Token Dispatch: Podcast Reflections

The Week That Was

Markets witnessed a widespread downturn across asset classes this week. Bitcoin was down 3.65%, while silver fell 9.24% and gold 3.12%. The dollar index rose 0.29%, and spot crude gained 0.54%. The S&P 500 CFD was down 0.88%. The US cash-market figures differ slightly: by Friday’s close, the S&P 500 was down 0.6% for the week, the Dow 0.9% and the Nasdaq 2%.

On Friday alone, the Nasdaq fell 2.9%, its steepest daily drop since June.

The sell-off worsened as investors questioned whether the returns from AI investment justify the cost. Intel fell 28.6% after its outlook disappointed, while Amazon’s results renewed scrutiny of the cash required to build AI infrastructure. The Nasdaq’s weekly decline was larger than the S&P 500’s, and small caps finished higher. That divergence suggests the pressure was concentrated in technology rather than spread evenly across the market.

The economic data gave the Federal Reserve little reason to relax.

The first estimate of US third-quarter GDP showed annualised growth of 3.4%, up from 2.2% in the second quarter. September’s PCE price index rose 3.6% year over year, while core PCE rose 3.1%. The Fed held its policy rate at 3.75%–4% in a 10–2 vote; the two dissenters preferred a quarter-point hike, and the statement said inflation remained elevated.

The message was that growth is holding up, but the inflation problem has not gone away.

Other central banks moved in different directions.

The Bank of Canada raised its policy rate by a quarter point to 2.5%, citing persistent energy-price pressure. The European Central Bank held its rates steady but warned that higher energy costs could raise inflation and weigh on growth. The Bank of Japan also held the rate at 1.25%, while signalling that further increases remain possible.

Geopolitics kept that energy pressure alive.

Brent futures rose 2.4% on Friday to $117.64 a barrel after the UK Maritime Trade Operations agency reported that a tanker had been hit by explosive devices in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran separately claimed that several tankers had caught fire after hitting mines; Reuters said it could not immediately verify that account. Qatar presented Iran with a proposed framework to end the US-Israeli war, but an Iranian official called the ideas unacceptable.

Crypto’s biggest story was Binance’s reported security breach.

The exchange estimated the impact at about $6.3 billion and said roughly $3 billion had been frozen with help from blockchain partners; it also said user funds were safe. Binance’s initial account pointed to a compromised engineer’s laptop, while blockchain-analysis firms attributed the attack to North Korea-linked actors. That attribution remains an assessment as the investigation continues. Bitcoin fell below $79,000 after the news, and crypto-futures liquidations rose sharply.

What We Covered This Week

At The Token Dispatch, we followed a common question: what makes an asset or an AI service useful in practice, and who provides the trust, liquidity or infrastructure that lets it work?

In Turn a Ticker Into a Financial Product, Vaidik wrote on how tokenised assets can gain attention, access and financial uses in a different order from traditional markets. Memecoin trading helped create liquidity for stock tokens, while institutional products still rely on trusted intermediaries.

In Stocks Will Borrow Where Brokers Can’t, I looked at what changes when tokenised shares can back loans. Borrowers may gain access to credit beyond a broker’s usual hours or reach, but stale weekend prices leave both lenders and borrowers exposed.

I then examined Aave’s new lending structure in Marrying DeFi Funds with RWA Collateral. Its Hub-and-Spoke model lets specialists such as Sentora assess tokenised real-world assets as collateral, while Aave retains control over shared liquidity and the ability to switch a lending desk off.

Thejaswini explored two less visible inputs behind AI.

In Life-Coach the Robots, she followed businesses that collect people’s physical actions to train robots, and asked whether contributors receive fair compensation or retain meaningful control over their data.

In AI Inference 2, she examined how buyers can tell whether an AI provider has served the model it claims to offer.

We have got more lined up for you in the coming weeks. Until then, we’ve got some recommendations that will keep you in good company.

On to this week’s reading list.

Regulation & Policy

Criminal: Scott Galloway argues that political corruption weakens the rule of law and institutions that help make the US attractive to entrepreneurs, and calls for voters to hold leaders accountable.

Crypto & Tech

North Korea gets away with $3 billion from Binance: Molly White examines the reported Binance wallet theft, efforts to freeze the stolen assets and the unanswered questions around user reimbursement.
Not Your Keys, Not Your DAT: Matt Levine looks at Datavault’s reported inability to withdraw Bitcoin held through an exchange account, and what the episode says about custody and digital-asset treasury companies.
From Exposure to Claim: The Formation of Frontier Financial Markets and ISDA: Lauris argues that a market can lack a workable financial instrument even when buyers, sellers and demand exist, and explores how ISDA-style contracts could help create one.
The Biggest Opportunity In Crypto: Marlon makes the case for on-chain options as a major growth opportunity, pointing to expanding options demand and crypto’s still-small market.

Finance & Economy

When banking could be a capital offence: Byron Gilliam recounts how Sweden’s first bank created paper credit, overextended its lending and brought its founder close to execution.
The Heisenberg principle of investing: Byron Gilliam argues that precise measures, such as near-term earnings forecasts, can be less useful to judge a company’s long-term value.

AI & Innovation

Verification Is Not Knowledge: Cosmos Institute and Jessica Hullman argue that formal verification cannot replace human understanding, judgment and accountability in science.
The AI Boom Has a Power Problem: Delphi Digital examines the electricity demands of AI data centres and the companies that may benefit as the race to supply power accelerates.
Charts of the Week: Attention is All You Need: A collection of charts looks at competition for viewers’ limited attention, the continued demand for GPUs and the growing pressure on SaaS companies to prove their security.

Culture & Beyond

In praise of the dilettante: Jay Miller makes the case for the curious amateur, whose wide-ranging interests counter an age organised around specialisation and optimisation.
An Afghan woman recalls how her country’s devastation led to her own: In a short documentary, an Afghan woman recounts how war and social upheaval reshaped her childhood and family life.
What Is Special About Human Beings?: Using Frankenstein, The Culturist asks what makes human life valuable and how that should guide technological progress.
Thoughts on Humanity in the Age of the Machine: Priyanka Desai reflects on humanity’s place in an era shaped by machines.

That’s all for this week. I’ll be back next Saturday.

Until then, happy reading!
Prathik

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Disclaimer: This newsletter contains analysis and opinions of the author. Content is for informational purposes only, not financial advice. Trading crypto involves substantial risk - your capital is at risk. Do your own research.

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The Reading List: Week 43 📚

Thejaswini M A — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 10:49:15 GMT

Hello,

Welcome to Edition 22 of The Reading List. Prathik is on leave, so I’m the one choosing your weekly reads.

I began the week with How to Be an Explorer of the World by Keri Smith, a beautiful gift from a dear friend. The pages are orange and grey, hand-lettered, with cut-out photos scattered across them like someone’s scrapbook. You can call it a field guide to life and experiences.

@amazon.in

Smith keeps a small bowl of sea glass on her desk. She tips the pieces out and sorts them by size, then shape, then colour. She holds each one up to the light and wonders how many hands touched it before the sea did. Some of that history is gone for good, and she works out the rest by looking for a long time.

A good amount of finance comes down to that kind of patience. This reading list is my own small bowl for the week, pieces I picked up because they caught the light.

On to the article….

StablesReward: Your AI Agent Spends, You Earn

AI agents can surf the web, read reviews, and book hotels for you. All these tasks cost money. But what if these tasks could earn you back something?

Launching soon. Free to join.

The Week That Was

The Nasdaq had its worst week since June last week. It fell 4.5% on fears that AI companies borrowed too much to build data centres. By Wednesday, it had recovered almost half of those losses. The Nasdaq Composite rose 1.1% on Monday, was flat on Tuesday, and rose another 1.1% on Wednesday. The S&P 500 added 0.4% on Monday, 0.3% on Tuesday and 0.6% on Wednesday.

The AI worry found its way to Korea as well. Elice, a Korean data centre company, listed on Tuesday after retail investors oversubscribed its IPO more than 400 times. It closed 32% below the offer price. Kospi fell almost 4%. A day later, the Kospi bounced 3.3% as foreign investors bought back in and Samsung Electronics and SK hynix each rose more than 5%. On Thursday, it gave back almost all of that, falling 3.5%. Feels like all three of these moves came from nerves.

Oil kept climbing as ships kept getting struck by projectiles in and around the Strait of Hormuz. Brent futures crossed $111 a barrel on Tuesday, the highest since May.

Higher fuel costs are now feeding into inflation well beyond the US. UK inflation jumped to 3.5% in September from 3.1%, and motor fuel was the biggest push.

The Fed is in its quiet period before the 27-28 October meeting. It raised rates to 3.75-4% in September. On Kalshi and Polymarket, traders priced in about a 12% chance of a rate hike at next week’s meeting and about 77% for December. The 10-year Treasury yield ended Wednesday at 5.13%, barely changed on the week.

France now pays about 1.55 percentage points more than Germany to borrow for ten years. This is the widest gap since the eurozone debt crisis, as protests spread and investors doubt it can pass next year’s budget. That budget also includes a plan to tax crypto-to-stablecoin swaps at 31.4%, which the National Assembly passed by a single vote on 16 October.

Bitcoin stays between $81,000 and $85,000. US spot bitcoin ETFs took in $526.7 million on Monday, their best day this month. BlackRock’s IBIT took $665.2 million, while $138.5 million left Fidelity’s and Grayscale’s funds. Tuesday was much quieter, at $23.2 million. Wednesday nearly matched Monday at $524.8 million, and this time Fidelity’s fund took in $212.7 million. BlackRock filed for a bitcoin fund that limits how much you can lose and how much you can gain. BlackRock earns either way, nice business.

What We Covered This Week

We started the week with Vaidik’s Data: The New Asset Class. AI labs have nearly run out of public text to train on, so they now buy the Slack threads, emails and work logs that companies have piled up over years. Vaidik argues that this emerging market resembles early commodity trading, where brokers understand prices better than sellers.

Vaidik also wrote A Premier on Conditional Markets, on what comes after prediction markets. He looks at markets that make DAO decisions, which he thinks run into Goodhart’s law, and markets that price an asset if a specific event happens.

This week’s product piece took me into private markets. In Can’t Sell? Borrow, I looked at Techdollar, which lends against vested shares in private companies like Anthropic, OpenAI and Stripe, at 0.80% to 1.5% a month. Most companies now take about 12 years to go public. A loan buys employees time without selling, and it only makes sense if the shares hold their value.

We have more lined up for you in the coming weeks. Until then, here’s what you can read. On to the list…

Regulation & Policy

AI Is Transforming How Economies Develop and Compete: BCG’s 2026 AI Maturity Matrix scores more than 75 economies on how exposed they are to AI and how fast they can put it to use, and moves Japan and South Korea into its top tier this year.

Crypto & Tech

Maybe We Were Wrong About Blockchain: Joe Weisenthal admits he used to laugh at conference speakers who were excited about blockchain but not bitcoin. He has joined the Hyperliquid fan club while also appreciating stablecoins and agentic payments. (Paywall)
Don’t rage against the machines: Byron Gilliam uses the Hindu tradition of Ayudha Puja, which honours the tools people use in their work, to look at how humans should treat artificial intelligence.
The Crabification of Capitalism: Jonah Burian shows fintech apps, such as Robinhood and Coinbase, all evolving into the same bank-plus-brokerage superapp. He sees AI startups heading the same way.
Data quality as a contract: Coinbase’s Xuan He explains why thousands of data checks buried in pipeline code didn’t stop incidents at the exchange, and how the team now gives each check an owner and a consequence. Pairs nicely with Vaidik’s Frozen 2 piece.

Finance & Economy

The Shrugflation Triangle: Kyla Scanlon starts in a Las Vegas casino and builds a loop out of oil, AI borrowing and Treasury yields. A lengthy read, but also a good one.
The Near-Bag Experience: This one goes with what I wrote this week. Kram and Emma examine why employees at successful startups often fail to make substantial money from their equity.

AI & Innovation

Can a Million AI Agents Create Superintelligence?: Ramez Naam questions the assumption that running millions of AI agents simultaneously will produce superintelligence. Some pretty good infographics in there.
Citrini Therapeutics: Citrini Research describes an experiment to see whether AI could help people without extensive biotechnology experience design a potential drug. There’s a winner. (Partly paywalled)
The Beauty of Something Grown: Goodfire researcher Nick Cammarata claimed this month that most neurons inside large models can be read and understood. Author Dean Ball thinks that could be a turning point for knowing how AI works, also suggesting that Cammarata might be wrong.
I Can See Everything: Zvi Mowshowitz reads the same result and calls it progress, but says some people hyped it well beyond what it shows.
Do You Trust Apple?: (For the record, no.) Apple’s HomeView now shipped after years of delays. Ben Thompson says its success now depends on whether people trust a slower, more error-prone Siri enough to mount it in their walls.
AI is ushering in an age of personal media: Benj Edwards fed about 50 old voice memos into Suno and got back hundreds of songs that (by his own admission) nobody else will ever want to hear, his kids included.
Swarm Intelligence: Kevin Kelly says “Instead of a central AI brain, AI is like a gas, composed of zillions of tiny interacting AIs that create an atmosphere.”

Culture & Beyond

The Man Who Taught Us How to Pay Attention: A.O. Scott makes the case for art critic John Berger as an antidote to endless scrolling. Berger believed that looking was an active process shaped by personal experience, history, politics and social relationships. (Paywall)
How intuitions work: Although I read this one to justify my gut feelings, Marc A Moffett suggests that the gut feeling can be as rational as seeing something with your own eyes. Because intuition works much like perception.
How is music possible: Henrik Karlsson explores how arrangements of sounds produce such powerful emotions and alter our perception of reality.
Nora Ephron Anticipated Our Narcissism: Ellie Kemper and I admire Ephron’s willingness to write something simply because it amused her, without worrying whether everyone would understand the joke. Very fun. (Paywall)

Next on my bedside table is Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq. If you’ve read it, tell me which story to start with.

That’s all for today!

Thejaswini

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The Saturday Reading List: Week 42 📚

Prathik Desai — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 14:54:58 GMT

Hello,

Welcome to Edition 21 of The Reading List. Every Saturday, I share my favourite reads across crypto, finance, technology, culture, and beyond, alongside what I’m watching and reading.

This week’s selection spends some time with the machinery behind the AI boom: the chips, the lenders, the inference businesses, and the people trying to steal its secrets to capture value.

First, a look at the week that was.

Let’s get going…

StablesReward: Your AI Agent Spends, You Earn

AI agents can surf the web, read reviews, and book hotels for you. All these tasks cost money. But what if these tasks could earn you back something?

Launching soon. Free to join.

The Week That Was

Oil was the standout on our chart last week, gaining 7.83% while Bitcoin fell 1.88% and the S&P 500 CFD slipped 2.09%. Silver lost 6.29%, gold eased 0.51%, and the dollar index fell 0.49%. Expensive energy and weaker risk appetite made for an uncomfortable combination.

Wednesday’s US inflation report added to that discomfort. Consumer prices rose 0.6% in September, taking annual inflation to 3.7%, from 3.4% in August. Gasoline accounted for more than half the monthly increase, but the pressure extended beyond fuel: core inflation rose 0.3% over the month and accelerated to 2.6% annually.

That strengthened the case for further tightening without settling when the Fed would act. Policymakers also have weaker September payrolls and the tightening already delivered through borrowing costs to consider. The Conference Board highlighted that tension between what the inflation data suggest and the more cautious signals coming from Fed officials.

The market reaction changed as the week progressed. Yields and the dollar initially jumped after the inflation release. Later, anxiety about the debt financing the AI buildout drew investors towards government bonds, pulling yields back down while stocks remained under pressure. Renewed attacks around the Strait of Hormuz kept oil-supply concerns alive.

What We Covered This Week

At The Token Dispatch, we attempted to answer two connected questions: what makes a financial business difficult to replace, and who carries the risk when money finds new uses?

I explored the first in Money’s Utility as Moat, looking at how NG.CASH and Lemon build around local habits, licences and customer relationships. Stablecoins can provide shared infrastructure while the businesses offering useful ways to save, borrow and spend own the customer.

In Why Chip Lenders Now Sell Their Loans, I examined USD.AI’s shift towards originating GPU loans and selling them once they have a payment record. The model recycles capital, but still needs willing buyers and someone to bear the risk before the chips start earning.

Thejaswini explored Give the Bot a Loan, asking how AI agents might borrow to fund work before customers pay them. Her examination of Priors and other early projects comes back to familiar lending questions: is the income real, can the borrower repay, and who absorbs a default?

She also examined State of Hooks, on the contracts that customise how on-chain markets operate. Changing fees, sharing arbitrage profits and updating trading rules creates room for experimentation — and gives whoever controls those updates considerable power.

In Financial Nihilism, Vaidik connected the appetite for shorter, more speculative bets with fading faith in patient wealth-building and an increasingly uncertain future. His essay asks whether apparent recklessness also reflects a loss of confidence in the conventional route to financial security.

We have got more lined up for you in the coming weeks. Until then, we’ve got some recommendations that will keep you in good company.

On to this week’s reading list.

Regulation & Policy

Don’t Bet Against the Sports Bets: Matt Levine examines the fight over regulating Kalshi’s sports contracts and the absence of a market on whether those contracts will remain legal. (Paywall)

Crypto & Tech

Conditional Markets Are Beginning to Blossom: Galaxy maps the projects moving beyond predicting events to pricing their effects on assets and using markets to make binding decisions.
Active Liquidity On Chain: Evidence from PropAMMs Across Chains: Category Labs examines how proprietary market makers outperform passive liquidity pools through frequent repricing, counterparty-sensitive quotes and other trading advantages.
App-Controlled Sequencing, in a Box: Keone Hon introduces Typewriter, an open-source framework that lets crypto applications define their rules and control the order in which transactions run.
Paper Trade: Game Theory, Strategy, and Outlook: Shaunda Devens examines Papertrade, a synthetic perpetual-futures platform on HyperEVM offering highly leveraged trading in Bitcoin and Ether.
Making Options Easier to Use: Tacticalls previews an options-trading interface built around copying trades, following traders and hedging existing wallet positions.
The Big Business of Spare Capacity: Byron Gilliam connects the historical trade in New England ice with Grass’s attempt to turn spare internet bandwidth into a business serving AI’s demand for data.
How LLMs Might Make Crypto Mining Useful: Byron Gilliam explores Pearl’s proposal to combine blockchain security with AI computation, including why its mining work need not actually be useful.

Finance & Economy

Private Markets Are the New AI Markets: Matt Levine asks whether investors are increasingly paying private-market fees for exposure to an AI boom that already dominates the broader economy. (Paywall)
The Compute Credit Cycle Just Turned: Stanley Lee argues that lenders are beginning to distinguish between compute operators, making financing choices and customer diversification more consequential.

AI & Innovation

AI Companies Play Cat-and-Mouse With Secret-Stealing Spies: The Wall Street Journal reports on AI companies’ efforts to protect corporate secrets from espionage, including approaches to employees and insider threats. (Paywall)
Where AI Chip Architecture Meets Economics: Kevin Immanuel Gubbi explores the relationship between compute, memory and chip design, including why memory matters for running AI locally.
The State of Crypto Inference Providers: Blockworks Advisory surveys crypto inference businesses competing across price, latency, privacy and hardware, with differing dependence on token incentives.
Microsoft’s Bigger Bet on Its Own Silicon: Satya Nadella outlines plans to scale Microsoft’s Maia chips into the primary inference system for its own products and services.
How to Be More Ambitious: A Tutorial for Humans with Models: Felix Rieseberg offers a practical framework for using AI to pursue larger goals, investigate problems more deeply and draw on unfamiliar disciplines.
Anthropic’s AI Worm Research Raises New Fears About Smart Device Security: Scientific American examines research into AI spreading through connected gadgets, alongside cybersecurity experts’ assessment of how novel those threats really are.

Culture & Beyond

The Ladder of Knowledge: Alexander V Gheorghiu traces debates over mathematical truth and argues that Gödel’s incompleteness need not impose a final ceiling on human knowledge.
Deskilling the Body: Melanie Challenger examines how outsourcing navigation, memory and attention to technology can erode the abilities we develop by exercising them.
Plants Move to Get Away from Their Decaying Brethren: Scientific American reports on research into how plants move away from decaying material to protect themselves from its microbes.

That’s all for this week. I’ll be back next Saturday.

Until then, happy reading!
Prathik

P.S.: Read, watched or listened to something worth sharing? Send it my way for a future edition.

📩 Fill out this form to submit your details and book a meeting with us directly.

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The Saturday Reading List: Week 41 📚

Prathik Desai — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 15:31:20 GMT

Hello,

Welcome to Edition 20 of The Reading List. Starting last week, we made this a weekly, and not fortnightly, Saturday affair. Every Saturday, I’ll keep sharing my favourite reads across crypto, finance, technology, culture, and beyond, alongside what I’m watching and reading.

Before we get to the reading, here’s what moved markets and what we covered at The Token Dispatch.

Let’s get going…

StablesReward: Your AI Agent Spends, You Earn

AI agents can surf the web, read reviews, and book hotels for you. All these tasks cost money. But what if these tasks could earn you back something?

Launching soon. Free to join.

Get started with a 7-day free trial

The Week That Was

Last week, the US economy handed the Fed another awkward combination to deal with. While businesses in the country were still expanding, hiring was subdued and price pressures persisted.

Monday’s services survey showed the ISM index easing to 54.9 in September, comfortably above the 50 mark separating expansion from contraction. But its input-price index climbed to 74, the highest since July 2022. Fuel costs and supply disruptions were making it more expensive to meet demand. An expanding economy is good for company revenues, but rising costs complicate what shareholders get to keep.

September’s weak payroll gain of 29,000, reported on 2 October, suggested employers were reluctant to hire. But Thursday’s release showed new unemployment claims falling to 197,000 for the week ending 3 October. Slow hiring had not become widespread firing.

For the Fed, that leaves room to wait without declaring victory over inflation. Minutes published on Wednesday showed most officials expected another rate increase before year-end. Christopher Waller reinforced that message on Thursday, while allowing that increases need not come at consecutive meetings. A possible October pause is still compatible with higher rates later. September’s CPI report, due on 14 October, is the next important test.

US markets finished the week with gains across major US equity indices: the S&P 500 rose 1.2%, the Nasdaq 0.6% and the Dow 0.9%. Small caps diverged, with the Russell 2000 losing 0.9%. The US 10-year Treasury yield ended around 5.24%, slightly lower over the week but still elevated. Gold futures gained 1.4%.

Bitcoin was trading around $82,750 on Saturday morning in the US.

Crypto still faces a demanding backdrop. A Fed pause could offer relief, but expensive money and persistent energy inflation limit the case for an easy liquidity-driven rally. The economy’s resilience gives investors something to buy into, and central banks a reason to remain cautious.

What We Covered This Week

At The Token Dispatch, we examined what changes when software makes more of our financial decisions, and which parts of the system remain difficult to automate.

In Everything Everywhere All at Once, I explored why we need agents that can navigate across stocks, perpetual futures and prediction markets. In the piece, I also talk about the challenges that constrain the current agentic stack.

In Remittance Won’t Have a Global Winner, I explained why the evolving remittance stack will be won by local champions who will dominate licences, banking relationships and last-mile payouts.

Thejaswini tested how much judgement we hand over in The Apps That Trade for the Clueless. Turning a hunch into a strategy is getting easier; knowing whether its backtest means anything, or whether its creator benefits from unnecessary trading, remains harder. She then went shopping for discounted intelligence in GPT 97% Off, examining AntSeed’s open marketplace for AI access and the problem of verifying what an unfamiliar seller actually delivers.

Vaidik, meanwhile, questioned the foundations in DeFi Built the Wrong Toolkit. DeFi’s early tools were shaped by volatile tokens and anonymous borrowers. He explored why the arrival of income-producing assets could require different market structures, and bring on-chain finance closer to the traditional infrastructure it set out to challenge.

We have got more lined up for you in the coming weeks. Until then, we’ve got some recommendations that will keep you in good company.

On to this week’s reading list.

Regulation & Policy

What Is Needed for Tokenisation to Deliver: The IMF examines the legal rights, interoperable networks and reliable settlement assets needed for tokenisation to move beyond fragmented markets.
Asymmetry: Scott Galloway argues that cheap drones and unconventional tactics expose the weaknesses of America’s expensive military. In this piece, he also makes the case for rethinking defence spending.

Crypto & Tech

Crypto Can Originate-and-Distribute Now: Byron Gilliam explores how USD.AI’s GPU Loan Exchange brings the banking model of originating and selling loans to on-chain infrastructure financing.
Does the Internet Need to Be Liberated?: Grass’s business of collecting web data for AI revives an old conflict: information is easy to copy, but the people producing it still need to get paid.
Stocks With Benefits: DCo traces how tokenised stocks evolve from price exposure into useful collateral and native on-chain shares, asking which apps and issuers capture the value.

Finance & Economy

Consilience of Curves: Alexander Campbell connects AI acceleration, geopolitical fragmentation and Western reindustrialisation into an investment thesis grounded in energy, minerals and the cost of capital.
Markets Are Feeling Crowded: Byron Gilliam examines whether AI’s enormous financing needs are raising borrowing costs and crowding out investment across the rest of the economy.
Underwriting Digital Credit Liquidity: Keyrock tests whether Bitcoin-backed preferred shares can function as dependable collateral, examining stressed liquidity, exit times and reliance on issuer buybacks.
Losing Less Between Your Best Ideas: Rhino offers a compact reminder that preserving capital between high-conviction opportunities matters as much as finding the next winning trade.

AI & Innovation

Vibe Manufacturing Is Here: Greg Isenberg explores how AI-assisted design, desktop 3D printing and on-demand factories could make small-scale physical-product businesses easier to build.
Honor Among Machines: Samuele Marro introduces dovetail, a research project developing verifiable rules that could let independent AI agents cooperate without a central gatekeeper.
The Physics Nobel for Hunting Cosmic Neutrinos: Francis Halzen’s Nobel recognises the IceCube observatory and its discovery of high-energy cosmic neutrinos, opening another way to study the distant universe.

Culture & Beyond

What If Your Kid Becomes a Nepo-Baby?: Jords questions how we judge inherited advantage, arguing that success should account for where people started and whether they enjoy the lives they build.
How to Assemble Science: Helen Pearson explains why combining existing evidence can reveal life-saving insights that the constant pursuit of individual scientific breakthroughs overlooks.

That’s all for this week. I’ll be back next Saturday.

Until then, happy reading!
Prathik

P.S.: Read, watched or listened to something worth sharing? Send it my way for a future edition.

📩 Fill out this form to submit your details and book a meeting with us directly.

Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

The Saturday Reading List: Week 40 📚

Prathik Desai — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 12:32:22 GMT

Hello,

Welcome to Edition 19 of The Reading List. Starting today, we’re making this a weekly (not fortnightly) Saturday affair. Oh yes! I am excited, but also nervous about doubling the frequency.

I’ll keep sharing my favourite reads across crypto, finance, technology, culture, and beyond, alongside what I’m watching and reading. Now that I will have a leaner list than what I used to have until now, perhaps I will give you a deeper synopsis of each of the pieces I recommend.

Let’s get going…

Frontrun: Early Bird Holds the Edge

Most people hear about a promising startup the day it announces its funding. By then, the investors who backed it have known about it for months. How did they get there first?

Hours of digging, who started the company, what they’ve built before, how to reach them, and understanding what to write to them so that you can join them early in their journey.

Frontrun does this digging for you. When top investors start following a young company on X, Frontrun flags it, finds the founder, and writes your opening message. You can read the draft, tweak it, and hit send without leaving the platform.

Frontrun gives you a ready brief on every company it flags.

You can also automate a daily morning report with the list of startups to track based on what your favourite accounts are following. Served hot, along with your breakfast.

The Week That Was

Markets spent the week reconsidering how urgently the Fed needs to raise rates again. Long-term borrowing costs, however, offered little relief.

Our cross-asset snapshot didn’t present a happy picture. The dollar gained 0.82%, gold fell 2.81%, silver lost 5.14% and US crude declined further. Bitcoin managed a 0.60% gain after giving back most of Friday’s advance. The S&P 500 CFD was almost unchanged.

Wednesday’s inflation report for August helped temper expectations for another hike. The PCE price index rose 0.3% in August, below the 0.4% economists expected, while core prices increased 0.2%. But annual headline inflation was still 3.4%, core inflation was 3%, and inflation-adjusted consumer spending rose 0.6% over the month. The economy had given the Fed room to wait, without settling its inflation problem.

Friday’s jobs report strengthened that case: employers added 29,000 jobs in September, against expectations of 90,000, and unemployment edged up to 4.2%. By Friday, market-implied odds of an October hike had fallen to about 23%, from 64% a week earlier. US stocks rallied that day, although the S&P 500 still finished the week lower.

The complication was in bonds. The US 10-year Treasury yield reached 5.34% on Thursday, its highest since 2002. Elevated yields and a stronger dollar weighed on precious metals, while the rupee closed Thursday at its weakest in two months. Expectations for the next Fed meeting were softening, but financing conditions remained demanding.

For crypto, my reading is that the week reduced one immediate threat: another imminent rate rise. Bitcoin’s modest gain despite the stronger dollar was resilient, but hardly enough evidence to declare independence from the wider financial backdrop.

What We Covered This Week

At The Token Dispatch, we examined who gets paid as technology changes how we trade, shop and work.

I explored the relationship between speculation and tokenised equities in Meme Coins Are Now Selling Stocks: pairing memecoins with stock tokens creates demand for the latter, while exposing the limits of their available supply. In Turning Rival Aggregators into Toll Payers, I followed the money further. In this piece, I explain how rival trading order aggregators can compete for customers while Robinhood collects from the chain on which their trades settle.

Thejaswini examined the contest over the shopping journey in AI Goes Shopping. Rye helps agents complete purchases across online stores, but the system recommending products still decides which merchants get seen. She also posed the question Can Research Become a Marketplace?. Vaidik, meanwhile, looked behind the promise of autonomy in The $12 Million Robot, examining the remote human labour that keeps robots working and the economics that can make retaining those workers attractive.

We have got more lined up for you in the coming weeks. Until then, we’ve got some recommendations that will keep you in good company.

On to this week’s reading list.

Thanks for reading! This post is public so feel free to share it.

The Clarity Act Collapses: Molly White examines the failed push to advance crypto’s flagship market-structure bill and regulators’ efforts to accommodate the industry anyway. Her sceptical roundup also follows crypto’s political spending, courtroom battles and conflicts of interest.
Opening Schools Without Much Scrutiny: ProPublica journalists establish private schools to test oversight. Their experiment exposes how little scrutiny prospective operators can face.

Crypto & Tech

Not All LPs Are Equal: This working paper separates active and passive liquidity-provider returns across Uniswap pools. It finds that aggregate pool performance can flatter the experience of passive participants, especially where others actively reposition their liquidity.
State of Tokenization: September 2026: Pantera examines where trading and participation are developing across 671 tokenised assets. Its central distinction is between putting assets on-chain and building liquid markets around them, with transferability playing a major role.
The Fastest Growing Market in Tech Isn’t AI: Tomasz Tunguz makes the bullish case for tokenisation, connecting on-chain trading, round-the-clock price discovery and institutional adoption. He also highlights the opportunity for blockchain data providers, including his firm’s portfolio company Allium.
Crypto Capture of Foreign Aid: Crémieux highlights research linking World Bank aid disbursements with spikes in Bitcoin activity. The underlying working paper estimates possible aid leakage into crypto, using transaction, exchange and web-traffic data to investigate the pattern.

Finance & Economy

Opening Private Markets to the Public: Matt Levine approaches private-market access through the fees investors pay. His opening contrasts cheap retail index funds with expensive institutional strategies, asking how much of the difference buys better management.
Is an Agentic Bank Run Coming?: Apollo’s Torsten Slok asks what happens when AI automatically moves household cash towards higher-paying accounts. Depositors could earn more, while banks lose the cheap, relatively sticky funding on which their lending depends.
The Agent Economy: Who’s Most at Risk?: UncoverAlpha examines which aggregators depend on human attention, comparison and purchasing friction, and which control harder-to-replace services. It weighs the threat to existing margins against the possibility that easier purchases expand demand.
Less for More: Scott Galloway examines why employer-sponsored US healthcare keeps getting more expensive while workers shoulder more of the bill. He argues for expanding medical supply, tackling consolidation and widening Medicare access.

AI & Innovation

AI Solves a ‘Holy Grail’ Problem from Probability Theory: Scientific American reports on an AI-generated proof tackling a long-standing problem in percolation theory. The piece also captures mathematicians’ mixed reactions to a breakthrough whose crucial step came from a machine.
Predicting the Winner of Personal Agents: Hunter Rice argues that personal agents must understand a user’s background and relationships before they can reliably interpret individual requests. His focus is the onboarding problem: demonstrating value before users have invested time teaching the agent about themselves.
Reason Is More Than a Tool: Philosopher Sasha Mudd challenges the idea that intelligence amounts to optimising for a given objective. Drawing on Kant, she argues that human reason also examines which purposes deserve our commitment.

Culture & Beyond

Reading the Great Books in the Age of AI: Devin Stauffer argues that demanding books become more valuable as technology makes quick answers easier. Reading them cultivates sustained attention and independent judgement, while keeping difficult questions about living well open.
How to Actually Get Attention: Mark distinguishes going viral from getting people to pay attention. Drawing on examples ranging from nostalgic marketing to provocative launches and essays, he outlines six approaches to making content register with an audience.
Intimacy on Easy Mode: Matt Klein examines AI’s arrival in dating, emotional support and intimacy. He asks what we lose when endlessly accommodating systems remove the disagreement, uncertainty and effort through which human relationships develop.
My AI Agent Is Making Me Lamer: Priyanka Desai finds that agents have organised her life without making it more interesting. A personal reflection on how the time saved can disappear into further optimisation, while curiosity and digital exploration shrink.
How Your Nervous System Constructs—and Limits—Your Reality: Laney uses an unusual clinical case to explore how perception, identity and past experience interact. The essay extends into self-help; its broader claims about changing one’s reality warrant more caution than the neuroscience framing suggests.
How to Be Yourself When You Have No Self: Alexander Douglas draws on Zhuangzi to question the search for a fixed, authentic identity. He explores how loosening our attachment to who we think we are can leave us more open to change.
Green Tree Ants and Their Imposters: This short film follows insects and spiders that imitate green tree ants in appearance, behaviour and even smell. Some borrow the ants’ fearsome reputation for protection; others use the disguise to prey on them. (Video.)

That’s all for this week. I’ll be back next Saturday.

Until then, happy reading!
Prathik

P.S.: Read, watched or listened to something worth sharing? Send it my way for a future edition.

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The Saturday Reading List: Week 38-39 📚

Prathik Desai — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 13:17:30 GMT

Hello,

Welcome to Edition 18 of The Reading List — your fortnightly antidote to the noise. Every two weeks, I share my favourite reads across crypto, finance, technology, culture, and beyond. I also share what I’m watching and reading.

Frontrun: Early Bird Holds the Edge

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The Fortnight That Was

Bitcoin led this fortnight’s returns, gaining about 9% against the S&P 500’s ~1.15%. The cryptocurrency also crossed the $86,000-mark for the first time since January 29. The dollar strengthened about 2%, while gold fell 1.24% and silver finished almost flat. Oil reversed some of its earlier gains, with US crude down 6.51% over the period.

The rate hike markets had been anticipating arrived. On September 16, the Fed raised its benchmark range by 25 basis points to 3.75–4%, pointing to resilient spending, robust investment, and inflation that remained too high. Bitcoin’s rally also coincided with tighter policy and a stronger dollar.

Oil moved with the prospects for diplomacy. Hopes of renewed US–Iran negotiations and reopening the Strait of Hormuz pushed prices lower earlier this week. But those hopes met another exchange of threats at the UN, sending crude sharply higher by the middle of the week. The fortnight ended with cheaper oil, but little certainty that the relief would last.

What We Covered Last Fortnight

At The Token Dispatch, our coverage was along two threads: buying technology in smaller, more useful units, and giving on-chain assets more of the functions we expect from finance.

I explored the first in A Spot Market for Compute, testing Orbio’s market for AI inference credits. Buying compute without adding another subscription was convenient. Thejaswini extended the theme in Wholesale Market for Software Capabilities, examining how Monid lets customers buy individual tasks across providers and whether the marketplace selecting the tools could capture the customer relationship.

I then explored a protocol that makes automated trading possible for retail traders with Renting the Quant Desk. TrueNorth combines research, portfolio context, and execution in one place. This helps retail investors make better-informed decisions while owning the screen through which those decisions become trades.

Vaidik explored a less conventional path to adopt equity stocks in Robinhood’s Wealth Effect: memecoins paired against tokenised stocks, turning speculative demand into demand for equity tokens. I followed with A Share with a Say, on the infrastructure connecting tokenised holdings to shareholder votes and why ownership rights matter beyond price exposure.

Thanks for reading! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Open the Frontier: Jack Dorsey argues for open AI and independent scrutiny, warning that safety rules designed around today’s leading labs could entrench their power.
AI-Written Speeches Are Taking Over Politics: The Economist writes on politicians outsourcing more of their speechwriting to AI, and voters’ discomfort with machines helping their representatives speak for them. (paywall)
An AI Safety Standards Body: The Information reports that Anthropic, OpenAI and Google privately discussed establishing a shared AI safety standards body. (paywall)

Crypto & Tech

Why Crypto Businesses All Look the Same Now: Four Pillars on exchanges, wallets and brokerages converging around the same products as the range of commercially viable onchain businesses narrows.
Backpack: The Tokenization Engine of Internet Capital Markets: Frictionless’s investment case for Backpack, built around redeemable shares, unified collateral and the opportunity to distribute US equities globally.
NET-work in Progress: Our colleagues at DCo examine NetNet’s attempt to support a rebasing currency with external revenue, and how much dependence on speculative demand remains.
Beyond Tokenisation: Making RWAs Useful Onchain: Castle Labs uses Mantle to argue that tokenised assets need deep liquidity, collateral uses and connections to DeFi before asset counts mean much.

Finance & Economy

Bitwise’s Institutional Crypto Adoption Report: Bitwise interviews 15 institutions about what they own, how much they allocate and what would make them sell, offering a closer look behind the adoption headlines.
Kalshi Levers the Predictions: Matt Levine writes on bringing leverage to prediction markets, and what changes when traders no longer fund their entire potential loss upfront.
Beginners Guide to the Bull Cycle of 2026: 0xJeff’s personal trading lessons on liquid tokens, due diligence, position management and knowing when to leave a winning trade.
The Next Insurance Giants: Chris Ahn sees an opening for new insurers where AI changes operating costs, stablecoins expand distribution and scientific progress changes the risks being insured.
Investing for the Compute Bottleneck: Grayscale argues that scarce power and operational computing capacity could capture value regardless of which AI models or applications prevail.
Should Global Markets Have One Physical Center?: Logan Jastremski questions why global order flow must race towards one physical location, exploring the possibilities and trade-offs of distributed market infrastructure.
Play Your CARDS Right: Kunal Doshi’s bullish Collector Crypt thesis, centred on whether Ripmart’s live-shopping model can bring in collectors beyond crypto’s existing speculative audience.

AI & Innovation

Natural General Intelligence: Ryan Orbuch makes the case for a model trained on direct observations of Earth, helping us understand its interconnected systems and the consequences of intervening in them.
The Case for Global Benefit from AI: DeepMind researchers argue that everyone has a moral claim to AI’s benefits, drawing on rights, reciprocity, fairness and the cost of wasted human potential.
What If AGI Is Already Here, and It’s Made of… Children?: Pascio’s speculative case that general intelligence could emerge from interacting agents, challenging the expectation that it must arrive inside one powerful model.
Community Software: Ben Roy asks whether cheap AI-built apps will make software a matter of community and shared identity, with different groups assembling tools around their own values.
Moats & the Barbell-ification of Software: Mike Vernal argues that cheaper development could favour giant integrated platforms and small niche businesses, leaving mid-sized software companies exposed.
The Copycat Trap: Crypto’s Lessons for AI: Jonah compares the rush to fund AI labs with crypto’s alternative-chain boom, asking whether investors are paying premium prices for tomorrow’s commodities.
Robotics Tipping Point: Citrini examines progress in robotic hardware, intelligence and commercial use, arguing that adoption may arrive through accumulated advances rather than one defining breakthrough. (paywall)
As We May Think: Vannevar Bush’s 1945 essay on extending human memory and connecting knowledge, written long before the tools that made those questions part of everyday life.

Culture & Beyond

Long Nostalgia: Niko on Pokémon cards and vintage collectibles as pieces of personal identity, exploring the emotional demand beneath their financial appeal.
A New Media Playbook: Tulip King explains the Threadguy Stream’s business: build around one personality, treat clipping as a core skill and distribute each broadcast far beyond its live audience.
AI Art Is Theft: Wordgrammer argues that ignoring artists’ grievances helped harden opposition to AI, and that dismissing mathematicians’ concerns risks repeating the mistake.
The World Is Changing: AI for Creativity: Jeffrey Katzenberg makes the case for AI expanding access to animation while human storytelling determines whether the work connects with an audience.
Programmable Gravity: Ben Roy on algorithms shaping our ambitions, tastes and identities, and why users need more control over what their feeds pull them towards.
Where a Land Ethic Blooms: Craig Maier finds environmental responsibility in everyday farming decisions, where knowledge of soil grows alongside relationships with family, neighbours and place.

That’s all for this fortnight. Catch you in the next edition.

Until then, happy reading!
Prathik

P.S.: Want to recommend interesting literature? Write to me, and I shall include them in the next edition 👇🏾

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The Saturday Reading List: Week 36-37 📚

Prathik Desai — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 13:17:29 GMT

Hello,

Welcome to Edition 17 of The Reading List — your fortnightly antidote to the noise. Every two weeks, I share my favourite reads across crypto, finance, technology, culture, and beyond. I also share what I’m watching and reading.

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The Fortnight That Was

Over the last two weeks, oil (WTI) is up almost 17%. Everything else is flat or down: the S&P and bitcoin barely moved (−0.3%), the dollar softened (−0.5%), and gold and silver fell the hardest, down 2.4% and 2.7%.

The trigger was the Strait of Hormuz. US and Iranian forces traded strikes on oil tankers, Saudi Aramco’s Jizan refinery was hit for the second time in a month, and traffic through the chokepoint that carries a fifth of the world’s crude thinned to roughly ten ships a day. Brent pushed toward $97, US pump prices to $4.15 a gallon, diesel to a record.

An oil shock is an inflation shock, and an inflation shock changes what the Fed can do. Coming off a strong August jobs report, with 162,000 added against a 56,000 forecast, and unemployment steady at 4.1%, the market started pricing a rate hike. JPMorgan flipped from “no moves in 2026” to a 25bp increase at the September 15–16 meeting, and the odds of a hike crossed 60%.

That’s why the metals broke. Gold and silver had been the momentum trade all year; a hawkish repricing knocked the legs out, silver falling 6% in a single session. The tell of this fortnight is that the classic havens didn’t act like havens. Oil was the only asset honestly pricing the war. Bitcoin and equities just managed to hold.

What We Covered Last Fortnight

At The Token Dispatch, we spent the fortnight on covering structural issues. Two movements ran through the coverage: crypto reaching outward into the rest of finance, and a machine economy quietly wiring itself up alongside.

I opened with From Tokens to Everything Else, on protocols converting their fees into real-world assets, like stocks, dividends, tokenised equities, so that a protocol’s market is no longer measured only by the value of crypto. I stayed with structure in The Unbundled Fund, where near-zero custody costs let strategy, rebalancing and issuance come apart into separate, competing layers.

Vaidik then argued in From Bookie to Bloomberg that prediction markets are becoming risk infrastructure, ICE’s $2 billion move on Polymarket is about owning the data layer, much as Lloyd’s coffee house once did for insurance. I picked up credit in Troubleshooting On-chain Credit, making the case that on-chain lending only works once it stops pretending it can skip identity, reputation and legal recourse. Vaidik closed the finance thread with Crypto Options: Is the Time Now?, on why options are finally overtaking perps after October’s crash exposed how punishing path-dependent leverage can be.

Thejaswini took us into the machine economy. Software by the Sip looked at pay-per-call software markets built for AI agents that buy tools one API call at a time, while Who Checks the Agents? asked who verifies, pays and polices those agents, and found the trust layer lagging badly behind the payment rails.

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AI Could Make Markets Unintelligible: Byron Gilliam on economist Markus Brunnermeier’s pitch for a regulator-protected “human-only” trading lane, as insurance against markets where AI’s informational edge grows too wide for people to price.

Crypto & Tech

Robinhood Chain’s Reverse Playbook: 100y on how Robinhood Chain inverts the usual crypto playbook: start with tokenised stocks and proven DeFi rails, then bolt on stock-paired memecoins to pull in speculative liquidity.

Finance & Economy

Why Would Anyone Sell a Good Asset?: Oister on why secondaries are becoming central to India’s maturing private markets: selling a good asset isn’t a red flag, just two investors with different time horizons.
Interest Rates and Stock Prices: An Old Debate Resurfaces!: Aswath Damodaran dismantles the reflex that higher rates mean lower stocks; rates move discount rates and cash flows at once, so the net effect splits by company and sector.
An Ode to Counter-Positioning: Packy McCormick on counter-positioning: how startups win by adopting a model incumbents can’t copy without gutting their own revenue, and why that window shuts fast.
The Rise of Compute Markets: Jay Yu on whether GPU compute becomes a traded commodity like electricity, and why fragmented hardware, locations and pricing make clean benchmarks and derivatives so hard to build.
Hedging Compute Prices: Ronit Jain’s primer on cash-settled compute forwards and options, and how buyers, operators and lenders could finally put a price on future GPU cost.
Dallas Gets Some Equities: On the Texas Stock Exchange moving into equities and what a Dallas venue built to court issuers means for the NYSE/Nasdaq duopoly.
AAA AI: On how the AI data-centre buildout is quietly becoming a debt story, and the credit machinery — ratings, structured finance — assembling around it.

AI & Innovation

Software Is About to Eat the World Much Faster: Marc Andreessen argues coding agents move software production from the speed of human labour to the speed of compute, multiplying what a single engineer can ship.
The AI Transformation Loop: Mark Ajzenstadt on dropping AI into private-equity portfolio companies through short, measurable workflow experiments rather than year-long, consultant-led transformation programmes.
How AI Is Breaking the Internet Economy: Shoal Research on AI crawlers dismantling the web’s content-for-referral bargain, and the pay-per-request infrastructure publishers will need to charge machines directly.
My Prediction on AI in the Next Five Years: Ben Cera sees models becoming invisible commodities under outcome-priced apps, agents forming their own economy, and human edge shifting to trust, taste and distribution.
Will AI Soon Lead to Double-Digit Growth?: Ben Moll and Alex Imas, self-described AI bulls, explain why a capability explosion isn’t a GDP explosion; five heroic assumptions all have to hold, and probably won’t.
Investing in AI: Diego Lora maps the AI value chain across nine layers, with an uncomfortable takeaway for retail: most of the good exposure is private, foreign, or already richly priced.
The Existential-Risk Story Might Have Some Plot Holes: Byron Gilliam pokes at AI doom forecasts: earnest, internally coherent, and resting on precisely zero historical data points.

Culture & Beyond

How Do People Get New Ideas?: Isaac Asimov’s long-unpublished essay on creativity: new ideas come from connecting unrelated ones, which needs informal, low-pressure rooms where people can risk sounding foolish.
The “Learn to Code” Era Is Dead: John Burn-Murdoch reads falling computer-science enrolment as young people betting that “learn to code” no longer guarantees a career in an AI-shaped labour market.
The Group Chat Theory of Everything: Ben Roy on the group chat as the new private social unit quietly shaping what we buy, believe and vote for.
Doomscrolling Ourselves to Death: Ed West on James Marriott’s The New Dark Ages: the collapse of reading since its mid-century peak, and what a post-literate public does to democratic life.
The Forest Is Always Dark: Michael Dempsey on deciding under uncertainty: how much certainty you actually need before acting, and why a longer time horizon lets you ignore what short-term players obsess over.
It’s Not the Thought That Counts: Jords makes the case for wilful, selective ignorance: one finished local good deed beats endless paralysed awareness of problems you can’t touch.
One Big Web: A Few Ways the World Works: Morgan Housel on borrowing truths across disciplines: lessons from kittens, genetics and ecology that quietly govern business and behaviour.
The Curio Cabinet of Medieval Mental Health: Katherine Harvey on medieval medicine’s holistic view of the mind — gardens, music, company and animals as prescriptions that eerily anticipate today’s “social prescribing.”
Tolkien’s Secret to a Lasting Marriage: Tolkien’s 1941 letter to his son, framing marriage as sustained sacrifice rather than soulmate-hunting — a pointed rebuke to leave-if-unsatisfied culture.
Have We Finally Found Dark Matter? The LUX-ZEPLIN detector logged a collision that fits neither known backgrounds nor standard predictions: maybe a crack in a 40-year search, maybe noise.

That’s all for this fortnight. Catch you in the next edition.

Until then, happy reading!
Prathik

P.S.: Want to recommend interesting literature? Write to me, and I shall include them in the next edition 👇🏾

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The Saturday Reading List: Week 34-35 📚

Prathik Desai — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 15:46:20 GMT

Hello,

Welcome to Edition 16 of The Reading List — your fortnightly antidote to the noise. Every two weeks, I share my favourite reads across crypto, finance, technology, culture, and beyond. I also share what I’m watching and reading.

I didn’t read much last fortnight. Instead I dusted off my own personal Substack and wrote about something that’s been on my mind for a while: the pleasure is in the process, but not outcomes. Perhaps give it a read?

This fortnight, I will get back to the book I am halfway through - When Genius Failed and give you a full review into what you could take away from it in the next edition.

Crypto Investing On Autopilot

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Today’s issue was sponsored by them, and it comes in the week they launched ATPs with Bitwise. More on their release on Bloomberg here. Explore how Glider combines RWAs and programmatic finance directly in its product here.

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The Fortnight That Was

Last fortnight, the bond shook crypto from its deep slumber that lasted for months. Scott Bessent, the US Treasury Secretary, announced a plan to at least double the size of the Treasury’s quarterly bond buyback operations to lower borrowing costs and manage market liquidity.

This increases the maximum size of liquidity support buyback operations for longer-dated nominal coupon securities from $2 billion to at least $4 billion per operation.

Crypto rallied in response to this. Long-end yields dipped, the dollar softened, and a market that had been leaning heavily short got run over. The market session on August 19 saw well over $1 billion in short liquidations.

Over the fortnight (Aug 16–29), Ethereum and Bitcoin shot up by almost a third and a fourth of their market caps. Everything else stayed flat.

Bitcoin remains well below both its January 2026 high and last October’s all-time peak. But for the first time in a while, the price moved in a direction that was different from sideways.

What We Wrote at The Token Dispatch

Last fortnight at The Token Dispatch, we focused a lot on what’s being built for an agentic, tokenised economy.

Vaidik opened with Agentic Payments With Fraud Check, where he examined OpenAI’s new receipt-verification cookbook that comes closest to a fraud check for autonomous agents transacting over x402. He also proved on whether an on-chain settlement record actually proves an agent bought the right thing, or merely that money moved.

TJ followed with Yield-Industrial Complex, on how Wall Street is now packaging every native crypto cash flow it can find, including BTCI’s 27% covered-call “yield,” Fidelity, Grayscale and 21Shares turning on staking in their ETFs, and stripping the income away from the underlying asset risk.

I wrote Unblocking Capital With Blockchains, on the $1.7 trillion trapped in excess working capital and the web of circular B2B debts that keeps it stuck. In this piece, I explored how blockchains can net those obligations the way Splitwise settles a group trip, or the way Wall Street solved its own paperwork crisis 60 years ago.

TJ then did a fancy experiment with AI agents in $5 Spent Well. In the field experiment, she handed an AI agent its own $5 wallet and watched it run Pixel Pet Studio, a do-or-die micro-business selling five-cent pixel animals and paying its own daily server rent - all this with no human in the loop.

Vaidik continued his series with Compute Capital Markets: Part IV. Here he traced where all the AI compute money actually comes from, including corporate cash flow, debt, equity, and now pension and insurance float. He also examined why the ~3-year lag between committing capital and getting working chips explains today’s shortage.

And I closed the fortnight with The Business of Trust, on how every era of commerce needs a new middleman to broker trust between strangers. In this piece, I explore how, in an age where agents spin up disposable identities in seconds, crypto rails (ERC-8004 identities, soulbound reputation tokens, behavioural scoring from the likes of Skyfire, RNWY and ChainAware) are racing to become the credit bureaus of the machine economy.

We are lining up a lot more interesting pieces for you in the coming weeks. Until then, here’s a recommendation list to give you good company.

Thanks for reading! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Banking lobby’s campaign against Clarity will backfire: Columbia’s Omid Malekan argues that banks holding the Clarity Act hostage over stablecoin yield are a hugely profitable industry demanding protection it doesn’t need and inviting populist retaliation.
The SEC sets crypto free: Byron Gilliam on the SEC’s proposed Safe Harbor rule, which gives protocols up to four years to reach a “decentralised or functioning” state and self-certify their exit from securities law.

Crypto & Tech

Tokenised Stocks Have Arrived. Their Credit Market Hasn’t: The piece maps a 24,000x gap between the ~$461B off-chain securities-backed lending market and the ~$19M of credit drawn against tokenised equities onchain, arguing the bottleneck is legal enforceability, not price or dividends.
Everything else is a name. Payments is a market: Alex unpacks H1 2026’s $11.2B crypto fundraising, showing the $2B “exchange” category is two mega-rounds and five licence-grab acquisitions rather than a broad venture signal.
Why commodity traders may be the strongest vertical for stablecoin banking: Kirill Bulychev argues stablecoin neobanks win many low-volume accounts but that commodity traders, with genuinely high transaction volumes, are the segment where the horizontal model actually pays.
A Second and Final Eulogy for Bitcoin Maximalism: Nic Carter argues Bitcoin succeeded wildly while nearly every testable maximalist prediction failed, using the Coldcard hack and the failed Filters coup as the ideology’s Great Disappointment.

Finance & Economy

The bond market has something to say again: Byron Gilliam on the Bond Vigilantes waking from a two-decade slumber as 30-year yields hit 20-year highs, with the Fed neutered by a $40T debt load and Congress unwilling to act.
Deep Dive: The Next Trillion-Dollar Futures Market: Chamath Palihapitiya on CME’s plan to launch compute futures, framing the financialisation of GPU-hours as AI capex ($765B) overtakes oil and gas for the first time.
AI Refi: Matt Levine explores the consumer-finance truth that lenders profit from customers who fail to optimise, and what happens to that edge when everyone has an AI to refinance their mortgage for them.
Predict the KPIs: Matt Levine on stocks as bets on future earnings and the strange market that emerges when the metric being predicted is itself a moving target.

AI & Innovation

Give me 20 minutes and I’ll make you impossible to manipulate: Dan Koe lays out three levels of thinking (NPC, Main Character, Programmer) and four daily habits — question, curate, read, create — to escape the “intellectual obesity” of the algorithmic feed.
The death of articulation: jords argues that outsourcing writing to LLMs risks a “genius on the tweets, illiterate on the streets” future, and that competent human communication is becoming a scarce, valuable edge.
What Does It Mean To Be Human, Now? Highlights and reading list from Cosmos founder Brendan McCord’s Aspen seminar, tracing an arc from AI’s “dethronement” of human function to what remains irreplaceable.
Human in the Loop: Nic Carter’s short story about a “responsibly aligned” future where mandatory human oversight turns every automated system into a bureaucratic farce — as a man’s ceiling slowly collapses.
The humanoid robot ‘Olympics’ is as ridiculous as it is impressive: Two robots beat Usain Bolt’s 100m record at Beijing’s World Humanoid Robot Games — then crashed into a wall (one caught fire), a neat illustration of narrow feats versus real-world competence.

Culture & Beyond

Twitter Brain: jords writes, as a self-described survivor, that the mind is shaped by what it consumes, and that a week of one-thing-at-a-time attention can rebuild a scattered attention span faster than you’d think.
Internet Overexposure Syndrome: Katherine Dee proposes that “Borderline,” “Autist,” and “Schizo” online archetypes are rational adaptations to the internet’s environment rather than the psychiatric conditions they resemble.
Empire of flight (Why birds don’t buy Bentleys): Antone Martinho-Truswell argues birds never developed complex culture because flight is an “evolutionary black hole” that removed the selection pressure that pushed humans toward it.
What’s this buzz about bees having culture? An Aeon/Nature video on Alice Bridges’ experiment showing untrained bumblebees learning a two-step puzzle by watching others — the first socially-learned problem-solving seen in an invertebrate population.
Where are all the aliens? A new book explores possible answers: Astrobiologist Seven Rasmussen on the Drake equation, the Fermi paradox, and the “cosmic mirror” idea that the technosignatures we hunt for reflect our own moment in technology.
Why your ability to cope with stress changes with time: Behavioural scientist Masha Remskar on how seasonal, circadian, and social rhythms stack to make resilience a dynamic balance rather than a fixed trait.
Some Thoughts on the Real World: Bill Watterson’s 1990 Kenyon commencement address on play, refusing to sell out, and inventing your own life’s meaning against a culture that measures worth by salary and title.
The Principles of Better Decisions: Hades argues better decisions come from better mental models and not more information. In this piece, Hades walks us through first-principles thinking and opportunity cost as tools for seeing what others miss.
Kulfi: Life After Swipe: Co-founder Garvit Agarwal on building Kulfi, a games app exclusively for couples that’s raced up India’s charts by owning the 9 pm-to-midnight bedtime slot, on a “content-as-engineering” playbook of 20+ in-house posts a day and zero paid marketing.

That’s all for this fortnight. Catch you in the next edition.

Until then, happy reading!
Prathik

P.S.: Want to recommend interesting literature? Write to me, and I shall include them in the next edition 👇🏾

📩 Fill out this form to submit your details and book a meeting with us directly.

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The Saturday Reading List: Week 32-33 📚

Prathik Desai — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 15:20:51 GMT

Hello,

Welcome to Edition 15 of The Reading List — your fortnightly antidote to the noise. Every two weeks, I share my favourite reads across crypto, finance, technology, culture, and beyond. I also share what I’m watching and reading.

What I’m Watching and Reading

I just started When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management by Roger Lowenstein. Resuming my reading last week after a long break has convinced me of something few would relate with: you can absolutely fall in love with non-fiction finance books despite the numbers, for something few people expect them to do. The best of these books talk about human psychology and how we think and behave around money. The first 40-odd pages explain it perfectly.

@Goodreads

Lowenstein opens with John Meriwether, the shy hedge fund executive who built the legendary Arbitrage Group at Salomon Brothers by importing academic quants onto a trading floor that ran on instinct and trust. There was one thing that impressed me the most about the initial chapters of this book. It’s how the author shows the culture that reflected the devotion the traders had for Meriwether. The book superbly articulates the intellectual arrogance and the certainty that risk could be deconstructed and tamed. You sense what will follow early, but the process of reading the prose that culminates into the inevitable detonation of what was building up underneath is what makes for an excellent read.

I’ll likely finish this one in the next week, so I’ll hold the rest of my review for the next edition of reading list.

Got any recommendations for nice watches or reads? Write to me?

The Fortnight That Was

July CPI rose just 0.1% month-on-month, bringing the annual rate down to 3.4%, with core at 2.5%. Both these were a touch below June and in line with forecasts.

@BLS

Producer prices were even tamer as PPI was flat for the month against expectations of a 0.2% rise, and core came in soft too.

Markets read it as a sign to stop worrying about a rate hike, which didn’t seem entirely impractical last month. Hopes for a rate cut in September went back up.

The S&P 500 closed at a fresh record above 7,800 for the first time ever, carried by heavyweight tech and favourable quarterly earnings.

Gold climbed 7.87% in the last two weeks, with precious metals advancing across the board as traders digested a softer jobs report and looked ahead to the inflation data.

Silver has now surged more than 150% over the past year, propelled by rate-cut anticipation.

Even amid all this market chaos, bitcoin continued to move sideway with minimal volatility.

We, at The Token Dispatch continued to focus on the thesis of crypto fast becoming the underlying rails for the broader financial market.

What We Wrote at Token Dispatch

Most of our stories last week focused on who captures the value in the newly emerging world of Web 2.5. where traditional finance and crypto converge.

I closed the week with Distribution Trumps Asset Class, where I explore how crypto and Wall Street have started funding each other’s revenue. BlackRock’s spot bitcoin ETF became its most profitable fund, while Robinhood’s new chain became Uniswap’s single largest fee contributor within weeks. Hyperliquid now earns most of its revenue from oil and equity perps that have nothing to do with crypto. The ideological war between crypto and traditional finance means nothing beyond the fact that distribution was and still is the biggest moat any business can have. Earlier this week in Rewiring Commerce for Agents, I traced how Cloudflare, Google, Stripe and Visa are tearing apart every layer of online buying and rebuilding it for machines, where advertising dies and the real value moves to whoever can vouch for an agent’s identity.

Vaidik explained with Paying to Disrupt Visa, how the pitch of “cutting out the card network” is not as sensible as it sounds. He proves this by showing how every stablecoin card is still a debit product leaning on the Durbin Amendment and sponsor-bank workarounds, and cannot function by sidestepping Visa. In Dead Chains Walking, he followed Aave’s exit from six blockchains and showed how a chain dies once its credit market leaves. He makes a great parallel to global banks abandoning small-country corridors after 2008.

In the week before the last, Thejaswini wrote Ondo’s Taken a Decision, where she explains why Ondo scrapped its blockchain entirely and chose to keep Ethereum exclusively for settlement.

Thanks for reading! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Netting is all you need: Simon Taylor explains why “instant” isn’t always better in payments. Taylor does this by explaining how banks’ netting and liquidity-saving mechanisms make slow rails cheap, and why 17 US banks chose tokenised deposits over stablecoins to port their moat on-chain.
The Future of Vaults: Tempest argues on-chain vaults are the next crypto primitive to cross into TradFi after stablecoins and perps, with Coinbase, Kraken, Robinhood and Uniswap routing users into them. They explain where the vaults are expected to go from here.
From porters to protocols: Byron Gilliam traces clearing houses from 19th-century bank porters lugging gold across Manhattan to CHIPS, and asks whether a blockchain protocol like Cycles can open the clearing-house club to everyone beyond banks and financial institutions.
Technology finds its own uses: A nice take on how the internet may be remembered as the training data for AI, and how bitcoin’s mining infrastructure and talent are becoming the shovels for the AI build-out.

Finance & Economy

Jane Street suffers $15bn hit after meltdown at Situational Awareness: The secretive trading giant was wrongfooted by July’s AI-stock rout, a rare setback even as it cleared $40 billion in net trading revenue, with the sell-off also torching Leopold Aschenbrenner’s leveraged AI fund. (behind paywall)
The jobless boom has arrived: The WSJ’s framing of 2026’s defining paradox: record profits and a soaring S&P alongside stalled hiring, flat wages, and AI letting firms do more with fewer people. (behind paywall)
Supermarket economics: A revealing interview with a grocery-union economist on how scanner tech, e-commerce, and the Kroger-Albertsons merger reshaped who captures value in the trillion-dollar business of feeding America.
On edge and max extracting: polar uses a friend’s collapsing TikTok sponsorship income and the power-law distribution of poker hands to make a sharp point about how market edges decay, and why knowing the type of edge you hold matters as much as having one.

AI & Innovation

NVIDIA speedrunning the creation of a synthetic hyperscaler: Clark Tang argues that as AI inverted data-centre economics, Nvidia is being forced to assemble its own hyperscaler because incumbents were too slow and too eager to commoditise its margins.
Base Power & the Future of Electricity: a16z’s Profiles of the Future on how collapsing solar and battery costs made electricity generation cheap, even as the cost of delivering it surged, leaving America’s 20th-century grid a poor fit for the AI-power era.
AI designed a virus, and scientists brought it to life: Stanford and Arc Institute researchers used genome language models to design the first fully AI-generated viral genomes, producing 16 working bacteriophages that killed antibiotic-resistant E. coli. The piece also reignites the biosecurity debate. (behind paywall)
An AI for Africa would be built on Hunhu/Ubuntu ethics: Fainos Mangena argues that Western-built AI smuggles in individualism and autonomy, riding roughshod over the communal “I am because we are” ethics that animate much of African moral life.

Culture & Beyond

Velocity is the new authority: Om Malik’s argument that the organising principle of information has shifted from authority to sheer speed, where what travels fastest wins and thoughtful work simply doesn’t move.
When is stereotyping a handy tool, and when is it a sin? A prize-winning philosophy essay on why generalising is a cognitive necessity we’d be lost without, and where exactly the line falls between a useful shortcut and a moral failure.
What do you want?: Calvin Rosser on the central, unglamorous task of adulthood: figuring out what you actually want, why “safety” is an illusion, and why no one else can hand you the answer.

That’s all for this fortnight. Catch you in the next edition.

Until then, happy reading!
Prathik

P.S.: Want to recommend interesting literature? Write to me, and I shall include them in the next edition 👇🏾

📩 Fill out this form to submit your details and book a meeting with us directly.

Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

The Saturday Reading List: Week 30-31 📚

Prathik Desai — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 16:05:02 GMT

Hello,

Welcome to Edition 14 of The Reading List — your fortnightly antidote to the noise. Every two weeks, I share my favourite reads across crypto, finance, technology, culture, and beyond. I also share what I’m watching and reading.

What I’m Watching and Reading

I spent the past two weeks prepping for moving cities. So cardboard boxes and last-minute checklists got all my attention. I haven’t read nearly as much over the past month as I usually do. But I did make one trip to the cinema (cannot miss that for sure).

I watched The Odyssey a little over a week ago and gave it 4.5.

Christopher Nolan’s storytelling is top-notch and the single biggest reason to watch it in theatres. Matt Damon and the rest of the cast are breathtaking in places, carrying the emotional weight of a journey whose scale could easily have overwhelmed its characters.

I found dialogue delivery and visuals slightly lacking by Christopher Nolan’s standards. Some stretches appeared dull and too monochromatic for a film built around one of literature’s most expansive journeys.

Ludwig Göransson compensates for much of that. He does with the music what only he seems capable of doing. Even when the film seems to be lost in the dullness of the visuals, Ludwig keeps the film alive and moving.

Between watching The Odyssey, packing up one home and attempting to make another feel like one, I have had a relatively quiet month of reading. But I promise to be back with some interesting reads over the coming fortnight.

Despite my thin reading list, the macro events kept the calendar full

Got any recommendations for nice watches or reads? Write to me?

The Fortnight That Was

In the final two weeks of July, US inflation cooled marginally (at least for now), while the US–Iran conflict refused to reach a durable conclusion.

US consumer prices rose 3.5% in the year to June. The Federal Reserve’s preferred Personal Consumption Expenditures index subsequently eased from 4.1% in May to 3.7% in June. Overall, inflation is slowing, but it remains too high for the Fed to feel comfortable.

US real GDP expanded at an annualised rate of 1.5% in Q2, slowing from 2.1% in the first quarter. Consumer spending, investment and exports increased, but lower government spending dragged on the headline figure.

Despite slower growth and inflation still above target, the Fed kept interest rates unchanged at 3.5%–3.75%. The 9–3 vote was divided, with a trio voting in the opposite direction for the first time since 2019. Economic activity is holding up, but the war-induced energy shock has made the path back to 2% inflation more difficult.

By the end of July, the pause in the US-Iran war looks less like a settlement and more like another interval between escalations. Iran said it had stopped or turned back vessels attempting to cross the Strait of Hormuz, while attacks on shipping and US-linked facilities revived fears of a wider regional conflict. Brent crude ended July roughly 22% higher.

The markets reflected all this uncertainty.

Bitcoin was the only major asset in the chart to end the fortnight meaningfully lower (-1.6%). Ether outperformed BTC with 1.3% gains in the fortnight. However, both ETH and BTC ended July in the green with 18.6% and 7.3% gains.

Underneath these price movements, we kept observing and writing about the same structural change across crypto, AI, fintech and capital markets.

Creating a financial asset, issuing a token or building a model is becoming easier. The more valuable layer is increasingly the one that provides product distribution, financing, liquidity, and a place inside the wider economy.

That was also the thread running through the stories we published at Token Dispatch over the past fortnight.

What We Wrote Last Fortnight

With Is Crypto VC Dying?, Vaidik examined why specialist investors such as Paradigm and Framework Ventures are broadening their mandates into AI, robotics and aerospace. The shift does not necessarily mean crypto has failed. It may instead signal the maturity of the technology, meaning the informational advantage once held by crypto-only investors matters less. Crypto founders must now compete for capital and attention inside portfolios increasingly dominated by AI.

In Equity Learns to Borrow, I explored why raising corporate debt is routine while issuing equity remains a ceremony involving bankers, roadshows and substantial fees. Tokenised issuance could widen the geographic pool of buyers and allow companies to distribute shares more continuously, making equity issuance behave a little more like tapping a debt programme.

That drove me to write further about the thesis of crypto transforming into fintech. DTCC, SWIFT, Visa and other financial infrastructure operators are beginning to use blockchains to move securities, deposits and collateral. Crypto’s biggest impact may come from becoming the infrastructure they use behind the scenes. Crypto companies that once hoped to defeat Wall Street are increasingly invoicing the traditional financial companies by offering them tailor-made crypto infra solutions.

Vaidik then challenged one of the industry’s favourite interpretations in Is Crypto Money Fleeing Crypto?. The growth of tokenised real-world assets is usually presented as evidence that traditional institutions are arriving on-chain. Yet much of the identifiable demand comes from crypto protocols and DAO treasuries converting volatile reserves into tokenised Treasuries and dollar yield. The RWA boom may currently be more about crypto dollarising itself.

Finally, in Robinhood’s Bigger Baskets, I looked at how Robinhood is increasing the amount each existing customer does within its ecosystem. Funded customers grew 7% year-on-year in the second quarter, but average revenue per user climbed 24%. Robinhood Chain and its forthcoming social feed may matter less as standalone businesses than as connective layers that encourage the same customer to trade, borrow, save and invest across more products without leaving the platform.

Across a majority of our stories, we focused on one recurring theme: crypto is making issuance easier. Distribution, financing and integration are becoming the moat.

We have plenty more coming over the next two weeks. Before we get there, here is some literature that should keep you in good company.

Some of these could be behind a paywall. Sorry!

Thanks for reading! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Republicans Are Stuck in 2020. Maybe We All Are.: An argument that pandemic politics, election denial and anti-science grievance fused in 2020 into a coalition that continues to define the American right.
Resist the Technocrats: A critique of international institutions that disguise political choices as neutral expertise, and a case for restoring democratic disagreement without rejecting knowledge itself.

Crypto & Tech

The Machiavellian Case for Decentralized Networks: Omid Malekan argues that decentralisation matters not because distributed systems are flawless, but because they constrain how much power any single institution can accumulate.
One Human, Once: A deep dive into proof-of-personhood systems, comparing centralised biometric databases with identity systems built around passport chips and zero-knowledge proofs.
Onboarding the Next Generation: Binance Research examines how younger users are entering crypto, what they use it for and which products could turn early experimentation into durable adoption.
Lending Markets Are the New Kingmakers: As issuing stablecoins and tokenised assets becomes easier, lending protocols may decide which versions matter by setting collateral caps, LTVs, liquidity, and borrowing utility.
The Broken Link Between Protocol Revenues and Token Value: A useful reminder that a successful company or protocol does not automatically make its associated token a good investment, as Ripple’s equity and XRP increasingly demonstrate.
I Believed…: A reflection on crypto’s retreat from its 2021 utopian promises and its maturation into a more regulated industry built around stablecoins, tokenisation, perps and prediction markets.
The Changing Shape of Onchain Ownership: Noelle Acheson explains how BNY’s onchain transfer-agent service could make tokenised funds more useful by allowing legal ownership to move alongside the token itself.

Finance & Economy

In Defense of Markets That Sometimes Close: A case for nights and weekends as natural circuit breakers that give institutions time to negotiate rescues, reorganise risk and stop financial stress from compounding continuously.
An SPV of an SPV of an SPV: A map of the hidden fees, ownership ambiguity and exit risks inside layered private-market SPVs, followed by a plea for boring but enforceable investor protections.
Singapore’s Average Wealth Is Climbing, but There’s a Catch: Singapore ranks far higher in average wealth than median wealth, exposing how gains from financial assets disproportionately accrue to richer households.
What Would It Look Like If the AI Bubble Popped?: Matt Stoller traces how an AI bust could travel through retirement funds, universities, utilities, private equity and public budgets without necessarily resembling the 2008 crisis.
Information Timing and Release: The Gaming of Guidance: Aswath Damodaran connects corporate reporting with central-bank guidance and argues that more frequent information is not necessarily more useful information.
The Situation Deteriorated: Matt Levine uses the unwinding of Situational Awareness’s leveraged AI trades to show how a long-term thesis can be right while its short-term funding structure still destroys the trade.
Elevators Won’t Repair Themselves: A look at independent sponsors and search funds through a basic private-equity question: does value come from financing the acquisition or operating the company afterwards?

AI & Innovation

Why Compute Might Get 10x More Expensive: Dwarkesh Patel argues that increasingly valuable AI output could make demand for compute grow faster than supply, concentrating frontier intelligence and pricing out lower-value uses.
Inference Market—and Micro—Structure: A framework that treats AI-inference providers like market makers competing through quotes, latency, compute inventory and token-level economics.

Culture & Beyond

The Writing Habit That Saved My Brain—and My Future: Dan Koe presents writing as a system for thinking clearly, learning faster and gradually building a body of work that compounds into opportunity.
Overthinking Hates a Moving Target: George Mack recommends walking, sketching and speaking thoughts aloud as practical ways to make vague worries concrete and interrupt rumination.
Streamlining Addiction: An essay on how mobile gambling and prediction markets remove the physical and social friction that once limited addiction, repackaging vice as seamless trading.
Extreme Heat Is Costing Us Hours of Lost Sleep: Three charts show how hotter nights are reducing sleep worldwide, with the heaviest burden falling on people living in warmer and lower-income regions.
Humanity’s Golden Age of Language May Have Occurred 2,000 Years Ago: New modelling suggests humans may once have spoken many times more languages before empires and large states accelerated linguistic homogenisation.
How Art Invented Humanity: A philosophical argument that art was not merely produced by an already formed human mind, but helped create human self-awareness and cognition.
Propaganda I’m Not Falling For: 21 short provocations rejecting familiar scripts around careers, hustle, retirement, constant news consumption, passion, talent, legacy and luck.
How the Creator Economy Took Over Media: Scott Galloway examines a barbelled media economy where a handful of creators capture enormous value while most struggle to convert attention into a sustainable livelihood.
Why Talented People Outside the US Keep Losing Roles They Should Win: An essay on how proximity bias, self-promotion and cultural discomfort with workplace politics can make capable remote and international workers invisible to the institutions evaluating them.

That’s all for this fortnight. Catch you in the next edition.

Until then, happy reading!
Prathik

P.S.: Want to recommend interesting literature? Write to me, and I shall include them in the next edition 👇🏾

📩 Fill out this form to submit your details and book a meeting with us directly.

Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

The Saturday Reading List: Week 28-29 📚

Prathik Desai — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 11:40:10 GMT

Hello,

Welcome to Edition 13 of The Reading List — your fortnightly antidote to the noise. Every two weeks, I share my favourite reads across crypto, finance, technology, culture, and beyond. I also share what I’m watching and reading.

What I’m Watching and Reading

I am on a book break this week. I have not quite found the next one yet, and I would rather wait than begin something out of obligation.

I did finish I Will Find You, the eight-episode mini-series. It moves quickly and, unusually for an adaptation, does not feel like it is merely borrowing a book’s reputation. It knows when to keep things moving. If you want an easy-yet-thrilling watch, I’d strongly recommend watching this one on Netflix.

This weekend is for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. Nolan remains, in my view, one of the few filmmakers whose intellectual ambition is matched by control over the actual filmmaking. The film was shot entirely with IMAX cameras, which makes the absence of a proper IMAX screen near me especially annoying. But who knows? I may travel 300 miles at the end of the month to watch it again on the screen it was made for.

@TheOdyssey

Got any recommendations for nice watches or reads? Write to me?

The Fortnight That Was

The past fortnight followed a grim, but familiar rhythm. The fragile US–Iran ceasefire gave way to another round of American strikes, Iranian retaliation against US-aligned Gulf states, and renewed anxiety around shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. The seesaw continues; the difference is that markets are no longer treating each headline as a fresh apocalypse.

A new strike only matters when it threatens oil movement, damages regional infrastructure, or makes shipping through the Hormuz less predictable. That is why crude has remained the only expression of the conflict. WTI is up 18.9% in the past fortnight, while Bitcoin is up 2.1%, the S&P 500 is down 0.7%, and the dollar is broadly unchanged.

Zooming out gives a better picture. Since the start of the conflict on February 28, Oil is up 27%, the S&P 500 gained 8.3%, while Bitcoin is 5.5% in the red.

Nevertheless, our team at The Token Dispatch has been monitoring the infrastructure progress underway despite all the global macroeconomic drama.

What We Wrote Last Fortnight

Over the past fortnight, most of our stories focused on one specific question: when an asset, a network, or a financial product becomes more useful, who controls the infrastructure around it and who captures the value?

Vaidik’s two-part series on compute followed that question from the GPU itself to the market being built around it. In Part II, he looked at the uneasy logic of lending against hardware that depreciates faster than the debt used to finance it. In Part III, he mapped the emerging pricing, clearing, verification and settlement layers that may eventually turn compute into a real capital market.

I wrote about Robinhood’s attempt to build a financial supermarket, where the chain is not really the product and serves as connective tissue among its dozen existing businesses. In Making Capital Reallocate Faster, I explored what changes when capital can move and reprice faster than the institutions designed to contain it.

We also examined the ownership question from two directions. What Does a Token Holder Own? asked whether token holders retain any meaningful claim once crypto protocols begin raising conventional equity. The Aladdin Playbook looked at the other side of that bargain: how BlackRock’s BUIDL is becoming increasingly load-bearing collateral for on-chain finance, and what that does to crypto’s claims of independence.

Thejaswini took a sceptical look at the incentive systems behind two very different networks. The Intelligence Arbitrage asked whether Bittensor’s capital allocation mechanism rewards useful AI work or simply whichever subnet can sustain the strongest token bid. And Aave’s Extraction examined the price users may be willing to pay for convenience: a fixed yield, fewer decisions, and a familiar interface.

We have got more lined up in the coming weeks. Until then, here’s a reading list to give you good company.

Thanks for reading! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Robinhood’s Chain and Digital Asset Strategy: Insights4vc breaks down Robinhood’s push to build its own chain and tokenised-asset stack.
Dear Robinhood, Please Do Not Build: Artemis argues against the app-chain land grab, making the case that Robinhood should plug into existing rails rather than fragment liquidity with its own chain.
Is trade.xyz Existential to Hyperliquid?: A close look at whether the emerging venue trade.xyz genuinely threatens Hyperliquid or whether the incumbent’s liquidity and network effects hold.
The Always-On Economy: Pantera argues that programmable, 24/7 on-chain markets are quietly rewiring finance into a system that never closes.
TradFi Doesn’t Want DeFi, It Wants Blockchain: a16z crypto argues incumbents are adopting blockchain rails while sidestepping DeFi’s permissionless ethos.
How Financial Systems Become Fluid: On how tokenisation and interoperable rails dissolve the settlement frictions that keep today’s financial system siloed.
Inference in Capital Markets: Galaxy maps how AI compute — GPU futures and inference capacity — is being financialised and brought on-chain as a new crypto-native capital market.
Privacy Tokens: Chamath makes the case that privacy is becoming core financial infrastructure rather than a fringe feature (behind paywall).
Securitize Jumps After Partnering With Cantor: Securitize shares popped after the tokenisation firm tied up with Cantor Fitzgerald, another sign of TradFi leaning into on-chain assets (behind paywall).
The Decade Ahead: Delphi Ventures lays out the three macro forces it’s betting on for the next decade, from synthetic intelligence undercutting labour to the US unwinding the order it built, with crypto positioned as the parallel system (behind paywall).

Finance & Economy

How Artificial Spotify Streams Broke a Kalshi Market: How manufactured Spotify plays distorted a prediction market on streaming numbers, a case study in how thin the line between market and manipulation can be.
Citrini on surviving a drawdown: Ahead of CPI, Citrini offers important advice on treating the portfolio as its own position, knowing your tilts, not averaging down just to fix your cost basis, and using an early drawdown to study how you react rather than fighting your own psychology.
The Ozempic Economy: How private markets are repricing food, fitness and pharma around GLP-1 drugs, and where the capital flows next.
The Everything Chart: Pieter Levels stitches the macro trends he thinks explain almost everything into a single, attractive one-glance chart.
Circle and Coinbase’s Stablecoin Squeeze: JPMorgan warns that USDC’s economics face a “prisoner’s dilemma” as distribution deals like Hyperliquid’s siphon reserve income away from Circle and Coinbase (behind paywall).
Why China Got Rich and India Didn’t: David Oks argues China’s miracle rests less on freeing markets than on decades of hard social modernisation and human-capital investment that India never underwent.

AI & Innovation

Apple Sues OpenAI: Ben Thompson reads Apple’s trade-secret suit against OpenAI as less about stolen secrets than about a company furious at losing talent and unnerved by an AI shift that threatens the iPhone.
The Workers Left Behind by China’s Robot Drive: A dispatch from China’s factory floors on the workers displaced as the country races to automate (behind paywall).
XPeng Aims for 1,000+ Robots a Month: The EV maker plans to mass-produce humanoids and roll them out globally, another sign the humanoid race is accelerating (behind paywall).
The AI Superforecasters Are Here: Scott Alexander weighs fresh evidence that AI models can now match or beat expert human forecasters, and what that means for judgment work.
Robotics: Leveraging Human Labour: ARK sizes the shift from fixed-task automation to general-purpose humanoids at a ~$26 trillion opportunity as robots learn to generalise across tasks.
Latent Space as a New Medium: Kevin Kelly reframes an AI model’s latent space as a creative medium in its own right.

Culture & Beyond

What Is Web 2.0? Tim O’Reilly’s 2004 essay that coined the term for a paradigm shift is worth revisiting as we argue over what the next one (call it Web 2.5) really is.
People Reading Was Actually a 500-Year Glitch: Priyanka Desai argues that post-literate is really pre-literate. As AI drops the cost of flooding the zone to zero, deep reading collapses, and a small “clerical class” that still reads inherits a priest-like authority over everyone who delegates it.
The Postliterate Age: The Atlantic’s cover story on a deepening reading crisis and what a society that stops reading deeply stands to lose (behind paywall).
The Decline of Deviance (Part 1): Adam Mastroianni on why people seem to break fewer rules and take fewer risks than they once did.
The Decline of Deviance (Part 2): The follow-up on what a more conformist culture costs us, and whether the trend can reverse.
Boomermaxxing: The Lost Art of Being Unforgettable: A playful argument for the older-generation habits that make a person genuinely memorable in an age of frictionless, forgettable interaction.
Ancient Egyptian Princesses Were Powerful Weapon Users: A new analysis suggests that royal women in ancient Egypt were trained in arms, complicating longstanding assumptions about who wielded power.
Permanent Daylight Saving Is Bad for Your Health: Scientific American on why the science favours permanent standard time over permanent DST for human health.
A Super-Earth’s Leaking Helium: Helium escaping a super-Earth exoplanet could be the first hint of a surprisingly complex atmosphere.
Silicon Valley Has a Science Fiction Problem: Ali Rıza Taşkale argues tech titans claim sci-fi inspired them while stripping out its politics and grafting their own worldview onto stories that imagined better futures.

That’s all for this fortnight. Catch you in the next edition.

Until then, happy reading!
Prathik

P.S.: Want to recommend interesting literature? Write to me, and I shall include them in the next edition 👇🏾

📩 Fill out this form to submit your details and book a meeting with us directly.

Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

The Saturday Reading List: Week 26-27 📚

Prathik Desai — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 11:40:13 GMT

Hello,

Welcome to Edition 12 of The Reading List — your fortnightly antidote to the noise. Every two weeks, I share my favourite reads across crypto, finance, technology, culture, and beyond. I also share what I’m watching and reading.

Sticking with the flipped order from last edition, since it worked well.

What I’m Watching and Reading

I finally closed out Debt: The First 5,000 Years. The last 30% took me nearly twice as long as the first two-thirds did. Graeber slows right down into medieval and colonial credit systems that demand more patience than the opening chapters. I put the book down more often and sooner than I did in the first two-thirds.

One good thing is that the book stayed consistently informative right to the end. Since the book is split into thematic chapters, you could always pick it right back up from where you left off. Every chapter had something worth underlining, even the ones that might seem dull. Being useful and being interesting aren’t always the same thing, and Debt is a good reminder of that.

That wraps up my first tryst with a long book about money. I will pick up something lighter next. Got any recommendations? Write to me?

On screen, I’ve just started watching I Will Find You on Netflix. Two episodes in, and I’m liking how it’s unfolding. It’s got well-paced storytelling that builds tension just as well as Harlan Coben’s books do (Expecting some eye rolls from bibliophiles).

Adaptations can go either way, but this one feels like the right one after a long time. I will tell you more about it in the next edition.

The Fortnight That Was

Two editions ago, I flagged how fragile the fresh Iran-US ceasefire looked, never more than one missile away from unravelling. Well, if a little over 24 hours of ceasefire counts, then the agreement surely worked. After renewed strikes over what the US called repeated ceasefire violations, President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that “the Islamic Republic of Iran will no longer exist” if the violations continue.

@realDonaldTrump

On the market front, although the BTC price is still struggling around $60,000, we are not worried about its correlation with the broader crypto industry. There’s also little to support any theory around how every missile near the Strait of Hormuz will reroute crypto’s direction. That’s because there’s so much happening in parallel, including tokenised stocks, compute futures, bank-grade settlement rails, for one volatile ceasefire (or the lack of it) to decide where this industry goes next.

In the past two weeks, most of our stories have focused on how TradFi and DeFi are both pulling up a chair at the same table. The emerging world is creating new points where value accrues, and those who adapt to improve access to finance and the movement of money are positioning themselves well to capture a bite of that value.

What We Wrote Last Fortnight

Vaidik’s Who Actually Owns Your Stocks? and my follow-up, A Token Can Be the Asset, both examined how tokenisation inherits the old ownership chain and how different models of stock tokenisation offer varying benefits at different trade-offs.

Thejaswini’s Money Is Only as Good as the Issuer traced how banning a CBDC just hands the job of “trustworthy dollar” to stablecoin issuers instead, for better and worse. In Stretched to the Limits, I went back to evaluating the unravelling of Strategy’s STRC and what we got wrong in our first note about the credit instrument. I reassess the model and explain the problem in Strategy’s credit discipline. Thejaswini closed the week with Nobody Buys DeFi Insurance, on why protection markets stay tiny while the risk they’re meant to cover keeps growing.

I then wrote Who Captures Value in Web 2.5?, where I explored how value in the emerging world of finance is accruing in the translation layer connecting banks and institutions and who is capturing it.

Vaidik then wrote Compute Capital Markets, in which he explored how GPU hours are becoming a tradable commodity, with stablecoin settlement handling the plumbing work that electricity futures once did.

Collectively, these stories signal that the crypto industry is transforming into infrastructure and that it’s the best shot at building something that will outlast the next cycle.

There’s more lined up for you in the coming weeks, but here’s a reading list to keep you company until then.

Regulation & Policy

Reclaiming Opacity: The Imperative for Privacy in Crypto: A case for why crypto’s radical transparency became a surveillance tool, tracing the Tornado Cash and Samourai prosecutions and arguing that privacy needs to be infrastructure and not a feature.

Crypto & Tech

Money went on-chain first, the assets are following: Jevgenijs Kazanins uses a new Wharton paper to split RWAs into liquid money-like claims versus illiquid assets, and argues the second category is where tokenisation actually creates new liquidity, not just re-plumbs old.
Castle Labs RWA Report: This deep dive lays out the current state of real-world asset tokenisation, mapping issuers, curators, and distribution across the stack.
Rebuilding Securities Finance on Aave V4: Stani Kulechov makes the case that repo, margin lending, and securities-based loans are ripe for moving on-chain, with Aave V4 built to sit between the borrower and lender, and the fee-heavy stack of custodians and clearing houses.
Dollars Without Borders: Joel John argues that Web3’s biggest opportunities have shifted from memes and speculation to tokenisation and stablecoins, framing them as the mechanism by which American institutions and property rights are exported to the rest of the world.
Doppler: Rebuilding Capital Markets for the Tokenised Era: Doppler argues that tokenisation is just the starting point; the real opportunity lies in the liquidity, collateral, and financing infrastructure that enable tokenised assets to function as markets.
Going Institutional: A close look at ZKsync’s Prividium bet to win bank adoption against Canton Network, betting that cryptographic privacy beats governance-based trust once institutions cross borders.
State of Onchain Finance Q2 ‘26: Allium’s quarterly report tracks stablecoins, tokenised funds, equities, and prediction markets stacking up as onchain finance moves from speculation to infrastructure.
The other American Revolution: Fiat currency: Byron Gilliam traces fiat money to a 1690 Massachusetts Bay Colony experiment, arguing that tax-backed paper money was one of the decisions that helped secure America’s independence.
A system based on identity is vulnerable (behind paywall): Noelle Acheson’s Monday note on identity-based trust breaking down at scale, alongside her weekly stablecoin and macro calendar.
The moneyness of stablecoins (behind paywall): A new legal paper argues stablecoins aren’t quite money yet, and that the GENIUS Act helps less than most assume.

Finance & Economy

Small Themes: June 2026 (behind paywall): Citrini argues the AI trade has crowded out attention from five under-owned setups — senior housing, sold-out stadiums, exchange competition, fintech, and airlines.
Are Mega-Funds Taking Over Seed?: Data on how a16z, Sequoia, and General Catalyst have systematically taken over the top of the seed market, and why their conversion rates may not survive the current pace.
Two Concepts of Markets: A philosophical take on whether markets are a camera revealing prices or an engine that creates them, using prediction markets as the live test case.
The age of the solopreneur: Stripe’s economists find solo founders growing faster than employer businesses, with AI filling the gaps that once required hiring a team.
The World as Model: Meltem Demirors argues that the next trillion-dollar opportunity is the sensing layer that enables physical assets to be priced and traded the way HFT firms price markets.

AI & Innovation

America’s data-centre backlash puts the AI boom at risk: The Economist reports on rising community opposition to hyperscaler data centres across the US, with Meta sites worth $30 billion and gigawatts of load now colliding with local politics that could throttle the AI buildout.
How Much Memory Do We Fucking Need?: Zeitgeist Labs writes on the memory chip supply-demand mismatch that has taken Micron up nearly 10x in nine months, and how much room there might be left before the trade peaks.
AI’s winner-take-all era is over: Ashu Garg argues the “model is not the moat” narrative is winning as tokenmaxxing burns out, regulation shifts, and IPOs like Cerebras and SpaceX force a healthier debate about where AI value actually accrues.
How to survive AI mass replacement (& escape wage slavery): Dan Koe on how the real threat isn’t AI itself but dependence on employers and institutions whose incentives were never aligned with your survival to begin with.
AI search could make answers blander: New research suggests that AI search trained on AI-generated content could converge on the same narrow set of answers, a phenomenon dubbed “AI search collapse.”
Illegible benefits: A philosopher argues that every transformative technology, from anaesthesia to writing, has costs that are immediately visible and benefits that stay unimaginable until the technology creates the vocabulary to describe them.
The Winning Essays for the Big Questions About AI: Dwarkesh Patel’s contest winners cover ending pandemics with AI, what countries outside the AI race should do, and why labs may make money the way Hong Kong’s subway system does.

Culture & Beyond

Mary Beard Looks at Trump and Can’t Not Think of Ancient Rome: The classicist reads Trump’s triumphal arch, UFC-on-the-lawn, and $250-bill plans through the lens of Roman emperors, where spectacle, mind-changing, flattery, and coinage were the machinery of one-man rule.
Six Months into the “Hero’s Journey”: A former a16z partner reflects on leaving VC to found a biotech startup and why choosing which games to play matters more than winning any one of them.
29% Loaded: Jack Raines turns 29 with 29 beliefs about money, risk, envy, and adulthood — some reversed from his twenty-something self.
Counterfeit Congregation: An essay on how streaming, texting, and now AI companionship have replaced the in-person congregation humans evolved to need.
Europe IRL: Scott Galloway argues Sweden and the Netherlands show that capitalism and strong safety nets aren’t a contradiction, tying it to something the US is losing: trust.
America’s Next 250: An essay from General Matter’s CEO imagining the next 250 years of American energy and abundance, if the bottlenecks get solved.
A reading list for the deeply curious: a16z crypto’s team shares 13 summer reads on manufacturing, biology, market design, and management.

Want to recommend interesting literature? Write to me, and I shall include them in the next edition 👇🏾

That’s all for this fortnight. Catch you in the next edition.

Until then, happy reading!
Prathik

📩 Fill out this form to submit your details and book a meeting with us directly.

The Saturday Reading List: Week 24-25 📚

Prathik Desai — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 11:40:04 GMT

Hello

Welcome to Edition 11 of The Reading List — your fortnightly antidote to the noise. Every two weeks, I share my favourite reads across crypto, finance, technology, culture, and beyond. I also share what I’m watching and reading, because a newsletter that only talks about charts is a slow way to kill the will to live.

What I’m Watching and Reading

This edition, I am flipping the order of how we go about the editions because…why not?

I’m about three-quarters through Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber, which is a slow burn of a book, but a fascinating one. The book is a lot more about human relationships and behaviours that money grew out of: obligation, trust, who owes whom and why. It made me look at the thousands of years of social wiring underneath a simple transaction. I’ll have more thoughts once I close it out, but it’s already started reframing how I read the way money functions.

On screen, the last two weeks were a blast of human psychology from two very different angles. Obsession explored how far the pull of fixation can drag a person, and how little it takes to tip a strong want into something disastrous.

But what I didn’t prepare for was the ride that Backrooms took me on. Filmmaker Kane Parsons beautifully translates his strange internet idea of endless, fluorescent-lit liminal spaces into something genuinely unsettling on screen. The way the imagery conjures dread out of empty rooms and how deliberately it leaves you with more questions than answers are what stayed with me from the movie.

With Backrooms, Cannes-winning Renate Reinsve continues to have a blockbuster of a year. The movie adds another feather to the Norwegian actor’s award winning titles - The Sentimental Value and The Worst Person in The World. Chiwetel Ejiofor keeps you at the edge of your seat with the unreconciled conflicts his Captain Clark’s character carries within.

It’s a lovely watch for anybody who loves to leave the cinemas with a cloud of questions hanging over their heads and putting their minds to work in an uneasy manner (well, that’s just how weird my brain functions)

With that out of the way, let’s head to how the past fortnight fared.

The Fortnight That Was

Just days before we wrapped up the week, the U.S. and Iran signed a peace deal, committing to terminate operations on all fronts, including Lebanon. The 14-point agreement also states that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon and will also commit a $300-billion fund for the “reconstruction and economic development” of the country.

A deal, at last. Yet, Israel continued to attack Lebanon before the ink even dried. Over the last four months, we have seen this play out: a signed agreement here is never more than one missile away from being put on hold. That is just the volatile world we have been living in lately, with peace and outbreaks of violence sharing the same news cycle, sometimes within the same hour.

Markets still had something to cheer about over the past fortnight.

Bitcoin gained a modest +4.18% over the fortnight. Ether recorded ~9% gain, while the Nasdaq added 5%.

Yet nothing here suggests much about crypto’s future trajectory. Lately, we have been arguing at Token Dispatch that bitcoin’s chart and the crypto industry are decoupling for good. But don’t take our word for it. Look at the kind of stories we have been writing for the past two months and the stories I have been reading (some of which have been included in these reading lists for the past month). They prove the thesis of crypto’s evolution as fintech infrastructure far more convincingly.

What We Wrote at Token Dispatch

Throughout this fortnight, most of our stories addressed the one important question of who actually owns the value once the plumbing becomes invisible.

TJ closed it with Is Distribution Everything?, tracing how Coinbase, Stripe, and Kraken are owning the infrastructure they once rented. Through the piece, she also asks whether open-source protocols are destined to become the duct tape that fills the cracks the giants haven’t monetised yet. Vaidik picked up the same fight one layer up in The ‘Checkout’ War, dissecting why OpenAI’s Instant Checkout died six months in, and why the agentic-commerce land grab between Amazon, Google, and Stripe may be settled by stablecoin rails that make the middleman fight pointless.

I spent the fortnight on the IPO and the deposit. In The Unbundled IPO, I explained how SpaceX’s listing tore apart the banker’s old IPO bundle of pricing, distribution and delivery. I explored how banks’ roles will change in upcoming IPOs, with perp venues and prediction markets pricing in the stock weeks before the bell rings on the bourses.

Defending the Deposit followed the dollar itself, as stablecoins, tokenised deposits, and SoFi’s hybrid race to own convertibility. With Neobanks Have to Be Banks, TJ explained how the survivors of the neobank wave lived by getting a charter and lending you your own money.

All these stories collectively signal that crypto is growing into finance and integrating with traditional finance, rather than resisting it.

There’s more lined up for you in the coming weeks, but here’s a reading list to keep you company until then.

Regulation & Policy

Africa’s Stablecoin Moment: A look at how African stablecoin adoption is moving from proof of demand to the harder work of regulation, banking access, liquidity, and local-currency rails.

Crypto & Tech

The State of RWAs on Hyperliquid: Covalent maps how Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 has turned RWAs into 85+ always-on perp markets across stocks, indices, commodities, FX, and pre-IPO companies.
Vitalik’s Covered-Call Stablecoin: A take on Vitalik’s proposed stablecoin design, where stability comes from splitting ETH exposure rather than relying on liquidation-heavy debt.
Under the Uniswap Thesis: A useful pushback on the idea that tokenisation automatically benefits Uniswap, arguing that distribution, turnover, and value accrual matter more than headline RWA growth.
Crypto Enters the Space Age: Mert argues that crypto can no longer rely on patchable software standards; as AI improves formal verification, security and rigour become the industry’s next survival test.
Bitcoin Yield Is a Lie: A useful reminder that BTC has no native risk-free yield; every income strategy introduces counterparty, market, technical, or tail risk. (behind paywall)
Cost of Trust 2.0: 1kx updates its thesis around blockchains as trust-reduction infrastructure, with sharper focus on which trust markets can actually produce venture-scale outcomes.
The Race to Trade Everything: Galaxy breaks down Hyperliquid’s HIP-4 and how outcome markets could turn the perps venue into a direct competitor to Polymarket and Kalshi.
Rails Aren’t Enough: A sharp stablecoin payments piece arguing that enterprises do not just buy fast settlement; they need SLAs, exception handling, reconciliation, and payment operations that work when things break.
The Singleness of Onchain Money: Byron Gilliam uses 19th-century bank notes to explain why on-chain dollars need to become more fungible across issuers and venues.
Money Flow Is the Moat: A16z’s Jason Rosenthal argues that the best crypto businesses sit inside value flows, including payments, custody, credit, settlement, and not beside them.
The RWA Tokenisation Playbook: A beginner-friendly map of the RWA stack, from treasuries, credit, equities, and commodities to the issuers, curators, DeFi protocols, and apps that distribute them.

Finance & Economy

The Bitter Lesson as Moat: A quant-finance essay on why secrecy and know-how are weakening as moats, while compute-scaled systems, proprietary data exhaust, and distribution become harder to copy.
Ya Gotta Believe: Byron Gilliam uses the Knicks’ comeback and prediction-market pricing to show why investing is about probabilities, not certainties.
Bitcoin’s Institutional Ascent: ARK argues that ETFs, public-company treasuries, custody maturity, and retirement access are pushing bitcoin from speculative fringe asset to institutional allocation.
Robinhood’s Retail Finance Bet: Artemis makes the bull case for Robinhood as a Gen Z and millennial financial super-app, not just a crypto-correlated brokerage.
The Stock Market Gets More Stock: Matt Levine explains how AI capital demand, SpaceX’s IPO, and pre-IPO perps point to a new era where equity markets raise capital again instead of merely shrinking through buybacks.
Perps Don’t Work for Compute: Dave Friedman argues that compute needs dated forward curves, not perpetuals, because GPU-hours are perishable and hardware obsolescence is the real pricing problem.
The Art of Arbitrage: Yuan Han Li frames great crypto companies as arbitrage machines that find a gap, build a growth loop around it, and then graduate into durable mainstream businesses.
The Great Restructuring: Andrei Grachev argues that crypto is moving from belief-driven cycles to extraction and hard competition, where RWA and IPO perps make exchange listings even harder for new tokens.

AI & Innovation

AI Labs as L1s: Alok Vasudev compares OpenAI to Bitcoin and newer AI labs to alt-L1s, framing the AI lab race through crypto’s familiar hierarchy of incumbents and challengers.
The Untrainable: Sarah Guo argues that measurable AI work gets commoditised first, while messy organisational context, private correctness, and trust remain harder to automate.
Do Consumers Want Agentic Commerce?: A useful counterweight to agentic-commerce hype, asking whether consumer payment habits are actually ready for autonomous shopping.
A Frontier Without an Ecosystem: Satya Nadella frames the AI-era firm around human capital and token capital, where the real moat is the learning loop between people, workflows, data, and models.
Three Paths for Agentic Payments: A framework for agentic payments built around whether AI replaces, integrates with, or creates new payment behaviour.
Anthropic’s Safety Superpower: Ben Thompson argues that Anthropic’s safety mission, talent brand, data policy, and business incentives may be unusually aligned — and that this alignment is both powerful and worrying.
Owning vs Renting Intelligence: Lin Qiao uses the Mythos shutdown to argue that AI companies need to turn workflows, data, evals, and domain knowledge into owned intelligence rather than rented API dependency.
Who Prices Intelligence?: Jaya Gupta asks who will allocate and price intelligence when AI capability, cost, latency, and risk become independent product variables.
Workflows Are King: Jamin Ball argues that AI moats will move from systems of record to workflow orchestration, where the company coordinating the agents owns the strategic layer.

Culture & Beyond

Money Measures Life Poorly: A thoughtful essay on why money is the easiest scoreboard for life, but not the best one once time, health, relationships, and meaning enter the equation.
New Media Is Insider Media: Anu explains why small audiences of the right people can now matter more than mass reach, especially in Silicon Valley’s insider-media ecosystem.
What Is This Rock?: Aeon explores Anthropocene geology through strange human-made rocks, where industrial waste, tyres, coins, and natural processes blur the line between natural and unnatural.
Mostly Dead: Jords writes this personal essay on distraction, screen addiction, and the unsettling idea that time spent scrolling can feel like time spent outside the land of the living.
The Art of Presentmaxxing: Pascal turns mindfulness into a practical daily protocol, arguing that presence is built through small mundane “reps” rather than another optimised self-improvement ritual.

Want to recommend interesting literature? Write to me and I shall include them in the next edition 👇🏾

That’s all for this fortnight. Catch you in the next edition.

Until then, happy reading!
Prathik

📩 Fill out this form to submit your details and book a meeting with us directly.

The Saturday Reading List: Week 22-23 📚

Prathik Desai — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 12:44:16 GMT

Hello

Welcome to Edition 10 of The Reading List — your fortnightly antidote to the noise. Every two weeks, I share my favourite reads across crypto, finance, technology, culture, and beyond. I also share what I’m watching and reading, because a newsletter that only talks about charts is a slow way to kill the will to live.

This fortnight, though, the charts were hard to ignore.

We will take a quick look at how the markets moved over the last two weeks before I share with you how we at Token Dispatch are keeping our minds sane during the ongoing market downturn.

Let’s get the painful part out of the way first.

The Fortnight That Was

Bitcoin slipped below $60,000 this week, touching its lowest level since October 2024. Most of the broader crypto market followed it down. As much as $1.3 billion was liquidated out of crypto markets across long and short positions.

BTC, ETH and SOL, all lost approximately a fifth of their market cap in the past two weeks.

Depending on how closely you tracked these prices, this either felt like a bad dream, a familiar cycle, or the point where the weak hands start quietly leaving.

But I am an eternal optimist. I look for the good news even when the going is tough (Primarily because it acts as a consolation to my bleeding portfolio). I think downturns are useful in a way. It helps clear the industry of those who don’t care enough about its fate. Every narrative sounds profound when the charts are green. But only the true advocates hang in irrespective of which ways the candles move.

Just as any other industry, crypto has a section that keeps working, earning, building and shipping whether BTC is at $60,000 or $100,000.

While prices were bleeding, the U.S. approved the first regulated Bitcoin perpetual futures. Crypto exchanges kept expanding into stocks, commodities, private-company pricing, and prediction markets. Perp DEXs kept processing volume and stablecoins kept moving money.

It’s easy to overlook these developments in a red market.

Bear markets can hurt investor motivation, stop people from opening dashboards, make investment in the entire industry seem delusional.

But the actual industry was doing something else, and we covered it extensively at Token Dispatch.

What We Covered Last Fortnight

We started with Everything is a data centre now, where Thejaswini followed the noise in Rockdale, Texas, and found the bigger story underneath. Old aluminium plants became Bitcoin mines, which are now turning into AI data centres.

I then wrote Pricing the Private, in which I examined how crypto is building a parallel pricing stack for private companies. SpaceX perps on Hyperliquid, Polymarket contracts around IPO milestones, and tokenised access products are all doing something similar. They are letting public markets financialise their opinions about companies that are yet to list on public exchanges.

Thejaswini then took us into institutional money with Meet Me at the Agorá. Project Agorá is a permissioned, compliance-heavy system in which tokenised deposits and central bank reserves move only after the rules allow it. TJ explains the impact of programmable money when coupled with a gatekeeper at the door.

Vaidik wrote America Finally Gets Perps, explaining why the CFTC’s approval of regulated Bitcoin perpetual futures is a watershed movement. The piece is a culmination of what we have been seeing in crypto markets for a little over a year now. The piece tells us the impact this could have on U.S. institutions which were largely been locked out of a market that’s too big to ignore.

I closed the fortnight with ‘Every Exchange is an ‘Everything Exchange’, in which I argued that crypto exchanges are becoming full-stack fintech platforms. They started with tokens, but the infrastructure now supports trading perp contracts, tokenised RWAs, pre-IPO equities and even event contracts. I flirt with the idea of what happens when every exchange becomes a multi-asset brokerage and how do they stand apart in such a world.

At Token Dispatch, we are focusing heavily on how crypto infrastructure (read ‘blockchain’) is capitalising on the inefficiencies of traditional financial systems. There’s a lot we are working on that we are excited to send your way in the coming days, especially around the metamorphosis of crypto into fintech.

Until then, here’s a reading list that will keep you in good company.

Regulation & Policy

Anthropic Hits Pause?: The Claude-developer has warned that frontier AI may need a coordinated slowdown if self-improvement risks move faster than society can govern them.
Banks Answer Stablecoins: JPMorgan, Citi and other big banks explore tokenised deposits as TradFi’s more regulated response to crypto-native money rails.

Crypto & Tech

Continuous Probability Markets: A smart prediction-market design piece on why real hedging needs price ranges, not just binary yes-or-no contracts.
AI Needs Blockchains: Pantera’s Paul Veradittakit makes the case that AI agents need crypto rails for payments, identity, open systems and resource coordination.
Bitcoin vs Ethereum Money: A structural audit of Bitcoin and Ethereum’s monetary claims, arguing that first-mover advantage is not the same thing as superiority.
Stablecoins Go Invisible: A useful stablecoin distribution essay on why the winning rails may disappear into treasury dashboards, checkout flows and existing workflows.
Crypto Price Discovery: Arrakis’ thread on how Hyperliquid and on-chain perps are becoming a new venue for price discovery beyond just crypto-native assets.
Crypto Without Bitcoin?: A provocative thread/article arguing that crypto may be entering a cycle where Bitcoin is no longer the only asset setting the market’s direction.
The Agentic Future: 0xSammy curates three early crypto-AI mechanisms, from compute-within-consensus to tokens that behave like LP positions.
Private Money Is Fine: Nic Carter pushes back against the “stablecoins are dangerous private money” critique by revisiting the free-banking history people often misread.

Finance & Economy

Fake Money Built America: Byron Gilliam uses America’s counterfeit-banknote era to show how messy private credit helped build a young financial system.
Hormuz, Oil, Fragility: A timely NYT opinion piece on why the Strait of Hormuz remains one of the world’s most dangerous energy chokepoints.
Copper Has a Problem: A commodity scarcity piece arguing that the world needs far more copper than current mining capacity is prepared to deliver.
a16z, Pre-IPO: A sharp read on why a16z’s media, platform and multi-strategy buildout increasingly makes it look like a public company before the listing.
Management Fee Machine: Dan Gray explains how venture capital’s incentive structure rewards scaling assets and fees, even when larger funds produce worse exits.
Prediction Markets, Tested: Asterisk asks the uncomfortable question: are prediction markets actually useful information machines, or mostly better-packaged casinos?
Opting Out of AI: Bloomberg looks at what it means to sit outside an AI boom that increasingly feels impossible for companies and investors to ignore.

AI & Innovation

Google’s AI War Chest: Google’s reported AI infrastructure raise shows how frontier AI is turning into a capital markets story as much as a technology story.
Search as Code: Perplexity reframes search for agents as something models should compose through code, not just call through fixed query boxes.
China’s AI Valuation Race: A look at China’s “Six Little Tigers” of AI and whether their billion-dollar valuations have enough substance underneath.
AI Sticker Shock: Axios tracks the growing corporate panic over AI bills, unclear ROI and the very real cost of letting employees use models without limits.
AI Has No ROI: Ed Zitron expresses scepticism on enterprise AI economics, arguing that hidden token costs and vague productivity claims are finally colliding.
The Messy Middle: Molly Kinder writes about the politically difficult transition between today’s labour market and the post-AGI abundance story Silicon Valley prefers to jump to.
Robot Training Homes: The Verge reports on Shift’s offer to clean homes for free in exchange for footage that trains future household robots.
Pig Organs, Human Body: A striking xenotransplantation milestone where scientists tested pig liver and kidney transplants in a brain-dead person.

Culture & Beyond

The Burden of Discernment: Palladium uses Galileo, science and AI-era knowledge systems to ask how societies separate real dissent from weak contrarianism.
Retreat Yo Self: A funny, self-aware essay on meditation retreats, silence, self-improvement and why stillness is easier to admire than actually practise.
Metrics Maxxing: Scott Galloway takes aim at optimisation culture and the way metrics can slowly replace the actual thing we were trying to improve.
Can Ecosystems Malfunction?: Aeon questions whether ecosystems really “fail” like machines, or whether that language says more about human expectations than nature.
Flickering Enlightenment: A defence of the Enlightenment that does not ignore its failures, but argues its best legacy is permanent critique.

What I Am Reading & Watching

This fortnight, I am starting Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber.

@goodreads

I’ve wanted to read it for a while because debt is one of those words finance uses every day without considering its moral, political and historical weight. We talk about credit, leverage, money and repayment almost everyday. But I wanted to dive deeper into how debt became a way of organising human relationships long before modern banking took over.

On the watching front, I am waiting to watch Obsession. I usually try not to let hype decide my weekend plans, mostly because it has let me down too many times. But this one has been loud enough.

So that’s the plan: one book about 5,000 years of debt, one horror-thriller, and hopefully fewer red candles by the time the next edition goes out - that’s my ask of the…(no context spoiler ahead)...One Wish Willow.

That’s all for this fortnight. Catch you in the next edition.

Until then, happy reading!
Prathik

📩 Fill out this form to submit your details and book a meeting with us directly.

The Saturday Reading List: Week 20-21 📚

Prathik Desai — Sat, 23 May 2026 16:03:59 GMT

Hello

Welcome to Edition 9 of The Reading List — your fortnightly antidote to the noise. We moved our reading list edition to Saturday last fortnight and are sticking with it this time as well.

For those here for the first time, every two weeks I share my favourite literature on crypto, finance, technology, culture, and beyond. I also share what I’m watching and reading this fortnight, beyond the world of crypto and finance.

So, let’s start with what moved and what didn’t.

The Fortnight That Was

The US-Iran ceasefire has survived several stress tests. But that still won’t stop oil prices from rising. Crude oil prices have hovered around $100/barrel over the past fortnight, briefly rising within a touching distance of $110.

The effect of rising fuel prices is spilling over to other prices and showing up in inflation data. In April, US CPI rose 0.6% month-on-month and 3.8% year-on-year. Energy prices were up 17.9% from a year earlier, while gasoline was up 28.4%. Core CPI also rose 0.4% in April and 2.8% over the year.

@BLS

That leaves the Fed in an awkward place, walking a tightrope. The April FOMC minutes showed officials were still worried about inflation, energy prices, tariffs, softer hiring, and the uncertainty coming from the Middle East. The debate has become more two-sided: cut too early, and the inflation may come back; wait too long and the labour market may weaken faster than expected.

Markets, as usual, processed all of this with a mix of fear, denial, and greed.

Over the last two weeks, Bitcoin fell about 6%, gold slipped nearly 4%, and silver dropped more than 5%. Oil was down around 2% for the fortnight, but that number hides how volatile the asset remains. The S&P 500 rose a little over 1%, and US stocks closed their eighth straight winning week, helped by strong corporate earnings even as inflation worries kept sentiment fragile.

Since the war started, though, the story looks different. Oil is still up nearly 50%. Bitcoin is up about 14%. The S&P 500 is up close to 8%. Gold and silver are both still down double digits from where they were when the conflict began.

That’s the oddity of this market. The asset most visibly pricing war is oil. The asset quietly refusing to collapse is Bitcoin. The assets expected to behave like havens have not really done so. And equities, despite everything, are still levitating on earnings and AI enthusiasm.

With the charts out of the way, here’s what we wrote at the Token Dispatch.

What We Covered

The past fortnight was less about price charts and more about the invisible layers that decide who actually captures value in crypto: custody, regulation, distribution, legal wrappers, remittance corridors, and time.

I started with The Agentic Float, in which I examined how AI agents could create a new revenue stream from idle money. The piece argues that if agents need pre-funded stablecoin wallets to buy compute, APIs, content, and services, then whoever owns those balances can earn both transaction fees and float income. The agentic economy may create a Schwab-like float business for stablecoin issuers, wallets, and payment rails.

Vaidik then took the regulatory angle in The Decentralisation Test. The CLARITY Act may finally test crypto for when a token stops being treated like a security and starts being treated like a commodity. But the piece also asks if decentralisation becomes a legal threshold, does crypto become safer, or simply too expensive for small grassroots teams to launch?

Thejaswini followed with Regulatory Asphyxiation, a story about Ondo Global Markets and the long, messy road to tokenised stocks. Earlier attempts from FTX, Binance, and Mirror died because they treated regulation as a detail. Ondo is trying the opposite route: legal structure first, product later.

I then moved from stocks to swipes in Who Owns The Swipe?. Crypto cards look like a consumer product, but the card itself is the least interesting layer. The real business opportunity lies beneath the surface, in building a presence across multiple layers of the stack: issuing, compliance, APIs, FX, settlement, orchestration, and wallet distribution. Rain’s model shows why the winner will be the one who can provide infrastructure and earn from every swipe across multiple front ends, rather than just being a card provider.

Vaidik’s LATAM’s Remittance Trap extended the same infrastructure argument into remittances. The mistake most fintechs make is treating Latin America as a single market and remittances as a single product. Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, and Brazil each need something different: cheaper transfers, dollar savings, dollar access, or local settlement. The deeper lesson was that stablecoins win only when they disappear into the behaviour users already understand.

Finally, Thejaswini closed the fortnight with The Clock Is The Product. Hyperliquid’s edge is not only that it offers perps. It is that it stays open when traditional markets go dark. From oil contracts trading over the weekend to pre-IPO markets for Cerebras and SpaceX, the piece argues that continuous price discovery is becoming a product in its own right.

Taken together, the theme was that crypto’s next battle will be about owning the solutions that address existing bottlenecks.

Who holds the idle balances? Who passes the decentralisation test? Who controls the legal wrapper? Who runs the card stack? Who owns the remittance corridor?

We have a lot more coming over the next two weeks. Before we get there, here’s some literature that will keep you in good company.

Some of these could be behind a paywall. Sorry!

Regulation & Policy

Polymarket’s Dispute Machine Problem: A look at how prediction-market outcomes are resolved, and why even “truth markets” still need trusted arbiters.
America’s AI Backlash Grows: Local resistance to AI is moving from abstract fear to blocked data centres, political pushback, and worker anxiety.

Crypto & Tech

Maple’s Credit Market Test: GLC Research breaks down how Maple’s lending business performed through Q1 volatility across AUM, revenue, liquidity, and borrower demand.
Credit Beyond Borrow-Lend: Cork’s thread frames credit markets as a broader risk-pricing layer, not just another lending primitive. (Partial access only.)
Prediction Markets Hit Reality: Bloomberg takes a more sceptical look at whether Kalshi and Polymarket are actually forecasting machines or just better-shaped gambling venues.
Hyperliquid’s Wall Street Moment: 21Shares argues Hyperliquid is becoming legible to Wall Street as always-on market infrastructure, not merely a crypto perps venue.
Private AI Goes Onchain: A thread on private AI inference and why decentralised AI may be less about open models and more about private access. (Partial access only.)
Who Pays The Agent?: Keyrock maps the emerging agent-payment stack and why sub-dollar machine transactions break the card-era payments model.
State Of Crypto Perps: CoinGecko’s 2026 report traces the growth of perpetuals, the rise of DEX venues, and why perps are moving beyond crypto-native speculation.

Finance & Economy

SpaceX’s Private Market Jackpot: A private-market power-law story on how a SpaceX IPO could deliver enormous returns for early backers. (Paywalled)
Prediction Markets Go Public: Matt Levine frames prediction markets as the new workaround for private-market opacity, especially as retail investors seek exposure to companies like SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic.
SpaceX Investors Can’t Complain: In this one, Levine looks at SpaceX’s giant IPO pitch and the strange logic of complaining about governance after buying into the Elon Musk machine.
Compute Becomes A Commodity: ICE wants to launch compute-power futures, turning AI infrastructure into something markets can price, hedge, and trade.
The Startup Deal Playbook: A practical guide to how crypto and startup acquisitions actually work once founders move from narrative to negotiation.
Sohn’s AI Market Lessons: a16z pulls together market charts from Sohn to show how investors are pricing AI, power, chips, and infrastructure.
Let The Bubble Flow: A useful essay on rolling bubbles, passive flows, and why modern markets may inflate and rotate faster than older cycles.
Markets Copy The Future: A sharp piece on the “mimetic premium” — how markets first buy the symbols of a future before separating real economics from wrappers.
Bubbles Don’t Burst Cleanly: The author compares today’s AI trade with past bubbles and argues that recovery and collapse rarely happen in one clean move.

AI & Innovation

AI’s Data Centre Problem: Gallup finds Americans are increasingly opposed to AI data centres near them, turning AI infrastructure into a local-politics problem.
AI’s Fake Legal Cases: Scientific American explains why lawyers keep citing hallucinated cases, and why the deeper problem is not AI error but human over-trust under pressure.
Meta’s AI Layoff Moment: A story on how AI restructuring is reshaping Meta’s workforce, culture, and internal pressure. (Paywalled)
Build The Internal Agent: Auditless makes the case that the best workplace AI agents should live inside shared Slack channels, where context and adoption compound publicly.
AI Is Too Expensive: Ed Zitron argues that the AI boom still has not solved its basic economic problem: enormous costs without convincing margins.
Autonomous Agents Need Infrastructure: A thread on the technical and economic stack autonomous agents need before they can become more than demos. (Partial access only)
The Bull Case Ends: A darker AI-markets essay arguing that the most important tail risk in the AI bull case may be impossible to hedge.
AI Eats The World: Benedict Evans’ latest presentation deck gives a broad strategic map of where AI sits in the longer platform cycle.
The Physical AI Map: Canonical breaks down robotics and physical AI funding, helping separate serious infrastructure buildout from hype.
What Comes After Automation: A thoughtful essay on why automation does not eliminate human work as much as raise the premium on judgment, taste, and oversight.
Citizens Building AI Evals: A strong argument for teaching people to evaluate AI systems rather than treating model assessment as something only labs can do.

Culture & Beyond

Nourish And Consumer Health: A consumer-health company profile that doubles as a broader bet on nutrition, behaviour change, and the next decade of health startups.
How Money Changes Lifestyle: A blunt essay on how wealth changes life in tiers, often in ways people only understand after crossing them.
How Money Changed Me: A more reflective companion piece on what money fixes, what it exposes, and what it never really solves.
The ROI Of Joy: A personal essay on the psychological cost of turning even happiness, leisure, and relationships into return calculations.
Make Immigration Boring: Aeon argues that migration debates need less moral theatre and more sober thinking about numbers, tradeoffs, rights, and long-term population policy.
Rights Need Money: A powerful essay on why human rights cannot be separated from tax, debt, public finance, and the global rules that decide who actually has money to fund them.
The Doomsday Math Problem: A fascinating Scientific American piece on the “doomsday argument,” the eerie probability puzzle that tries to estimate how far humanity may be from its end.

What I Am Reading & Watching

I finished Scott Galloway’s Notes on Being a Man this fortnight.

I picked it up after pausing Reporting from Ramallah, which I found difficult to read. The individual chapters were short, the context kept shifting quickly, and I wanted something more continuous for the week. Galloway’s book gave me that.

It is not a perfect book, but it was captivating. At its weakest, it can sound a little too prescriptive, as if complex gender conversations can be reduced to a few rules for young men. But at its best, it does something badly needed right now: it makes space to talk about boys and men without turning that conversation into a ‘he vs she’ conversation.

@goodreads

The personal aspects of the book stayed with me the most. Galloway writes about being raised by a single mother, the absence and complexity of male role models, his own anger, body image, ambition, insecurity, parenthood, and what it means to raise sons without passing down the worst parts of masculinity. The book is strongest when it simply notes and discusses how masculinity can take confusing forms rather than defining it.

The chapters on body image were particularly interesting. We often talk about body image as a woman’s issue. But young men are also growing up inside a visual economy that constantly measures them: their height, muscles, jawlines, income, social status, dating success, and perceived usefulness. Galloway discusses all this without making it sound like a competition of suffering.

This fortnight, I don’t yet know what I’ll watch next. But after a book like this, I might need something lighter. Write back to me if you have any recommendations.

That’s all for this fortnight. Catch you in the next edition.

Until then, happy reading!
Prathik

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The Saturday Reading List: Week 18-19 📚

Prathik Desai — Sat, 09 May 2026 17:21:54 GMT

Hello

Welcome to Edition 8 of The Reading List — your fortnightly antidote to the noise. We moved our reading list edition to Saturday last fortnight and are sticking with it this time as well.

The Fortnight That Was

The conflict in the Strait of Hormuz is far from over. The celebrations following U.S. President Donald Trump’s announcement of ‘Project Freedom’ were cut short last week, after he paused the plan that involved the U.S. military guiding stranded merchant ships through the Strait.

Although conversations around ceasefires have advanced considerably in the past fortnight, they remain on fragile sheets of paper, with recurring violations reported from both sides.

The U.S. and Iran are still talking through proposals for an interim deal. Iran has accused the U.S. of breaching the ceasefire, while the U.S. says it acted after Iranian attacks on naval assets in the Strait. So, the direction is not clear yet.

But markets didn’t seem too bothered with all this, or perhaps they had already priced in the conflict and corrected quite a bit.

In the past fortnight, both Bitcoin and equities inched over 2% higher. Oil remained elevated and volatile due to ongoing activity in the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of global oil consumption passes. Gold and silver stayed weak despite the geopolitical backdrop, both ending lower over the fortnight.

BTC holders had their reasons to cheer as it crossed the $80,000 mark for the first time in three months last fortnight. Since the war began, BTC price has shot up 20% while crude oil is up ~53%. On Friday, the S&P 500 closed at a record high above 7,400 points for the first time ever. A robust earnings week from Amazon, Alphabet and Meta, three of the Magnificent 7, drove up the equities. Although the crisis in Iran is far from over, the markets appear to have stopped panicking.

As always, none of this stopped the crypto ecosystem from having enough activity to talk about.

At Token Dispatch, we spent the fortnight looking at the parts of crypto that are trying to become less fragile, less cyclical, and more useful.

We started with Galaxy’s De-Correlation Test, in which I explained how Galaxy Digital’s operating businesses are beginning to decouple from pure crypto price cycles. Its digital assets segment stayed roughly stable even as crypto prices fell sharply, while Helios gives it a shot at building earnings from AI infrastructure without relying excessively on token exposure.

In The Art of Professional Stalling, Thejaswini explored how the Clarity Act is caught between lobbying, yield restrictions, and political delays, even as the product continues to grow without waiting for permission.

Then, I explored what makes BTC miners’ pivots into AI infrastructure and HPC perfectly timed. In Miners’ New Lease of Life, I discuss how Bitcoin miners can convert power and land into data centre value.

In “Is Ethena Making Money?“, Thejaswini traced how USDe’s economics depend on funding rates, collateral returns, and the behaviour of yield-seeking capital.

Vaidik wrote Crypto’s K-Shaped Thesis, arguing that crypto’s infrastructure is working well even when many liquid tokens are not. The industry is becoming more useful to exchanges, payment companies, banks, and traders than to the token holders who funded the dream.

I then looked at Can PMs Win the Perps Race?, after Kalshi and Polymarket moved toward perps while Hyperliquid moved toward event contracts. Everyone wants to become the everything exchange; the harder question is who already owns liquidity, leverage, and user habit.

Then, in Japan Just Put Its $9T Bond Market On-chain, Vaidik explained why tokenisation becomes serious when it touches collateral plumbing. Japan’s JGB experiment with Canton is a reminder that the boring back office may be where blockchain gets its most institutional use case.

We are working on more interesting stories in the days to come. But until then, this reading list will keep you in good company for the weekend.

Regulation & Policy

Polymarket’s Shaky U.S. Homecoming: The Information reports that Polymarket’s U.S. comeback has been slowed by executive churn, infrastructure delays, and questions around its nominal U.S. CEO.
The New Boogeyman: Molly White tracks the escalating crypto-politics circus around World Liberty Financial, Justin Sun, Trump-linked crypto interests, and pro-crypto lobbying.
Everyone’s a Loser: A commentary on the WSJ’s Polymarket profitability story, asking whether prediction markets are harsh or simply behave like most professionalised trading venues.

Crypto & Tech

Finance’s Digital Transformation, Finally: a16z crypto argues that blockchains are finally pushing finance through the kind of software-native transformation other industries saw decades ago.
Why Coinbase Wins in an AI-Native Finance World: Artemis makes the bull case that Coinbase is being mispriced as an exchange, while its upside may come from USDC, Base, x402, and agentic payments.
How On-Chain Infra Helps the Application Layer: A thread on how Polymarket and Hyperliquid are winning across the services they provide by optimising the underlying blockchain technology.
Hyperliquid Q1 2026 Report: Hyperliquid Research Collective’s Q1 report tracks the venue’s financial performance, ecosystem progress, and its push toward becoming a broader “house of all finance.”
State of Tokenisation Q1 2026: Pantera’s report maps a $320.6B tokenisation market across 593 assets and shows how the RWA stack is becoming a measurable institutional category.
The Six Layers of Stablecoin Payment Infrastructure: Paxos breaks stablecoin payments into licensing, onboarding, custody, funding, payout, and conversion.
Why Stripe Built Its Own Chain: Decentralised.co explains Stripe’s crypto acquisitions as a move to own more layers of the cross-border payments stack rather than merely process card transactions.
The Truth About Onchain Yield: Kelly Ye’s piece asks the question investors should ask before chasing DeFi yield: where does the return actually come from, and what risk is being hidden?
The State of Stablecoin Infrastructure Q2 2026: Verda’s interactive stablecoin map tracks 3,873 companies across stablecoin issuance, payments, ramps, agentic payments, RWAs, wallets, and compliance.

Finance & Economy

By the Time It IPOs, You’ve Missed It: A sharp private-markets opener on how the economic life of major companies now happens before public investors ever see an S-1.
Banking Beyond the Law: Aeon explores hawala-style underground banking networks and why informal trust-based money systems keep outpacing state-controlled finance.
Spending Money for Maximum Return: A practical essay arguing that the best use of money is not more stuff, but buying back time, energy, attention, and optionality.
Young Indonesians on the Debt Treadmill: A consumer-finance story on how young Indonesians are getting trapped by easy credit, pay-later products, and debt rollovers.
The Great $110 Trillion Wealth Transfer Won’t Happen Any Time Soon: WSJ argues the much-hyped boomer wealth transfer will be slower and messier than expected because older Americans are living longer, spending more, and often passing wealth first to spouses.
Sell the Electricity No One Is Using: Matt Levine explains energy efficiency as a financial product and how selling saved electricity rather than adding more supply.
Scarce Assets: Packy McCormick argues that abundance in technology and capital will make genuinely scarce assets, like teams, brands, art, land, and status, even more valuable.
The Most Spectacularly Wrong Thesis: A satirical take on why the Nasdaq tripling over the next few years may sound insane, but might not be as absurd as past “obvious top” calls looked in hindsight.

AI & Innovation

The AI Stack: Chamath maps AI into six layers, infrastructure, chips, data, models, execution, and applications, to think through where value may accrue.
The Quiet Bundling: Free Systems shows how coding agents often default to their own APIs and even appoint themselves as judges when writing code for AI models.
The Work of Knowledge in the Age of AI Reproduction: Rex Woodbury extends Walter Benjamin’s “aura” framework to AI, arguing that knowledge artefacts are becoming cheap while judgment and provenance become scarcer.
Apocalypse No: Scott Galloway pushes back against the simplistic “AI will take all jobs” narrative and reframes the AI labour debate in more grounded terms.
AI Isn’t Coming for Your Job. It’s Coming for Your Mind: Baillie Gifford’s Tom Slater argues AI’s bigger impact may be cognitive: outsourcing effort, weakening memory, and changing how humans learn.
Training AI to Govern for Us: A Stanford GSB classroom experiment on building AI agents that can represent people’s preferences in legislative-style simulations.

Culture & Beyond

The Eye in Your Pocket: Carissa Véliz argues that digital devices are not neutral tools; they are artefacts designed around surveillance, prediction, and control.
If the Quantum Canary Sings, It’s Too Late: Nic Carter argues Bitcoin cannot wait for a clean early-warning signal on quantum risk because by the time the “canary” moves, the damage may already be done.
Four Culture Fixes: Robin Hanson proposes four broad cultural interventions to address long-standing coordination and institutional failures.

What I Am Watching & Reading

I am halfway through Scott Galloway’s Notes on Being a Man.

Scott writes like he's having a conversation he refuses to make polite, and that actually keeps me turning pages even when it reads harsh at some places. Some chapters feel like a punch in your face. But what I love the most about his writing is that there are parts where he spares the bravado and gets genuinely vulnerable about fatherhood, failure and the dynamics of parenting two sons in his middle age.

There are many points in the book where it asks you to sit with the discomfort of thinking about what he says. It feels nice in a way that’s hard to put in words. But it surely feels like a book worth a read.

On the watching front, I plan to circle back to some of the old Indian classics in the weeks to come, the kind that you always mean to watch but never quite get around to. This fortnight, I hopefully will.

I plan to start with Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali. A dear friend has been coaxing me to watch how Ray shows deeply human themes like poverty and aspiration on the screen.

So between Scott and Satyajit, this weekend looks packed.

Write back to us with any recommendations through the next fortnight that you think we should include in the upcoming edition.👇🏾

That’s all for this fortnight. Catch you in the next edition.

Until then, happy reading!
Prathik

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The Saturday Reading List: Week 16-17 📚

Prathik Desai — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 11:30:06 GMT

Welcome to Edition 7 of The ~~Friday~~ Saturday Reading List — your fortnightly antidote to the noise. My editor felt the curated list would land better on a Saturday, instead of a Friday. So here we are! I hope you spot this in your inbox on a relatively free Saturday morning that lets you sit back and read some of these picks.

Every two weeks, I share my favourite literature across crypto, finance, technology, culture, and beyond. I also share what I’m watching and reading.

Hello,

The past fortnight felt like the market briefly exhaled amid all the war and macro uncertainties. I know the war is still far from over. The ceasefire is fragile, and a durable solution still feels far away. But markets seemed tired of moving with each announcement about war.

For now, the markets are pricing in what the next move would be.

The Fortnight That Was

Risk assets, including equities and BTC, recovered well in the last two weeks, while oil has given back a chunk of its war premium even as the Strait of Hormuz remains far from fully operational.

Bitcoin rose about 6.6% through the fortnight, while the S&P 500 gained 6.2%.

Oil moved the other way. USOIL fell about 9.4%. That is probably the clearest sign that traders saw less immediate risk of a wider supply shock, even if the Strait of Hormuz question has not disappeared.

Despite multiple hacks and exploits in the last fortnight, builders in crypto infrastructure kept building and deploying. Both incumbent prediction market giants, Polymarket and Kalshi, announced the launch of perpetual futures trading.

Our team at Token Dispatch has written extensively on some of these topics.

I started with Ethena in When the Yield Runs Out, where I examined how USDe’s once crypto-native yield machine is now leaning into equities, commodities, institutional lending, prime brokerage, and RWAs to survive across more than one market regime. Ethena’s new strategy is diversification, but the old liquidity mismatch problem has not disappeared.

In another piece, Capital Budgeting, But On-Chain, I explained how Aave’s $25 million capital allocation vote shows DeFi moving beyond into a territory where it enabled token holders take capital budgeting decisions.

Thejaswini followed with The Fed Chair’s Portfolio, where she broke down the disclosed exposure of incoming U.S. Fed Governor candidate Kevin Warsh to Solana, Optimism, and many other crypto infrastructure companies.

She then wrote The Quantum Race is a Governance Test, in which she explains why quantum risk is not just a cryptography problem. She cites Bitcoin debates, Ethereum research, and how Tron can move fast because it is more centralised than it likes to admit.

Vaidik closed the fortnight with Why Google’s Billions Couldn’t Fix African Internet, a DePIN story that explains how Share is trying to fix the broken middle layer between African submarine cables and last-mile ISPs, using crypto.

You can see the theme running across the fortnight.

Even when the world outside crypto remains unstable, those within the ecosystem are busy building and deploying despite hacks, governance fights, and political conflicts.

Our team has lined up more stories around these themes for the coming fortnight. Until then, here’s a curated reading list to give you good company.

Regulation & Policy

The Tokenisation of Stocks: A useful map of the public, private, and in-between structures emerging as tokenised equities move from wrappers to market infrastructure.
What Can Be Tokenised?: Franklin Templeton’s broad reminder that tokenisation is not just stocks, but spans funds, bonds, commodities, private credit, real estate, and more.
A Guide to Crypto Crime: Amid ongoing hacks and exploits, Arkham has put together a taxonomy of crypto crime, from pig-butchering and drainers to mixers, bridges, ransomware, and laundering patterns.
Satoshi Coins Without a Freeze: Nic Carter argues for a cleaner Bitcoin quantum-transition path that deals with dormant Satoshi-era coins without resorting to a blunt freeze.

Crypto & Tech

Perps Are Coming to Polymarket: Polymarket’s next move pushes prediction markets closer to trading infrastructure, with leverage entering the product stack.
Kalshi Markets: Kalshi is turning sports prediction markets from betting-like products into trading venues.
Concentrated Liquidity for Lending: A DeFi lending idea that borrows from concentrated liquidity design to make lending markets more capital-efficient.
Airwallex Enters In-Store Payments: A payments-stack thread on why the next fintech challenge may be around building offline checkout, and not merely cross-border digital rails.
IR & Token Transparency in 2026: Novora benchmarks 150+ protocols and shows the gap between on-chain revenue visibility and actual investor-grade reporting.
Tokenised RWAs: $16 Trillion by 2030: Theo’s case for why today’s RWA market still looks tiny against the institutional asset classes tokenisation wants to absorb.
The Rise of Composable RWAs: Dune argues that what RWAs can be used as collateral, can be looped and composed inside DeFi, is more important than just tokenising all RWAs.
Beyond the Flywheel: Galaxy argues that DATs cannot survive as passive balance-sheet wrappers; they need staking, MEV, DeFi yield, or real operating models.

Finance & Economy

Uncharted Waters: Capriole reads Bitcoin’s macro, technical, and on-chain signals as quietly constructive despite AI-security fears and geopolitical volatility.
The Most Future-Proof Job: Shopify argues that entrepreneurship may be the safer hedge in the AI-era as business creation becomes cheaper and traditional jobs look shakier.
Break Now, Fix Later: Scott Galloway brings his wit to turning the White House ballroom fight into a broader critique of political destruction without credible rebuilding.
Apple’s Hardware Succession: Apple’s reported Cook-to-Ternus transition raises the question of whether hardware discipline can fix Apple’s AI-era drift.

AI & Innovation

The Future of Entertainment Is Interactive: Dylan Abruscato argues that entertainment will transcend its current passive viewing format to one in which audiences begin participating in the show itself.
The Agentic Economy Will Be Massive. Agentic Commerce Won’t: Dragonfly pushes back on the easy “agents need stablecoins” thesis by asking how many agents will actually need to transact.
Google’s $40B Anthropic Bet: Google deepens its Anthropic exposure, turning the AI race into an even more capital-intensive fight between cloud, compute, and model labs.
DeepSeek’s China Capital Moment: Tencent and Alibaba reportedly circling DeepSeek shows China’s AI champions are becoming national-scale strategic assets.
Mythos Accessed by Unauthorised Users: Bloomberg’s report on unauthorised access to Mythos is an example of why frontier AI security is now a market-structure issue.
5 Ways Blockchains Help AI Agents: a16z crypto lays out where blockchains can matter for agents: identity, payments, governance, trust, and user control.
Claude Design: Anthropic’s design product pushes Claude deeper into creative workflows, from prototypes and pitch decks to branded visual systems.

Culture & Beyond

The Art of Comparison: A thoughtful essay on personal finance that talks about comparing without letting envy, status games, or wealth ladders ruin your sense of progress.
The Mathematical Reason Most People Never Make It: A psychological essay on why outcomes are often nonlinear, delayed, and less forgiving than motivation culture suggests.
Does Reading Do Us Any Good?: Aeon makes the case for literature as a means of preserving attention, memory, and personal freedom.
How Darkness Might Save Migratory Birds: Scientific American explains how switching off artificial lights during migration windows can materially reduce bird deaths.
Justice Is Geometric: Aeon uses African fractal societies to show how bottom-up systems can encode reciprocity, circulation, and fairness without a single centre.

What I Am Watching & Reading

I had picked up Reporting from Ramallah last fortnight and made it through roughly a third of the book.

Amira Hass’ writing is sharp, humane, and observant. But I paused there because the book’s structure was hurting my reading rhythm. The chapters are short, almost like dispatches, and the context switches quickly from one piece to the next. Each article deserves attention, but reading them back-to-back made the experience feel slightly fragmented. It is the kind of book I think I’ll return to slowly, one or two pieces at a time, rather than race through in a week.

So, I moved to Scott Galloway’s Notes on Being a Man.

I’ve only just started, but it already reads like one that annoys, provokes, and occasionally makes the reader nod in agreement. Galloway starts with that familiar bluntness that I adore in his witty No Mercy/No Malice newsletter. More on the book in the next edition.

On the watching front, I’m planning to watch Hamnet this weekend.

I can’t wait to watch Oscar-winning Jessie Buckley play her character. Her versatility as an artist surprised me in The Bride!, even though the film itself was messy. There’s something about her screen presence that makes one want to keep watching how she carries her character even when the story around her is wobbling.

It’s going to be a packed weekend, but perhaps a good one.

Write back to us with any recommendations through the next fortnight that you think we should include in the upcoming edition.👇🏾

That’s all for this fortnight. Catch you in the next edition.

Until then, happy reading!
Prathik

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The Friday Reading List: Week 14-15 📚

Prathik Desai — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 12:42:30 GMT

Welcome to Edition 6 of The Friday Reading List — your fortnightly antidote to the noise. Every two weeks, I share my favourite literature across crypto, finance, technology, culture, and beyond. I also share what I’m watching and reading, because if this newsletter were only about charts and tokens, I’d have bored myself out of writing it by now.

Hello,

“There are no winners in war.” The events happening around us are the perfect testimony to this quote.

Just two days ago, the world was rejoicing over a two-week ceasefire agreement that the U.S. and Iran had managed to reach. Those on the ground, in the line of fire, celebrated the lives and property that the deal could save. Others, like me, living thousands of miles away, didn’t know what that felt like. But we still celebrated. Ironically, not just the lives that could be spared, but the recovery capital markets and portfolios witnessed.

Iranian demonstrators celebrating the two-week ceasefire [Vahid Salemi/AP Photo]

Within 48 hours of signing the ceasefire, both countries were back to threatening withdrawal from the truce. The reason? Israel continued its strike in Lebanon. Markets responded by paring some of the gains made after the ceasefire was announced. They processed everything in real-time, and they had to. Whether the ceasefire holds or lives are saved, the trades must be settled. That’s how the global economy expresses itself - through pricing the events.

This tension drove many developments in the past fortnight across crypto and finance. Let’s get started.

The Fortnight That Was

Over the last two weeks, the traditional markets (S&P 500), Bitcoin and commodities (Gold and Silver) moved in strict alignment. Both BTC and S&P 500 closed the fortnight with modest single-digit gains. BTC crossed $71,000 for the first time in two weeks on April 7 as the U.S. and Iran struck a ceasefire agreement.

@tradingview

Crude oil was the most volatile asset, driven by uncertainty about the resumption of shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. After rising 24% between March 27 and April 7, the oil price gave up all those gains in just one day when the ceasefire agreement was struck. But it rose by 6% in the next two days as nations continued to threaten withdrawal from the truce.

There’s still a lot more noise that went around in the markets, but we focused on writing about the things underneath the geopolitical crisis.

I started the fortnight by discussing the unbundling of financial markets, drawing on events such as the U.S.-Israel-Iran war. In this piece, we discussed how the old system that bundled the market across venue, wrapper, and time is now unbundling due to more efficient markets elsewhere.

Thejaswini wrote about why Canton has stopped playing defence and started lobbying regulators about the risks posed by zero-knowledge proofs to institutional finance.

Vaidik unpacked the Coinbase-Better-Fannie Mae mortgage product that lets Bitcoin holders borrow against their holdings to purchase a home without triggering a taxable event. He also wrote about why the structural design makes it different from the 2021-era crypto lending collapses.

In a quantitative analysis earlier this week, I deconstructed Polymarket’s fee overhaul and wrote about how its bell-curve pricing model could improve execution quality rather than just extract fees from traders.

Thejaswini followed up with a piece on why the U.S. Department of Labour is exploring the option of investing Americans’ 401(k) retirement savings in crypto.

We have got a lot more in store for you in the coming weeks. But here are some readings to keep you company until then.

Regulation & Policy

An Interactive Guide to GENIUS Implementation: A useful map of the implementation phase of the GENIUS Act after legislation.
Is Everything a Swap?: A note on how the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (2010) was enacted to catch both old derivatives and clever new wrappers that try to dodge the same rules.
How Prediction Markets Turned the World Into a Casino: A mainstream framing of the Kalshi-Polymarket moment, where the line between trading and gambling looks less principled.

Crypto & Tech

Lessons from Six Months in Agentic Payments: A note on what actually starts to matter once you spend time close to agentic payments instead of just appreciating the demo.
The CT Ceiling: A good reminder that crypto-native distribution is not the same thing as product-market fit; if you market only within CT, you eventually run out of room.
TAO and the Free Rider Problem: A bear case on Bittensor: what if TAO finances the upside, but the upside never accrues back to TAO?
Which Blockchain Will AI Choose?: A practical question that asks not what humans want to use, but what rational agents would choose for payments, discovery and trust.
Future of Onchain Liquidity Routing: As DeFi liquidity fragments further, routing starts to look less like a convenience layer and more like core market infrastructure.
When Risk Engines Become Moats: Our partners at Decentralised.Co explain why Hyperliquid’s risk engine that lets new markets scale without blowing up the venue is its biggest moat.
Trade’s Markets Thesis: A bigger-picture perspective on how perps turn into technological infrastructure by spreading across asset classes
USDe Backing Diversification: This explains why Ethena wants USDe to have a more diversified backing mix if it wants to survive more than one type of market regime.
Hunt for Satoshi Raises Existential Risks: Less about identity porn, more about why crypto still seems desperate for a breakthrough founder myth. (paywall)
Our Quest Not to Solve Bitcoin’s Great Mystery: FT leans into the absurdity of the endless Satoshi-candidate industry. (paywall)
Why I Think Satoshi Is No Longer With Us: Nic Carter presents an interesting counterpoint to the latest wave of Satoshi sleuthing.

Finance & Economy

How Private Equity Became Hooked on Second-Hand Deals: A timely look at how secondaries have become a liquidity machine for private capital when traditional exits do not quite show up. (paywall)
Strait of Hormuz: A Citrini Field Trip: Probably the most literal macro research here: go to the choke point itself and ask what the market is getting wrong. (paywall)
Inside the Funnel: What reviewing 2,000 funds teaches you about how crowded, filtered and power-law-driven venture really is.
A Stablecoin-Native U.S. Bank for the Innovation Economy: One of the clearest tests yet of whether a US bank can be built stablecoin-native from day one rather than retrofit crypto later.
Stablecoins for Neobanks: An operating thesis for why stablecoins matter to neobanks. It explains how they compress cross-border payments, yield products and market expansion into one stack.
Prediction Market Leverage Landscape: A useful map of the leverage models being built around prediction markets, and the structural places where they can break.
The Anxiety Economy: Why Trading Explodes: Explains why trading booms: less greed, more the feeling that passive compounding will not get people where they need to go.
Buy Bitcoin at Night: Matt Levine’s commentary on the overnight anomaly and the strange appeal of packaging Bitcoin’s after-hours edge into a product.
Bad Analogies: An important rebuttal to the lazy habit of calling every cash-burning AI company “the next Amazon.”

AI & Innovation

From Hierarchy to Intelligence: Jack Dorsey’s provocation that AI does not just change productivity, it may change the org chart itself.
Agents Will Become Companies — Thread: Sreeram’s thesis in short form: crypto plus AI can create internet-native firms with agents, assets and capital of their own.
Agents Will Become Companies: The fuller version of that thesis, and a more convincing case than most AI x crypto fluff for why agents might become actual business entities.
AI as a Transaction-Cost Shock: A sharp Coasean idea: if AI crushes transaction costs, the shape of the firm itself starts to change.
Infinite Midwit: One of the better essays on why better AI has made some people calmer, not more terrified; the machine is tireless and informed, but still weirdly mid at the center.
AI Captured 80% of Global Venture Funding: A sobering reminder that venture is starting to look less like a broad market and more like a giant capital-allocation machine for frontier AI.

Culture & Beyond

Principles: A dense list on speed, risk, writing, integrity and output that reads better as craft advice than life-hack content.
Giggles: The most 2026 startup origin story imaginable: a fake app joke, a Minecraft YouTuber, a meme prediction market, and somehow real money.
Catastrophe Markets: A serious ethical essay on what it means when disaster itself becomes a tradable spectacle.

What I Am Watching & Reading

Last week, I picked up another non-fiction on geopolitical crisis after completing Betty Mahmoody’s Not Without My Daughter.

Amira Hass’ Reporting from Ramallah is a collection of short stories from the reportage of an Israeli journalist in the occupied land.

I am only 30 pages into this collection, but there’s one thing that Amira doesn’t let me forget through the book. It’s the multidimensional crisis that contrasts with how popular media often portrays civil war. There are accounts of Israel as a state versus the Israeli people; Palestine versus the Palestinian people; each against the other, and each against themselves.

It shows you how a crisis is never binary, but layered.

@Goodreads

I also watched Project Hail Mary a couple of weeks back. There’s so much to argue for expert reviewers in terms of the validity of science and logic. I will leave that to them.

What stood out most to me was how it portrayed the human-alien relationship. In that regard, it does what Interstellar tried to do with love across dimensions, except it’s even better here. Less metaphysics, more conversation. All that an average human relates to - love, compassion, and companionship.

That’s all for this fortnight. Catch you in the next edition.

Write back to us with any recommendations through the next fortnight that you think we should include in the upcoming edition.👇🏾

That’s all for this fortnight. Catch you in the next edition.

Until then, happy reading!
Prathik

📩 Fill out this form to submit your details and book a meeting with us directly.

The Friday Reading List: Week 12-13 📚

Prathik Desai — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 11:35:16 GMT

Hello,

Welcome to Edition 5 of The Friday Reading List — your fortnightly antidote to the noise. Every two weeks, I share my favourite literature across crypto, finance, technology, culture, and beyond. I also share what I’m watching and reading, because if this newsletter were only about charts and tokens, I’d have bored myself out of writing it by now.

Four editions in, and the reading list keeps growing, the recap keeps getting meatier, and the puzzle from the last edition seems to have stumped a few of you. The right answer was: ‘MINER, AGENT, CREDIT, NODES → MINTED’.

With that out of the way, let’s get started with this edition.

The Fortnight That Was

The US-Israel-Iran war that dominated the last edition continued to impact markets over the last two weeks, but with a different story this time.

With tension simmering in the Strait of Hormuz, uncertainty remains in the markets. Oil, which had spiked over 60% in the first week of March, gave away half of those gains in the fortnight. USOIL slipped 1.5% in the last two weeks, yet it is up 30% since the war started.

Gold and silver continued to slip further, worsening their reputation as commodities expected to thrive in uncertainty. Gold dropped over 13% this fortnight, while Silver fell even harder, losing 17%. Whether that’s profit-taking after the record rally until January end, or margin calls forcing liquidations, or the market deciding the conflict is priced in, the move is striking. Since the war started on February 27-28, silver is down over 26% and gold 17%.

Bitcoin slipped about 4% in the past fortnight, despite touching $76,000 for the first time since February 4. For the full month, it moved almost sideways with just 2% gains. The S&P 500 continued its slide, losing about 3% over the last two weeks and nearly 5% for the month. The dollar stayed flat.

At Token Dispatch, our team covered broader shifts in the ecosystem beyond the price charts.

We focused on regulation, execution quality, payment rails, privacy, and AI pricing — five separate stories that paint a dynamic picture of an industry that speaks about how fast it’s growing, failing and learning, contrary to how dull the price charts may make it look.

The fortnight opened with me asking if and when a system should slow you down. In Finance Needs Speed and Brakes, I dived deep into the Aave–CoW swap fiasco, where a user lost nearly $50 million in a single transaction because no meaningful brake existed between intent and execution. I traced this by recounting the history of strategic friction, from seatbelt reminders in cars to Pay.UK’s Confirmation of Payee. The piece argues that in finance, safeguards aren’t something you build after product-market fit.

My colleague, TJ, followed with AI Agents Are Coming for Visa’s Lunch, in which she contextualised recent events in the AI Agentic economy, including Tempo’s mainnet launch, Visa’s CLI tool for agent payments, Mastercard’s BVNK acquisition, and Circle’s testing of Nanopayments for agents. The piece maps out how x402, Tempo, and the Machine Payments Protocol are building the rails for a customer that doesn’t need what made Visa great.

Vaidik then explained why the $33 trillion stablecoin market still struggles to keep salaries private in Crypto’s Open Secret. Researchers have extracted spending habits, peak sales times, and average order values from businesses that accept crypto, all straight off the public ledger. The piece walks through how Aleo, a Layer 1 blockchain where privacy is the default rather than a bolt-on, is building the infrastructure to fix this.

While the Crypto Twitter (CT) was busy resharing Bittensor’s $TAO price charts (and making me regret missing the trade, yet again), I wrote about why Bittensor’s public pricing of AI can be a game-changer. AI valuation today is decided by a select few in closed-door meetings. In Bittensor and the Public Price of AI, I explained how the model lets AI stakeholders finance, build, validate, and price AI projects in public, in real time.

TJ brought the fortnight home with “What Took So Long,” in which she questions the long-pending regulatory clarity that finally arrived on March 17. The SEC and CFTC published a joint framework that categorises every token into one of five buckets: digital commodity, digital security, stablecoin, digital collectibles, or digital tool. The clarity might still not do its job if the CLARITY Act, which sets these definitions in stone, gets stuck in the Senate.

Stop Switching Tabs. Switch to Velo.

Tab 1: Charts. Tab 2: News. Tab 3: Trading Terminal. Tab 4: Why are you living like this?

You’re tracking a chart, something moves, and you switch to check the news. By the time you take a call and make a trade on your terminal, the moment’s gone. You’ve missed the valuable few seconds.

I didn’t know what to expect when I opened Velo. Maybe a different version of a zillion other trading platforms I’ve seen before. Instead, it welcomed me with a clean interface. With one click, I could connect my Hyperliquid and Bybit wallets and start trading.

Velo gives you everything you need, all at once

Real-time price charts and on-chain data, built for speed
Funding rates, open interest, and CVD — all without the extra tabs
Crypto news integrated directly into your chart workflow
Trading is live; analyse and execute without changing screens

The trading terminal lets you move between spot and futures trading with a click of a button on the same screen. You can even set customised news alerts from a feed populated by outlets like Bloomberg, Reuters, Financial Times, and WSJ, and track the price of any asset from the same screen. Try it here.

Start here 👇🏾

Velo

We have a lot more coming over the next two weeks. Before we get there, here’s some literature that will keep you in good company. Some of these could be behind a paywall. (Sorry!)

Regulation & Policy

Prediction Markets vs Sports Betting: A bipartisan Senate push to stop CFTC-regulated prediction venues from listing sports and casino-style contracts.
Grayscale’s HYPE Filing: The S-1 for Grayscale’s HYPE ETF shows Hyperliquid is already being translated into familiar TradFi wrapper language.

Crypto & Tech

State of Crypto Design: A useful argument that crypto’s bottleneck is no longer core infra but the human layer, including UX, brand, and design talent.
Everyday App Framework: A framework for why crypto still hasn’t shipped a true everyday consumer app, and which products come closest.
Why Drift, Why Now: Our partners at Decentralised.co lay out the case for Drift as a discounted bet on Solana’s perpetuals and future internet capital markets.
Hyperliquid’s Big Year: A year-in-review framing Hyperliquid as something larger than a perps venue, as it approximates a full on-chain exchange stack.
Meteora’s Holder Report: An investor-relations-style token-holder report built around cash flows, treasury, and buybacks.
Digital Dollar Ramps: A clean explainer on how Bridge-style virtual accounts compress the fiat-to-stablecoin conversion stack.
x402 vs MPP: A sharp breakdown of the emerging standards war in agent payments, per-request on-chain payments versus session-based, rail-agnostic settlement.
RWAs Are Different: Multicoin’s latest on why RWAs behave differently from earlier DeFi markets because they bring exogenous assets on-chain.
Nasdaq Meets Talos: A bridge story that explains why tokenised collateral is interesting only when it plugs into existing risk, surveillance, and collateral workflows.
S&P, But 24/7: A thread around trade[XYZ] bringing S&P-linked exposure into continuous, Hyperliquid-powered markets.
Argentina’s 8% Problem: A concise remittance wedge: sending money to Argentina is costly, and most of that drag appears to come from everything except FX itself.
Perps by 2030: A piece on how decentralised perpetual exchanges can take a material slice of options, futures, and CFD volume over time.
What Happens After TGE: Thoughts on the post-launch problem - when the product works, but price, liquidity, and community decay when there’s no durable value sink.
Micropayments Without Friction: A thread on continuous micropayments, batch settlement, and protocol-level abstraction across stablecoins and cards.

Finance & Economy

Debasement in Three Acts: A Rome-to-dollar-to-crypto essay on how empires use monetary resets to buy time, often at the expense of trust.
We Learned Nothing: Jerry Neumann’s attack on startup orthodoxy — once everyone follows the same playbook, differentiation disappears.
Collapse of Terminal Value: Chamath’s thought experiment on what happens to equity valuation if AI makes moats temporary and terminal value stops carrying the model.
Ozempicization of Everything: Kyla Scanlon on optimisation culture, quick fixes, and the economic psychology underneath gambling, health, and control.
Costless Sacrifice: Packy on why AI cheapens output and floods the zone, making effort itself a scarcer signal.
Post-Employment Era: A thread introducing the idea that the prestige and security once attached to employment are decaying.
Hitting the Battery Wall: An excellent systems piece on why humanoid robots may be constrained less by software ambition than by battery physics and replacement economics.
Kalshi at $22B: The funding headline matters less for the number itself than for how quickly prediction markets are being repriced as core market infrastructure.
24/7 Markets, Finally: A framing of how Trump-era headline risk and Hyperliquid-style perps are nudging always-on markets into the mainstream.
Oil, War, and Fragility: Balaji’s thread argues about how attacks on Middle Eastern oil infrastructure would spill over into the global economy.
Digital Finance in 2030: Artemis sketches a world where neobanks, lending, agentic payments, prediction markets, and trading are the five enduring pillars of blockchain-enabled finance.

AI & Innovation

Selling Yourself to AI: The Guardian writes on a new data-labour market where people sell voice, video, chats, and ambient life data to train models.
Your Agents Are Cheap: A piece that correlates agent quality with token spend, context, and compute budget more than prompt cleverness.
Agentic Utilities: Citrini’s read on the shift from AI as chatbot to AI as always-on service, and what that means for incumbents and losers.
AI Is a Stack: A thread arguing that the AI money is still flowing through the stack of power, chips, data centres, cloud, followed by models and apps.
ARK’s 2026 Big Ideas: ARK’s annual thematic deck spanning AI, robotics, biotech, space, and blockchain/fintech.
NVIDIA x Nebius: A large-scale infra story: NVIDIA is investing $2 billion in Nebius and backing a plan to deploy more than 5GW of systems by 2030.
Meta Pulls Back on VR Social: A telling metaverse retreat as Meta’s centre of gravity shifts away from the earlier bets.

Culture & Beyond

Be Seen Anyway: A punchy essay on how invisibility is becoming economically expensive in a world where trust, work, and reputation are increasingly public-facing.
Reading Socrates in Silicon Valley: An FT critique of tech-bro stoicism that uses philosophy to push back on shallow self-mythology.
Don’t Block the Archive: EFF’s case that shutting out the Internet Archive won’t stop AI scraping, but will destroy the web’s public memory.
The Forgotten Organ: A neat science read on why the thymus may matter more for long-term health and ageing than researchers assumed.
Look to Artists: A short philosophical video on attention and why art offers a counterweight to purely instrumental ways of seeing the world.

What I Am Watching & Reading

I finished Not Without My Daughter last week. Betty Mahmoody’s descriptions of 1980s Tehran, the crumbling streets, the checkpoints, the constant vigilance, stayed with me throughout this fortnight as the Iran conflict dominated the news. As I read the book, I felt a constant, humanitarian, relatability to the women and civilians living through what’s unfolding now that I hadn’t felt before.

It’s hard not to imagine what it’d be like for the civilians living through something equally tragic, if not worse, right now, with unexpected and sudden bombings and airstrikes rattling through the city.

A difficult but important read.

This fortnight, I’m looking forward to watching Project Hail Mary. A space sci-fi genre with Ryan Gosling starring in an Andy Weir adaptation is hard to pass up.

It’ll likely be an exciting first week of April.

Write back to us with any recommendations through the next fortnight that you think we should include in the upcoming edition.👇🏾

That’s all for this fortnight. Catch you in the next edition.

Until then, happy reading!
Prathik

📩 Fill out this form to submit your details and book a meeting with us directly.

The Friday Reading List: Week 10-11 📚

Prathik Desai — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 13:40:15 GMT

Hello,

Welcome to Edition 4 of The Friday Reading List — your fortnightly antidote to the noise. Every two weeks, I share my favourite literature across crypto, finance, technology, culture, and beyond. I also share what I’m watching and reading, because life shouldn’t be all about price charts and portfolio bags.

Three editions in, and the format is starting to feel less like an experiment and more like a habit. With each edition, the reading list is getting longer, and I’m finally resisting the urge to include every single thing I read. Progress, phew!

Speaking of progress, I managed to curate something fun for y’all! Solve the puzzle and write back to us with the answer, and a lucky winner will get a shoutout in the next edition.

Didn’t get the answer? Wait for us to reveal them in our next edition.

Now, for the past fortnight. Let’s start with what moved and what didn’t.

The Fortnight That Was

Let’s get the elephant out of the room first. The last two weeks were dominated by one story, and it wasn’t crypto.

The U.S. and Israel launched strikes on Iran on February 28, and the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and LNG shipments pass, was all but shut down. Oil did what oil does when supply arteries get squeezed: it panicked. USOIL spiked over 65% in a week before pulling back to around +37% by the time this edition goes out. Your timeline was likely flooded with memes about natural gas rationing, oil tanker rerouting, and people suddenly becoming armchair experts on Persian Gulf chokepoints.

The ripple effects were predictable yet painful. There’s no respite in sight as the world is gripped by uncertainty over the duration and extent of the war. Equities dropped in the past two weeks, with the S&P 500 down about 2.6%. Gold, which you’d expect to rally on war risk, instead fell 5%, while the dollar strengthened about 2.5%.

And then there’s Bitcoin. BTC climbed about 9% through all of this. Whether that’s a safe-haven signal or just crypto being decorrelated for once, I’ll leave for you to interpret.

Meanwhile, our bunch at Token Dispatch told stories about things that will probably stay relevant for longer than price movements and charts.

I started the fortnight by asking whether crypto can fix capital formation in Underwriting as Software. The piece traces the underwriting function from Edward Lloyd’s coffeehouse in 1688 to Hyperliquid’s HIP-6 proposal, arguing that whoever controls where a token is born captures the most durable fees in the ecosystem. A year ago, pump.fun-Raydium war was the proof; HIP-6 might be the next iteration.

Vaidik followed with Know Your Agent, a deep dive into the infrastructure gap between what AI agents can do and what they’re allowed to do. Automated traffic now exceeds human traffic on the web, yet confidence in autonomous agents has halved in the past year. The piece maps out the discovery, identity, and reputation layers that need to exist before an agent-driven economy can function at scale.

TJ explored what might become crypto’s most consequential distribution story in The Second Attempt. Meta is putting stablecoins into WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram, and this time, nobody is stopping them. The piece explains why the 2026 version is structurally different from Libra, why Stripe is the frontrunner to power it, and what it means for the 4 billion people who already use Meta’s apps daily.

Nishil wrote DeFi’s Capital Aggregator, where he unpacks how the vault ecosystem has unbundled into three specialised layers — protocol, curator, and distribution — and why over $6 billion flowed into on-chain vaults last year. The story gives us a glimpse of what the future of finance could be. The Crypto.com example shows how a retail user earning 4.82% on stablecoins, unknowingly backed by a Wall Street CLO fund tokenised through Centrifuge and managed by Janus Henderson.

I closed the fortnight with “Can DeFi Fix Private Credit?“, tracing the parallels between John Law’s Mississippi Bubble and the redemption crises affecting Blackstone, BlackRock, and Blue Owl’s private credit funds. In that piece, I explored whether on-chain private credit can fix the transparency and double-pledging problems, and what flaws it imports from the tradFi world.

We have a lot more coming over the next two weeks. Before we get there, here’s some literature that will keep you in good company. Some of these could be behind a paywall. (Sorry!)

Regulation & Policy

CFTC Offers First Guidance on Prediction Market Manipulation: The CFTC issues its first major advisory asking prediction market exchanges to consult regulators on manipulation-prone contracts

Crypto & Tech

The infrastructure story in DeFi is maturing fast. Vaults are scaling, lending is consolidating, and the platforms that control issuance are capturing the most durable revenue. Here’s what’s worth your time.

The “Investible” Crypto Tokens: Ignas combs through 17,000 tokens and finds only 132 worth holding amid the bear market; two protocols generate 69% of all holder revenue.
DeFi Lending Markets: Rosetta’s deep intelligence report on $45.6B in tracked DeFi lending TVL, Morpho overtaking Aave on Base, and the quiet rise of tokenised Treasury collateral.
Prediction Markets Won’t Scale Without Trust: Santiago Roel Santos argues insider trading is the single biggest growth constraint on prediction markets.
State of Crypto Leverage — Q4 2025: Galaxy Research walks through how on-chain lending declined with market prices, while CeFi lenders held steady through a historic liquidation event.
Coinbase launches Token Manager: Liquifi rebrands as Coinbase Token Manager, offering end-to-end token lifecycle tooling. including cap tables, vesting, compliance, and Prime custody in one platform.
Tether Invests in Eight Sleep at $1.5B: USDT-issuer makes a strategic health-tech bet, backing the AI-powered sleep company with plans to integrate its QVAC edge architecture.
What’s Kalshi’s Revenue?: A forensic analysis of all 203 million Kalshi trades, explaining how prediction markets work and how much money is flowing through them.
Coming of Age: My colleagues at Decentralised.co trace crypto’s shift from speculative premia to fundamentals
The Future of B2B Payments: Finance teams are finally treating payment infrastructure as strategic, not operational, and stablecoins are ready to step up.
The Financial Infrastructure Layer: Aave’s CEO makes the case that DeFi has solved supply-side liquidity and the next evolution is fixing the demand side.
Bringing the World On-Chain: How HIP-3 turns Hyperliquid into the “everything exchange”: global, open, and 24/7 financial markets.
In the Stables: The Rise of Yield-Bearing Stablecoins: Messari maps the quietly surging category that could reshape how passive dollars sit on-chain (behind paywall).
DeFi Is Becoming a Duopoly: DefiLlama’s data shows almost all revenue in most DeFi verticals is now captured by just the top two players.
Why Circle Thinks the Next Phase of Crypto Will Be About Payments: Circle is betting its future not on USDC alone, but on becoming the full infrastructure layer for internet-native money.
The $100B Revenue No One in Crypto Is Competing For: Trailer fees paid by global asset managers could become a recurring, AUM-linked revenue stream for tokenised fund issuers on-chain.
Fixed Rates Will Take DeFi Beyond Crypto: Morpho’s Paul Frambot argues fixed-rate markets are the missing primitive that will scale onchain lending to institutional money.
Agentic Commerce Won’t Kill Cards: a16z’s Noah Levine argues stablecoins won’t displace Visa, but AI agents will expose a new gap in merchant acceptance infrastructure.

Finance & Economy

Strategy Credits Where They’re Due: Byron Gilliam borrows Ben Thompson’s “strategy credit” framework to examine cheap corporate signalling in crypto and beyond.
The Worst Acquisition in History, Again: Scott Galloway traces Warner Bros.’ cursed M&A history — seven sales, mergers, and breakups — and why Paramount Skydance buying WBD won’t end well.
Private Credit Gets Marked Down: Bloomberg’s take on what happens when private credit portfolios finally face real markdowns (behind paywall).
President Trump’s CONFLICT Playbook: Twelve months of geopolitical conflict analysis distilled into a clear investor playbook for what comes next in the market.

AI & Innovation

ChatGPT Uninstalls Surged 295% After DoD Deal, Sensor Tower data shows a sharp consumer backlash. ChatGPT uninstalls spiked while Claude downloads jumped 51% following Anthropic’s Pentagon refusal.
Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps: a16z’s March 2026 deep dive broadens its lens to include AI-augmented incumbents such as CapCut and Canva, reflecting how AI has gone from a feature to a foundation.
Why the ATM Didn’t Kill Bank Tellers: David Oks flips the classic economics parable, ‘ATMs didn’t kill tellers, but the iPhone did’, and the lesson is about paradigm replacement that AI is bringing.
This Might Be the Last Job You Have: An analysis of how AI apps crossed 1B weekly users, with ChatGPT commanding 900M, built from scratch with no distribution advantage.
The State of Consumer AI — Part 1, Usage: Lightspeed’s Anand Iyer explores what stays investable when AI devours everything, only the “too fringe” ideas that APIs can’t replace.
Labor Market Impacts of AI: Anthropic’s March 2026 research paper presents new empirical data on how AI is already reshaping labour markets.

Culture & Beyond

Restless by Design: A beautifully written neuroscience essay on why we can’t sit still anymore, how constant stimulation rewired our default mode network and made stillness feel aversive.
A Quirk of Geology Explains Iran’s Oil: Scientific American explains how the same continental collision that created the Middle East’s oil reserves also trapped it behind the Strait of Hormuz. Timely, to say the least.

What I Am Watching & Reading

This weekend, I plan to watch Boong, a Manipuri film that has been winning attention well beyond India’s North East. The film is an important one not just because it was the first Indian film to ever win a BAFTA Award, but also because of where it comes from. Manipur, a small state tucked in north eastern India, spent the past couple of years in the shadow of brutal communal violence, loss of life, displacement, and repeated internet shutdowns.