What newborns and new startups have in common: Sleepless nights, endless doubt, and sudden breakthroughs

Brandon Donnelly 🇨🇦 @donnelly_b Traffic is horrible in Toronto and it will only get better once we fully embrace a post-car future. Everyone driving around most of the time just isn't going to work for a city region of our scale. 132 11:29 AM • Apr 24, 2025 We talk a lot about mobility and traffic congestion on this blog — particularly in the context of Toronto — and that's because it remains a problem and we continue to avoid any sort of big and meaningful moves. Instead, we like to politi...

For the first time in history, visual art has a social layer. This post explores how NFTs and networked platforms have transformed art from something private and niche into something people can share, remix, and build community around. Drawing comparisons to music, gaming, books, and sports, it reflects on how distribution models drive cultural connection and why we are still early in art’s evolution.

MegaETH walks the talk with Crossy FluffleThese days, new blockchains highlight how fast they are with TPS (transactions per second) to show what they’re capable of. However, nothing beats showing vs. telling. Last week MegaETH launched Crossy Fluffle, inspired by the popular Crossy Road mobile game. Like Frogger, players have to get their Fluffle bunny character as far as possible in 1 minute. The way the MegaETH team showed it was also notable:Each move is a transaction, reflected in the lo...

This morning I had a surgical procedure to fix an inguinal hernia. This afternoon I am sitting at home writing this post. While not quite “waving a tricorder” this is a massive testament to medical progress. Also right up front: thanks to everyone at Weill Cornell Medical Center for being not just incredibly professional but also super friendly. And thanks to Gigi Danziger for being there from start to finish! As it turns out I can judge how much progress this represents from personal experie...

The proposal seeks to test raising the Ethereum mainnet gas limit to 150 million by the Fusaka hard fork.

A ZK protocol designed to scale zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) compute across chains.

DeAI summer is coming, get ahead of the curve. Here's everything you need to know.

To build a global onchain economy, we need to scale to keep gas fees under one cent. Our goal for 2025 is to reach a gas target of 250 Mgas/s — a 100x increase from where we started. In Q1, we hit a major milestone: 25 Mgas/s, 10x from launch. We’re now on track to reach 50 Mgas/s by the end of Q2. This quarterly review provides a status update of critical scaling bottlenecks, and our progress towards eliminating them.

A month ago, I launched Tortoise, a music collective and product studio built on Farcaster. There were three main pieces of this launch:Deployed the Tortoise Token ($TORT) Launched the Tortoise Player, a Farcaster mini app for streaming, sharing, and collecting music Released a song called Vains on the Tortoise PlayerA ton of work went into this launch, and it was quite successful. The project took over the timeline on launch day, $TORT did over a million USD in volume, and most importantly, ...

Here are the current priorities: 1. CryptoWalletFocus is still growing usage — over 95,000 funded wallets!Second focus is on making mini apps better — new dev tools this week!Deprecating Frames v1 — exploring a date 2. SocialStorage RedenominationSignups for Free with social proof 3. ProtocolSnapchain migration — please move over to SnapchainLaunch Overview

If India is to achieve its data centre ambitions, it needs to find new sources of efficient power. While nuclear is a solution, it will take too long to come on stream. We need alternatives, and enhanced geothermal might just be it.

How to navigate true organization-wide adoption of AI workflows in this next era of work

Are We Losing the Plot? We're more into a decade of crypto now, and you can feel it – it seems there has been suddenly but all at once a recent vibe shift among the industry. Something's changed. The original bet, crypto at its core, was on open, censorship resistant, decentralized, permissionless infrastructure. That raw energy, that fight for a different kind of internet – it feels quieter now. The reality settling in is that these core values... are simply opposite of the fast narratives a...

Welcome back to another Unlocking the Future. Today we are diving into the messy, hype heavy reality of AI in the corporate world. Everyone is talking about agents, copilots, and automation, but what is actually going on inside real companies? Let's dive.

In many contemporary digital audio applications, automated classifiers and recommendation engines rely on precise signal analysis. This precision leaves music vulnerable—not to hacked accounts or copyright issues, but to manipulation at the algorithmic level. Independent artists, concerned about classification errors or exploitative sampling practices, have begun embedding calculated noise patterns into their tracks. These techniques are not about artistic aesthetics; they are ...

This week’s EMC was part crypto confessional, part creator summit. Diana, Humpty, and Gramajo unpacked the fallout from the Zora airdrop, debated whether creators or collectors matter more, and got real about which parts of crypto are actually delivering value. Plus, Humpty gave us a behind-the-scenes look at the upcoming Creator House at Farcon.

Toronto may not be selling that many new condominiums these days, but population growth remains high across the region. For the 12-month period ending July 2024, the Toronto census metropolitan area added approximately 269k people. And for the 12-month period ending July 2023, it added about 255k people. In the context of Canadian and American cities, this makes it the fastest growing metropolitan area for two years running (see above chart). Lower immigration targets are expected to bring th...

Hello, and welcome back to another edition of "I liked it so much I paid for it", my weekly series where I will highlight the content I loved so much on Farcaster that I paid it. This series shall continue as long as my bank account allows for it and/or until I get so irritated by crypto culture that I silently disappear.

In this post we deep dive into the implementation details of MTCannon - a Fault Proof Virtual Machine that improves the efficiency of how OP Stack rollups verify state transitions.