The Saturday Reading List: Week 22-23 📚
Articles, op-eds, books, podcasts, movies, and more
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.
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
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appreciate the inclusion, prathik!