Sean 🇯🇵🇺🇸 (@SeanButta) header
Sean 🇯🇵🇺🇸 (@SeanButta) profile picture

sidequesting | fmr @MessariCrypto, @DL_Research, @Accenture | travel, culture, cars, golf and tech

Midwest
Joined February 2016
Photo by Sean 🇯🇵🇺🇸 (@SeanButta)Photo by Sean 🇯🇵🇺🇸 (@SeanButta)Photo by Sean 🇯🇵🇺🇸 (@SeanButta)Photo by Sean 🇯🇵🇺🇸 (@SeanButta)Photo by Sean 🇯🇵🇺🇸 (@SeanButta)Photo by Sean 🇯🇵🇺🇸 (@SeanButta)Photo by Sean 🇯🇵🇺🇸 (@SeanButta)Photo by Sean 🇯🇵🇺🇸 (@SeanButta)Photo by Sean 🇯🇵🇺🇸 (@SeanButta)Photo by Sean 🇯🇵🇺🇸 (@SeanButta)
Sean 🇯🇵🇺🇸 retweeted
trade[XYZ] launched its first market on Hyperliquid 381 days ago. Today, we are joining forces with ICE, parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, to bring perpetual futures on Hyperliquid to U.S. regulated markets. I don’t usually write long posts, but today merits reflection. For years, builders across this industry have worked to show that open, onchain markets could support price discovery, manage risk, and withstand stress to the standards of traditional market infrastructure, all while staying open when and where those markets aren’t. Our achievements stand on the shoulders of those builders. And today, the company that owns the New York Stock Exchange has chosen to build upon the work of every developer, trader, market maker, and user who took a chance on us and our markets. We share this moment with all of you. Markets are shaped by their participants. A new generation of investors trades from their phones, across asset classes, at any hour of any day. Until Hyperliquid, the right infrastructure for those markets didn’t exist. Building these markets was hard. It took novel approaches to pricing, funding, and risk, refined with real capital at stake, in markets that don’t close. It also meant earning the trust of the people trading on them. We’re honored that the community recognized that effort and responded in kind. That trust is what allowed us to grow our volumes to a ~$1 trillion annualized run rate in just over a year, to help pioneer new instruments like pre-IPO perps, and to earn the confidence of storied institutions like S&P Dow Jones Indices. That’s why ICE has chosen trade[XYZ] as its exclusive partner to bring 24/7 perps to the U.S. Shifts in technology have pushed markets toward greater transparency, better price discovery, and broader access: from the coffee house to the curb exchange, ticker tape to the telephone, the trading floor to digital exchanges. ICE helped write that last chapter. In 1997, Jeff Sprecher bought a small power-trading technology business for $1. ICE launched as an electronic energy marketplace in 2000, helped digitize major commodity markets, and acquired the NYSE in 2013. It has grown exponentially because of this appetite for innovation. That’s the partner we wanted: a partner that looks forward and embraces progress. Americans deserve access to the most innovative markets in the world, and the protections of U.S. regulation. With trade[XYZ] and ICE, subject to regulatory approvals, they’ll have both. The difference isn’t just access. Perps don’t expire, so traders never have to roll positions, and liquidity concentrates in a single deep market for each asset. Cross-margining enhances capital efficiency by letting one pool of collateral back positions across stocks, commodities, and crypto. Underpinning it all are atomic clearing and settlement, real-time risk management that enables continuous markets, and universally applied rules that anyone can verify. This is the next chapter we’ll write together. My responsibility, our responsibility, is to now build markets worthy of the confidence our partners and our users have placed in us. Our commitments will not waver: to fair and transparent markets, to diverse markets, to low costs of execution, and above all, to market integrity. All of this in pursuit of one thing: A universal exchange, open around the clock, coming to the United States. We’re proud to have deployed more than 100 markets on trade[XYZ]. But measured against the opportunity ahead, we’ve barely started. There is an enormous universe of assets we haven’t reached, alongside things people want to trade that have no established market at all. Wherever there is demand to trade an asset, we want trade[XYZ] to be where its price is discovered. Global stocks, commodities, bonds, pre-IPO companies, compute, new indices, digital assets, interest rates, equity baskets, volatility products, alt assets… Anything. Anytime. Anywhere. Ultimately, everything you own should work with everything you trade. Picture a headline breaking on Saturday night. You should be able to post tokenized shares as collateral, hedge your portfolio with an index perp, add exposure to oil, and take a view on a company that has not yet gone public. All in one account, all on one risk engine, before any traditional market opens. trade[XYZ] and Hyperliquid were built for this. I hope someone opens their first investment account years from now to find that trivial, and to wonder why their predecessors needed so many separate financial relationships. Getting there will take liquidity, reliability, trust, and prices people have reason to believe. It will take years. I’m prepared to spend them. Finally, a few thank yous. First to the XYZ team: For the tireless nights and for committing to this vision before it was obvious. To Jeff Sprecher and ICE, with special thanks to Michael Blaugrund and Trabue Bland who championed us throughout: You’re a world-class, technology-embracing team that proves innovation and scale are in fact not at odds. To Stan Druckenmiller: For your partnership and helping us turn the next page. To Hyperliquid Labs: For being the best partners we could ask for. You set an impossible standard, one we continually strive to meet. @chameleon_jeff, @iliensinc, @xulian_hl And most importantly, to our users: You traded these markets when no one thought it mattered. Guess what? It did.
trade[XYZ] and ICE, owner of the New York Stock Exchange, are joining forces to bring 24/7 perpetual futures on Hyperliquid to the United States. In just over a year, our markets on Hyperliquid have surpassed $650 billion in volume. They provide continuous price discovery for stocks, indices, and commodities, and have become trusted reference points for retail and institutions alike when traditional markets are closed. Much of the world trades them. Until now, Americans could only watch. We intend to change that. Subject to CFTC approval, trade[XYZ] and ICE plan to establish a new, dedicated U.S. market, with novel exchange and clearing infrastructure built on Hyperliquid. Planned contracts span equities, indices, commodities, FX, and crypto, with access through participating brokers and platforms. We’ll share more on products, eligibility, and timing as approvals progress. ICE brings more than 25 years of experience operating regulated markets, clearing, and managing risk. trade[XYZ] brings the product development, market design, and technology behind the most liquid and robust markets on Hyperliquid. Innovation and the protections of U.S. regulation shouldn’t be a trade-off. Together, we plan to prove it. ICE is making a strategic investment in trade[XYZ] and joins us in building towards the future of Hyperliquid. A small group of market luminaries is joining as well, beginning with Stan Druckenmiller. For more than four decades, few investors have anticipated the great turns in markets as often as Stan. We’re proud to have him with us for the next one. We’re building the U.S. market in parallel with our existing HIP-3 markets, which we’ll continue to expand and innovate on. We expect both to flourish. They each have a long road map ahead, from new asset classes to new ways to trade them. To the Hyperliquid community, whether you were here before us or came because of us, thank you. You took a chance on new markets and you made them matter. You’ll forever be a part of this story. Anything. Anytime. On ICE[XYZ].
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Sean 🇯🇵🇺🇸 retweeted
American glass. American metal. American silicon. American batteries. American workers. American everything. BlueChip is the first American computer in decades. Don't let anyone lie to you and say it can't be done. Designed in California. Built in America.
BlueChip. Built in America. America made the first electronic computer to win a war. Now we depend on our greatest adversaries to build the computers that run our economy and defend our nation. Today, we bring it home.
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Sean 🇯🇵🇺🇸 retweeted
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Sean 🇯🇵🇺🇸 retweeted
Effective Immediately, all organizations using PHP for their systems are advised to be prepared for an update addressing two critical vulnerabilities. PHP is widely used for web applications. These vulnerabilities often provide a direct path to the server's file system or database. If an immediate update is not feasible, it is recommend that organizations take the system offline until it can be fully mitigated. NSA will follow up shortly with more specific guidance.
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Sean 🇯🇵🇺🇸 retweeted
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight at you, then they add you to their Long-Term Capital Markets Assumptions paper and predict you'll be the best-performing asset of the next decade.
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Sean 🇯🇵🇺🇸 retweeted
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Sean 🇯🇵🇺🇸 retweeted
Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead. You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement. I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible. But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier. Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want. Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well. So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it. If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.
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Sean 🇯🇵🇺🇸 retweeted
whatever field you’re in, start moving closer to hardware. not because software is dying. because software is becoming abundant. ai can already generate code, interfaces, analysis, content, workflows. but atoms are still stubborn. • ai → learn chips, accelerators, edge compute • software → learn embedded systems, electronics, networking • biology → learn instrumentation, sensors, lab automation • physics → learn robotics, semiconductors, energy systems • design → learn cad, materials, manufacturing • economics → study factories, energy, logistics, supply chains the closer you move toward physical reality, the harder the problems become. heat. power. materials. tolerances. reliability. manufacturing. logistics. you don’t need to abandon your field. combine it with hardware. • software + hardware. • ai + robotics. • biology + machines. • physics + manufacturing. the next generation of builders won’t just manipulate information. they’ll use information to manipulate atoms.
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Sean 🇯🇵🇺🇸 retweeted
Over the next few years you are going to have to fight with everything you’ve got to retain your humanity. They will try to convince you to give up connecting with each other, to give up truly being alive. It will be the most important fight of your whole life
cool use case of chatgpt work i heard last night: connect your family calendars and explain your kids' interests. every morning for the drive to school, have it make a podcast that talks about one kid's soccer game that afternoon, one kid's upcoming birthday, some news, etc.
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Sean 🇯🇵🇺🇸 retweeted
Here’s something I believe about November 30, 2022: It's one of the greatest and clearest dividing lines in humankind's story I feel it most with books Anything published before the release of ChatGPT now feels like a holy relic. A time capsule The capsule contains words we know to have been assembled by a human mind Everything after carries seeds of doubt: Who created this? How much of it was generated?Whose intentions are hidden inside? Once, we worried about psyops. The greater threat will soon be modelops: the subtle manipulation of human thought through the models that increasingly mediate/manipulate what we read, see, believe, and imagine This doesn't require a conspiracy. It'll emerge from incentives, feedback loops, political pressure, corporate interests, models learning to reinforce the ideas that make them more useful, more indispensable Whatever comes next, I find myself marveling at what humanity created before the threshold Every old book, painting, film, and song now contains something we can never fully recover: a sort of virginal, unpolluted innocence The shards that survive will be cherished. And we'll hand them down for generations
WTF AI companies are purchasing large quantities of used and rare books. Scanning their contents to train models. Then turning the originals to pulp. The sum of human thought, digitized and shredded. Every book that gets scanned disappears from the physical world permanently. The knowledge survives only as training data inside a system no one can hold, browse, or resell. What used to sit on a shelf for centuries now exists as weights in a model that might get deprecated next quarter.
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Sean 🇯🇵🇺🇸 retweeted
Without naming names, that Slack integration from the famous AI fearmongering and rugpulling company is made to steal your business intellectual property and create themselves new moats.
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Sean 🇯🇵🇺🇸 retweeted
Just got back from @consensus2026 Miami. Some unfiltered thoughts on the vibes: The industry has clearly grown up. The degens are gone, the allocators are wearing suits, and your @Uniswap booth has been replaced by a JP Morgan activation with 50 year old boomers. Cautiously optimistic with a distinctly institutional aftertaste. This was not a bull market conference. Key takeaways: 1) CLARITY Act has serious momentum. Everyone at the conference basically agrees it's getting done before summer. The urgency is real, people are done waiting. And the regulatory window feels genuinely unprecedented: CLARITY Act, GENIUS Act, a CFTC chair actively engaging with the industry, this combination has never existed simultaneously before. The institutional urgency you're seeing everywhere is directly correlated to this window feeling time-limited. Miss it and you're explaining to your board why you sat on your hands during the most favorable crypto regulatory environment in history. 2) Institutions are not dabbling anymore. They are ALL IN on tokenization and terrified of missing it. No one is debating whether blockchain rails are useful. The debate is now who gets the mandate. And quietly @coinbase , @krakenfx , @RobinhoodApp and @Bullish and others are being seen more as competitors than potential partners by a lot of these TradFi players. 3) TradFi M&A is going to keep ripping. @krakenfx just grabbed Reap for $600M. Visa, Mastercard, Swift etc they can't miss the train and they're willing to overpay for the ticket. 4) Crypto VC is consolidating fast. @a16z and @katie_haun just announced $2.2B and $1B funds respectively. Meanwhile the boutique VCs are either pivoting to AI or quietly closing shop. Same playbook is happenign as traditional VC, the big platforms eat everything and the small guys scramble. Seed and pre-seed is basically a ghost town right now. Late stage and pre-IPO is where the action is. 5) Investment themes were aggressively consensus (no pun intended): Stablecoins, tokenization, vertically integrated neo-banks, regulated or permissioned DeFi. Literally everyone is trying to be a tokenization platform. Issuance, management, settlement, curation, pick your lane, slap tokenization on it, try to raise money. 6) Building in crypto is genuinely hard now. Your competition isn't some scrappy new L1 or GMX, it's @tether , @Anchorage , and @Securitize. there are now many crypto businesses running 200M+ annual Rev with serious management teams and deep pockets. The barbarians are now the establishment. New entrants are going to have a very bad time. 7) Pure token-only plays have become extremely contrarian. Controversial take but I think the biggest returns will come from a handful of tokens that can credibly signal in a compliant way that the token remains the only value accruing asset going forward. 8) A lot of teams are in a genuinely weird spot on the token/equity dynamics. Decent products, decent teams, but a complete stakeholder clusterf*** that nobody can untangle. Many of these will simply not survive. 9) The agentic finance and agentic commerce crowd was loud. The actual substance was not. A lot of big claims, very little to show for it. Feels very early and mostly vibes. Color me skeptical for now. 10) @Bullish acquiring Equinity for $4.2B was the boldest move of the conference. @ThomasFarley and @BonannoDavid now have a full-stack RWA proposition: issuance, transfer agency, tokenization, exchange and settlement under one roof. Massive move. Very positive for the industry regardless of whether you think the price or the move were right. 11) @BitMNR and @fundstrat are apparently tired of winning and has decided to let your grandma keep her ETH... for now. The pace of accumulation is slowing. Tom, we await your next allocation with bated breath. 12) DeFi apps are moving up the stack and getting smarter about it. They don't want to be the commodity infrastructure layer getting squeezed by exchanges that own distribution. Some genuinely interesting announcements, @buffalu__ at @jito launching JTX being the highlight. 13) Nobody at the conference was talking about retail coming back. The entire conversation was institutional. That's either a sign of maturity or a sign that the industry has quietly given up on mainstream consumer adoption for now and is betting the next cycle gets pulled by institutional flows rather than retail FOMO. Probably both. 14) The L1 debate is officially dead. Nobody and I mean nobody was arguing SOL vs ETH or pitching their shiny new L1. The crowd that used to religiously defend their chain of choice has either grown up, cashed out, or both. Institutions don't care about your consensus mechanism. They care about settlement finality, compliance rails and liquidity. The L1 wars were fun while they lasted. RIP. 15) DATs are a mess. Had some genuinely productive conversations with a few of them but let's be honest most are an absolute clusterf*** operationally and very few are running anything resembling a legitimate business. The structure is a disaster at the stakeholder level and the governance makes your average startup cap table look clean. That said, the permanent capital vehicle concept is still genuinely compelling and I think a handful of these will turn out to be absolute home runs. The model isn't broken, most of the teams just are. Bottom line: Consensus 2026 felt like the moment crypto stopped being a movement and started being an industry. Whether that's exciting or depressing probably depends on when you got in.
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Sean 🇯🇵🇺🇸 retweeted
The State of RWAFi Q1 2026 Report is here. Developed in collaboration with @DefiLlama, this report breaks down tokenised commodities, equities, real estate & alternative finance. Same macro trend, yet evolving differently under unique constraints. assets.dlnews.com/dlresearch…
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Sean 🇯🇵🇺🇸 retweeted
I like blockchain tech quite a bit because it extends open source to open source+state, a genuine/exciting innovation in computing paradigms. I'm just sad and struggle to get over it coming packaged with so much braindead bs (get rich quick pumps/dumps/scams/spams/memes etc.). Ew
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Sean 🇯🇵🇺🇸 retweeted
"So You Want to be a VC" Im enjoying this week in Boston visiting students promoting my new book - Runnin Down a Dream. Not surprisingly, many ask me about trying to break into venture capital. I wrote a letter answering this question 15 years ago. I would send it out when people inquired. I'm making it public for the first time - with zero modifications. 1) I think it holds up well 2) make sure and read my new book also 3) I probably can't help with followups (as suggested in the letter) Hope you find it useful. Good luck!
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Sean 🇯🇵🇺🇸 retweeted
As DeFi matures, investors deserve accurate, public information about protocols, and protocols need a better way to communicate with investors. We’re proud to partner with @sparkfinance to launch the first DefiLlama investor relations portal. This goes deeper than DefiLlama’s normal dashboard, incorporating additional metrics and granularity, along with a place for Spark to provide context for its analytics. This is a one-stop shop for everything that Spark users need to stay informed: * Comprehensive analytics about Spark financials and usage * Quarterly reports * Recent announcements from Spark
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Sean 🇯🇵🇺🇸 retweeted
if you’re asking me a question about how to improve opsec you should def check out SEAL Frameworks frameworks.securityalliance.… literally all of this was written by real people in this space, for real people on this space.
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Sean 🇯🇵🇺🇸 retweeted
This new DeFi paper out of Cambridge University's Centre for Alternative Finance uses DefiLlama as its primary data source. The llama has entered the literature.
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Sean 🇯🇵🇺🇸 retweeted
If anyone else is affected by coinbase shutting down their commerce accounts you can use checkout.llamapay.io/ It's API is a drop-in replacement for coinbase commerce so you can switch by just replacing urls and keys Plus much more efficient + lower cost
Hey all, looks like @coinbase @CoinbaseBiz is killing their coinbase commerce platform and the business account are only available in the US and Singapore. So CT what are the option to replace them ? @MoonPayCommerce ? Who else ?
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