Almost 12 years ago, I left
@DRWTrading with
@wesarn_real to start
@digitalasset.
@ShaulKfir joined us shortly after. The name felt right. The idea was simple but audacious: build a global settlement system that is asset agnostic. One that doesn’t eliminate banks, exchanges, and intermediaries, but tears down the barriers keeping people from accessing assets and settling at a fraction of today’s cost. A new financial world, built for the end consumer.
We knew institutional adoption was the path. We just didn’t know how long it would take.
We failed. We made bad decisions. There are things we would have done differently. But we never let go of our North Star, even when people around us were convinced we had no idea what we were doing. That focus, conviction, and most of all, patience, led us to launching
@CantonNetwork. And the results speak for themselves.
Today is a new chapter in that story.
I’m proud to announce that
@a16zcrypto is leading our latest round, joined by some of the giants of the global financial system, including
@ABNAMRO, ADIA,
@apolloglobal,
@BNPParibasCIB,
@Broadridge,
@citsecurities,
@CMEVentures,
@cbventures, Green Wolf Asset Management,
@Hanwha_Official,
@HSBC,
@icapitalnetwork,
@LCVentures,
@OptiverGlobal,
@polychain,
@R136Ventures,
@SPGlobal,
@sbigroup,
@smash_capital,
@SoFi,
@Tradeweb, and
@WilliamBlair, and others we’ll be naming shortly. Twelve years ago, I could not have imagined building alongside partners of this caliber.
$CC today processes the highest fees of any institutional blockchain network. And we’re just getting started. What’s coming later this year is just as exciting.
None of this happens without the builders, the ones who show up to weekly tokenomics meetings, dial into operations subcommittees, spend nights and weekends building apps on Canton, and show up on
@X to cheer this ecosystem forward. You are not just supporters. You are partners. I’m honored to be on this journey with you.
On a personal note:
@a16z hits differently for me. Ben’s book The Hard Thing About Hard Things was one I kept coming back to during the hard stretches. Having his firm lead this round is meaningful in a way that’s hard to put into words. So I’ll let him do it:
“The hard thing isn’t setting a big, audacious goal. The hard thing is spending sleepless nights trying to achieve it. The hard thing isn’t dreaming big. The hard thing is waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat when the dream turns into a nightmare. Motivating yourself by watching YouTube shorts or Instagram reels isn’t the hard thing. The hard thing is working every day and being consistent even if you feel like shit. The hard thing isn’t boasting you could achieve anything. The hard thing is working like hell to achieve something. The hard thing isn’t believing in yourself. The hard thing is getting things done when nobody believes in you, even when you doubt yourself. The hard thing isn’t telling yourself that you must achieve the impossible. The hard thing is toiling hard every day for years despite knowing that success is too uncertain.”
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It is with a heavy heart that we announce we are winding down the Botanix network.
This decision is the hardest one we have made in four years, and we want to share the reasoning openly because the people who backed us, built with us, and used what we shipped deserve more than a quiet shutdown notice.
First off, an immediate practical consideration for the Botanix community: please withdraw your Bitcoin and other assets before July 9th, 2026.
When we started in 2022, the pitch was simple enough to say in a sentence: bring real utility to Bitcoin. What that actually meant in practice, and what we have spent nearly four years building toward, was more ambitious than that sentence made it sound. We were trying to build a Bitcoin-based blockchain that could find genuine product-market fit as a platform for Bitcoin applications, without using token incentives to drive growth, manufacture users, or simulate utility. Almost every chain that has launched in the last cycle has reached for the same playbook (issue a token without PMF, engineer the incentive surface, point at the resulting metrics), and we did not believe this route is a viable strategy in the long term. We wanted to know whether a Bitcoin chain could earn its users on the strength of what was built on top of it, the value it brings in the market with Bitcoin itself as the only meaningful economic primitive in the system.
And we built it. The Spiderchain went live and stayed live, a year of mainnet operation with one hundred percent uptime and zero security incidents on a genuinely novel cryptographic architecture. We built Dynafed, a dynamic federation that turned the Spiderchain from a static multisig set into a rotating, decentralized one, the technical milestone that most people in this space said could not be built on Bitcoin without compromising trust assumptions. Twenty-five million transactions, two hundred thousand wallets, and tens of millions of dollars in assets moved across the chain, every single number of that earned organically without a token, without airdrops, without points programs, or any of the manufactured-demand machinery. Chainlink, Morpho, GMX, Dolomite, Fireblocks, Alchemy, Galaxy, OKX Wallet, all integrated. We shipped a Bitcoin neobank with BINK on iOS and Android, with self-custodial email login for Bitcoin (something that had never existed before), native Bitcoin yield, and the lowest borrowing rates against Bitcoin anywhere in the world, all of it downstream of owning the infrastructure. The point of saying this is not to argue with our own conclusion. The protocol works, the product works, and our team and ecosystem worked in concert to do exceptional work.
We have run this experiment in earnest, with a working protocol, real applications, and a serious team, for over a year on mainnet and nearly four years in total. The honest answer we have arrived at, after living inside it every day, is that it did not work, at least not in this market and not on this timeline.
We want to share what we think we learned, with the caveat that some of this is conviction and some of this is still suspicion, and we would rather be transparent about the difference than pretend to have clarity we do not have.
The first thing I've had to sit with is timing. Bitcoin utility, making Bitcoin programmable, productive, and integrated into real financial activity, isn't where the real world users sit right now. The conversation is still on Bitcoin as a reserve asset, on its monetary and political positioning, on base-layer conservatism. Those questions are upstream of the ones a Bitcoin L2 needs people to be asking. I still believe Bitcoin gets there, but belief in the destination is not the same as being able to predict when, and nobody can. It's also possible the destination never materialises at all, and that Bitcoin's role as a reserve asset is simply where it settles. If that's true, there will never be a market for what we were building, and no amount of time or capital would change that.
The second is the token question. We intended to eventually launch a token. We saw it, and still see it, as a genuinely new form of equity, something closer to an IPO than an airdrop, to be done when you reach product market fit and the moment is right. That moment never came. What became clear over the last year is that the market largely stopped rewarding even the more considered versions of that playbook. Token launches across the board have broadly underperformed, and those that did go to market with tokens haven't seen the outcomes or PMF that the model is supposed to produce.
The third lesson is about where DeFi demand on Bitcoin actually lives. For most use cases that exist today, lending, yield, leveraged exposure, WBTC on a mature general-purpose L2 is genuinely sufficient. Users have voted with their behaviour, and the verdict is that the trust assumptions of a wrapped representation on Ethereum are acceptable to almost everyone who wants Bitcoin-denominated DeFi. Decentralisation matters to people in principle and in conversation; in practice, when something cheaper and easier is in front of them, they use it. The security case for a dedicated Bitcoin L2 is real, but it only matters for a narrower band of applications than our thesis required, one of the clearer lessons this market has taught us.
The fourth lesson is structural. The on-chain economy is consolidating around venues that own the user relationship: Hyperliquid, Robinhood, the major CEXes, and now TradFi participants absorbing an ever-larger share of attention, flow, and revenue. Convenience and institutional credibility win, every time, as soon as they're available. As retail participation thins, that concentration only deepens. We were, and still are, believers in decentralisation, but the current direction of on-chain growth is running through distribution, and any team building base-layer infrastructure today is rowing upstream against that current. We were no exception.
The fifth lesson is the most concrete. Both of the above played out directly in our economics. The users we attracted were primarily using Bitcoin as a store of value for yield, a legitimate use case, but not the high-frequency transaction volume that drives fee revenue on a network like ours. BINK was our answer to that: a Bitcoin neobank designed to bring daily usage of BTC and stablecoins on-chain, driving the transaction volume the network needed. It was the right strategic instinct, and one we never got the chance to fully test. BINK only landed on both app stores in the last few weeks, a product that by its nature could only be built once the underlying infrastructure was proven and live. When users choose the convenient option and economic gravity pulls toward distribution, what's left on a decentralised infrastructure layer is a user base that costs more to serve than it generates. Infrastructure costs are what they are, and the fee income never came close to covering them.
If you would like to see how we were imagining a Bitcoin future and what we have been working on since September, feel free to download BINK and give it a spin: it’s a full-fledged self-custodial Bitcoin Neobank with email login, one click borrowing, a Lightning integration and more.
App store:
Play store:
This UX is where we think Bitcoin is ultimately heading towards although it feels too early. You can use invite code 1SD31R, but remember to remove your funds by July 9th.
We could keep going. We have chosen not to, however, because continuing past the point where additional time stops producing additional learning is not conviction, it is something that looks like conviction from the outside while corroding into something else on the inside. We would rather stop now, with integrity intact and resources available to take care of the people who took a chance on us, than push the experiment past the point where it still has something to teach us.
Reminder: Please withdraw all your assets by July 9th. After this, the federation will sweep the remaining Bitcoin. Any other assets or tokens on the network from then onwards will unfortunately be unrecoverable.
After this, the federation will sweep the remaining Bitcoin. Any other assets or tokens on the network from then onwards will unfortunately be unrecoverable.
To our investors, who backed a thesis that was harder to defend than it should have been, to our partners who built alongside us and bet pieces of their own roadmaps on ours, to the developers who deployed on Spiderchain, to our users and the BINK community who showed up for something experimental and stayed, and most of all to the Botanix team who shipped a genuinely novel system with rigour and care and who made every hard day worth the difficulty: Thank you, more than the words available here can carry.
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In 1990, the World Wide Web was invented on Steve Jobs' computer. Steve ignored it.
This is the story I tell in my new book Steve Jobs in Exile. Here is what it should tell the rest of us about the moment we are in now.
Steve was running NeXT, an unsuccessful computer company. He had been pushed out of Apple five years earlier and was burning his fortune trying to build a successor to the Macintosh. The machine NeXT sold was a matte-black magnesium cube -- expensive and beautiful and not selling.
In October of that year, on the other side of the Atlantic, a British physicist named Tim Berners-Lee took delivery of a NeXT Cube at CERN, the physics laboratory on the Swiss-French border. He used it to invent the World Wide Web. The web ran on the Cube for its first year of existence. The revolution was happening on Steve's hardware, and yet Steve ignored it.
Here is the question I keep thinking about from my book.
If Steve Jobs, the most visionary tech mind of his generation, missed the Web, the most civilization-shaping tech of his lifetime, how are the rest of us supposed to see anything coming?
Berners-Lee had been asking his boss at CERN for a NeXT Cube for months. His boss finally signed off, hoping to test the exotic Cube. "He suggested that I should buy one of these NeXT machines I'd been talking about so enthusiastically," Berners-Lee later told Fresh Air. "And if we needed a sort of test project to run on the NeXT machine ... 'Why not just do this hypertext thing you're talking about?'"
The "test project" evolved into the World Wide Web.
The problem Berners-Lee was trying to solve was not a glamorous one. CERN employed thousands of scientists from over a hundred countries, most cycling through on short assignments and taking their knowledge with them when they left. Berners-Lee was trying to keep institutional knowledge from walking out the door. He wanted a system that worked the way human memory does, where any piece of information could connect to any other without permission or central control.
Through late 1990, he coded in his gray-floored office. The Cube's object-oriented system let him build in months what would have taken a year on anything else.
By December, the first website went online. The World Wide Web now existed, running on a single black NeXT Cube in CERN's Building 31. Berners-Lee scrawled a warning on it in red ink: "This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!"
Underneath the elegant interface he was building HTTP, HTML, and the server software that would deliver web pages. These three inventions would form much of the invisible plumbing of our modern connectivity.
When a colleague of Berners-Lee's brought a demo of the Web to NeXT's headquarters in California, he could not get anyone there to pay attention. Nobody even dared show it to Steve, afraid he would dismiss it. NeXT was busy with its own internet plans, which Steve eventually killed.
So back to the question. If Steve Jobs missed the web, how are the rest of us supposed to see whatever comes next?
The honest answer is that we cannot. Nobody can. The rest of us are not going to outpattern-match Steve Jobs.
But here is what I learned writing Steve Jobs in Exile. Transformations almost always begin in obscurity, on the margins, solving boring problems with boring tools. The web did not look revolutionary in 1990. It looked like a tool for sharing physics papers.
We are in another such moment now. AI is the obvious changemaker. But the biggest transformations are rarely the obvious ones. The next one is happening somewhere right now, and it is trickier to spot than any sweeping proclamation about AI. We will recognize it, if we recognize it at all, from the unglamorous work few people are focused on.
I will not speculate on what Steve would have made of AI today. But if he could miss the Web, the rest of us are going to have to look harder.
Photo of the original CERN NeXT Cube courtesy of Robert Scoble.
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