James Altucher:

Erebor: The Anduril of Finance

When Silicon Valley Bank collapsed in 2023, startups found themselves locked out. They couldn’t make payroll. Founders were forced to pause R&D, lay off staff, or scramble for bridge loans. Thousands of products were delayed, shelved, or defunded. Early-stage companies lost months of runway—critical in a world where timing is everything.

Enter Anduril founder Palmer Luckey and his latest project, a new crypto-friendly digital bank called Erebor. Erebor is stepping in to keep an SVB-style collapse from happening again.

Not by patching the old system, but by replacing it with rails designed for the digital age. No more waiting three days to move payroll. No more panic over frozen wire transfers. Everything happens on-chain, programmatically, and 24/7.

Erebor builders Jacob Hirshman and Owen Rapaport saw firsthand how broken traditional banking was for anyone building in crypto, AI, defense, or frontier tech. Luckey became the first backer, not just for ideological reasons, but because he saw how fragile the capital stack was for critical infrastructure. He saw the same thing in fintech that he saw in defense: the incumbents were fat, slow, and hostile to innovation.

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Greg Guenthner:

Trump Media files for 'Crypto Blue Chip ETF' with SEC

President Donald Trump continues to expand his crypto-related offerings, this time with a planned exchange-traded fund tied to the prices of five popular cryptocurrencies.

Trump Media & Technology Group (DJT), a Florida company that operates the Truth Social media platform, announced Tuesday it had filed paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission for approval to launch the “Crypto Blue Chip ETF” later this year.

The proposed ETF would have 70% of its holdings in bitcoin, the world’s most popular cryptocurrency, 15% in ethereum, the second-most popular, and 8% in solana, a cryptocurrency popular in the meme coin community. The fund would hold 5% in the cryptocurrency developed by the company Ripple and 2% in the crypto created by the exchange Crypto.com, which will act as the ETF’s digital custodian.

Trump Media previously announced plans for a crypto ETF with just bitcoin and ethereum. It’s unclear if the company plans to move forward with that ETF offering.

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Davis Wilson:

Jack Dorsey’s New Private Messenger App Doesn’t Need an Internet Connection

What has Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter (now X) been up to lately? Among other things, creating experimental little projects, like a new private messenger that doesn’t need the internet to function.

On Sunday, Dorsey announced the beta launch of a new messaging app that he says relies on mesh networks to pass messages from user to user via the power of Bluetooth technology. The service sounds vaguely like Amazon’s Sidewalk project (which similarly used mesh networks to power IoT devices), and which we advised against using back in 2020.

According to Dorsey, his messenger—called Bitchat—allows for decentralized, private communication, in such a way that does not require internet infrastructure.

“By leveraging Bluetooth Low Energy mesh networking, bitchat enables direct peer-to-peer messaging within physical proximity, with automatic message relay extending the effective range beyond direct Bluetooth connections," Dorsey explained.

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