@dominic_w @ilblackdragon @NEARProtocol @near_intents
@near_ai
@NEARLegion
Full disclosure I hold $Near.
I did a very deep objective dive into this serious $ICP v #Near IP drama and this is an honest take.
1/3
The claim that $NEAR “stole” $ICP’s vetKeys technology deserves a serious examination of the facts, not accusations based on technological similarities.
And once you examine NEAR’s own research publication, DFINITY’s open-source repository, and the Apache 2.0 license, that accusation becomes considerably harder to substantiate.
Let’s establish a few things.
1. NEAR publicly acknowledged the similarity in February 2026.
On February 23, 2026, NEAR One published a technical research article titled Confidential Key Derivation in the MPC Network.
In that publication, NEAR’s researchers explicitly stated:
“While building our solution, we converged to a protocol similar to VetKeys, even though we were not aware of this result.”
Think about the significance of that statement.
NEAR wasn’t concealing the similarities. Its researchers publicly acknowledged the existence of a comparable cryptographic protocol and stated that they had arrived at their solution independently.
Does that statement independently prove they didn’t copy anything? Of course not.
But neither does the existence of similar technology prove that they did.
If you’re going to accuse developers of intellectual-property theft, the burden is on you to provide evidence supporting the allegation.
2. DFINITY deliberately released its vetKeys libraries under Apache License 2.0.
This is where the accusation becomes especially questionable.
DFINITY’s official vetKeys GitHub repository explicitly identifies Apache 2.0 as its license.
Apache 2.0 is not a restrictive, noncommercial license. It’s a permissive open-source license designed to encourage software adoption, modification, redistribution, and commercialization.
Under Apache 2.0, developers generally have the legal right to:
• Copy the licensed source code.
• Modify and improve it.
• Create derivative software.
• Integrate it into other applications.
• Redistribute the software.
• Incorporate it into commercial products.
• Compete with the original developer.
All subject to the terms of the license.
Let me emphasize that last point.
COMPETING WITH THE ORIGINAL DEVELOPER DOES NOT AUTOMATICALLY VIOLATE AN OPEN-SOURCE LICENSE.
This is fundamental to understanding how open-source software works.
3. Apache 2.0 also contains an explicit patent license.
This is a particularly important detail that frequently gets overlooked.
Apache 2.0 provides recipients with a perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free patent license covering certain patent claims held by contributors that are necessarily infringed by their contributions.
That patent grant has limits. It doesn’t automatically license every patent relating to the technology.
However, it provides more protection than a simple copyright permission.
So even the argument that DFINITY might own patents related to vetKeys needs to be examined against the actual scope of the license & any relevant patent claims.
4. Open source does not eliminate copyright—but it grants permission to do things copyright would otherwise restrict.
DFINITY retains copyright in its original contributions.
That is entirely consistent w/ open-source licensing.
The important distinction is that Apache 2.0 expressly authorizes specified uses of that copyrighted material.
A copyright holder generally cannot successfully claim infringement merely because someone exercised rights the holder already licensed to them.
To establish a meaningful infringement case, you would need to identify something like:
• A violation of the applicable license conditions.
• Unauthorized copying of separately protected code.
• Infringement of an applicable patent outside the license grant.
• Misappropriation of confidential information.
• Another independently actionable violation.
2
2
320
Strata retweeted
The end of an era.
It does, in fact, seem like my 1.5 year streak is coming to an end. It was a good run, but just like anyone else, eventually I will be wrong.
Over the past 500 days, I managed to capture every single major swing movement, playing the bear market perfectly and managing to capture the local bottom at 62K as well.
However, I think it’s important to acknowledge mistakes and reflect on things. It was definitely foolish not to realize any gains from the profits made on the way up. In doing so, the market erased nearly all of them.
Of course, I am in a much better position than most. I didn’t lose any money on the drop, but I did give back uPNL, which in my eyes is basically the same as having lost it, despite not actually losing anything like many others most likely have.
The market does have a funny way of humbling everyone, and given the context, let me be a prime example of that. When you’re at the top of your game, winning consistently and predicting every major movement, the devil comes for you.
The only lesson learned here is to always make sure to take profits off the table. That was indeed my mistake. I was right in capturing the movement upwards, but wrong in derisking and wrong to remain fixated on one particular price region. As a swing trader and investor, the biggest mistakes I have usually made have been taking profits too soon. Hence, I didn’t want to make that mistake this time around. But again, sometimes taking profits too soon might be the sensible thing to do.
I am still, of course, bullish on the HTF. Anyone who understands how markets operate will understand why it’s foolish to be bearish on an asset that has proven itself for 20 years. I am still in my swing positions and spot positions. I just thought it was necessary to create this post.
If BTC happens to test 62.6K in the coming weeks, my current 75–76K continuation long gets stopped out. That will be the true invalidation of "I was wrong" with my first major swing being stopped.
Now, the important distinction here is that if we test 62.6K, I will still be holding my initial swing long entry, the one I have been holding for months. The invalidation on this is 31K, as I’m utilizing cross margin.
I will still be holding all of my spot as well.
So, the key takeaway regarding my positioning:
Long from 75–76K > Inval. 62K
Long from 62.6K > Inval. 31K
Spot from 65.9K > Inval. none
BTC has now retraced more than half of the move upwards. Only time will tell if we are able to start forming a base soon.
A humbling experience, which is exactly what I have been after for a while now. It does get boring being right all the time. There is no challenge when that is the case. It might be painful to round trip nice gains, but it was necessary in the context of humbling my mindset. It’s time to get back to the drawing board.
Always be humble, because what God gives, He can also take. And most importantly, take profits. Nobody goes broke doing so.
One thing I can promise you is that I never ask people to judge me on my winners, I ask them to judge me on my losers because I have so few.
Strata retweeted
⚠️⚠️ If Nvidia fires Jensen Huang, America loses the AI race. And China wins it. ⚠️⚠️
I'm choosing my words carefully.
Nvidia's board is deciding whether to remove its founder. Wall Street wiped out hundreds of billions of dollars in a single evening, and everyone is pretending you can replace a CEO like you change a light bulb.
You can't replace Jensen Huang.
This isn't about morality. It's about mechanics.
Let's start from the beginning.
Three engineers meet in a Denny's in San Jose. Jensen is 30. As a teenager, he washed dishes in that same kind of diner. The plan: chips for 3D graphics, in a market that doesn't exist yet.
The first product flops. The Sega deal falls apart. Nvidia is weeks away from dying. Jensen goes to Sega, admits his chip won't work, and asks them for money anyway. Sega invests $5 million. That money saves the company.
For years, he opens his meetings with the same line: we are 30 days from going out of business.
Then comes the GeForce, the first GPU. Then CUDA. He decides to make his chips programmable for any kind of computation, not just video games. Billions burned for a decade on a bet nobody understands. Wall Street hates it. He holds.
Then AlexNet, the neural network that kicks off the deep learning revolution, is trained on two Nvidia graphics cards. Jensen understands what it means before anyone else. He pivots the entire company to AI. He personally hand-delivers the first DGX-1 supercomputer to a small research lab called OpenAI.
Today Nvidia is worth around $4 trillion. Almost all the AI on the planet runs on its chips.
That's not luck. That's 33 years of tryhard.
And here's what people don't understand about founders.
A founder CEO isn't a job title. It's a nervous system. Jensen has around sixty direct reports. He knows every layer of the stack: transistor physics, chip architecture, software, data centers, TSMC, customers, governments. He sees the next bottleneck before it shows up.
That kind of awareness isn't taught in an MBA. It doesn't transfer in a three-month handover. It's built over three decades of brutal decisions, made against everyone's advice.
Right now, no one else on Earth has that level of awareness of the system. Even Dan Ives, one of the most followed analysts on Wall Street, says it: Jensen is not replaceable, and no one on the bench can step in seamlessly. The name floated for interim CEO is the CFO. An excellent CFO. But the question isn't who keeps the books. It's who decides the next architecture.
We've seen this movie before. Twice.
Steve Jobs. Apple's board pushes him out. Serious managers take over. Twelve years later, Apple is months from bankruptcy. Jobs comes back. iMac, iPod, iPhone. Apple becomes the most valuable company in the world.
Travis Kalanick. Investors push him out. Uber becomes calmer, more profitable. And walks away from the most important bet of its generation: it sells its self-driving unit. Today Waymo runs robotaxis across American cities, and Uber signs partnerships with the people it could have beaten. A company that manages. No longer a company that conquers.
The pattern is always the same. A board optimizes for reputational risk. A founder optimizes for the mission. Replace the second with the first, and the company doesn't die right away. It just stops making the bets that matter.
And the further we go into AI, the truer this gets.
When everything changes every six months, when a single architecture decision commits $100 billion, when thousands of agents execute what a handful of humans decide, value concentrates in one thing: the judgment of whoever holds the wheel. AI doesn't dilute the founder's role. It multiplies it.
Should national security concerns be taken seriously? Of course. An independent investigation is normal. But the board itself said it had no reason to believe Nvidia's secrets or national security were compromised. And we're talking about removing the most strategic person in American tech before the findings are even in.
So let's ask one question.
If a Chinese intelligence operation really was targeting Nvidia, what would its best possible outcome be?
Not a stolen secret. Jensen Huang's exit.
Beijing doesn't need to beat Nvidia.
The board can do it for them.
funny how that works
people just don’t understand the concept of but fear it’s not in our nature
humans try to avoid fear and run to safety
the market is the opposite we must learn to run to fear and embrace it ironically that leads to an enormous amount of safety
15
Strata retweeted
$SNDK Looking primed 👀
Price is up 13% today and has reclaimed the 0.618 fib after dipping into the buyzone.
I am still happy buying here, especially if price can reclaim the 50WMA, which is the next low risk entry.
Wave 3 target: 355% 🚀
$SNDK I've nailed this 👀
Price is down another 22% today and down 51% since I went bearish on it.
It has sliced through the 0.618 fib and I now expect a test of the lower 0.786 fib.
If support shows up there I'll be buying heavy.
Strata retweeted
Our message to Nvidia's board:
Do not fire Jensen Huang.
There is no clear replacement for Jensen Huang. We are confident that his departure would ultimately be a net negative for Nvidia, its shareholders, and the AI Revolution.
First, take a look at the data. History also suggests that removing a successful CEO will come with a significant cost.
A study of 187 forced CEO departures from S&P 1500 companies found that removing outperforming CEOs resulted in negative long-term stock returns. This case would be no different, in our view.
Jensen Huang is the definition of an outperforming CEO. Nvidia's board must not make a decision in the heat of the moment.
The board should take the time to conduct a thorough investigation and consult with shareholders, with a strong emphasis on the latter.
Quite literally, Nvidia's board should convene a special shareholder meeting and hold an advisory vote on this decision. This is the most consequential CEO controversy in world history. Shareholders deserve a say.
In addition, Nvidia's stock, $NVDA, is now down -35% in 26 trading days, nearly half of which is a result of the recent scandal.
We believe Jensen Huang's potential removal as CEO is now ~80% priced in.
Why take an action with massive downside potential when the market has already priced in much of that risk?
The downside of retaining Huang may be limited, while the potential upside is tremendous.
Lastly, history shows that retaining Jensen Huang could still lead to a favorable outcome. In 2019, Amazon retained Jeff Bezos as CEO after his extramarital affair became public, and the company's stock subsequently surged +108% by 2021.
Personal misconduct should not be ignored, but it must also be distinguished from corporate wrongdoing and weighed against the consequences of removing an executive who is instrumental to the company's success.
We believe Jensen Huang is an irreplaceable part of Nvidia and the AI Revolution more broadly.
Once the dust settles, firing Jensen Huang would prove to be a costly mistake.
It is time to pause and consult your shareholders.
Strata retweeted
This is f*cking insane
Everyone is talking about Jensen Huang's affair this week. Almost nobody is talking about what he told CBS about the next $15 trillion
Nvidia CEO:
"Energy comes in, intelligence comes out. Input, output. It's as simple as that"
In 5 minutes, he explains the whole AI economy from first principles:
0:00 - 350 years ago: electricity let us power anything
0:46 - The internet era: data centers let us find anything
1:09 - AI: software that reasons and uses your tools to do anything
1:48 - One photo of a backyard → CAD files for the builders
2:35 - The AI factory: what a data center actually makes
3:44 - The math: a $100T economy, $15T of it needs more intelligence
4:49 - Why electricians and builders are the quiet winners
When AI stocks run, most people blame hype
Jensen is teaching the stack underneath:
energy → AI factory → tokens → intelligence → every industry
Old way: data centers store information
New way: AI factories manufacture intelligence
Better than any $2,000 AI course I've seen
Who wins bigger from this, chip makers or electricians?
