building for the peoples economy @synchronicityHQ - creating the best strategy builder prev. @pintodotmoney, @beanstalkfarms - true crypto fiat money
Joined February 2021
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Brian ๐ retweeted
Meet Signac, our AI strategy assistant that helps you build bespoke trading strategies, optimize your trading logic and parameters, and deploy it. All with natural language.
You can inspect and edit the results right in the canvas. Been having a lot of fun with this. @brendan_ cooked.
before, copying this strat would've taken time and code to do this. Now you can setup in seconds on @SynchronicityHQ
We will continue to make the experience even better for our testnet users
The only edge in markets that never gets arbitraged away โ from a crypto quant running Sharpe ~4:
Leigh Drogen (@LDrogen), CIO of Starkiller Capital. Sharpe ~4. Started his career as a quant at a NY equity hedge fund.
Drogen:
"If the only thing you ever did was put a 50-day moving average on Bitcoin โ long when above, out when below โ you would massively outperform everything."
"You would stay out of the massive puke-inducing crashes."
"If you knew nothing โ couldn't tell Ethereum from the Nth lending protocol โ and just bought the top 20th percentile by 30-day return and shorted the bottom 20th, you'd make a whole bunch of money."
"What is the intrinsic value of Dogecoin? Nothing. You could make the case Bitcoin has no intrinsic value either."
"The vast majority of assets in digital asset space have no intrinsic value โ which is why cross-sectional momentum works so well."
"Momentum is the only persistent alpha in all markets. All other alpha gets arbitraged away. Human behavior never will."
it's so great to be building a product I would actually use.
Polymarket is emerging as a real information market. which means for the first time, we can build autonomous strategies off of live sentiment data.
simple example: long/short stocks based on upcoming earnings calls. frontrun the market by using the market.
Brian ๐ retweeted
Trading on polymarket -> what will happenโจ
Trading off polymarket -> be ready no matter what happensโจ
Now you can create trading strategies that are prepared for all outcomes.
You donโt need to wait for market resolution. Set a % threshold to move before the market moves.
now more than ever, the value you bring is the vibes, mentality, and values you bring onto the team. As the cost of technical experience and execution goes down, its really the soft skills that creates the differentiating factor between candidates
> bro applied to +200 internships
> got 1 unpaid offer, did it for 7 months
> is graduating with a 4.0 GPA
> did full stack large-scale web dev
> did research in an AI lab
HE CANNOT GET A JOB.
โeven if I did get a job Iโd be wrangling with AI 1-2 years until you have AIs that can wrangle themselves and Iโm not even useful anymore.โ
discovering programming from first principles
A lot of people are arguing that HTML burns more tokens than markdown. It's true but you can save at least 40% by externalizing the CSS to a template with <link rel="stylesheet" href="./styles.css">. This style.css is your formatting so the LLM will never output CSS again.
I tested on a 12116 token HTML article and it dropped to 6,723 tokens so -44%!
You'll have this:
<div class="card">
<span class="badge">External CSS</span>
<h1>Hello, world.</h1>
<p>...</p>
</div>
Instead of this:
<style>
.card { /* 20 lines */ }
.badge { /* 12 lines */ }
h1 { /* 8 lines */ }
/* ...and ~100 more */
</style>
<div class="card">...</div>
Brian Armstrong just laid off 14% of Coinbase, restructured the org to become more flat, and is optimizing around 1-man teams with non-technical people shipping production code.
The timeline is full of jokes about this but I think people are missing what's actually happening.
Flat hierarchy + high agency trust is becoming the meta.
AI is collapsing the time between "I have an idea" and "it's live in production." The orgs that figure this out first win. The ones clinging to 14-person approval chains for a button color change are going to get lapped.
With every conversation, you unknowingly perform a lossy compression algorithm. Your idea exists in your head as pure intent. You translate it to English. The other person translates your English into their mental model. By the time it reaches implementation, you're three translations deep from the original intent.
That friction is real and it compounds. More people, more translation layers, more drift from the original idea. One person with good judgment and the right tools skips all of that.
Non-technical people shipping code sounds scary until you remember what every initial technology wave looks like. Early transistors were unreliable. First cars broke down constantly. Electric lighting was expensive and inconsistent. Nobody looked at those and said "well this is as good as it gets." They were the worst versions of themselves.
That's where AI-assisted code is right now. The worst it will ever be. People aren't used to code having a probabilistic element to it, a yolo factor. But reliability curves only go in one direction. People drive cars but aren't mechanics. People use lights but aren't electricians. Things always trend towards abstraction long term.
The real question isn't whether non-technical people should be shipping code. It's whether your org is structured to take advantage of the fact that they can.
This is an email I sent earlier today to all employees at Coinbase:
Team,
Today Iโve made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%. I want to walk you through why we're doing this now, what it means for those affected, and how this positions us for the future.
Why now
Two forces are converging at the same time. We need to be front footed to respond to both.
First, the market. Coinbase is well-capitalized, has diversified revenue streams, and is well-positioned to weather any storm. Crypto is also on the verge of the next wave of adoption, with stablecoins, prediction markets, tokenization, and more taking off. However, our business is still volatile from quarter to quarter. While we've managed through that cyclicality many times before and come out stronger on the other side, weโre currently in a down market and need to adjust our cost structure now so that we emerge from this period leaner, faster, and more efficient for our next phase of growth.
Second, AI is changing how we work. Over the past year, Iโve watched engineers use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks. Non-technical teams are now shipping production code and many of our workflows are being automated. The pace of what's possible with a small, focused team has changed dramatically, and it's accelerating every day.
All of this has led us to an inflection point, not just for Coinbase, but for every company. The biggest risk now is not taking action. We are adjusting early and deliberately to rebuild Coinbase to be lean, fast, and AI-native. We need to return to the speed and focus of our startup founding, with AI at our core.
What this means
To get there, we are not just reducing headcount and cutting costs, weโre fundamentally changing how we operate: rebuilding Coinbase as an intelligence, with humans around the edge aligning it. What does this mean in practice?
- Fewer layers, faster decisions: We are flattening our org structure to 5 layers max below CEO/COO. Layers slow things down and create coordination tax. The future is small, high context teams that can move quickly. Leaders will own much more, with as many as 15+ direct reports. Fewer layers also means a leaner cost structure that is built to perform through all market cycles.
- No pure managers: Every leader at Coinbase must also be a strong and active individual contributor. Managers should be like player-coaches, getting their hands dirty alongside their teams.
- AI-native pods: Weโll be concentrating around AI-native talent who can manage fleets of agents to drive outsized impact. Weโll also be experimenting with reduced pod sizes, including โone person teamsโ with engineers, designers, and product managers all in one role.
In short: AI is bringing a profound shift in how companies operate, and weโre reshaping Coinbase to lead in this new era. This is a new way of working, and we need to leverage AI across every facet of our jobs.
To those who are affected
I know there are real people behind these decisions โ talented colleagues who have poured themselves into this company and our mission. To those of you who will be leaving: thank you. Youโve helped build Coinbase into what it is today, and I am sincerely grateful for everything you've done.
All impacted team members will receive an email to their personal account in the next hour with more information, and an invitation to meet with an HRBP and a senior leader in your organization. Coinbase system access has been removed today. I know this feels sudden and harsh, but it is the only responsible choice given our duty to protect customer information.
To those affected, we will be providing a comprehensive package to support you through this transition. US employees will receive a minimum of 16 weeks base pay (plus 2 weeks per year worked), their next equity vest, and 6 months of COBRA. Employees on a work visa will get extra transition support. Those outside of the US will receive similar support, based on local factors and subject to any consultation requirements.
Coinbase prides itself on talent density. Our employees are among the most talented people in the world, and I have no doubt that your skills and experience will be highly sought after as you pursue your next chapters.
How we move forward
To the team that is staying, I know this is a difficult day. Weโre saying goodbye to colleagues and friends you've been in the trenches with. But hereโs what I want you to know as we move forward together:
Over the past 13 years, we have weathered four crypto winters, gone public, and built the most trusted platform in our industry. Weโve made it this far by making hard decisions and by always staying focused on our mission. This time will be no different โ nothing has changed about the long term outlook of our company or industry. And most importantly, our mission has never been more important for the world. Increasing economic freedom requires a new financial system, and weโre building it.
The Coinbase that emerges from this will be more capable than ever to achieve our mission.
Brian
One of the biggest feature requests we've gotten is the ability for strategies to restart.
Today the engineering team is shipping Cycles.
Cycles let your one-off strategies become perpetual. Define your logic once and it loops back to another defined point. That's it.
This opens up a lot. The video shows a simple perpetual EMA crossover strat, but you can go much deeper. multiple cycles in one strategy, branching, converging, looping back at different points. It's all composable.
In the future we'd like to add things like conditional logic and external data triggers to make cycles even more expressive.
excited to see what people come up with!
$40B is being extracted from the market, just because theyโre microseconds ahead of you. Itโs no wonder why the people are gravitating towards moonshots and casinos when youโre already behind from the start
every year the extraction keeps going up, but no one bats an eye. the asynchronous nature of the markets leads to a massive wealth transfer from the slow to the fast.
markets should be based purely on strategy and alpha, the speed game adds significant noise and incentivizes the fastest trade, rather than the right trade.
New market microstructures like blind FBA are the foundation for a more fair world, where strategy finally beats speed.
deepseek always reminds me that open source != free speech. i always put those in the same bucket
๐ DeepSeek-V4 Preview is officially live & open-sourced! Welcome to the era of cost-effective 1M context length.
๐น DeepSeek-V4-Pro: 1.6T total / 49B active params. Performance rivaling the world's top closed-source models.
๐น DeepSeek-V4-Flash: 284B total / 13B active params. Your fast, efficient, and economical choice.
Try it now at chat.deepseek.com via Expert Mode / Instant Mode. API is updated & available today!
๐ Tech Report: huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/Dโฆ
๐ค Open Weights: huggingface.co/collections/dโฆ
1/n
someone from circle wants to lower the optimal utilization and of USDC and jack up interest rates in an attempt to bring in liquidity. this would just promotes capital that leaves as soon as conditions normalize. this reads less like healthy market pricing and like a liquidity ransom to restore withdraws
governance.aave.com/t/arfc-iโฆ
![[ARFC] Improve Liquidity Buffer for USDC on Aave v3 Ethereum Core โ Raise Slope 2, Lower Optimal...](https://pbs.twimg.com/card_img/2118050340390019072/0WRjwEOZ?format=png&name=420x420_2)
Claude, deliver this ubereats order on a citibike using this API. make no mistakes
You missed the subway and need an e-bike across NYC, transit402.dev gets you there.
Real-time MTA + Citi Bike data in one API. Pay just cents via x402 or MPP
Add to your agent and get around NYC your way
Frequent Batch Auctions eliminate front-running, sandwich attacks, and latency arbitrage by clearing orders at a uniform price in discrete intervals.
But this is only one of the many components needed to create a truly fair market
We're building the rest at @SynchronicityHQ. Come join the beta waitlist now ๐
Frequent batch auctions (FBA) eliminates the speed race, killing frontrunning, sandwich attacks, and latency arbs.
implementing FBA on transparent blockchains still runs into the issue of information leakage and last look advantage.
This is the first level of inefficiency that we aim to tackle on @SynchronicityHQ. looking for people to try out testnet now :)
Professor Eric Budish (UChicago) delivers a 1-hour masterclass completely deconstructing the exact math HFT bots use to extract millions from continuous order books.
Bookmark this and watch it today, if you want to stop trading narratives and start trading architecture
It will permanently change how you view markets and liquidity. Check the quoted post below to see an example of HFT bot that appears to be exploiting these mechanics, printing over $500k in just 26 days on Polymarket.
For the platform, attracting this level of algorithmic warfare is the ultimate validation. This level of deep, constant liquidity cements the platform as a Tier-1 financial fortress.
What you'll learn inside:
- The fundamental flaw in the continuous limit order book (clob)
- How latency arbitrage actually works under the hood
- The concept of the "liquidity tax" and who ultimately pays it
- Why pure speed mathematically eliminates directional risk
There are no magic pills or secret formulas in this game. The edge simply belongs to those who understand the mechanics better than the others.