Something Interesting
Robinhood just started selling tokenized shares of OpenAI and SpaceX to Europeans. Stock hit an all-time high on the news. They're literally giving away €5 of private company tokens to juice adoption.
This is the perfect crystallization of private equity's identity crisis. The entire asset class exists because you can't trade it. No daily marks = no volatility = happy employees watching their RSUs "steadily appreciate" while public market peers get destroyed.
Everyone is racing to bring price discovery to an asset class whose entire value prop is avoiding price discovery.
Apollo launched semi-liquid interval funds. Blackstone's BREIT offers quarterly redemptions. Hamilton Lane trades on NASDAQ giving retail PE exposure. Moonfare lets you buy PE funds for €50k instead of €5M. Now Robinhood's tokenizing unicorns directly.
During April's crypto crash, every pre-IPO employee I know was grateful their equity couldn't trade. OpenAI employees watched Anthropic rumors swirl, competitive launches drop, regulation threats mount—and their shares stayed peacefully frozen at last round's $300B valuation. But what happens when those same employees can check their tokenized shares every morning? Watch them dump 40% when DeepSeek v3 launches?
The incentive misalignment is breathtaking:
Outsiders see PE's $4 trillion TAM and 2-and-20 fees and desperately want access
Insiders need illiquidity to preserve the entire business model—smooth J-curves, no awkward LP conversations, stable employee morale
Private equity works because it's private. The inability to mark-to-market isn't a bug—it's the core feature. Price discovery is what traders provide as a public service. PE's innovation was avoiding us entirely. The barbarians found a back door—Robinhood's tokenizing unicorns without asking permission. Meanwhile, PE managers are cannibalizing their own model with semi-liquid funds, racing to collect fees before the illiquidity premium disappears.
Market Meta
REX-Osprey's SOL staking ETF launches this week—first to market. I was curious why giants like BlackRock didn't just copy REX's approach and beat them to it. The whole thing didn't make sense, so I had a conversation with o3 to understand what I was missing.
Turns out the big boys aren't asleep—they're avoiding a trap:
1. The hidden tax bomb - REX's structure means the fund pays corporate taxes (21%) before investors pay their own taxes. It's like getting taxed twice on the same money. Every day, the fund's value gets dinged by these tax obligations. Similar funds using this structure underperform by 2-5% annually just from taxes. Imagine buying a SOL ETF and watching it lag regular SOL by 3% every year—even when the price goes up. BlackRock knows their clients would riot.
2. The 3% poison pill - Here's the killer: other funds legally can't own more than 3% of REX's ETF without jumping through expensive hoops. That means Vanguard can't put it in their target-date funds. Wealth managers can't add it to their model portfolios. The big distribution pipes that drive billions into ETFs? Completely blocked. It's like opening a restaurant where Uber Eats and DoorDash can't deliver your food.
REX is betting none of this matters because retail investors will see "7% yield" on their app and hit buy. They're probably wrong about demand—SOL futures on CME trade $70M daily after months of hype (very rough figure).
I'm not a believer, but happy to be surprised. If this works, it'll be because retail showed up.
Personal Development/Life 🌱
My athletic performance was stuck for six months. Same workouts, same nutrition, same sleep—minimal progress. The breakthrough wasn't supplements or recovery protocols. It was making my warm-up harder.
Old routine: 10 minutes stretching, light cardio, start training.
New routine: Pull-ups, push-ups, single-leg squats, resistance bands. The warm-up is a workout. (Repeat at cooldown)
The mechanism makes sense: I was treating preparation as separate from performance. But your nervous system doesn't distinguish—it just knows total load. By front-loading intensity into something I do daily regardless of motivation, I accidentally created a forcing function for progressive overload.
Forcing functions are underrated mental models for life design. They're constraints that make desired behavior inevitable. My warm-up happens every session no matter what—I just made it carry the critical work. Can't skip what's built into the non-negotiable routine.
Other forcing functions that work:
Living in a studio apartment forces minimalism
Deleting apps forces presence
Public commitments force follow-through
Key insight: Don't add new habits—weaponize existing ones. Your warm-up already happens. Your morning coffee already happens. Your commute already happens. Which routine can you transform into a forcing function?
(Also discovered Magdalena Bay during long warm-ups. "Imaginal Disk" on repeat. Sometimes delayed recognition creates better art—she's been grinding since 2016, just hit mainstream. There's a lesson there too.)
Note: This post was written with significant AI assistance. I provided the core insights and observations, then worked with Claude to develop, structure, and refine the ideas through back-and-forth conversation. The frameworks and personal experiences are mine, but the execution relied on AI for research, organization, and polish.