#decentralized-ceremonies

#decentralized-ceremonies

Revolutions leave behind artifacts - not always weapons or flags, but the quieter objects that carried a message before anyone knew how far it would travel. A wheat-pasted broadside on a Los Angeles overpass. A hand-lettered cardboard sign held up in the snow outside a Tokyo office building.

Carrez calls this 'the survival problem,' and it forms part of his definition of sovereignty - digital, data, AI, and so on. He says, 'A lot of people are just talking about digital sovereignty as like a catchphrase for a bunch of things.'

TezQuest is designed as an interactive layer to TezDev, turning the event into a hands-on experience rather than a series of talks. Attendees are encouraged to explore projects across the ecosystem, complete challenges, and directly interact with teams building on Tezos.

Tokenization is about bringing real-world financial assets onto infrastructure that can support global scale and continuous market access, said Carlos Domingo, Co-Founder and CEO of Securitize.

Agentic payments is very early, and we still are figuring out the best way to structure these. So our team just came up with what we thought was the most elegant, minimal, efficient protocol that anyone can extend without our permission.

Identity spoofing against older adults alone grew by 8x between 2020 and 2024, driven in part by convincing AI impersonations of friends and loved ones. It's a problem costing people in the U.S. nearly half a billion dollars a year with no end in sight.

In the early 20th century, sociologist Max Weber noted that sweeping industrialization would transform how societies worked. As small, informal operations gave way to large, complex organizations with clearly defined roles and responsibilities, leaders would need to rely less on tradition and charisma, and more on organization and rationality. He also foresaw that jobs would need to be broken down into specialized tasks and governed by a system of hierarchy,

What I walked through wasn't just an immigration gate. It was a node in a rapidly expanding global infrastructure of digital identity, one being constructed at extraordinary speed, across dozens of countries, by a mix of governments, multilateral organizations, and private technology vendors. The people building it believe they are solving real problems: fraud, statelessness, inefficient public services, financial exclusion.

Asset prices are in freefall, key legislation hangs by a thread, and members of Crypto Twitter fret it's their turn to learn what it's like to "have fun staying poor." One company, though, is sitting pretty amid all this. That would be Tether, which last week reported $10 billion in profits for 2025, and has amassed so much gold it's now storing bars of the stuff in Swiss bunkers from World War II.

The internet you experience daily-endless scrolling, algorithmic feeds serving content you didn't ask for, AI-generated slop clogging search results-isn't the only internet available. It's just the one that's easiest to stumble into. You're not stuck with the internet that has evolved alongside the rise of hegemonic platforms. We're 20-plus years into the social internet, and the winners of the last round of audience capture have made clear they're shifting to optimize for social broadcasting instead of networking, to maximize market share and market cap.

According to data from Statista, approximately 67% of Roblox users were under the age of 17 - and the vast majority were under the age of 13 - in September 2020. Now that distribution appears to be shifting - there now appear to be more daily active users (DAUs) over the age of 13 than below. At the same time, Roblox has been falling short of its financial goals; the company's most recent financial report shows that it missed both its top and bottom lines.

Sentiment among DeFi users remains positive heading into 2026, with 72% of respondents globally expressing optimism about the sector's future. U.S. users reported one of the highest confidence levels at 83%, while sentiment across Asian markets was comparatively more muted, with respondents in Singapore (64%), Taiwan (63%) and in Hong Kong (56%).