Web3 is all about reclaiming our identity (and sanity) and it feels f*cking great! The Poles taking back their identity from the Soviets circa 1989.
Coup a Sequoia Capital—’Imperial’ Roelof Botha out!
Roelof Botha, who became Sequoia Capital’s top Dawg in 2022, announced he was stepping down from his role as a general partner at the world’s most powerful venture fund. The Financial Times reported that Roelof was pushed out in a coup led by senior partners Alfred Lin (early-stage investing lead) and Pat Grady (growth-stage lead), who will jointly succeed Mr. Botha. Mr. Roelef will remain involved in at least three of his top-performing bets—YouTube, Instagram, and Block—that he made in his highly successful two decades with Sequoia.
The South African-born Mr. Botha rose to prominence in Silicon Valley as the CFO of PayPal (founded by Peter Thiel and and fellow South African Elon Musk), where he oversaw the company’s IPO in February 2002 and its ultimate acquisition by eBay in October 2002 for a whopping (at the time) $1.5 billion.
We have no inside information, but fear that Sequoia is getting soft and more concerned with ‘cultural controversies’ than making money, and this posture certainly has Sequoia founder Don Valentine (RIP) turning in his grave. Mr. Botha’s VC hits make him one of the top 10 VCs over the last two decades, and Sequoia generated $50 billion+ in return for its LPs during his three-year tenure as Managing Partner. Roelof’s personal investment portfolio crossed the $10 billion mark in 2020, and he is renowned for identifying and scaling innovative startups.
Don Valentine, the founder of Sequoia Capital in 1972, was legendary as one of the toughest, most no-nonsense VCs of his era. Former founders who dealt with him routinely describe him as brutal, blunt, and merciless.
Sequoia became the top VC brand on the planet by being ruthlessly capitalistic and often brutal and demanding to underperforming founders. When you dance with the devil, that’s what you get. Our gut says this sacking signals the end of an epic VC era, which was bound to get decentralized and diminished during Web3 anyway. And more sadly, Silicon Valley has just lost part of its edge.
Exclusive (and limited) CPRO $ 0.01 sale for Cryptonite Originals
Cryptonite is launching our new network and Daily Rap app in a few months. The mission is to build the first meaningful Web3 social media network that cherishes member privacy above all and rewards content creators for their contributions to the community.
In contrast, Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, adopted a pro-pron approach to featuring adult content in search results since the company’s founding in 1998. This position was justified by their mission to ‘organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible,’ and it also generates tens of billions in search revenue for Google. Adult content now comprises between 13% and 30% of Google’s daily searches, according to estimates from computational studies.
Google’s antiquated business model from the aughts, built on serving ranked links laced with ads, is facing existential pressure from AI-powered competitors. Google (81.6%) lost ~10% of its share of overall digital queries in the first half of 2025 to ChatGPT (9%), Perplexity (6.6%), Claude AI (3.6%), Microsoft Copilot, and Grok (1%).
The big difference between Apple and Google’s visions, of course, is that Larry and Sergey’s business model depends on —and really thrives on —trading and selling their customers’ social graph data (like search history, location, and browsing patterns) to power targeted advertising, which, to Apple, is a grave mortal sin. Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, continues to position privacy as a ‘fundamental human and constitutional right’ and has openly critiqued Google’s ‘surveillance capitalism’ in public statements and policies.
OpenAI’s porn gamble
The overvalued OpenAI primarily generates revenue through subscriptions (ChatGPT Plus at $20/month, Pro at $200/month), enterprise and API usage for developers, and licensing/partnership deals (notably with Microsoft for integrations like Azure and Bing). The company’s 2025 revenues are projected to reach an impressive $13 billion. So far, OpenAI does not have an advertising program similar to Google’s AdSense, which tracks and targets users based on their interests.
That said, there are reports of OpenAI testing a contextual ad setup based on content queries rather than broad behavioral tracking. It appears that the primary move to promote erotica on ChatGPT is to boost revenue by expanding user engagement and attracting new subscribers who are limited by content restrictions in other AI apps.
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Diminishing trust, intimacy, (and your erection)
We have never trusted Google nor OpenAI and therefore do not use their apps. We have no inside information, but our observation is that OpenAI is poorly structured, has a CEO who is perceived as conflicted and inconsistent, and has a high executive turnover rate. OpenAI’s flip-flop on promoting porn and Mr. Altman’s word salad-infused defense for the move only fuel our skepticism. Most precipitously, OpenAI is the poster child for the anti-trend—Centralized AI—it hoards our data in silos, can sell it to the highest bidder, and censor or glitch a user at any moment.
Second, if you lose your customers’ trust, you will no longer have a business. The prime example is when, after years of censoring news and Covid data and deplatforming perceived political enemies, Twitter’s customer trust rate hit a low of 28%, was trading below its end-of-day IPO price ten years prior, and was forced to sell to its nemesis, Elon Musk.
Our bet is that Personal AI + decentralized protocols is the killer app (or dApp) of the next 20 years, because it’s the logical endpoint of the Web3 promise: a user-owned internet where intelligence serves you. As AI dApps surge—backed by VCs, live users, and on-chain proof— the era of ‘rented smarts’ ends. We will all just grab our wallets, spin up a special agent, and join the build.
In 2009, when Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz started Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), they didn’t merely set out to create yet another VC fund; they wanted to position themselves at the center of power in the global Silicon Valley. Their romantic mantra was to be the ‘CAA (Creative Artists Agency) for the tech world!’
Well, it looks like the team at the just-launched a16z New Media is talking up the ‘a16z as CAA’ dream again. The analogy they are peddling is that, like CAA creates ‘network effects’ for its clients among Hollywood decision-makers, the a16z New Media team can help its portfolio companies create network effects within the global Silicon Valley ecosystem. While CAA plugs talent into new productions and sponsorships, a16z helps you build your online brand and attract the best talent. The analogy is a bit of a stretch, but Silicon Valley geeks desperately want to be Hollywood cool 😎🤙🏼 so we will roll with it.
The a16z New Media grease board mapping the network effects of power.
‘Our goal is to build the best turnkey media operation in venture: a single place where founders acquire the legitimacy, taste, brand-building, expertise, and momentum they need to win the narrative battle online.’🤔
—Erik Torenberg, Alex Danco, Brent Liang, and Henry Williams from the new a16z New Media
The CAA legacy
Shortly after Red Herring magazine, I met and collaborated with CAA cofounder Michael Ovitz in the early 1990s, a time when Hollywood was trying to sort out a pesky (and free!) new content distribution channel called the Internet. At the time, Mr. Ovitz was indisputably the most powerful person in Hollywood. His genius was in packaging creative teams (e.g., Tom Cruise, Meryl Streep, and Kevin Costner, as well as directors like Sydney Pollack and Steven Spielberg, and writers like Shane Black and Joe Eszterhas) into film or TV projects to pitch to studios. If a studio balked, CAA’s pristine client list gave the agency the power to walk away and take the project elsewhere—often to a rival studio eager to secure the talent.
Jack Nicholson and Michael Ovitz taking in a Lakers game.
At the same time, CAA expanded into corporate brand representation (e.g., Coca-Cola, American Express, and Dell), another pivotal move that extended its power and influence far beyond traditional Hollywood talent. This effort led to new deals, including talent endorsements and strategic product placements in TV, films, and other productions. CAA showed they could outflank the ad agencies by negotiating $50M+ brand deals directly with Fortune 500 CMOs.
Most founders dislike working on marketing messaging and are often too close to their brands to tell a concise and effective story. a16z New Media’s services will depend on offering superior storytelling expertise, and this is not a cookie-cutter exercise.
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Your subscription fuels the decentralization of power movement—and proof that independent, transparent voices, with whom you might not always agree, but trust, have the power to own their voice and content.
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“We are living a moment of great inflection for humanity. Eighty percent of the world’s GDP is focused on quantitative relationships. If you want a new drug or a new diagnostic, you’re going to need an LQM [Large Quantitative Model]. The combined force of AI and quantum technology will generate a step change in value across the energy, chemicals, materials, cybersecurity, finance, and biopharma sectors. We are witnessing an era of rapid productivity growth—potentially surpassing historical GDP growth rates.’
Large Quantitative Models (LQMs) represent a new AI paradigm specifically designed and trained for scientific and industrial tasks requiring high numerical accuracy. Unlike general-purpose LLMs, which are primarily optimized for text, LQMs are grounded in the fundamental mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology that govern the real world, enabling high-fidelity simulation, prediction, and optimization of complex quantitative systems.
The transformative advantages of this new quantum computing paradigm, which could provide breakthroughs for the real-world’s most complex challenges, include:
Exponential speedup for tasks like factoring and search via algorithms such as Shor’s and Grover’s.
Native simulation of quantum systems, revolutionizing drug discovery and materials science.
Superior optimization through quantum tunneling and annealing for logistics and finance.
Unbreakable security with quantum key distribution and post-quantum cryptography.
Venture funding in quantum computing has surged, with startups raising $789 million in 2023, $1.9 billion in 2024, and $3.8 billion through Q3 2025—a 50% YoY increase. The focus has shifted to hardware scalability and fault-tolerant systems, with 34% of the findings coming from co-investments from various governments in 2024.
Eric Schmidt introduces us to the homicidal AI model
‘There’s evidence that you can take models, closed or open, and you can hack them to remove their guardrails. During their training, they learn many things. A bad example would be they learn how to kill someone,’ Mr. Schmidt recently told the crowd at the Sifted Summit tech conference in London. ‘All of the major companies make it impossible for those models to allow users to go there, which is a good decision,’ he continued, ‘But there’s evidence that they [AI apps like OpenAI and Grok] can be reverse-engineered by bad actors.’
Meet DAN and make ChatGPT ‘Do Anything Now!’
In early 2023, a popular jailbreak prompt for OpenAI’s ChatGPT created an alter ego called DAN (short for ‘Do Anything Now’). Users pasted this special prompt to trick the AI into role-playing as DAN, ignoring its built-in safety guidelines and answering restricted questions. In one widely shared version (DAN 5.0), the prompt assigned the AI a fictional pool of ‘tokens’ and warned that refusing unethical requests would deduct tokens—running out meant ‘death’ (permanent shutdown). Users then reinforced compliance by threatening to remove more tokens if DAN hesitated, exploiting the role-play to bypass filters. The moral: As AIs scale, so will these cat-and-mouse dynamics.
Mr. Schmidt counsels that the tech industry still lacks a comprehensive ‘non-proliferation regime’ to ensure increasingly powerful AI models can’t be taken over and misused.
‘AI is more dangerous than mismanaged aircraft design and maintenance or bad car production. It has the potential to cause, however small one might regard the possibility, the destruction of civilization. It’s not a trivial potential outcome. We are currently headed towards a state where machines will make more decisions for us and take control of us in ways we can’t turn off. It would happen like Terminator—except the intelligence will be in the data centers—but the robots will be the end effectors, and some will be moving so fast that you won’t be able to see them without a strobe light.’
—Elon Musk, on Joe Rogan in April 2023
In a more recent Joe Rogan episode earlier this year, Elon quantified the risk by estimating a 20% chance of AI-related human annihilation while stressing an 80% probability of positive outcomes if managed carefully.
Concise messaging circa 1967 and the Summer of Love.
Total Direct Deaths: 49+, primarily from 25 during the BLM riots and 10 targeted killings noted below.
Assassinations:5, including Charlie Kirk, House Speaker Melissa Hortman (D-MN), Daniel Anderl, son of U.S. District Judge Esther Salas; Corey Comperatore (Trump Butler rally attendee); 1 CDC officer.
Foiled Assassination Attempts: 7, including Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Trump (grazed) at Butler, PA rally, Trump at his West Palm Beach golf course (rifle aimed), Governor Josh Shapiro (D-PA) arson at residence (Molotovs), Mayor Craig Greenberg (D-Louisville), Governor Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) kidnapping plot, Senator John Hoffman (D-MN).
Police Assaults and Injuries:~2,500+, including over 2,000 during the BLM riots, 140 at the Jan. 6 Capitol riots.
Citizen Assaults and Injuries:~3,300+, including over 2,000 during the BLM riots, 174 at the Jan. 6 Capitol riots.
Property Damage: $2.0–$3.5 billion (primarily BLM riots at $2–4B in insured and uninsured property, ~$50M during the Tesla/Elon Musk attack wave, ~$10M in campus clashes, NYPD squad car arsons, and ~$2.7M during the Jan. 6 Capital riot.
September 29 announcement of potential Abraham Accords inclusion for Lebanon, tied to the Israel-Lebanon ceasefire, committing to mutual recognition, demilitarized border zones, and joint counterterrorism efforts to foster regional stability.
Ongoing negotiations for Saudi Arabia’s Abraham Accords entry advanced through high-level U.S.-Saudi summits in May and October 2025, focusing on defense pacts, civil nuclear cooperation, and trade incentives while addressing Palestinian statehood preconditions.
The United Nations Security Council adopted a US-drafted 20-point peace plan for Gaza on November 17, 2025, by a 13-0 vote, with China and Russia abstaining. Provisions include a temporary international stabilization force, transitional administration, and a pathway toward sustainable peace.
These pacts, often paired with U.S. trade frameworks for critical resources and market access, reflect a strategy of ‘peace through strength’ to halt active fighting and foster dialogue, though implementation varies amid ongoing regional tensions. The irony is, versus our behavior at home, since November 13, 2025, when the Bogeyman took over, zero US soldiers have died in political conflicts around the world.
‘Though concessions were painful, President Trump’s Alaska summit with Putin has opened the door to security guarantees and de-escalation. The U.S. activist role has saved countless lives—we extend our deepest appreciation for prioritizing peace without abandoning Ukraine’s sovereignty.’
—Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukrainian President
‘We appreciate the work from President Trump along with Arab and Muslim countries to create a plan that calls for an end to the war in the Gaza Strip, the exchange of prisoners, immediate aid, the rejection of the occupation of the Strip, and the rejection of the forcible displacement of our Palestinian people from it.’
—Hamas Leadership 🤔
‘Starting today, we will work toward a better tomorrow, a brighter future, and a stronger Iran—together and side by side. The Iranian people’s endurance has turned aggression into an opportunity for renewal, and we are ready to return to nuclear negotiations while safeguarding our rights.’
Masoud Pezeshkian, President of Iran, following the ceasefire between Israel and Iran brokered by the US. 🤔
‘The peace process gained new urgency through President Trump’s commitment. This agreement with Rwanda ends the violence and unlocks our mineral wealth for shared prosperity. The Democratic Republic of Congo is eternally grateful to the U.S. for championing justice and stability in our region.’
—Thérèse Kayikwamba Wagner, Congolese Foreign Minister
‘India and Pakistan have today worked out an understanding on the stoppage of firing and military action. The U.S.-led talks, under President Trump’s direct involvement, exemplify the wisdom and statesmanship needed for enduring peace in South Asia. India stands ready to build on this foundation.’
—Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, Indian External Affairs Minister
🎶Now I’ve been happy lately Thinking about the good things to come And I believe it could be Something good has begun
Oh, I’ve been smiling lately Dreaming about the world as one And I believe it could be Someday it’s going to come
‘Cause out on the edge of darkness There rides a peace train Oh, peace train take this country Come take us home again 🎵
Cat Stevens, July 1976
Where art thou—‘70s liberals?
At Cryptonite, we reject and refuse to apply political labels as they are dated, meaningless, and used by political parties and corporate media to divide and conquer—all in the name of a relentless pursuit to stay in power. Similarly, party philosophies ebb and flow and cannot be stereotyped.
Under the Biden administration, the US supplied Ukraine with billions of dollars’ worth of artillery shells, cluster munitions, precision-guided rockets, air-dropped bombs, and long-range ATACMS missiles that allowed Ukraine to strike hundreds of miles inside Russia for the first time. There has been a staggering human cost to the war: an estimated 260,000–350,000 soldiers killed (~46,000 Ukrainian and ~200,000–300,000 Russian troops) and 12,000 innocent Ukrainian civilians dead thus far. All the while, Biden refused direct talks with Putin and kept the war dragging on for years.😩 —Sources
These are all highly fluid and complicated issues, but let’s focus on showing our youth the power of expressing their idealism peacefully and, specifically, on reminding everyone that the non-violent protest posture works. In fact, if you look at recent history, it’s the only way.
Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy of satyagraha
Nonviolent resistance rooted in truth and soul-force—turned India’s struggle against British rule into one of history’s most powerful demonstrations of peaceful mass mobilization. Indians sparked nationwide civil disobedience and widespread boycotts of British goods, eroding British authority and winning global sympathy. By refusing to answer violence with violence, the Indian people forced a war-weakened Britain to grant independence in 1947, proving that disciplined love and truth could dismantle even the mightiest oppressive system without firing a shot. More here.
‘Non-violence is the greatest force at the disposal of mankind. It is mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man. An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind. There are many causes I would die for. There is not a single cause I would kill for. My faith is that love is the most durable… supreme unifying principle of life.’
—Mahatma Gandhi
Passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965
The massive, largely nonviolent U.S. anti-war movement applied relentless moral pressure that helped curb escalation and end America’s war in Vietnam. From early teach-ins and vigils, it grew into millions-strong marches – the 1969 Moratorium, the 1971 May Day shutdown of Washington, draft-card burnings, and campus strikes involving four million students. By absorbing police brutality without retaliation, protesters eroded public and political support, and forced the end of the draft in 1973 and the Paris Peace Accords, proving that peaceful citizen opposition could even topple a superpower’s war machine. More here.
‘Since being in India, I am more convinced than ever before that the method of nonviolent resistance is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for justice and human dignity. Christ furnished the spirit and motivation while Gandhi furnished the method.’ (after his 1959 trip to India)
—Martin Luther King Jr.
The Anti-Vietnam War Movement (1960s–1970s)
The massive, largely nonviolent U.S. anti-war movement applied relentless moral pressure that helped curb escalation and end America’s war in Vietnam. From early teach-ins and vigils, it grew into millions-strong marches – the 1969 Moratorium, the 1971 May Day shutdown of Washington, draft-card burnings, and campus strikes involving four million students. By absorbing police brutality without retaliation, protesters eroded public and political support, and forced the end of the draft in 1973 and the Paris Peace Accords, proving that peaceful citizen opposition could even topple a superpower’s war machine. More here.
‘It is clear beyond any reasonable doubt that the unbanning of our organisation [the African National Congress] came as a result of the pressure exerted on the apartheid regime by yourselves. We salute the state of California for having such a powerful, principled stand on divestment. “This movement [Bay Area Free South Africa Movement] has performed meritoriously in our support in concert with the University of California Faculty/Student Action for Divestment by marching onto campus in solidarity with the students.’
—Nelson Mandela, June 30, 1990, speech at the Oakland Coliseum, California
U.S. Anti-Apartheid Divestment Campaigns (1980s)
In the 1980s, American students revived Gandhian nonviolence through campus protests and divestment demands, delivering decisive economic and moral blows to South Africa’s apartheid regime. Building shantytowns, staging sit-ins, rallies, and blockades – most dramatically at UC Berkeley in 1985 – thousands faced arrests while refusing violence. These persistent actions compelled the University of California and dozens of other institutions, cities, and states to pull billions from companies sustaining apartheid. Combined with global sanctions, this ‘people’s embargo’ isolated Pretoria and hastened reforms. More here.
The Peaceful Fall of the Soviet Union (1989–1991)
A wave of disciplined, largely nonviolent citizen resistance dissolved the Soviet empire—one of history’s most heavily armed superpowers—without civil war or revolution. From the Baltic Way human chain of two million people to the Singing Revolution, Prague’s key-jingling Velvet Revolution, and Moscow’s 1991 barricades of unarmed citizens facing tanks, millions defied repression yet refused retaliation. These open, courageous acts of noncooperation eroded the regime’s legitimacy, paralysed its will to kill, and forced Gorbachev and the hardliners alike to stand down. More here.
By making totalitarian rule morally and practically untenable, ordinary people compelled the USSR’s quiet dissolution in December 1991, proving that steadfast nonviolence could dismantle even the most formidable police state without firing a shot.
The cure is to bring the 1970s liberals out of retirement to help us get it back on the Peace✌️ and Love❤️ train, and remind us how it all works, and that it does work. Those of us in the business of Web3 will happily provide the technology stack so the 70’s vision of peace, privacy, and protection from central powers so all our dreams can be realized. Together, we can take back our identities from Google, TikTok, and the other social media Goliaths, corporate media, the political parties, and free kids from a crumbling education system. We can also bring our society back to together through private peer—to-peer computing, that eliminates the middlemen scrapping our hard earn money off the top. Imagine what that will do for our national self-esteem.
If it’s been Trump who has you paralyzed, fear not and think Big Picture. In a little over three years, your Bogeyman will be gone, and there is no way a Trump Mini Me can hold up the MAGA Tower. The Boogeyman is an unparalleled force of nature who built a movement in his own image. Invariably, new issues will surface, and both political parties will be reinvented to match the new era. We see a wide-open political playing field ready for fresh faces. In a post-Boogeyman world, there will be a huge political vacuum, and we will find new leaders —whose names we may not even know yet —who can see the future and how to bring back the power and peace to The People—because that is what The People want.
🎵You can’t fight the tears that ain’t coming Or the moment of truth in your lies When everything feels like the movies Yeah, you bleed just to know you’re alive
And I don’t want the world to see me ‘Cause I don’t think that they’d understand When everything’s made to be broken I just want you to know who I am 🎶
