Hi,
We’re doing a Met Gala recap, roasting tech stacks and also farming biochar on today’s livestream starting now. Tell me, who else has the range?
Love,
The Boys
Writer: Deana
Editor: Miranda
Creators, last call to apply to Octant’s creator program for grants and mentorship!
Money’s Up.
A wave of fresh capital announcements hit the timeline this week, genuinely catching me by surprise given the general state of the crypto industry lately.
a16z crypto closed a $2.2B Fund 5. The thesis areas: stablecoins, tokenization, perps, prediction markets, and AI agents.
The day before, Haun Ventures announced a $1B raise across two new vehicles, also pointed at infrastructure, tokenized assets, and agents. Paradigm has been raising up to $1.5B since February. Dragonfly closed $650M earlier this year.
Crypto VCs are so back.
The general thesis is as follows - the actual great use case for crypto is NFTs, yield-farming, machines paying each other, and that time has arrived. AI agents need rails that work at machine speed and machine cost, and credit cards do not do that.
Chris Dixon’s letter puts it more poetically: a future where "swarms of software agents can decide, act, and transact on a user's behalf, acquiring compute, data, and services as they go."
Case in point is Stripe, which is building Link (announced last week) for exactly this future. Stripe CEO Patrick Collison said, "in the not-too-distant future agents will account for most transactions online." Stripe is cagier about the crypto of it all, but it’s still in there.
The "agents need crypto rails" thesis is the strongest narrative crypto has had in a while. Probably since the 2021 decentralized internet pitch, which Dixon now tacitly concedes underperformed (Farcaster repaid $180M to investors earlier this year, RIP.) What's not yet real is the part where the agents actually transact at scale. The protocol exists, the volume does not. Maybe this would do it?
Anyway I’m declaring this a new cycle, and it’s a pleasure to be in it with you all.
Quick Hits.
Can your AI agent run on Shabbat? I need to know.
“The Apocalypse Early Warning System,” an app for tracking when oligarchs are leaving cities on their private jets.
Amazon’s AI ‘podcast’ feature is cursed.
Renaissance branding is a 2026 time stamp.
GameStop’s CEO is getting memed to death for this one. “Half cash, half stock.”
If you liked this, send it to a friend? ILY.
