sleepy0x13

Don't understand why so many people are suddenly criticizing Kaito

It's not Kaito who traps KOLs (or rather, those who can be trapped aren't true KOLs), and it's not Kaito who builds information cocoons for the masses.

It's the毛撸 group.

The reason I haven't been so eager to push Yaps these past few months, and why I haven't continued to play Ethos, is because I've seen too many instances of 'the higher-ups have policies, and the lower levels have countermeasures', various small organizations and groups manipulating product mechanisms to the point of absurdity, causing some originally good mechanisms to become obsolete, which has made me lose interest in these products. Moreover, many fake KOLs have been created.

In today's era, learning ability is a person's most core competitiveness, and viewpoints are a person's most powerful weapon. Coupled with the rapid development of AI making information equal, this is the best time for personal cognitive iteration. What we need to do is to refine and filter the vast amounts of information, and then form our own cognitive framework.

The thoughts and concepts of the masses are awakening, and fake KOLs who can only use AI to rewrite as a repeater will definitely be eliminated; it's just a matter of time.

Why can't we do a good U Card?

To be honest, this title is a bit deliberately eye-catching, but I really want to talk about my feelings after communicating with some PayFi project parties recently.

I used to be quite optimistic about the U Card direction, after all, it is an important link in the practical use of crypto assets and connecting the real world. But after communicating with them and switching to their perspective, I realized more clearly: this track indeed has demand, but the challenges are far greater than I imagined.

No matter how much Web3 talks about 'financial freedom', it ultimately has to land in the real financial system.

And the U Card is probably the most problematic part of this landing process.

Is there a demand for U Cards? Of course there is.

In some countries/regions, the local currency is severely devalued, and in some places, there is almost a blockade on crypto assets. In this environment, if you can provide a card that allows you to 'directly spend USDT, no need to cash out, and can bind to Apple Pay, WeChat, Alipay', this is not just 'enhancing the experience', it is a 'survival solution' that many people cannot avoid.

But the difficulty with U Cards is not on the user side, but on the project side: you have to survive first.

Most people actually can't figure out how U Card project parties should profit.

The profit model of traditional bank cards mainly relies on merchant fee sharing, account management fees, and the earnings from idle funds. In contrast, U Card projects find it very difficult to earn from these areas.

Let's start with merchant fee sharing. If a user pays 100 yuan, the merchant may only receive 97 yuan, and the 3 yuan in between will be divided among the issuing bank, Visa/MasterCard, acquiring institutions, and other parties.

However, many U Card projects are essentially not real card issuers, but are affiliated with some small overseas institution, borrowing a BIN number to issue cards, and just connecting a layer of interfaces.

So you undertake all the operations, customer service, and risk control work, but the profit has long been consumed by the upstream.

You are the card issuer, but you do not participate in the clearing; you are building the product, but do not control the channels; you are doing user operations, but do not even have the right to earn commissions.

In simple terms, you are doing things, but not mastering the structure of profit distribution.

Can you make money from users? This may be a more realistic question at the moment.

I have also talked to many users, and most of their usage habits are 'temporary recharge, immediate use', buying SaaS, subscriptions, VPNs, airports... low unit price and not very frequent.

This is very similar to when I used Kraken for withdrawals, recharging temporarily only when I wanted to cash out, and usually not depositing money into it.

So the accumulation of funds on the platform is actually very low, and even if you connect to a protocol like Morpho, you can't earn much money from interest rate differentials.

Is there a way to change this?

Everyone is thinking of ways, such as creating e-commerce scenarios to control consumption paths; connecting fiat currency deposits and withdrawals to attract Web2 users; increasing wealth management, trading, and asset management modules to improve retention, etc.

But the problem also arises: these are all areas with heavy compliance and responsibility.

To connect with Web2 consumption scenarios, you need a payment license; to engage in wealth management involves securities laws and investor protection regulations; to have deposit and withdrawal channels cannot avoid the compliance system of AML/KYC. Once problems arise, it also involves compensation, arbitration, invoice compliance...

This is no longer just a 'product iteration' issue, but rather a question of whether you are a member of this system.

So the U Card business is both a high-demand scenario and a significant structural challenge.

You are doing Web3, but you rely entirely on the Web2 payment networks, banking systems, and compliance interfaces. The deeper you go, the more connection points you have with the traditional system, and the greater the risks and responsibilities.

This is the structural reality we need to face. Web3 teams are often very good at building functions and iterating products, but the financial system of the real world talks about the logic of structure, power, and responsibility distribution. Some problems cannot be solved just by writing a contract or connecting an API.

But I also believe that this direction has great prospects.
It is precisely because it is difficult that there is an opportunity.

I hope this article provides some reference value to friends who are still working in this direction, and I sincerely look forward to seeing a successful case emerging from the real structure.

Perhaps the most anticipated delivery of the DePIN phone @EthereumPhone
Will always pay for unique design ❤️

The cooperative development team needs to conduct overseas payment tests, and it got stuck on the overseas card, so decisively cx'd a wave @0xinfini

Mass adoption

Last night, in a forgotten corner, the bored ape parent company Yuga Labs sold CryptoPunks again.

Since 2022, Yuga Labs has acquired:
- CryptoPunks, Meebits
- 10KTF, WENEW Labs
- PROOF (those collections in the Moonbird series)

Since 2024, Yuga Labs has sold:
- HV-MTL (2024.04)
- Meebits (2025.02)
- CryptoPunks (2025.05)

Actually, a long time ago, they were looking for someone to take over Moonbirds, and it seems they haven't been able to find anyone since they still haven't done any PR.

Hey, I just discovered that the @okxchinese plugin has a word search feature, must be a new function.

After selecting a word on Twitter, this floating block pops up, allowing you to click to view token performance. If it's an address, you can also check the profit and loss analysis for that address.

It's quite nice to suddenly find new features during daily use, especially since this feature is very interesting.

The recent uproar surrounding this issue leads me to conclude, after reviewing the evidence from both sides, that it's not that serious. It's just that the involved parties misunderstood each other a bit, and the chain reaction ultimately amplified the conflict.

However, this incident has exposed an ongoing problem: Web3 lacks a reliable "small court."

In Web2, there are platforms and companies, so when disputes arise, there is someone to mediate. Web3 has a few projects with "reputation systems," like Ethos, but I feel it currently doesn't quite qualify.

Its vision and ideas are certainly good, but under the expectations of airdrops, users banding together to give each other good reviews will gradually render the system ineffective. Additionally, the lack of independent judgment from the crowd stirred up by KOLs has made this issue even more pronounced.

If a "fair mechanism" doesn't even provide a space for rebuttal, then it is not arbitration but rather public opinion lynching.

I hope Ethos can implement a countermeasure that gives those who receive negative reviews a chance to rebut, and assess in a more fair and independent manner.

Unexpectedly, there was no drama, instead it was as if scripted

Is a raging bull market about to arrive?

I wish the principal was still intact.

Many DePIN products that I bought before have been received one after another, and I am quite disappointed. It was a presale, and it took such a long time to deliver the products, yet the quality is so poor, which is unacceptable.

Binance Alpha points can now be consumed, how can this not be considered GameFi?
If you know what we are talking about

Today, I want to share a project that has been rarely discussed in the Chinese community recently.

@Somnia_Network: It's not just another L1, but a rethinking of on-chain order for virtual behavior.

While most L1 projects are still adding features around throughput, fees, and compatibility, Somnia is doing something that seems out of place:

It returns to the first question of blockchain: Is the expressive power of the blockchain sufficient?

It's not about whether it is fast enough or cheap enough; it's about whether it can support more complex, real-time, and behavior-driven interactions in the future digital society.

The answer is likely no. And this is precisely where Somnia starts.

The chain can run transactions but is not good at expressing behavior.

Today's mainstream blockchains basically stay within the paradigm of "transaction-driven": you initiate an action, the chain packages it, reaches consensus, records it, and that's it.

But if you really want to build a native virtual world—game spaces, social interactions, collaborative systems, or even just real-time responses between multiple users—you will quickly find that Ethereum-style logic is fundamentally insufficient.

The chain cannot perceive the triggering relationships between complex behaviors, state updates are too slow, transaction fees are too high, and cross-space migration is almost unfeasible.

So everyone is doing logic off-chain and settling on-chain. And the chain becomes a "confirmation tool" rather than a "behavior container."

This is not anyone's fault, but rather a cost of the architecture. And Somnia aims to solve this problem.

Somnia provides a structural response at the foundational level.

It's not a "performance upgrade" but a paradigm shift.

Somnia utilizes a multi-stream consensus architecture, combined with its self-developed IceDB database, to enhance state updates and concurrency capabilities, rather than TPS itself; its way of extending Solidity is to express the "reactive relationships" between on-chain states, similar to the bindings between components in front-end frameworks.

More importantly, it has designed a protocol that allows for the combination and migration of assets and identities. The goal is not to improve the transaction experience but to build a foundational layer for "cross-virtual-space behavioral continuity."

What it aims to support is not a GameFi project but a category of scenarios:

In these scenarios, users are not executing a single transaction but are continuously interacting, with states constantly changing, identities and items migrating, and all of this must happen natively on-chain.

The ambition of this setup is significant; its technical solution is not superficial.

Why is it the right time to pay attention to Somnia?

Not because it can explode immediately, but because it hits several emerging long-term trends:

1. The complexity of on-chain behavior is an irreversible trend.

From blockchain games to AI collaboration, to state-driven social interactions, more and more on-chain interactions will exceed simple transactions. The EVM architecture provides poor support for these behaviors, while Somnia at least proposes a solution.

2. Infrastructure is shifting from performance competition to paradigm competition.

Pure performance competition has hit a ceiling, and the next step is "who can better support new paradigms." Just as Celestia is for modularity, Fuel is for AA, Somnia is the player betting on "virtual behavior."

3. Builders are starting to look for new expressive spaces.

Not everyone is satisfied with replicating a transaction contract. Although Somnia's design is complex, its direction is new: not to run transactions faster, but to build systems more natively.

Additionally, it has launched a testnet, has a developer fund, and early incentives, making it a low-threshold, low-risk, yet high information density research window for builders and observers alike.

It does not rely on hype, does not expect a short-term user explosion, yet it deserves to be a key marked project when you study the evolution of Web3 architecture.

Final judgment:

Somnia is not about putting everything on-chain but allowing "the behaviors that should be on-chain" to exist in the correct way.

It is neither designed for today nor suitable for all projects;

But it provides a serious infrastructural solution for the types of complex on-chain interaction scenarios that may arise in the future.

In a market filled with rapid narratives and shallow competition, Somnia uniquely stands in a position that is not in a hurry to prove itself, attempting to combat the restless industry logic with structural thinking.

You don’t need to bet on it immediately, but you’d better not miss the opportunity to observe it.

I found out that I received two invitation slots for Ethos when I came back on May Day. Bosses who need them can DM me directly.