interesting to see tether's investment arm cooking over the last few months the company reported over $10B in net profit in 2025, with $6.3B in excess reserves sitting on balance sheet seeing a lot of skeptical takes on the timeline about these recent investments, will offer a slightly different view corporate venture is when a company deploys capital from its own balance sheet to invest in startups tether's cash flow gives them the ability to supercharge this idea, and act like a sovereign allocator of capital balance sheet diversification is of course important, and goal is always is financial return but unlike trad venture, the strategy for corporate venture can often include optimizing for strategic levers on behalf of the parent co put differently, helping invest in a future where parent company wins corp venture deals can carry some signal to see where the parent company observes the world moving tether's last few investments help paint a decent picture here: layer zero (infra) - pretty clear at this point tether's ambition is to own as much distribution around off-chain and on-chain settlement of stables. powered in part by networks like layerzero, tether can further its terminal vision for USDT as an asset that flows freely across centralized platforms and decentralized networks whop (work) - an internet marketplace where creators sell creator subs, communities, tools, digital products/services of all categories. today, prohibitively high transaction costs push creators and internet businesses to adopt legacy biz models like time-based subscriptions, bundling, and ad-supported services stables running over blockchains enable frictionless, 24/7 global payments at any arbitrarily small denomination of value ^ applied to creator marketplaces like whop, USDT penetration may offer consumer-friendly payment alternatives to trad biz models that unlock new types of product/service revenue eight sleep / QVAC (health) - i've been a power eight sleeper since 2020, love this product, and this one caught my eye this morning looking into this a bit, back in december 2025, tether announced QVAC Health, a personal health platform where all health data is designed to be stored locally on device (including all relevant PII, heart rate, sleep patterns, and aggregate biometric data from connected devices) from this lens the eight sleep investment makes more sense sleep/biometric streams help predict when a person is tired, stressed, training, sick, traveling, etc these states drive tremendous spending decisions (food, supplements, appointments, subscriptions) further, if you believe in a world (i do) where agent-based transactions start to intermediate finance, work, health, and purchasing decisions powered in large part by hyper efficient, internet-native, stablecoin transfers the tactical investments in L0, whop, eight sleep / QVAC, and others start to paint a decently clear picture for me it looks like the next stage of tether/USDT is pointing toward a consumer penetration story embedding stables where systems touch as much economic activity and data as possible as a consumer x AI crypto investor a cool side quest to keep an eye on

AI x Crypto last month at my investor AGM in new york i gave a < 8 minute lightning talk on the AI x Crypto intersection briefly covered both infrastructure and application layers check out the talk if you’re interested, i created it to be approachable for all audiences i'll also add here a few policy points that didn’t make my talk across the last few hundred years, america has created unprecedented opportunity for individuals and businesses, in large part because of our country’s long revered bias towards market competition and entrepreneurship on the eve of AGI, i believe we have a responsibility to renew our identity as a leader on these dimensions i think this can be accomplished, in part, by orienting our country’s AI policy goals towards crypto based systems i dive further into this idea in my essay from january: xitter.cf/derekedws/status/18762… empowering these two technologies to integrate together will likely catalyze widespread participation in open source and community-owned networks, through incentivized contribution at all layers of the AI stack over time, this will stimulate richer competition in all categories of AI creation, and encourage new forms of bottoms-up mobilization and broader social impact and best of all blockchains allow any individual to provably own the digital objects, work, systems, and infrastructure we’re collectively creating around AI and synthetic intelligence systems anyway no one has all the answers here, but i continue to believe there’s a north star for humans at this intersection i hope you enjoy the talk and ideas presented

a few thoughts on mainstreaming crypto and killer products one of my fav consumer products over the last year are the ray-ban x @Meta AI glasses have really enjoyed using them the product brings together hands-free camera/video, natural language AI (voice/audio), bluetooth/internet connectivity, and open-ear speakers (all under $400 USD) one possibility i’m looking for with regard to a larger consumer crypto moment: parallel technologies that weave together a product that is (1) simple to use, (2) reasonably priced, (3) offering a unique consumer payload not otherwise reproducible by each technology alone a product bigger than the sum of its parts few historical examples: - the personal computer mainstreamed when innovations in the microprocessor, graphical UI, operating systems for simple software development, and mass produced electronic accessories converged into a seamless non-technical experience - the internet mainstreamed when personal computer penetration converged with innovations in ethernet/LAN, open standards (TCP/IP), browsers, email, and search it's possible a glasses product might serve as a similar product/hardware unlock to push crypto mainstream, where the UX/friction upgrade from mobile to glasses, in collaboration with other parallel innovations, is so significant that it creates an interesting moment for crypto adoption playing this thought experiment out, here’s a few thoughts on a crypto-enabled glasses product with mainstream value props (under < $400 USD) would require using the same base primitives that make the ray-ban x @Meta AI product so fun to begin with (hands-free camera/video, natural language AI (voice/audio), internet connectivity, open-ear speakers): - Security. Store private keys on hardware’s embedded secure enclave, encrypted with eye (or face) scan - Identity. Link the product's wallet to a user's larger namespace network on @clustersxyz for seamless cross-chain identity across @ethereum, @solana, @bitcoin and other decentralized environments - Crypto x AI Apps. Use the product's microphone and voice-enabled natural language prompting to execute transactions or crypto strategies over any blockchain using @AIWayfinder (+ $PROMPT staked community pathways for economic security) - Crypto x AI Infra. Access SOTA AI models of all types that originated out of distributed training networks like @NousResearch, @PrimeIntellect, @Opentensor, @gensynai - WiFi. Connect glasses to decentralized WiFi across 3M+ hotspots on @weRoamxyz - Mobile. Connect glasses to decentralized mobile carrier on @helium - Network Incentives. Earn hands-free crypto rewards (that flow directly to wallet) for categories like video/photo mapping (@Hivemapper) or daily walk/run challenges (@PulseNoLimits) - Audio. Stream open-ear decentralized audio via @audius - Social. Mint photos/videos onchain, with blockchain-anchored timestamps, to decentralized social platforms like @sharexyz + many more consumer crypto protocols yet to build for this environment ultimately, the hardware product i'm describing should offer an open, verifiable, and fully programmable hardware/software stack—one that builders can trust, extend, and iterate on without asking permission this type of permissionless composability/modularity is one of crypto's great powers would love to see more hardware solutions provide a similar technical foundation for these types of products in the future (by exposing firmware, secure element integrations, and I/O behavior to external inspection) reach out to me or any of the investors at @Collab_Currency if you're working on these ideas (+ thanks to @aradtski for riffing with me)

v fun and wide ranging convo chatting crypto networks, internet culture, and @PulseNoLimits wearables with @NyxNoLimits and @MikeZajko thanks for having me on the pod @tokenwarrant ♥️

1/ AI, Crypto, and America. A new framework to match new realities. My essay for @collab_currency. medium.com/collab-currency/a…

another fresh squeezed @net__society episode out the door @pridesai @awrigh01 @ChrisF_0x @derekedws marfa review, cattelan's banana auction, meme token stuffs, crypto venture secrets, deSci, and lots of other mid crypto takes by your favorite squad ♥️