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Coming from adtech, user privacy was always center stage. No one wants their data exposed or mismanaged.
But it’s complicated. Entire systems were built to coordinate data collection and sharing. They were designed to protect users, but in practice they reduced privacy to clicking “I agree” on a pop-up that no one really reads or fully understands what they've consented to.
There are fundamental gaps that should change but they can’t (or won’t). Business models depend on them. That’s one of the reasons why I pivoted to a technology that reimagines data ownership, provenance, and verifiability: blockchains.
Despite scams and memecoins dominating headlines, blockchain-based technologies are advancing fast. Enterprises and banks are building. Slowly, then suddenly, people will realize their favorite apps and everyday banking rails are powered by blockchains.
At the center, again, is privacy.
But this isn’t just a “human rights” debate. It’s about understanding the difference between privacy vs confidentiality and how confidential systems can accelerate business outcomes: buying products, paying staff, and moving money.
From banks to fintechs to commerce, businesses are paying attention. Industry leaders like SWIFT’s @TomZschach and @a16zcrypto are educating the market. Even SEC's @HesterPeirce is being more vocal about it.
So are we. We’re moving the conversation forward with solutions built for everyday users and businesses: encrypted amounts, public addresses, and selective disclosure so you keep liquidity and UX while protecting sensitive data.
Imagine instant settlement without leaking commercial data with verifiability. Any Finance department would love that.
Check out the article below.
Onchain finance gives institutions a level of control they didn’t have in DeFi. It could fill the gap permissioned DeFi was trying to fill, but without turning the underlying network into a walled garden.
Our financial markets are evolving w a new category that isn't DeFi or TradFi. "Onchain finance" competes w Wall St. on its own terms, pairing the benefits of public blockchains w "trust" as a feature.
@jchervinsky & I wrote about it in @FortuneMagazine: fortune.com/2026/09/18/oncha…
James Bae retweeted
1/
The SEC granted a five-year "Innovation Exemption" today letting onchain AMM venues trade tokenized stocks without registering as exchanges. Here's what's in it, and what isn't 🧵
Kudos to the @solana team.
Perfect example of turning attention into participation, creativity, and charitable giving.
We're selling ad space on the Solana logo.
9 spots, with 100% of proceeds donated to Nepal flood relief. Win and your logo or artwork sits on our PFP and pinned post for a week.
24 hours to bid and donate: nepal.mallow.art
Powered by @mallowdotart
James Bae retweeted
CT missed the most important earnings call of the week. It wasn't a crypto company. It was @Cloudflare
Everyone caught the wallet announcement. The real alpha was in the call itself.
Today Cloudflare monetizes the internet through subscriptions: security services, AI platform spend, pools of funds. A mix of SaaS and IaaS economics. The CEO was explicit that AI agents are about to break that model.
Cloudflare sits in front of roughly 20% of internet traffic. Here's what that traffic looks like from the call:
- AI agent requests up 1,700% YoY
- Agents crossed 50% of total network traffic this quarter. First time in history non-human traffic is the majority. Management admitted it happened faster than their own models
- Their projection: if trends hold, non-human traffic outnumbers human traffic 1000x within 5 years
The monetization shift is the key part. The ad-supported internet doesn't work when the visitor is an agent. Cloudflare's CEO answer: block malicious bots for free, charge good agents a tiny fee per request. Fractions of a penny. They want to be the ones defining that layer.
Now the throughput math here:
- Cloudflare handles ~500M requests per second
- They estimate 1 to 10% is monetizable via micro/nanotransactions
- That means 10M TPS on day one, scaling to 100M TPS
Visa peaks at ~20k TPS
The CEO's framing: "we're building this while others compete with Visa." Three to four orders of magnitude beyond card rails. No existing payment network can settle this. It has to be something new.
Two conclusions I keep coming back to:
- Being short L1 throughput is being short agentic workflows. If agent traffic gets monetized per request, the settlement layer needs to scale orders of magnitude beyond anything live today.
- The fee math for L1s flips. Base fees have collapsed across ETH, SOL, everywhere. MEV is getting internalized by apps. Hard to build a base fee revenue case at human scale. But at 10M TPS and $0.001 per transaction, you're looking at ~$315B a year in base fees alone. At 100M TPS the number gets silly.
Stablecoins and crypto are the end-game here for Agentic finance @jerallaire @circle
James Bae retweeted
1/ Today, more than 140 companies, most of which compete fiercely with one another, agreed to back the same stablecoin. The vehicle is @openstandard, a new and deliberately independent company launching Open USD, or OUSD, and positioning it not as anyone’s product but as neutral infrastructure for payments, trading and the internet economy.
Cognitive work will become increasingly commoditized.
The ability to make people feel seen, known, and understood will become increasingly scarce.
Barbell strategy for killing it in an age of superhuman AI:
Simultaneously get as close to AND stay as far away from AI as humanly possible.
1. Get close — play with AI models, use them to help you think, ask them to teach you about the world, get them to help you create, work with them to write code, understand what makes them tick, embed them into your everyday life, have fun.
2. Stay far away — learn to tell stories, make eye contact, build a team, lead with courage, connect far-flung ideas, build lifelong friendships, debate persuasively, think forbidden thoughts, handwrite ideas, confess your fears, fall in love.
Spend less time trying to master mental transformations that are purely mechanical — building spreadsheets, analyzing trades, balancing accounts, writing code by hand, following playbooks, searching for needles in haystacks. These are the emerging no-man's land, squarely the domain of AI.
Venture to the extremes. That’s where all the fun is anyway.
James Bae retweeted
Privacy is critical to bringing the world onchain. Institutions, consumers, and agents will all benefit.
Great to see teams like @0xfairblock building on Solana. We're excited for programmable privacy with Swig.
Solana launched @solanapayments with some of the biggest names in finance. It's live and already moving $2T+ quarterly stablecoin transfers. The next step is making these payment flows safe for institutions.
Fairblock is coming to Solana to help protect against info leakage.
James Bae retweeted
Fairblock is coming to Solana
We think Solana will handle a vast majority of onchain payments in the future, and we are meeting that moment by laying the confidentiality foundation.
Solana launched @solanapayments with some of the biggest names in finance. It's live and already moving $2T+ quarterly stablecoin transfers. The next step is making these payment flows safe for institutions.
Fairblock is coming to Solana to help protect against info leakage.
James Bae retweeted
Solana launched @solanapayments with some of the biggest names in finance. It's live and already moving $2T+ quarterly stablecoin transfers. The next step is making these payment flows safe for institutions.
Fairblock is coming to Solana to help protect against info leakage.
James Bae retweeted
It's wild how fast the Fairblock community is building.
First of many: Fairsplit, built with the Fairblock Confidential SDK.
Split USDC. Reveal only what’s required.
Now live on @base.
James Bae retweeted
Privacy made simple
We are shipping at an exceptional rate at Fairblock
The next few months are going to be 🚀
James Bae retweeted
Introducing the Stabletrust Confidential Transfer SDK
Simply add confidential transfers to an existing app or build apps for workflows (payroll, checkouts, P2P transfers, agentic payments, etc.) where amounts stay private and disclosure is supported for compliance when needed.
James Bae retweeted
This is the first AI cut.
And it will send shockwaves.
Remember: Jack is one of the greatest founders of all time. He created this platform that we’re all on, and has been early to many technological shifts. And Block was doing very well as a business.
So, for him to cut 40% of headcount in this way is a signal to everyone in tech: get good now. Become indispensable. Work nights and weekends. Learn the AI tools and raise your game. Or you might not make the cut, as an employee or as a company.
I know. That sucks. But capitalism is natural selection. The market is unforgiving, because you are the market. After all, it’s not like you’re buying some random gallon of milk from the store; you’re always buying the best product at the best price.
So too for apps: your customers are always installing the best piece of code they can get. And because AI is going to create new winners, if you aren’t the best in your market, someone may become better with AI. Particularly with the new agentic workflows.
To be clear: Block’s severance is generous by any measure. 20 weeks of pay, six months of health insurance and vested equity, all of that goes far beyond any typical package. Jack did his level best to cushion the disruption. The laid off are a temporarily unfortunate class, as opposed to a permanent underclass.
But had he not leaned into the AI transition, he might have had to lay off more people, slowly, and over time, as faster competitors went after his market share.
How would they do that? Sure, AI isn’t a panacea by any means, but the closer you are to software engineering the more aggressively you need to embrace agentic workflows. The AI companies are already doing that, and places like Stripe, Shopify, Coinbase, and now Block are pushing hard on this area.
There will be overcorrection. But the fundamental technical innovation is real. And you need to either disrupt yourself or get disrupted.
we're making @blocks smaller today. here's my note to the company.
####
today we're making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company: we're reducing our organization by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000. that means over 4,000 of you are being asked to leave or entering into consultation. i'll be straight about what's happening, why, and what it means for everyone.
first off, if you're one of the people affected, you'll receive your salary for 20 weeks + 1 week per year of tenure, equity vested through the end of may, 6 months of health care, your corporate devices, and $5,000 to put toward whatever you need to help you in this transition (if you’re outside the U.S. you’ll receive similar support but exact details are going to vary based on local requirements). i want you to know that before anything else. everyone will be notified today, whether you're being asked to leave, entering consultation, or asked to stay.
we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly.
i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter. repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus, and to the trust that customers and shareholders place in our ability to lead. i'd rather take a hard, clear action now and build from a position we believe in than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome. a smaller company also gives us the space to grow our business the right way, on our own terms, instead of constantly reacting to market pressures.
a decision at this scale carries risk. but so does standing still. we've done a full review to determine the roles and people we require to reliably grow the business from here, and we've pressure-tested those decisions from multiple angles. i accept that we may have gotten some of them wrong, and we've built in flexibility to account for that, and do the right thing for our customers.
we're not going to just disappear people from slack and email and pretend they were never here. communication channels will stay open through thursday evening (pacific) so everyone can say goodbye properly, and share whatever you wish. i'll also be hosting a live video session to thank everyone at 3:35pm pacific. i know doing it this way might feel awkward. i'd rather it feel awkward and human than efficient and cold.
to those of you leaving…i’m grateful for you, and i’m sorry to put you through this. you built what this company is today. that's a fact that i'll honor forever. this decision is not a reflection of what you contributed. you will be a great contributor to any organization going forward.
to those staying…i made this decision, and i'll own it. what i'm asking of you is to build with me. we're going to build this company with intelligence at the core of everything we do. how we work, how we create, how we serve our customers. our customers will feel this shift too, and we're going to help them navigate it: towards a future where they can build their own features directly, composed of our capabilities and served through our interfaces. that's what i'm focused on now. expect a note from me tomorrow.
jack
Building incorruptible markets means protecting businesses moving money onchain from unnecessary exposure that invites avoidable exploits.
It's about better outcomes without accepting transparency as the cost of using blockchains.
How confidentiality delivers value day to day:
