Christian Catalini

Silicon Valley won because ideas leaked across company boundaries at a bar in Mountain View.

'Cognitive surrender' is the psychology.

Karpathy described the limit on trillion-dollar autonomous systems as an aside about an overnight hyperparameter script: objective metrics are the perfect fit — and everything else isn't.

Verifying whether a paper is a breakthrough requires roughly the same expertise as producing one.

What individuals should do as AI collapses the cost of execution — rebuild expertise faster than the market rate.

In 1842, Lowell's textile mills scaled looms faster than weavers could check them.

AI is collapsing the cost of running finance while degrading the documents it trusts.

Generating the output is free.

A machine that never tires screams substitution.

Skill-biased technical change is dead.

AI is collapsing the cost of running finance while degrading the documents it trusts.

Nobody asked it to.

AI just gave you superpowers: how individuals compound them before the market catches up.

You've just been told you have superpowers — what do you build?

A Q&A on the economics of AGI: why verification, not intelligence, becomes the binding constraint as the cost of execution collapses.

Juniors struggling, top performers thriving — both true at once.

Intelligence tools paired with smaller and flatter teams are changing what it means to build and run a company — and junior roles vanish before people can build expertise.

The full 58-post walkthrough of the paper: what AI will actually automate, what stays human, and why the dividing line is measurability, not routine.

Episode 1: open versus closed money networks.

AI commoditizes software.

AI isn’t a product decision for fintech — it’s a market-structure decision: efficiency gains favor incumbents; a new interface gives startups a real shot.

The case for open networks over closed corporate rails, in sixteen minutes.

Why closed corporate blockchains lose to open networks: cooperate on the platform, compete on products.

To every founder asking what to build next in crypto, AI, or fintech: the invisible, boring standards are what let thousands of new products exist in the first place.

What the new stablecoin rulebook means for operators and corporate strategy.

AI commoditizes software, so the scarce layer in fintech becomes regulatory permission: the charter decides who gets to hold money.

Volume has doubled year-over-year, but it isn't retail — it's B2B settlement and internal transfers: what banks and traditional rails do, but 24/7, faster, and cheaper.

When we announced Libra, the reaction from the global financial establishment was 'energetic.'

Banks worry stablecoins will drain deposits.

Permissionless networks are finally doing the obvious, boring thing: connecting to a Visa card.

In the age of AI, money needs identity.

Wide-ranging conversation on stablecoins and payments infrastructure.

Proprietary CorpChains versus open networks: the platform war over the rails of the global economy.

Both are scarce assets whose value rests on social consensus — but unlike gold, Bitcoin has yet to earn the low-correlation role of a crisis hedge.

The Act does more than clarify rules: treat stablecoins as a simple utility, or as the new open architecture for payments — against a $187 billion private tax on the economy.

Money is the last closed network.

Open networks keynote at Lightspark Sync 2025.

The Economist called disruption 'one of the most influential modern business ideas' — and yet the data stubbornly refuses to cooperate.

Washington's stablecoin law promises competition in money movement, but a blind spot — interoperability — threatens to crown a single superpower instead.

How the GENIUS Act’s design could concentrate the stablecoin market — and how to stop it.

Stablecoins on Bitcoin via the Spark L2.

An all-star team, state-of-the-art tech, impressive partners, and 'neutrality' — and the price is handing a fintech giant the keys to global payments.

Libra is crypto’s favorite ghost story.

A framework for deciding whether corporate treasuries should hold bitcoin.

The entire story of AI and labor is about what we can — and can't — put a number on.

When one of the world's leading macroeconomists publicly apologizes for underestimating Bitcoin, it's worth paying attention.

See Bitcoin as “money‑as‑software” and the actual pattern snaps into focus.

Stripe is building a high-performance blockchain called Tempo.

Stripe and Circle are both building their own chains.

Can crypto go mainstream without losing its soul?