@NousResearch 🤝 @CoinbaseDev

Coinbase, the prediction market company?

Bitcoin has been stress-tested for over a decade.

Now, our teams of AI agents are stress-testing it too. Still holding up.

At @ycombinator, we're excited to fund more crypto startups solving financial needs including AI capital raising, stablecoins, trading, and agents.

Here's our latest crypto request for startups. Our next application deadline is Monday.

These layer cake traunche rounds are getting nuts. At the limit just drop stage designation and it’s a permanent rolling round for lifetime of company.

Love this

. @valkyries have the best fan energy in all of sports right now IMO.

Always-on markets for one of the fastest-growing crypto economies in the world — built onchain, funded in USDC.

Excited to back @Mochatradeapp, bringing India’s traders 24/7 perps on equities, commodities, and pre-IPO names.

There's lots of discussion about a16z dropping the word 'crypto'.

It's actually a sign of crypto winning. It's outgrown being a standalone sector and now runs through global finance and frontier tech: payments, trading, tokenization, AiFi, and much more.

We've spent more than a decade building this industry to make it useful everywhere, and we should welcome it escaping its own category. People used to say 'internet companies' - which is a prehistoric phrase now. Eventually, calling something a 'crypto company' should feel just as redundant.

Many of us (including me) will keep the word. But the millions, and soon billions, using it every day won't care what we call it.

They'll care what it lets them do.

Crypto grew up in the Dark Forest, and the entire world is about to find itself there

Disaster for pre-IPO founders in California.

IYKYK

open.spotify.com/track/77YKoNCj…

business doesn’t stop at 5pm, and neither should money movement. some of the many reasons why @cbventures is investing in teams accelerating the velocity of money and why stablecoin funding is always an option for companies receiving investment from us

MAYBE I WAS WRONG ABOUT BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY

I wrote about how I always used to make fun of the guys who said things like "Bitcoin is speculative, but the underlying blockchain technology is interesting." And now I think maybe they kinda had a point.

The outpouring of interest in our paper has been … a bit insane.

May I make four points?

1. We have not shown that “consciousness has a frame rate.”

I can see why people draw this conclusion: we report that inferotemporal and prefrontal cortex alternate between conscious and suppressed states roughly every 60 ms during binocular rivalry.

Consciousness depends on many brain areas, and our paper reports results from only a few select nodes.

We still don’t know how conscious access works--the actual recipe for generating conscious experience. What we have shown is that deep in the brain there is an extremely strong signal, rich enough to reconstruct a high-dimensional face in detail, that is inaccessible to consciousness. As I argued in the original tweet, this makes the problem of conscious access a lot more experimentally tractable. But to claim “consciousness has a frame rate,” one would need to have actually solved the mechanism for conscious access and shown that this mechanism operates at a frame rate.

While we currently don’t know conclusively one way or the other (see VanRullen & Koch, 2003 for a review of positive evidence), I personally am skeptical that consciousness has a frame rate. I believe the brain, within posterior parietal cortex, has continuous tracking mechanisms that actively represent the persistence of matter, including ourselves as physical bodies. The coupling between these persistent tracking processes and feature representations across the brain (like those in face patches) is, I think, the essential mechanism of conscious access.

This coupling need not happen at the rate of inferotemporal alternations (and inferotemporal cortex itself may not even alternate outside of the artificial situation of binocular rivalry). As an analogy: imagine the area crucial for conscious access holding a steady drone note, while inferotemporal cortex alternates between two notes, one in harmony and one dissonant. Inferotemporal content might couple to the drone only at moments of harmony, yet experience would still be continuous, because the drone itself (the tracking process that I believe is at the core of conscious perception) never stops. And areas without conflicting content, like auditory cortex during visual rivalry, could stay in continuous harmony with the drone.

In sum, there is no reason to conclude from our study that consciousness is discrete, with a "frame rate."

2. Our results resemble Jezek et al. 2011 (as @jjsakon notes).

Jezek et al. trained rats in two boxes that were identical except for their lighting cues, so that hippocampal place cells formed two distinct maps, one per box. They then “teleported” the rat by abruptly switching the lights. For a few seconds afterwards, CA3 place-cell activity flickered between the two maps, synced to the theta cycle (~125 ms).

@StanDehaene first pointed this paper out to me, and reading it blew me away. To my mind it is the strongest evidence for a bistable attractor in the brain, because the competing maps are stored within the hippocampus itself.

I think the phenomenon we see may be very similar at the circuit level: a bistable attractor network within inferotemporal cortex that alternately converges to one of two patterns, as cells in face patches work together to build a coherent representation of the input. In our case, both images are present in the input, so the competition could arise within IT or be inherited from earlier areas such as V1--recording there is an important next step. (It also still puzzles me that we didn’t see strong coherence between face patches ML and AM.)

More broadly, what’s different about our paper is the brain area (inferotemporal cortex, often modeled as a feedforward DNN) and the ability to relate the two competing patterns to consciousness, with one granted conscious access and the other not.

3. Please comment on bioRxiv!

The Twitter attention has been cool, but I really hope colleagues will be generous enough to post detailed commentary on bioRxiv, where there are currently 0 comments. As @seemaychou points out, peer review doesn’t have to come from just three anonymous reviewers. We would be truly grateful for your critical feedback.

4. Stay tuned

This work was done at Caltech, Berkeley, in collaboration with @EngelTatiana at Princeton, funded by NIH and HHMI.

I hope to share our vision soon for how we can solve consciousness @AsteraInstitute

1/ We discovered something totally unexpected about the neural structure of consciousness that overturns decades of thinking on its biological basis and brings us significantly closer to the recipe for generating conscious awareness.
New preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.648… (led by @HesseJanis, with @FrankLanfranchi, @_conor_mcgrory, @Yuelin_Shi, and @EngelTatiana)

the choice of secp256k1 over r1 (P-256) in bitcoin (and ethereum) was heavily influenced by the fear of an NSA backdoor. this has been very annoying for wallet developers because the secure enclave chips found in most consumer devices only support r1. passkeys use r1 as well.

turns out there is no backdoor after all... amazing work by anthropic.

anthropic.com/research/ecdsa…

AI agents are becoming economic actors, and they're choosing stablecoins. At @cbventures we're especially excited about projects building on the x402 protocol, which @coinbase incubated, and what it means for the future of open-sourced standards and internet-native payments.

Appreciated the chance to contribute to this report, @chainalysis! Will talk AiFi and x402 any day of the week.