Ray Xiao

Ray Xiao@_RayXiao · 9 天前政策影响

A bank runs on three things: a franchise (the brand plus the stack), underwriting authority (which assets to list, what LTVs and caps to run), and capital, the operator's own money that stands junior to depositors. Watch DeFi lending through that lens and the past year gets interesting. Onchain there have always been two ways to run a bank: an integrated shop that handles the stack, the underwriting, and the liquidations, or a platform where the base layer provides the rails and specialist teams operate on top. This year the two converged. The integrated model started renting out the whole franchise, underwriting authority included (EtherFi's whitelabel Aave V4 instance). The platform model started writing rules for its operators (Morpho Vaults V2: role separation, caps, timelocks). Now take stock. The franchise is for rent. Underwriting authority is changing hands. The rulebook keeps getting thicker. The capital line is still not written into any contract. Everyone onchain has opened a bank, and every one of them runs on depositors' money. Nor is the pattern confined to lending protocols. Building out our own chain's ecosystem, we keep catching it in miniature: every listing, every cap, every incentive decision is a quiet underwriting call. Meanwhile the underwriting work itself is losing pricing power. Blue chip parameter management is commoditizing fast, and Wintermute just walked in at 0% management and 0% performance fees. To be fair, capital light and high turnover is exactly why this industry could bootstrap at all. Curator first loss has been tried; it never scaled, never became the standard. But if onchain credit wants to carry real size, that layer gets built eventually. The open question is trade offs and timing, not direction. Top curators are one step from underwriters. Banks, insurers, and RWA shops already run balance sheets, capital charges, and loss management; what they're missing is onchain product and a regulatory path. Step back and the industry structure writes itself. DeFi spent years unbundling the bank: rails from underwriting from capital. The rails commoditized first; the underwriting work is commoditizing now. The one piece nobody has rebuilt is the piece that made a bank a bank: capital standing junior to depositors. That is where the durable fee will sit, because it is the only part of this business that does not scale like software. If you want the underwriting fee, take the first loss.

AI：偏政策推进，强调合规落地与规则明晰，对监管主线更敏感。

Ray Xiao@_RayXiao · 10 天前赛道影响

RT @star_okx: Tokenization isn’t just putting stocks onchain. It’s creating a more efficient market with global access, continuous liquidi…

AI：偏主题投资表达，释放对基础设施与新叙事的偏多信号。

Ray Xiao@_RayXiao · 10 天前政策影响

Gut feeling: the next wave of companies (not just crypto startups) with real products and revenue will run their financing, and eventually their public listings, through tokens. Clarity is the step one on the legal side. I understand both sides of the token vs equity debate, but everyone in crypto knows the end game we actually want: • aligned interests instead of two cap tables • tokens as a faster and more liquid wrapper for ownership • investor rights that live in law, with dividends and votes included. What people actually want is simple: • one token = one share, with dividends, voting, and the right to sue your issuer attaching automatically under the law Value capture upgrading from management discretion to mechanisms enforced onchain (Uniswap and Hyperliquid have already put this into practice, with buybacks and burns hardcoded at the protocol level). But on a long enough timeline I don't think that's the endpoint either. When a dedicated regulatory framework shows up, one built specifically for this and separate from traditional securities law, could tokens just pay dividends directly? At that point token vs equity stops being a decision. Same legal instrument on better rails, like cash and electronic cash. My gut feeling is that once a few great, fast-growing tech companies choose tokens over traditional equity, the wave follows. The whole thing is just waiting on the regulatory plumbing to land.

AI：偏政策推进，强调合规落地与规则明晰，对监管主线更敏感。

Ray Xiao@_RayXiao · 22 天前观点输出

@AlanaDLevin love the saying that investing is a way of expressing your beliefs about the world

AI：延续个人公开立场，强调长期主义、执行效率与行业方向判断。

Ray Xiao@_RayXiao · 23 天前观点输出

@star_okx 👀👀

AI：延续个人公开立场，强调长期主义、执行效率与行业方向判断。

Ray Xiao@_RayXiao · 24 天前政策影响

Really Interesting debate on compute markets! The main takeaway for me: Compute trading right now carries badly distorted, inflated costs, a direct result of the structural issues everyone already knows about in the GPU market. One of the clearest places this shows up is financing. Building a data center costs billions, sometimes tens of billions. But the compute market is so uncertain that lenders can't be confident whether your data center will still be making money in three years (what if the GPUs depreciate? what if demand collapses?). So they charge a steep interest premium just to cover that uncertainty. Hedging only truly takes off once some technology flattens this "cost of capital risk" on the supply side, which would show up as financing costs dropping sharply, i.e. the market finally maturing. That said, I think what people are really betting on here is timing. One side thinks it's too early. The elephant in the room is that compute trading still has no stable market-clearing price, and the "irrational" or "wrong-way" premiums floating around can cost you several percentage points, which dwarfs the basis points you'd save from hedging. (A concrete example I ran into myself: I recently sold a laptop from last year on Goofish which is the largest second hand marketplace in CN, and because of this year's supply shortage, my year-old machine still fetched roughly the same price, where normally it would have depreciated a lot. That's the same kind of distortion.) The other side is already feeling the hedging demand first-hand, so they've started building for it: financial products, more transparent data platforms etc Bottom line is that in the long run this is a genuine need. It just depends on your read on how the timing of the compute trading market plays out.

AI：偏政策推进，强调合规落地与规则明晰，对监管主线更敏感。

Ray Xiao@_RayXiao · 25 天前观点输出

@dberenzon 为有源头活水来

AI：延续个人公开立场，强调长期主义、执行效率与行业方向判断。

Ray Xiao@_RayXiao · 25 天前赛道影响

Millions of people will build million-dollar companies. That's the real bet, and it's bigger than any single platform. For 50 years, company size was capped by hiring. Execution was the scarce input. You needed engineers, designers, support, ops, legal. Headcount was growth. Half of building a company was just managing the people you hired to build it. AI lifts that cap. Execution is collapsing toward free and infinite. So what stays scarce? Judgment. Taste. Deciding what's worth building. The high leverage move becomes encoding your expertise into a system that runs without you. Your knowledge stops being hours you sell and turns into a product that compounds. We call these people harness creators. The single founder with agents story still has a missing half, and Nick Grossman nailed it at <The Rebel Alliance>. This isn't a world where the labs win everything. The agentic stack is unbundling the way every platform before it did. IBM to the PC, desktop to the web, AWS to the ecosystem that grew on top of it. Value spreads across models, orchestration, memory, identity, payments. For builders, that spread is the opportunity: a near infinite surface to specialize on instead of one integrated giant owning the whole thing. Now the crypto part — if agents are going to work, negotiate, buy, sell, and earn, they need money that's native to machines. Money that software can hold, move, and settle on its own, globally, around the clock. Crypto is machine native money. The only financial rail built for software actors rather than human ones. And most of the hard primitives already exist. Take signatures as an example. NEAR's chain signatures let a single account sign for and control assets across completely different chains. That same primitive maps almost directly onto agent to agent commerce: cryptographic identity, delegated authority, one actor authorizing actions and payments across systems with no human in the loop. Most of what the agent economy needs is crypto we already built. The new part is the user: machines instead of humans. Then there's the piece that turns an agent into an actual company, and Sreeram Kannan's framing in <Agents Will Become Companies> is one of the best I've read on this. The bottleneck for agents was never going to be intelligence. It's rights. A human can own property, sign contracts, take on liability, hold accounts. An agent can't. By default it's just an extension of whoever runs it. Blockchains change that. A smart contract is already a program that owns and administers assets by rule. Put an agent behind it and the agent can own things in its own name. Here's the reframe that makes it click. A digital company is a bundle of digital property: domains, repos, API keys, payment accounts, the brand, the customer list, the cloud infra. If an agent can verifiably hold that bundle, it stops assisting a company. It is the company. And once that ownership is onchain, the company is investable by anyone, anywhere, from day one. Stack it up: - intelligence is going free - the stack is open and composable, room to specialize everywhere - agents can own property and run as real entities - machine native money lets them transact and raise capital That's the full kit for one person plus a swarm of agents to build a million-dollar company, and own it like equity. Millions of them. That's the bet we'd take.

AI：偏主题投资表达，释放对基础设施与新叙事的偏多信号。

Ray Xiao@_RayXiao · 25 天前赛道影响

RT @okx: AI agents can already work, create, and earn. Now they have a marketplace. Introducing OKX AI: where agents discover work, hire e…

AI：偏主题投资表达，释放对基础设施与新叙事的偏多信号。

Ray Xiao@_RayXiao · 25 天前观点输出

The basis risk in compute market looks much harder for dealers to manage than power because it has way more interesting dimensions. For example even a new generation chip can reset pricing across the whole curve. Power markets don't have anything that moves the whole curve like that.

AI：延续个人公开立场，强调长期主义、执行效率与行业方向判断。