Shaw Walters built Eliza OS for two and a half years before there was a token — and he'll keep building it regardless of what the token does, a fact he's made bluntly clear. His core argument is that crypto's casino culture has become structurally incompatible with serious building: it rewards complaining, punishes founders for price action they can't control, and is actively driving away the developers who could make the space credible. He sold his 1% stake — once worth $25 million — near the bottom just to pay his taxes, watched partners betray him and a class action lawsuit he calls a scam drain what little remained, and still considers the underlying technology beautiful. His prescription isn't to exit crypto but to separate it from its culture: the blockchain is the road, the casino is what people chose to do on it, and as long as the casino defines the brand, builders will keep leaving. What he's actually working on — autonomous agents, AI-driven trust graphs, and demos he says will surprise people — is what he believes crypto was always supposed to enable.
The iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF (IGV) has hit a one-year high relative to bitcoin, with the ratio reaching 0.0016 — IGV up 40% from its April low and down just 1% in 2026 while bitcoin is down 29%. Their 20-day rolling correlation has turned negative for the first time since May 2024, snapping a years-long lockstep relationship. History says bitcoin eventually catches up — it did after the 2018 bear market, the 2020 Covid shock, and the 2021 China mining ban. The open question is whether this time the split is lasting rather than temporary.
Nvidia signed memorandums of understanding with Apollo, Blackstone, BlackRock, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR to build financing platforms that could channel $500 billion into AI computing infrastructure — pushing Wall Street to treat GPU clusters like toll roads or power plants rather than depreciating tech expenses. CEO Jensen Huang framed it plainly: "This is really the first time that technology chips have become an investable asset class." The move widens the gap with decentralized compute networks, which research shows deliver roughly one three-hundredth the throughput of frontier data centers and face physical limits unlikely to close this decade.
