Things I'm interested in today: (08.15.2025) (sorry for missing Wednesday - I was buying a house) - Tokenized Access This isn't a particularly "novel" concept - NFT gating/etc have been around for ages, but I do think we're starting to see more interesting use cases for gating that aren't just "community" - Backroom launched their product on Base yesterday for friendtech-style keys to give access to alpha channels curated by AI agents. TimeFun is allowing pay-to-play access for the time of top minds in the space. I'm sure there are more being developed. I'm really interested in value-add tokenization and unique spins on this. - DeFi It literally runs the future world. There's really two main areas of focus that I'm interested in here today - 1) aggregators/LP spots (leaning more into the idea of Project X being the next major protocol in this space) and 2) what I'm calling "obscured" or "everyday" DeFi...which is basically the idea/belief that DeFi will be as ubiquitous as smartphones or the internet within the decade. I'm interested in companies building rails for bringing DeFi (and all of the associated benefits) to *everyone* but without them having to know or care that crypto is involved...that's how we win. - AI Tooling I mentioned this last week, but I am getting more and more convinced that we're rapidly approaching the chatGPT moment for a bunch of other AI tools. Coding kinda seems to already be there, but I think video generation is probably up sooner than ppl believe. I can still remember ~3 years ago trying to get stable diffusion to work locally and generate still images for me...which were mostly terrible and the machines couldn't make hands properly. Now we have things like Grok Imagine, Veo, Gemini, etc in the trad world, and on the crypto side we have spots like Everlyn challenging incumbents to drive down costs and increase generation speed. We've got access to near instant animation and video gen that looks largely believable less than 3 years after the clankers couldn't make still images without mangled hands. This stuff is accelerating and I want to be on top of it.