Pickle Cat
Your Republican cat next door, decoding crypto chaos & roasting clowns 🤡 | Degen trader since 2013 (from Reddit)
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God does not casually bestow suffering upon you; every calamity is an opportunity.
If you keep locking yourself in a victim mentality, that is truly a pity. Years later, when you look back, you will only want to beat yourself up for missing the opportunity.
Because heaven will not give you a pass just because you cried enough. If you don’t cherish the opportunity, don’t learn or realize what you should, after a while, it will just give you a similar trial again.
Pessimists always prove themselves right.
But optimists have already started enjoying the world in advance and are more likely to see their wishes come true.
If you don’t believe life keeps giving you the same lesson until you pass it, go read the script God wrote for Leopold Aschenbrenner.
> graduates Columbia at just 19
> joins FTX future fund
> FTX blows up
> joins OpenAI superalignment
> gets fired for a “leak”
> raises a $20b AI fund
> fund blows up
> and he’s not even 26 yet
If he runs it back from here he’s a legend forever. If he doesn’t, he’s 25, he can just do it twice more.
Michael Sikand
JUST IN: FT confirms Leopold Aschenbrenner is in trouble after a historic tech drawdown.
FT reports SALP has been in talks with existing investors and lenders to raise fresh capital after heavy losses in the AI rout.
It also floated letting some investors buy assets straight out of the portfolio. His stated catalyst for the recovery is an Anthropic IPO.
I don't know why a bunch of you were saying that "he hedged" with a small sleeve of puts you saw on the recent 13F.
One of us.
This chat record from July 9th, along with the message posted on the TG channel on July 14th, still has its value skyrocketing infinitely 🤣 $SKHY ggwp
My Korean friends, are you still alive? Lately, you haven't been replying to the kakaotalk messages I've sent you 🥲
Been a bit over a month since I posted this 6 month oil thesis. Back then half the “experts” were screaming Brent $150 soon.
Glad I stayed skeptical.
Oil dumped hard after, then Brent clawed back to ~$100, right into the zone I said to respect.
Still see $100-120 as the level that matters. But should trim some cash off here right now.
Almost certainly still get violent dumps before midterms (September - October?) once trump starts cycling the peace-deal/break-peace-deal playbook.
Pickle Cat
Lately every other headline is some “expert” warning oil’s about to rip to $150.
I got curious and went and tested it. Pulled the inventory, flow and freight data and checked whether any of it backs the call.
Short version: the risk is real, but $150 is the wrong thing to root for.
Oil’s elevated and staying there. Crude’s genuinely stressed, Hormuz still isn’t normal, the buffer’s wearing thin, US crude drew 7 weeks straight and the market’s already leaned hard on SPR releases. The squeeze window is late June into July. So the tail is real.
But $100-120 is the level I respect, call it 60% over six months. $150 plus is one in four, and only if the buffer truly snaps. Brent’s around $90 right now while the US and Iran trade fire and float a Hormuz reopening deal that could land this weekend.
Even at the peak of the panic this spring, physical Brent never even made it to $150. Nobody’s betting $150 next week. Me neither. And if that deal lands, this cools off faster, not slower.
The setup I actually want is dull. Brent grinding between $100-120 with a slow, messy normalization is the zone where the people who move oil get paid, cargoes shoved onto long routes, ships busy, system inefficient, demand still intact.
Push it to $150 and hold it there and you kill that. Runs get cut, demand caves, less to ship, and high oil flips to bad-for-freight. The moonshot eats the trade everyone thinks it creates.
And the tankers already agree. If the shock were here, freight would be printing. It’s dead. Rates 50-80% under stress, MR Atlantic at $35k against an $80k median, boats everywhere with nothing to haul. When those rates crawl back toward stress, that’s the tell. Not yet.
So instead of playing (or praying lol) for the $150-160, I’m personally watching the $100-120 grind, because that’s where it pays.
Recently, a friend took me to a few AI events, and I felt a bit dazed afterward.
My first reaction was, isn't this just the vibe of the crypto events at the end of 2021?! The impact was so intense, damn.
Back then, everyone's eyes were still full of passion, living in the dream of changing the world. Who would have thought that just half a year later, everyone would be crushed mercilessly by the market 🤡
This post isn't hinting at anything, it's purely a nostalgic reflection on those naive but precious times.
Suddenly, I remembered watching Nolan's version of "The Odyssey" the day before yesterday. Odysseus was tied to the mast, enduring immense pain while listening to the Sirens' song, and survived. After finally making it through, his deputy asked him: What exactly did you hear?
Odysseus said: "It tells you that what you want most is what you can't have. And what you can't have is precisely what you once had and then lost."
People always think happiness will come only after achieving some future goal or becoming a certain kind of person. But happiness can happen at any moment.
Sometimes, the strongest happiness is hidden in the gap between two intense pains. It lasts for a very short time, but it's intense and precious.
Reading this brought back a very specific feeling.
I’ve been in crypto 13 years, long enough to watch things arrive looking like the future and leave without anyone announcing they were gone.
Late 2017 I was flipping cryptokitties almost every day while eth went straight up. I explained them at dinner, to grown adults, and I probably sounded insane, but I wasn’t talking about cartoon cats.
I thought I was looking at the beginning of digital ownership, culture moving onchain, and a new kind of internet where users could actually own the things they created and collected.
I didn’t think I had caught a mania.
I thought I had seen the future a little earlier than everyone else.
Then 2018 came and robbed me blind… the money disappeared fast. But the belief took years to die.
And even then, it didn’t really die.
It just kept coming back wearing new clothes. NFTs, creator economy, socialfi, onchain social, creator coins. Not all of them were the same, obviously, but somewhere underneath them was a future I had already wanted to believe in once.
That’s why the ideas that hurt the most when they die are rarely the obvious scams.
Nobody mourns those.
It’s the BEAUTIFUL ones, the ones that made sincere people think, “if this works, crypto actually changes the world.”
You don’t just invest in those ideas! You build your life around them! You make friends through them, attach your name to them, spend years defending them, and start living inside a future that hasn’t arrived yet!!
Then one day the market goes somewhere else.
Usually there’s no dramatic ending. The users stop showing up. The group chats get quieter. The people who used to post about it every day slowly move on. The thesis still sounds beautiful when you say it out loud, it’s just that nothing is walking toward it anymore.
You’re the last one standing in a room explaining what it was supposed to become.
That’s a hard thing to admit, especially in public.
Because you’re burying years of conviction, relationships, reputation, and a version of yourself that genuinely believed you were helping build what came next.
Reading @jessepollak’s post today reminded me I’ve watched this happen over and over again, to other people and to myself.
People outside crypto think the hardest losses are financial.
After enough cycles, you realize some of the hardest losses are the stories you had to stop believing, and the futures you had already started living in.
I still don’t know if I’ve fully let go of all of mine.
Probably not.
jesse.base.eth
lots of conversations about base over the last week. wanted to share my candid take after a week of listening and a lot of reflection over the last 6 months.
first off - in case it’s not obvious, the first quarter of 2026 was a punch in the face. I spent 2024 and 2025 making a two pronged bet to bring base to the world: (1) builders would unlock the next wave of crypto adoption; (2) adoption would be driven by new onchain-native social experiences - creators, content, messaging. imo we made the right bet on builders, but obviously the wrong bet on social. builders did drive the next wave of crypto adoption - prediction markets, perpetuals, stablecoins - but social was not at the center of it. in fact, the entire social side of the market that many of us had been building towards - farcaster, zora, miniapps, and yes, creator coins - disintegrated completely. I was wrong - whether it was timing wrong (is $ansem a creator coin?) or fully wrong, only time will tell, but regardless, i was definitively wrong.
the collateral damage was pretty bad! and this year has been an exercise in eating shit. we realized how our focus on social had meant that base had fallen behind in key areas that were now increasingly critical - we had perps (shoutout avantis!) and prediction markets (shoutout limitless!), but both were well behind scaled competitors. and we had a lot of room to improve in unlocking base as a platform for tokenization and payments that really worked for enterprises. people lost confidence, and CT spectators reminded me weekly of all of my mistakes as often as they could. it felt bad man, still feels bad.
but if there’s one thing i’ve learned from the last decade of building in this space, it’s that when things feel the worst, the best thing to do is just put your head down and build. so that’s what i’m doing. I refocused my time and attention back to the chain away from the app, started writing code again, shipped a bunch of stuff (azul, beryl, b20, privacy, ledgers) and questioned a bunch of my assumptions: does crypto need social to grow? does base need an app? can base be bigger than coinbase?
I thought for a long time that social was the only thing that could drive the sort of viral growth to get crypto to a billion people. unsurprisingly, I now believe that’s wrong. It’s clear that better money is more than enough - we are seeing this live with stablecoins, predictions, perpetuals, tokenization and i only expect it to accelerate. I am now focused on bringing a billion people onchain just by making global finance actually work.
on the app, my focus is on building base into the blockchain for global finance. to that end, i’ve handed the base app back to the coinbase mothership, where my now good friend @cobie will be taking it from here to make it the best damn app for onchain you’ve ever seen, including expanding beyond the base ecosystem in ways that tbh i won’t love as the leader of base.
it’s incredibly hard to grow a decentralized network inside of a big public corporation. and i feel like much of the discourse on CT over the last week is downstream of this. the following things can be true: (1) base (and i) love memes and (2) brian probably won’t ever bullpost memes on the tl (this activity is illegal once you’re over 40 years of age). it’s weird and we’re working through it as we continue to decentralize base, which has been our commitment from the beginning.
we’re going to build base into the blockchain for global finance and do everything we can to be the place that the world’s money settles over the next century. we will surely have formidable competitors (welcome robinhood and stripe!) and people may abandon our cause, but we welcome the competition and believe it’s our duty to win the respect and commitment of those who rally to our banner.
in 2026, this concretely means three things: winning trading, payments, and agents.
[continued in the reply]
说这么多，能先把实盘甩出来不？让大家学习下，为何都单股3000w了还天天纠结x的创作者收益
Leto Bao
I'm done posting in Chinese. The Chinese-language side of X is toxic — full of anger, bots, and no real discourse. Everyone's just chasing creator payouts, not actual conversation. None of my posts have gotten any feedback worth engaging with. I think I'll get a lot more out of the English-speaking community here.
If you’re not aware of your capacity to harm, your “goodness” is fragile. FAKE. Easily broken.
Y’all should be careful around those who make “but i’m a good/harmless person” their whole identity.
The worst are the self-appointed saints.
They’ll guilt-trip you into being “good” by their definition, moral-police everything you do, while holding themselves to none of it.
Because in their head they’re always at the moral high ground, aka “PURE”, so the rules are for you, not them.
Naive people often get possessed by the same forces they deny exist, because they genuinely believe “I could never do that/how can anyone do xx?!”
A “harmless” person who’s never been truly challenged isn’t good. They’re just WEAK.
Seems fine now. But one thing snaps and they turn on you worse than any openly shitty person could, because you never saw it coming.
I’m not saying the obvious assholes are better. I’m saying real goodness was never the absence of darkness.
It belongs to those who’ve been pushed to their limit, who’ve stared straight into their own capacity for harm, felt the pull… and still chose NOT to. Every single time. Deliberately.
That’s the only good I trust. The kind that had every reason to break and didn’t.
