I never paid much attention to Telegram until today. The imprisonment of Durov is my signal to buy $TON because I see it as proof that the $TON ecosystem is outpacing X and other Silicon Valley based social media apps. This is for 2 reasons: first, the revenue sharing model of Telegram is much more advanced and fair compared to that of X and Meta that are stuck in the stone age. Second, Telegram is the only platform where user privacy is protected. Lastly, I also believe that Durov isn't really going to give in to pressure from EU bureaucrats so these tailwinds are going to continue to fuel Telegram's growth in the short and medium term.

I believe that the final and parabolic phase of this bull will happen in 2025. Right now crypto resembles a coiled spring about to bounce off range lows. In these conditions a good microcap can give returns in the short/medium term making it easier to let bigger trades run & reach the final phase of the bull. Last year my pick was AYIN. This year my microcap of choice is LEO (ca: 3vLy3jPqWZdTqYx7KczLVXK674pbvruWzRVpeFmppump), a meme coin on Solana. I'm bullish LEO because contrary to other memes on Solana that are not unique and don't have committed teams behind them, LEO's CTO team has never changed and has been consistent from day 1. LEO's narrative is unique & based on a world famous meme that has never been used in crypto before. KOLs seem particularly responsive to it as well. Fundamentals for meme coins amount to being fun & having a solid core community that works around the clock. LEO has got both. My rule for microcaps is to always allocate either 0.15% of my portfolio or $100, whichever is smaller.

I rarely share my macro views on markets but this is a chart that should keep all crypto enthusiasts up at night. The CAPE (Cyclically Adjusted Price Earnings) ratio is a measure of how overpriced stocks are compared to the revenue of the underlying companies. In other words, a measure of irrationality in markets. I keep going back to this chart because based on CAPE, whose all time high so far was from the dot com bubble (43.21), we seem on path to the biggest market top in financial history. After that, the biggest crash will inevitably follow. The current value of CAPE is 36.29, the highest since November 2021 which is when the last bullish market topped. Crypto will probably play a key role in the final parabolic phase of this supercycle after which it will take several decades for markets to recover. For those of us who have always made a living trading, this chart should serve as important reminder that maybe it's wise to slowly start diversifying and building in the real world.

I've bought more TON today because TON is the underlying currency of the Telegram ecosystem. It's the currency with which users pay for services such as ad space and the currency with which content creators get paid. I believe TON to be very undervalued considering the scale of its ecosystem and the fact that Telegram is the only large scale social media app that hasn't been captured by the absolutist surveillance actors behind X and Meta. And for that very reason, it is the most competitive among them. In a way Telegram has become West's WeChat. Tencent, the owner of WeChat, has a huge stake in Tesla and probably in X. Considering X's privacy policy and its roadmap to integrate banking services, it's clear that Elon Musk aims to make X West's everything app, the WeChat counterpart. An everything app is the perfect surveillance app (Sam Bankman-Fried had a similar ambition with FTX). To use X users are required to give up an enormous amount of private data, this probably hinders growth. Telegram's privacy policy is much more user friendly and privacy is probably why Telegram's growth has outpaced X or why X cannot catch up with it. Of course Telegram is not Signal, but it's also true that Telegram's userbase is 20 times bigger than that of Signal and user data dynamics change with scale. There is value in an app that resists government attempts to install backdoors (they wouldn't have arrested Durov otherwise) or that refuses to share user data with third parties in general. Maybe some data gets leaked anyway, but probably much less than what's required to train AIs. For this reason I think TON has a lot more room to grow from here because markets still haven't priced in the implications for growth that follow from its user centric privacy policies.

The TON blockchain has stopped producing blocks for 4 hours. Many, of course, are now taking this opportunity to denounce TON for being centralized and to try and instil panic among holders. Unfortunately for them, if we look at TON's price action, their FUD seems to be falling on deaf ears. The reason is simple. While the current situation warrants caution for TON's users who cannot buy and sell onchain while this issue persists, being centralized isn't something that diminishes TON's value. Decentralization was never part of TON's value proposition. Its user engine, Telegram, isn't competing with Bitcoin or Signal. Telegram competes with X and Meta, not Signal. Also, Telegram didn't build TON to solve the blockchain trilemma. Telegram built TON to improve accessibility and UX for all content creators across the globe, both banked and unbanked. On Telegram one doesn't have to take a selfie with their ID to get a verification badge or to get access to account analytics. So most of these gentlemen yapping about centralization and false advertising seem, at best, a bit lost in the woods. TON is a game changer because for the first time there is a main stream social media app, Telegram, that is outcompeting Silicon Valley giants by offering better UX through better privacy. So if until yesterday sadic psychopaths like Alex Karp and Elon Musk gathered in their men caves to drink and laugh about how easily they can force users to give up any personal data they want because simply what are they going to do? what are they going to use?, today they've realized that their users will inevitably move to Telegram. This is the math behind my conviction that Durov's arrest is a sophisticated attack to try and bring Telegram in Epstein's surveillance club.

If we're to believe the official story, Cassie Heart, the founder of Quilibrium, is rejecting VC offers because they all want to engage in token warrants. Instead, she is looking for sophisticated investors who believe in Quilibrium's long term value creation capabilites and are willing to invest without asking for tokens in return. One can't help but wonder, is she bluffing and if not, what kind of VC invests without requesting tokens in return? There are 2 possible explanations:

1) Cassie is well aware of the centralized essence of her project but also very ambitions, so by sophisticated she means investors with a surveillance & control agenda (like Peter Thiel or Microsoft proxy funds). To put it in deep state jargon, she is looking for access into elite money. I think that's possible but not really plausible. Aside from those I can't think of any other kind sophisticated investors, that peddle in crypto, that are willing to put money in projects without token warrants. Unless, of course, they have a special relationship with the founder (like the one hinted in my tongue-in-cheek bullish tweet this morning).

2) Conspiracies and memes aside, the most likely explanation, in my opinion, is that Cassie has already raised enough seed and most of the money has been invested in a mining operation. The plan is to mine as much as possible of the coin early on while posturing as anti-VC and keeping a low profile to avoid attracting too much attention and competition. This is to make sure that her mining operation gets most of the supply now that rewards are high.

Privacy, decentralization and fair launch are just marketing buzzwords here. Quilibrium can't really claim a fair launch because there is no open source code of the mining algo and there is no fixed emissions curve. So insiders obviously have a huge edge. It can't claim to be a privacy project because it's scope is data hoarding and processing. But their launch strategy reminds me a lot of Kaspa, whose team received $8M in funding that was used to set up a mining operation. And, as they mined, they kept advertising the project as a hobby to outsiders. Just like with Kaspa early on, there are no official Quilibrium social media channels, everything seems community run and even the Telegram group where Cassie hangs out is private. So what do I think of Quilibrium? I think that it's another crypto experiment worth keeping an eye on because it has a strong community where most seem to be drinking the kool aid.