Anti Crypto
Crypto Talk
@microchipgnu
Who is this guy?
Built PSPDFKit. Raised €100M+ from Insight Partners.
Then built OpenClaw, now the fastest-growing open-source project on GitHub.
At first I was shocked.
Then annoyed.
Then I could
partly agree.
Lisbon, 2016
Broke college student.
A friend told me about
Ethereum over a beer.
He was up 3x. But then he said: "The technology might interest you."
Discovery
The first thing that excited
me wasn't making money.
It was saving money.
Deploy once. Users pay for compute. As a broke student, that idea was everything.
But...
Imagine paying every
time you open a
web page.
That's what blockchains asked users to do.
The industry thought this was a feature. For seven years.
The pattern
Every cycle promised something real
Anyone can raise capital globally.
$8.2B raised in 2017
Lend, borrow, trade without banks.
$15B TVL in 6 months
Provable scarcity on the internet.
$25B volume in 2021
Digital worlds with real economies.
$3T market cap peak
Real breakthroughs. Real technology.
But...
Every cycle went wrong the same way
86% below ICO price within a year.
Bitconnect. OneCoin. EOS.
Ponzinomics dressed as innovation.
98% of food farms dead
Right-click save was a fair point.
Market down 95% from peak
Hundreds of concurrent users.
Meta walked it all back
Same breakthroughs. Wrong user.
Mintbase, 2018 - 2021
We built utility NFTs for three years.
The market ignored us.
Until we did a collection with Deadmau5. 1M NFTs minted.
The market didn't want utility. It wanted spectacle.
You can be
technically right
for years and still
feel like you
wasted your time.
2022
The collapse
Uniswap never stopped. Ethereum never went down. Aave kept processing.
The protocols never crashed.
People did.
You build the engine,
someone else crashes
the car, and the
headline is
"cars are dangerous."
Late 2022
Then ChatGPT arrived.
I built blockchain plugins for it.
AI constructing on-chain transactions.
OpenAI took them down.
"Financial plugins." Same lesson crypto taught for a decade: don't build on someone else's platform.
Every crypto cycle was
the right idea at the
wrong time, built for
the wrong user.
AI agents don't mind
paying for compute.
That's literally
what they do.
HTTP specification, 1997
402
Payment Required
"Reserved for future use"
Dormant for 28 years.
Now AI agents need to buy things.
x402 in action
No account. No API key. No human. Just HTTP + Stablecoins.
Today
The scale
1B+
402 responses / day
$33T
Stablecoin settlement
$320B
Stablecoin market cap
Stripe launched x402 support. Using USDC. On Base. Stripe isn't competing with crypto. Stripe is building on crypto.
In 1999, $1.5T went
into telecom. Most
companies died.
But they laid fiber
under every ocean.
That fiber powered YouTube, Netflix, and Zoom. The bubble was the business model for the infrastructure.
frames.ag
Wallets and tools
for AI agents.
Open payment rails that software actually wants to use.
$ claude "research competitor pricing for our product launch,
scrape their landing pages, generate a comparison video,
and draft a go-to-market strategy doc"
Searching web for competitor data... exa-search $0.002
Scraping 12 landing pages... firecrawl $0.015
Generating comparison video... sora-v2 $0.12
Writing strategy doc... claude-opus $0.08
4 tools | 4 payments via Frames wallet | all txs on Solana confirmed
Done. competitor-analysis.mp4 + gtm-strategy.md saved.
Total: $0.217 | No API keys. No subscriptions. Just a wallet with a budget.
Frames traction
Today
1,796
Agents
92K
Transactions
$57K
Volume
200
Active 24h
Growing. Early. Real usage.
I didn't waste my 20s.
I just didn't know
who I was building
for yet.
@microchipgnu | read the essay