Looking back on the year and a half that I've been with @Arcium it is truly unbelievable. Unbelievable in the sense that I am an entirely different person than I was when I first joined. I came from a strictly engineering background, having designed, prototyped, and brought to market many different interesting products. Engineering from a design perspective is great, but I never realized how unfulfilling it could be. You're essentially stuck in a moat doing the same exact thing over and over. Speculating how to obtain more PMF, deciding if it's feasible or realistic mathematically and economically, designing it over months, testing and prototyping, and releasing it. Within this linear path, there are some deviations, but for the most part it's the same. When I was offered the opportunity to work with the team at Arcium, from a pragmatic standpoint it was hard to leave engineering. But there are moments in life where taking risks is necessary. As humans, our psychology resists change and risk inherently, but if you never take any risks I don't think you're experiencing life to the fullest. So I took the leap and never looked back as the head of community at Arcium. I have never been happier or more excited to wake up every morning than I have been over the last year and a half. Being able to interact with so many incredible people every day and help grow a vision I wholeheartedly believe in is one of the greatest feelings ever. It started off interacting and talking with as many people as possible to help get to know them, why they were interested in Arcium, and just build rapport. Over time this grew into X Spaces, AMAs, events, campaigns, etc. to slowly grow, always with the vision of educating and helping people understand what it was we even did. As the months went on my ultimate goal was always to educate, like I mentioned, but also help individuals see the potential and value they had within this space. I've always preached ad nauseam this idea of AI generated content and extraction as something that is so prevalent in this space, but even more so the general landscape of the digital world. There are so many that take this route that never learn to write, be creative/unique, or add value to themselves. It was always my goal with this community to help draw this out in as many individuals as possible. Because as a person, it has to be exhausting constantly cycling through projects/products you don't care about for months on end with no guarantee of success. With this I wanted to help people see how many concrete opportunities open up if you just commit to a creative moat you actually enjoy. It's all about being future-seeking, understanding the landscape and seeing how many choose the easy route of "AI" versus how many take the time to truly commit to something unique and creative. It's simple if you're aware. This mentality has echoed now and fulfilled itself within the Arcium community more than I ever thought possible. There are so many incredible members of this community it would be impossible to name them all. But these are people who arrived with nothing more than curiosity and walked away with skill, real relationships, and in many cases a career. Members of this community have gone on to work with ecosystem teams and across Solana. Because they committed to something they cared about and let the work speak for itself. This is what alignment means to me and our team. It is a shared belief that you grow by adding value, not by extracting it. When a community aligns like this, the wins stop being zero sum. One person landing a job, shipping a product, or finding their voice lifts everyone around them. I have seen it happen again and again over the last year and a half, and it never gets old. Today Arcium is one of the largest protocols of our category in existence, the confidential computing layer a real ecosystem runs on, the foundation on which confidential applications, AI agents, and encrypted markets are built. Watching those same people help build something this significant, where confidential computing is foundational infrastructure rather than an afterthought, is hard to put into words. The community and the protocol grew together, and neither would be here without the other. As we move forward there will always be continuous work on alignment and ecosystem support/growth. Much more is planned for this and more information will come out in the coming weeks about our patron program. The experience that we had with TGE was unimaginable, and I think we balanced a fine line. This is one of the milestones many teams approach with uncertainty, and our team worked so incredibly hard to make it a success. The outpouring of support and positive feedback was special and it meant a lot to our team. If you have been with us through the waves, the Spaces, the AMAs, the late nights, and everything in between, this next chapter is ours. We are not slowing down after TGE, we are now in full acceleration mode. Confidential computing will unlock an entirely new subset of applications, use cases, and technological advancements. Our team, ecosystem, and community will be the ones to bring it forward.

if you haven’t experience Fall in the Midwest you’re missing out I haven’t run my heat or AC in weeks because of how nice the weather is my windows just stay open all day and night truly undefeated

get over your fear of failure and of not being good at something right away getting past this turns all your potential energy into kinetic

midterm season in the us is insane every single day: > 5-10 ads in the mailbox > smear ads every commercial break > someone knocking on your door each week it's not about who has the best ideas it's about who can spend the most making the other look worse

im officially v02 maxxing

manifestation of your dreams and goals is just an extension of newton’s 3rd law your energy in will always equal your energy out stop wasting time expecting things to change for you. get to work

it has never been easier to learn almost anything if you’re still not improving, the bottleneck isn’t access. it’s you

i had a conversation with Dino at the beginning of this week about @motiongame_ i think it's rare to see a founder do any sort of 1:1 to talk through their product. we met for 30m and he talked through his vision and answered all the questions i had. i know he has and continues to do these 1:1's with many others, so it's a massive effort on his end it's refreshing to see this level of genuine connection in the space, really excited for what he and his team are building lots of 🫨

another private AI hat being thrown in the ring on top of their proof of humanity foundation i think world is doing some very unique stuff showcases how sought after the human element and agency is becoming digitally people are tired of not being in control

If you look at the definition of the dead internet theory you’ll find an idea that the public-facing internet has largely been abandoned by genuine human users. This idea has always fascinated me because we live in an age where there are more humans alive than at any point in human history. Each year we grow by around 70 million people. The theory itself is just a cultural meme, but what I do think is true is the complete and devastating loss of agency. Never in the history of man has it been easier to do nothing and rely on computers to do something for you, and that’s not an exaggeration. You can objectively tell AI to do almost anything for you (anything with the right model) and get an output with the only requirement being a prompt. Paired with short form, low attention span popular media, being “human” can almost be put on a resume. I worry about the younger generations and the true impact that they will have. Aging myself, but I grew up in a time that is looked back fondly as a bygone era by many. The internet hardly existed, human connection was foundational, media was informational and profit was tied to honest consumerism rather than bland, generic outsourcing. Every person used to have agency, or at least the vast majority of the population. People were present, they had soul, a unique human spirit. It was the golden era for family gatherings, holidays, consumer goods, and business progression. Now we have copy + paste of everything: goods, marketing, profit, it has all become a blob of neutral-colored tones. And the more the internet fills up with all this generated, neutral “stuff” the more valuable the idea of actual creation becomes. I take a lot of inspiration from accounts like Life on Film and @AllanPeters, and I know that many do as well. Even most recently with the @Tesla Roadster unveil, a car driving upside down on a ramp and flying off to land upright, it is the pure essence of what we miss the most. People crave the human experience, the creativity, the uniqueness that we can provide that AI never could. Now, don’t take me for someone who is against AI, I do genuinely think AI has and will continue to provide some of the most incredible technological and industrial advancements humanity has ever seen. It is important though, to reframe what it is useful for: producing a flat output. Critical thinking, theory crafting, taste, uniqueness, creativity, this is and will only ever be done by a human. My time with @Arcium embodied this mentality of genuine human connection. Working closely with people every single day and finding those who still believe that being human has value. You stand out against a sea of AI and generic meat proxies if you just take a second to think and lean on what makes you special. This will only continue to grow in value, especially in marketing, growth, and community positions across multiple industries. I’m extremely eager to take what I learned and experienced throughout my career and carry it into another project that understands this value for their customer as well. There are many ways to stand out, most of them very similar, but the ones that will truly succeed will lean into this mentality. The internet isn’t dead, there is proof humanity is only continuing to expand. It just needs more people willing to put in the work, lean into the human element, and create something they’re proud of. I’m now open to new opportunities, so if this resonates with you or your team, reach out.

If you’ve paid attention at all to the broader AI sphere, you will have seen general conversations have moved toward products like: Muse, Town, Instinct, and Hark which are finding PMF in something more personalized. Honestly, at this point it’s a race to build assistants that can essentially take what large models are capable of and integrate a personalized experience for users and enterprise. The value prop was pretty clear when Instinct raised around $250m at a $2.5b valuation last month which is now reported in talks to raise another $1b at a $10b valuation, which is mind blowing I do understand the excitement behind these agents because if you have something that can remember work, help you follow through on plans, and take care of mundane or even important business you’d otherwise spend hours doing, it's appealing. I don’t think enough people understand how precious time truly is and this technology can help reclaim it in our personal lives, along with it also having a large opportunity to streamline business processes. These can easily find information across company systems, coordinate work, and follow through on some routine tasks that could save time cumulatively across organizations. Which all sounds great and can help explain some of the interest, but you would also be smart to wonder how much of that value can reliably be delivered If you understand how AI functions, your curiosity will steer toward how this could actually work. All of these tasks require access to information in your personal life and information that businesses run on (including internal convos, sensitive records, financial docs, etc.). The more responsibility that we give these assistants (and AI in general), the more emphasis will be placed on what they have access to, control, and what they’re allowed to do with it. This access has power creep because people that find it useful will find more use cases for the technology. It can start as a simple connection or summary that leads to an automatic workflow that requires a bit more access and snowballs from there. Overtime, a comfortability inherently sets in without further understanding of the inner mechanisms There is a great TechCrunch article that talks about this type of concern, specifically with Instinct. If you do a bit of digging you’ll see that Instinct’s terms actually say that disconnecting doesn’t automatically delete the information it has already collected and that it requires a separate request. These tiny hurtles required to fully remove data is exactly what people don’t understand As these assistants gain more access and responsibility, mistakes can have extreme consequences. They can be manipulated through prompts to provide information even if it wasn’t supposed to or make mistakes because it misunderstood a prompt that leaks something irreversible. This technology has no morals, it is simply attempting to complete a task the best way possible with the access and information it has. There are some that are more comfortable running this technology locally, maybe even some businesses so that they have infrastructure they control. But, this takes time, resources, and knowledge on top of the responsibility of keeping it running and free of issues 24/7 All of this leads to why private AI and encrypted computing are so exciting, especially within this context. There is a huge opportunity to make this type of technology equally capable, but more than likely, even more capable while also protecting the information and access that it has. Think about how much more useful these products could be if you felt comfortable bringing your actual life, work, and sensitive information into them: finances, personal plans, internal convos, business documents, healthcare data, honestly there is no ceiling. This is what we are targeting with Blackthorn at @Arcium: private inference that protects information while the AI uses it. The goal is to let people and businesses use capable AI with sensitive information without having to run the infra themselves Simple, powerful, <encrypted>