Variant

@variant

45 Following

3273 Followers

Alana Levin pfp

SAVE THE DATE On April 8th, we're co-hosting a Protocol Security Day alongside our friends at Blockaid, Spearbit, and Anchorage It'll cover best practices for security hygiene across the stack Chain and protocol builders, register here: https://lu.ma/3bhzeh3i

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Daniel Barabander pfp

Daniel Barabander

Good crypto x AI projects leverage the features of crypto to overcome limitations faced by AI. Here are three examples of challenges of AI: 1. Resources. To be competitive as an AI company you need to aggregate significant resources (compute and data) and talent. 2. Composability. Agents cannot reliably chain actions together. 3. Native Payments. Agents, while nearly infinite in their ability to act on a web made up of natural language, remain restricted by the fact that payment rails do not exist on internet rails. These challenges can be solved through separate features of crypto: economic ownership, verifiability, and self-custody.

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Nina pfp

Same @variant newsletter. Different vibes. X: Ghost town Warpcast: Party time Farcaster community clearly LOVES us more 💙

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Variant pfp

New issue of our newsletter is out https://blog.variant.fund/march-2025-newsletter

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Daniel Barabander pfp

Daniel Barabander

I was going to do a cast on my new article on Agents as NFTs but @atown did a better job of explaining what I'm trying to capture than anything I could write. Check out the article here: https://blog.variant.fund/agents-as-nfts

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Daniel Barabander pfp

Daniel Barabander

I’m thrilled to announce our seed investment in Pluralis Research, which is building a decentralized AI training protocol. We are laser focused at investing in projects that use crypto ownership to solve coordination problems. Pluralis is a bullseye on that thesis, using ownership to solve the "resource problem" of training foundational AI models that are truly open. We couldn't be more excited to support Alex and the rest of the team. Full post here: https://blog.variant.fund/investing-in-pluralis-research

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Daniel Barabander pfp

Daniel Barabander

Greatly looking forward to joining @jchervinsky and the Exabits team for an AMA today at 12 PM ET! Going to cover some of the unique legal wrinkles at the intersection of crypto x AI. Join us soon! https://x.com/exa_bits/status/1900203369391591553

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Jesse Walden pfp

NEW GUARD https://x.com/jessewldn/status/1889147533810692332

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Jesse Walden pfp

NEW PRODUCT / PRE-SEED ANNOUNCEMENT https://x.com/jessewldn/status/1889369798305608110 If youre launching tokens you must yap to @aja about Doppler

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Jesse Walden pfp

this issue of the @variant newsletter is a banger a lot of good stuff rounded up from the last month or so. https://blog.variant.fund/the-ai-and-daos-edition

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Daniel Barabander pfp

Daniel Barabander

New piece: Why (good) AI needs crypto. TLDR: Closed AI is anti-competitive. Open source AI hits a “resource problem” (huge compute/data costs). Crypto fixes this by incentivizing resource contributions via ownership—unlocking bigger models & faster innovation. 🔗👇 https://variant.fund/articles/why-good-ai-needs-crypto/

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Jesse Walden pfp

thank you to @horsefacts.eth for giving this update on Farcaster at @variant's investor day in November. he discussed why programmable social is a "big idea," product-led protocol development, what drove 30x DAU jan-july, frames, membership-based channels, AI agents and a bunch more. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfKqRKkLNW8

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Jesse Walden pfp

Good story on the origins of Phantom wallet, and whats been driving their rocket ship growth in 2024. One of the few crypto products with millions of DAU/MAU/MTU https://x.com/jessewldn/status/1876658341813821944

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Sina Habibian pfp

Here is my conversation with @jchervinsky, chief legal officer at @variant, previously at the blockchain association and compound. We talk about: - how US govt/regulation works from first principles - how crypto played a role in this election - how legislation could change with the new administration - how to use the DUNA for building protocols Podcast here: intothebytecode.com/47-jake-chervinsky

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Jesse Walden pfp

Me and @paulframbot down by the schoolyard Please watch/share :) https://x.com/jessewldn/status/1869482665591931109?s=46&t=wQXqvpirzg313128L3-p1A

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Jesse Walden pfp

DAOs 2.0 https://jessewalden.com/daos-2-0/

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DeFi Education Fund pfp

DeFi Education Fund

In a paper published today in The International Academy of Financial Crime Litigators, DEF’s @atuminelli along with @jchervinsky & @dbarabander from @variant take a deep dive into the law on unlicensed money transmitting businesses, 8 U.S.C. § 1960, and argue that, based on an extensive review of the case law and statutory history, control over customer funds is necessary to define an entity as a “money transmitting business” - a business that “transfers funds on behalf of the public.” 🧵👇 https://www.defieducationfund.org/post/def-publishes-new-paper-in-in-the-international-academy-of-financial-crime-litigators

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Daniel Barabander pfp

Daniel Barabander

There is no law more existential for crypto projects than § 1960, which makes it a crime to operate an “unlicensed money transmitting business.” § 1960 is front and center in the Tornado Cash case, where a court held in September that Roman Storm could violate the statute even without control over user funds. Today, @atuminelli, @jchervinsky, and I published the most detailed analysis I’m aware of on how to interpret the statute in The International Academy of Financial Crime Litigators. Our core finding: § 1960 requires control, so the Tornado Cash court got it wrong. Check out the article here: https://edit.financialcrimelitigators.org/api/assets/cd682a1c-1cb0-4c99-a491-ac6155f4bdc2.pdf.

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Variant pfp

Reporting @dbarabander pre-Thanksgiving thoughts on agents 👇

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Jesse Walden pfp

Variant had its annual investor meeting on Tuesday. This is the gist of what I told LPs about the last few years and where I hope we're going: https://jessewalden.com/beyond-speculation-and-stablecoins-cryptos-next-phase/

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