~80% of this year's themes show up in Messari's 2026 thesis, with standout sections on “crypto money,” “TradFi x crypto,” and “decentralized internet finance.” Most L1s can't rely on fee capture in a cheap-blockspace world, so they lean on “monetary premiums” (belief-based value), but only a few assets can sustain that. Messari's ETH framing is ultimately also slightly contradictory, as they are bearish on fees/revenue share and bullish on “winning sectors” like RWAs. RWAs may simply be low-velocity (vault-like), so they don't translate into high chain revenue.
2025 is a year where prices ended roughly flat-to-down despite real institutional progress, whereas 2026 is about activation. Stablecoins will push deeper into payments, and tokenized assets will move into mainstream collateral/settlement. Galaxy's 26 calls range from big-picture (stablecoins overtaking ACH volume, and corporate/permissioned L1s doing real settlement) to very specific (DEX spot share >25%, Polymarket weekly volumes >$1.5B, and more ETF launches).
Stablecoin transaction volume roughly doubled YoY, but the growth isn't mainly consumers buying coffee. The biggest slices are Internal transfers and B2B flows, with retail-like categories (P2P/P2B/B2P) much smaller in comparison. There's also a clear weekday greater than weekend pattern, which is exactly what you'd expect if stablecoins are increasingly used as business settlement plumbing.
The AI x crypto theme evolved from 2023's decentralized data marketplaces and compute sharing to 2025's autonomous agents managing assets and executing trades. Bittensor surpassed $10 billion market cap as x402 payment protocols enable seamless high-volume settlements without human oversight. Agentic tooling revolutionized onchain development, allowing non-technical founders to launch businesses in days. Grayscale's Decentralized AI Fund holding NEAR, TAO, and FIL signals institutional buy-in. Crypto primitives address AI's centralization risks while AI enhances blockchain usability. Regulatory tailwinds will potentially accelerate adoption toward new highs in 2026.
Chainlink is positioning itself as the missing middleware for finance, moving onchain or the full toolkit for getting real-world assets and institutions to safely use blockchains at scale.
Figma's latest update refines the Crop tool to speed up everyday image editing, with faster access via double-click, automatic aspect ratio preservation, optional free scaling, and built-in preset ratios. Added features like snap-to-edges, resize-to-fit, and a dedicated Crop toolbar make alignment and cropping more precise and intuitive.
Adobe faces a proposed class-action lawsuit alleging it used pirated books to train its SlimLM language model for mobile document assistance. The lawsuit claims Adobe's training relied on the SlimPajama dataset, which contains the controversial Books3 collection of 191,000 pirated books that have sparked multiple legal battles against tech companies. This case joins growing litigation over AI firms allegedly training models on copyrighted materials without author consent or compensation, following similar lawsuits against Apple, Salesforce, and Anthropic.
Gorden Wagener is stepping down as chief design officer at Mercedes-Benz after 28 years, having led the brand's design since 2016. During his tenure, he expanded Mercedes into non-automotive sectors like speedboats and aviation, initiated high-profile collaborations with figures like Virgil Abloh and Nigo, and repositioned the brand as more youthful and dynamic. Bastian Baudy, currently overseeing Mercedes-AMG, will replace Wagener in this role.
Modern UX has shifted from a problem-solving discipline rooted in shared foundations to a faster, solution-first practice focused on execution and polish. While designers are highly skilled, the reduced emphasis on problem definition, exploration, and core UX principles risks diminishing the depth and purpose of the discipline.
UX design has been reduced to "cheerleading" that legitimizes predetermined ideas rather than solving real problems, as stakeholders demand outputs rather than defining actual business goals. The "build, measure, learn" framework has devolved into a linear sequence where teams build first and validate later, using design research merely to soothe anxiety and justify decisions already made. This dysfunction—amplified by AI tools that generate quick prototypes—transforms designers into accountability sinks who take the blame when projects fail, while learning and course-correction become impossible.
The $268 billion design agency market is growing, yet major agencies are shutting down because clients increasingly view design as replaceable by AI when it operates separately from business strategy. Designers who survive close the "Integration Gap" by moving beyond visual execution to understand business models, speak in terms of measurable outcomes, and make strategic decisions that directly impact revenue and company metrics. Those who remain tactical executors will compete with AI on speed and polish, while those who integrate deeply into business strategy become irreplaceable partners trusted to make judgment calls when challenges arise.
Vybe is Lovable for internal apps. It comes with pre-built building blocks - Integrations, SSO, and AI tools - so anyone in a company can build and launch internal AI-powered apps.
A judge and California's DMV have ruled that Tesla's “Autopilot” and “Full Self-Driving” branding is misleading, as it implies full autonomy that the vehicles do not have. Unless Tesla renames the features, it could face a ban on selling cars in California, despite already adding caveats and rebranding Full Self-Driving as “Supervised.”
Effective design stems from a genuine human connection rather than technical skills or trends. Before starting projects, research clients as individuals and prioritize conversations over email exchanges to understand their actual needs and concerns. This approach transforms transactional client relationships into collaborative partnerships where people feel heard, ultimately producing better design outcomes than any software proficiency alone could achieve.
The Dezeen editorial team selected nine diverse designs as 2025's best, including Nissan's electric R32EV sports car concept and Gustaf Westman's IKEA meatball plate.
Visual design trends for 2026 emphasize authenticity and emotion over perfection, with designers blending AI-generated elements with human refinement to create work that feels real and personal.
Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, some of Google's most important engineers for over 25 years, wrote a guide on optimizing software performance. Performance needs to be considered early in critical code paths instead of solely relying on post-development profiling for optimization. The guide also covers algorithmic improvements, efficient memory representation, reducing allocations, avoiding unnecessary work, and using parallelization.
CSS Grid Lanes is a new web standard to natively create flexible, dynamic masonry-style layouts on the web without JavaScript. This feature uses `display: grid-lanes` along with existing CSS Grid properties like `grid-template-columns` or `grid-template-rows` to define the layout's structure. It supports advanced capabilities such as variable lane sizes, item spanning, explicit placement, and introduces a "tolerance" property for fine-tuning item packing order.
Code review within teams should change to be primarily a human alignment mechanism. Large language models have no memory and have to rediscover everything in the system from first principles every time they are run. Humans can collectively maintain a shared vision of what the system should do. Code review should reconfigure itself around this purpose.
From a DX perspective, every transaction within a shard would always be serializable and never needs to be retried, making it much easier to think about. A single-threaded database would be fully horizontally scalable and have extremely high per-thread throughput, as it wouldn't need to sync with other threads. It would be a much more predictable system. While more restrictive, there would be no more hidden race conditions.
covering the most requested integrations. Watch solution architects demo Jira + ServiceNow cross-functional workflows, no-code integration setup, and connecting custom in-house tools. After the quick demo, you'll have a live Q&A with architects who've deployed these at
This gist contains a Claude skill for creating production-grade frontend interfaces that avoid generic AI slop aesthetics. The user provides frontend requirements, and the AI generates production-grade and functional code with visually striking and memorable design. The skill instructs the agent to never use generic AI-generated aesthetics, to interpret prompts creatively, and to make unexpected choices that feel genuinely designed for the context.
AI agents can execute destructive commands without understanding the consequences. They can do this even if the AGENTS.md file forbids such commands. This post provides a Claude Code hook that blocks certain git commands before they can run. The hook uses regex pattern matching, so clever or obfuscated commands may be able to bypass it.
Garage is a lightweight, efficient, and resilient S3 object store designed for reliability. Capable of running outside traditional datacenters, it guarantees data redundancy through 3-zone replication. Garage is a self-contained, dependency-free binary that is fast to deploy on various Linux distributions and machines.
Lite³ (TRON) is a zero-copy, schemaless binary serialization format that organizes data as a B-tree within a single contiguous buffer. This design allows for direct, O(log n) access and mutation of data fields without traditional parsing or serialization steps. It supports conversion to/from JSON, but is much more performant.
Rue is a memory-safe language that is higher-level than Rust, but lower-level than Go. It features a simple syntax inspired by various programming languages. Rue compiles directly to native code. It is still in early development.
2025 was an eventful year for LLMs, with paradigm shifts that redefined the field. Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) came up as a new training stage, allowing LLMs to develop reasoning strategies and driving much of the year's capability progress. The year also saw the rise of new application layers, local AI agents like Claude Code, "vibe coding" that democratized programming, and early hints of a visual LLM GUI.
Anna's Archive has created the world's first preservation archive for music by backing up Spotify's metadata and music files. This massive 300TB collection covers 256 million tracks and 186 million unique ISRCs, representing approximately 99.6% of all Spotify listens. The project archives a "long tail" of less popular music and makes the entire archive openly mirrorable.
A 'Code Orange' at Cloudflare is an incident that requires top priority from everyone across the company, with teams working cross-functionally as necessary to get the job done while pausing any other work.
JSON Structure is a strictly typed data definition language that describes JSON-encoded data so that mapping to and from programming languages and databases becomes straightforward.
A Raspberry Pi 5 can use powerful GPUs for demanding tasks like AI and media transcoding, often achieving performance within a few percent of a desktop PC.
Amazon's term for its incident review process, Correction of Error, implies that incidents occur as a result of errors, which limits the benefits available from the incident review process.
The $100M ARR ceiling is real, and it's catching a lot of good companies off guard. Founders who prepare for it can still break through. Do what works now, not what worked back in 2019. Go multiproduct earlier, tap into AI budgets, and build genuine platforms.
Imagine a company where any manager can hire whoever they want with no culture screens or founder veto. This thought experiment feels intuitively wrong for a good reason. The average white-collar worker is at least as much an externality to colleagues as an input into production. When outputs can't be properly attributed, rewards for good work are capped, and punishments for laziness are attenuated. Culture steps in to resolve this by making profit-seeking the means to a greater end - something worth existing beyond any individual's tenure or payout.
Dashboard products are used directly by end users as their primary interface for accomplishing tasks. Pipe products are used in the background. Customers rarely interact with them directly after setup. Companies can have both types of products in their portfolio, but products have to choose which camp they're primarily in. The choice will dictate product development, growth strategy, and organizational structure.
After watching roughly 3,000 sales calls, one thing is clear - nobody knows how to start them. The fastest-growing startup this author helped ($0-$6M in under 3 months) attributes its success to "knowing exactly what to look for in discovery."
Stop searching for the perfect pricing metric. You need a useful approximation that works today and can evolve. The practical approach - ask customers to rank which value propositions resonate most, then rank which metrics correlate with that value. If the same pairing shows up across multiple interviews, you're onto something. Even if you can't charge on outcomes yet, start tracking them. Create a mock pricing page as a hypothesis and test how prospects react before it's live.
Focus on solving real problems, not just raising capital, to attract investors. Use confident body language, like leaning forward and maintaining stillness, to convey credibility. Leverage pitch competitions for visibility and connections, aiding in building momentum and securing funding.