd be set. I once asked a post-economic founder friend why they didn't just sell the co and they said "and do what? right now, everyone wants to talk to me. if i sell, I will only have money."
I understand that many reading this scoff at the champagne problems of the valley. Society is warped in this tech bubble. What is often well-off anywhere else in the world is bang average here.
Unlike many other places, tenure, intelligence and hard work can be loosely correlated with outcomes in the Bay. Living through a societally transformative gold rush in that environment can be paralyzing. "Am I in the right place? Should I move? Is there time still left? Am I gonna make it?" It psychologically torments many who have moved here in search of "success".
Ironically, a frequent side effect of this torment is to spin up the very products making everyone rich in hopes that you too can vibecode your path to economic enlightenment.
Brandon Potts retweeted
Cantina was mentioned thrice in @Apple's security update yesterday.
We're doing our part in the looming bugapolypse to protect critical infrastructure.
Update your Apple devices 🫡
Apple patched a 13-year-old bug in WebKit yesterday.
Apex, Cantina's autonomous AppSec agent, found it.
It's one of three Apex findings in the same release. Two are CSP bypasses.
Full writeup: cantina.review/ze5
Brandon Potts retweeted
I’m excited to announce that DFlow has been acquired by MoonPay.
DFlow has consumed almost every waking moment of my life since I started it in 2021. An incredible amount of work has gone into it over the years with tangible growth results that reflect the massive effort of the entire team.
Today, DFlow is integrated almost universally across trading apps on Solana. Transactions constructed by DFlow are in almost every block produced on Solana. We’ve served millions of traders across the world. We’re constantly on the frontier of the technology powering markets, working with the largest and most cutting edge businesses in next-gen finance like Phantom, Kalshi, Coinbase, and hundreds more.
I’m proud of what we’ve built so far and excited to work with Ivan and the MoonPay team on the next phase of insane growth.
Brandon Potts retweeted
The next stage of @USDai_Official is more execution:
See what we've done in the last 6 months, and where we're going in the next 24 months, and how the most important commodity of the AI sector (GPUs) is turning into a new asset class 👉
Brandon Potts retweeted
Thanks @domcooke for spending months on researching and writing this piece. Einstein once said, "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." By that measure, Dom has blown me away with how deeply he came to understand Hyperliquid and what we're all building together.
When someone asks what "housing all of finance" means, I'm proud to point them to this piece. I hope readers appreciate just how much Dom and his team put into their work. It reflects the thoughtful craft that is in Hyperliquid's DNA. Special thanks to @patrick_oshag for taking a bet on Hyperliquid's story.
This is the story of Hyperliquid, the most profitable startup per employee on earth, told from a guarded office in Singapore.
Last year, its team of 11 generated $900 million in profit. It's 3 years old, has never taken a dollar of venture capital, and is beginning to change how century-old markets work.
Its founder, Jeffrey Yan (@chameleon_jeff), had never taken a physics class when he picked up a textbook at 16. Two years later, he won gold at the International Physics Olympiad. In 2019, he started trading with $10,000 from a living room in Puerto Rico—working off a television because he didn't own a monitor.
Within 3 years, he was running one of the largest anonymous crypto trading firms.
Then he shut it down. Yan was rich and free, but he had spent years inside crypto, watching it betray itself. Bitcoin's central premise was decentralization. Yet the biggest exchanges were centralized. Crypto kept reintroducing the dependence on trust it was built to eliminate. He set out to create what should have existed.
Hyperliquid is a blockchain with a trading exchange on top, and anyone can build on it. Yan's vision is to house all of finance. In 3 years, it has done over $4 trillion in volume. And in the past few months, it has begun to outgrow crypto.
Markets for oil, silver, and the S&P 500 now trade on Hyperliquid around the clock, weekends included, and are growing roughly 40% week on week. When the US and Israel bombed Iran on a Saturday in February, Hyperliquid was the venue traders turned to.
Hyperliquid's success has cost Yan his freedom. He works out of a secret office in Singapore and cannot travel without two bodyguards. Even the team's housekeeper doesn't know what they do.
In January, @domcooke spent a week at their office. Read his profile on Yan and @HyperliquidX below.
Brandon Potts retweeted
EXCLUSIVE: The CIA late last year raised the status of its elite cyber espionage division, providing it more resources to analyze and disrupt digital threats, as well as amp up the agency’s own technological innovation efforts.
therecord.media/cia-director…
