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A new episode of Hivemind is out now!
This week the team discusses whether AI is a debt bubble, what quantum risk means for bitcoin, what’s next for the Hyperliquid ecosystem and more.
Timestamps
00:00 Intro
00:44 Has Crypto Bottomed?
03:05 BTC’s Morning Seller Is Gone
04:32 Token Unlocks Into Year End
07:14 Do the Midterms Matter?
09:23 Is AI a Debt Bubble?
10:40 The Trillion AI Capex Math
15:53 Anthropic’s Revenue Is Exploding
19:10 The Reflexive AI Demand Risk
25:00 Why This Isn’t 2000
33:51 Crypto’s Goldilocks Case
36:01 Who Gets Satoshi’s Coins?
37:59 Quantum Fear Lifts ZEC and Pearl
41:49 Has Quantum Changed Your BTC Bet?
48:13 Two Big Themes for Next Year
50:12 Papertrade’s Token Problem
59:11 Kinetiq and the HyperEVM Bet
1:09:31 Why Hyperliquid Users Stay Loyal
1:12:30 PUMP vs FOMO
1:16:29 The Rise of Anti-Social Trading
The platforms behind speculation never have to pick a winner.
All they need is volume. In the 1840s a railway prospectus and a betting shop were different buildings in different parts of town. Now a 25-year-old can take a view on a chipmaker, gold, a football match and a Fed decision from the same app.
The platforms have moved to meet that demand. Same-day options hit a record 66% of S&P 500 options volume in July. Robinhood made more from event contracts in Q2 than from equities or crypto. Oil kept trading on Hyperliquid while CME was shut on the Saturday the US and Israel struck Iran.
Crypto has made new markets almost free to create. Launching a token on Pumpfun costs under $2, and only about 1% of the 19M+ made since January 2024 ever make it past launch. Pumpfun makes money on the trading whether or not they last.
The platforms aren’t immune. FTX went to zero, and revenue falls hard when the crowd goes home. But busts tend to leave the infrastructure standing. Britain kept its railways after the 1840s crash, and this cycle should leave behind AI’s data centers and crypto’s 24/7 markets.
Read the full report for free here.
delphi.link/Speculation
Delphi Digital retweeted
Grass Founder @0xdrej explains how AI flipped the hard part of search from engineering to data access.
“Now the internet’s blocking everything. And if you want to become a new player in this space, you need the ability to go and actually extract that data without getting blocked.”
Why are AI labs are so secretive about their training data?
New Delphi Podcast with Andrej Radonjic @0xdrej, founder of Grass
To a website, Grass looks like normal users browsing. Behind it is millions of opted in residential nodes and a data platform that has delivered exabytes of web data to the frontier labs
We get into how AI flipped the hard part of search upside down. The index used to be the moat, and crawling was free. Now AI tooling makes the index cheap, while AI crawlers have pushed the web into blocking everything. The hard part is getting the page at all
Training data is already a profitable business for Grass with most of the top labs and multiple Mag 7 companies as customers. Crawling for that data also means mapping the entire internet, which is what puts Grass in a position to build search on top of it. Contents API is live, Search is next, and multimodal grounding follows
00:00 Intro
00:43 From Nuclear Physics to Web Scraping
03:38 The Pandemic Signal Everyone Missed
07:31 The Smart TV Proxy Scandal
09:10 Why the Internet Is Blocking AI
11:56 Training Data vs Live Data
16:05 Mapping the Entire Internet
18:03 Delivering Exabytes to AI Labs
21:48 What AI Labs Really Pay For
24:43 How Robots Learn From Web Video
33:02 When Labs Change Direction
35:57 One API Call for Any Website
41:58 AI Flipped Search Upside Down
47:03 Can the Network Keep Up?
49:52 The Defense Tech of AI Data
52:58 Why Data Is the Alpha
57:08 Why AI Labs Won’t Buy Slop
59:17 The Metric That Matters Most
01:02:35 The $100 Billion Data Market
01:05:07 Who Actually Owns Grass
01:08:18 What a Real Moat Looks Like
01:13:16 What Happens Next
Disclosure. Delphi Ventures holds $GRASS
Full episode
Delphi Digital retweeted
The AI boom is feeding speculation from both directions.
The four biggest hyperscalers plan to spend $720B to $745B on capex in 2026, more than double the telecom boom’s peak as a share of GDP. That is the construction story traders are chasing.
AI feeds the lottery engine too. Its data centers are driving up power bills for the 67 million people on the PJM grid. Their demand alone added $9.3B to that grid’s costs in a single year.
Entry-level jobs are thinning as well. Employment for 22 to 25 year olds in the most AI-exposed roles is 19% below where it would have been had it kept pace with less-exposed peers.
AI hands young people both a story to chase and a reason to chase it.
Delphi Digital retweeted
A conversation with Dr. Alex Colville (@AlexJColville), co-founder and GP of Age1, the first longevity fund.
He studied the biology of aging for his PhD in Genetics at Stanford and has deployed more than $100M into longevity and biotech.
We discuss how Anthropic & OpenAi are suddenly buying biotech startups and racing to solve Ai drug discovery.
And why tech billionaires + crypto founders are both allocating significant capital to this sector.
Enjoy!
00:00 Intro
01:45 Chatgpt Moment for Biotech
03:57 Why Longevity Is Exploding Now
07:33 Exciting Bio Investment Areas
11:09 Growing Fresh Cells From Stem Cells
16:07 Epigenetic Reprogramming
19:50 Sponsored by Kraken
20:56 Reversible Cryopreservation
22:56 NewLimit's Big Bet
28:15 Is There One Cure?
30:10 Peptides Real or Hype?
34:30 What AI Is Unlocking in Biotech
36:54 Zero-Person Biotech?
40:35 Ai Labs Becoming Biotechs
44:06 Open Source vs Secrecy
47:18 Crypto Founders Longevity Bets
50:05 The Story Behind Age1
55:30 Moonshots
1:00:55 Dogs Living Forever
1:03:31 Manhattan Project for Aging
1:06:38 Contrarian Biotech
1:09:07 Holy Grail Bet
The AI boom is feeding speculation from both directions.
The four biggest hyperscalers plan to spend $720B to $745B on capex in 2026, more than double the telecom boom’s peak as a share of GDP. That is the construction story traders are chasing.
AI feeds the lottery engine too. Its data centers are driving up power bills for the 67 million people on the PJM grid. Their demand alone added $9.3B to that grid’s costs in a single year.
Entry-level jobs are thinning as well. Employment for 22 to 25 year olds in the most AI-exposed roles is 19% below where it would have been had it kept pace with less-exposed peers.
AI hands young people both a story to chase and a reason to chase it.
Read the full report for free here.
delphi.link/Speculation
Grass Founder @0xdrej explains how AI flipped the hard part of search from engineering to data access.
“Now the internet’s blocking everything. And if you want to become a new player in this space, you need the ability to go and actually extract that data without getting blocked.”
Delphi Digital retweeted
Speculation has always had two engines.
New technology makes the future look bigger than the present. Britain’s railways in the 1840s and the internet in the 1990s both ran on that engine.
Political and monetary strain pushes people toward long shots by making the ordinary path to wealth feel out of reach. In 1720 the public piled into South Sea Company shares that had been swapped for Britain’s war debt. In the 2000s the bet was a home bought with an easy mortgage.
The famous bubbles mostly ran on one engine at a time. Today both are running hard together.
AI is driving the largest private build in decades. The four biggest hyperscalers guided to $720B to $745B of capex for 2026.
Meanwhile, the social contract has been broken. A strained political and monetary order has culminated in a deficit that sits near 6% of GDP with no recession, and a home costs 3.5x the income of a household under 40.
The bets followed. Legal US sports betting grew about 25x from 2018 to 2025. Kalshi and Polymarket’s monthly volume matched that in a single year.
The things being bet on will keep changing names. The crowd will keep needing somewhere to bet.
Delphi Digital retweeted
Our report “The House Always Wins: Why Speculation is a Theme of the Decade” is out now.
Speculation runs rampant when new tech rearranges what’s possible or the system stops working for most. AI and crypto are now fueling both.
Read it for free here.
delphi.link/Speculation
Grass founder @0xdrej explains how AI labs price training data.
“We’ve got a specific benchmark that we want to improve a model on. What is the expected economic benefit of making the model better on that benchmark?”
New Delphi Podcast with Andrej Radonjic @0xdrej, founder of Grass
To a website, Grass looks like normal users browsing. Behind it is millions of opted in residential nodes and a data platform that has delivered exabytes of web data to the frontier labs
We get into how AI flipped the hard part of search upside down. The index used to be the moat, and crawling was free. Now AI tooling makes the index cheap, while AI crawlers have pushed the web into blocking everything. The hard part is getting the page at all
Training data is already a profitable business for Grass with most of the top labs and multiple Mag 7 companies as customers. Crawling for that data also means mapping the entire internet, which is what puts Grass in a position to build search on top of it. Contents API is live, Search is next, and multimodal grounding follows
00:00 Intro
00:43 From Nuclear Physics to Web Scraping
03:38 The Pandemic Signal Everyone Missed
07:31 The Smart TV Proxy Scandal
09:10 Why the Internet Is Blocking AI
11:56 Training Data vs Live Data
16:05 Mapping the Entire Internet
18:03 Delivering Exabytes to AI Labs
21:48 What AI Labs Really Pay For
24:43 How Robots Learn From Web Video
33:02 When Labs Change Direction
35:57 One API Call for Any Website
41:58 AI Flipped Search Upside Down
47:03 Can the Network Keep Up?
49:52 The Defense Tech of AI Data
52:58 Why Data Is the Alpha
57:08 Why AI Labs Won’t Buy Slop
59:17 The Metric That Matters Most
01:02:35 The $100 Billion Data Market
01:05:07 Who Actually Owns Grass
01:08:18 What a Real Moat Looks Like
01:13:16 What Happens Next
Disclosure. Delphi Ventures holds $GRASS
Full episode
Delphi Digital retweeted
New Delphi Podcast with Andrej Radonjic @0xdrej, founder of Grass
To a website, Grass looks like normal users browsing. Behind it is millions of opted in residential nodes and a data platform that has delivered exabytes of web data to the frontier labs
We get into how AI flipped the hard part of search upside down. The index used to be the moat, and crawling was free. Now AI tooling makes the index cheap, while AI crawlers have pushed the web into blocking everything. The hard part is getting the page at all
Training data is already a profitable business for Grass with most of the top labs and multiple Mag 7 companies as customers. Crawling for that data also means mapping the entire internet, which is what puts Grass in a position to build search on top of it. Contents API is live, Search is next, and multimodal grounding follows
00:00 Intro
00:43 From Nuclear Physics to Web Scraping
03:38 The Pandemic Signal Everyone Missed
07:31 The Smart TV Proxy Scandal
09:10 Why the Internet Is Blocking AI
11:56 Training Data vs Live Data
16:05 Mapping the Entire Internet
18:03 Delivering Exabytes to AI Labs
21:48 What AI Labs Really Pay For
24:43 How Robots Learn From Web Video
33:02 When Labs Change Direction
35:57 One API Call for Any Website
41:58 AI Flipped Search Upside Down
47:03 Can the Network Keep Up?
49:52 The Defense Tech of AI Data
52:58 Why Data Is the Alpha
57:08 Why AI Labs Won’t Buy Slop
59:17 The Metric That Matters Most
01:02:35 The $100 Billion Data Market
01:05:07 Who Actually Owns Grass
01:08:18 What a Real Moat Looks Like
01:13:16 What Happens Next
Disclosure. Delphi Ventures holds $GRASS
Full episode
Read the full report for free here.
delphi.link/Speculation
Speculation has always had two engines.
New technology makes the future look bigger than the present. Britain’s railways in the 1840s and the internet in the 1990s both ran on that engine.
Political and monetary strain pushes people toward long shots by making the ordinary path to wealth feel out of reach. In 1720 the public piled into South Sea Company shares that had been swapped for Britain’s war debt. In the 2000s the bet was a home bought with an easy mortgage.
The famous bubbles mostly ran on one engine at a time. Today both are running hard together.
AI is driving the largest private build in decades. The four biggest hyperscalers guided to $720B to $745B of capex for 2026.
Meanwhile, the social contract has been broken. A strained political and monetary order has culminated in a deficit that sits near 6% of GDP with no recession, and a home costs 3.5x the income of a household under 40.
The bets followed. Legal US sports betting grew about 25x from 2018 to 2025. Kalshi and Polymarket’s monthly volume matched that in a single year.
The things being bet on will keep changing names. The crowd will keep needing somewhere to bet.
Our report “The House Always Wins: Why Speculation is a Theme of the Decade” is out now.
Speculation runs rampant when new tech rearranges what’s possible or the system stops working for most. AI and crypto are now fueling both.
Read it for free here.
delphi.link/Speculation
Ethena founder @gdog97_ explains why DEXs keep taking market share from centralized exchanges.
“At a structural level, DEXs are just in a much more powerful position from the way that you can run your business and how efficiently you can do that versus a centralized exchange.”
