2026-03-02 04:15:58
\
In an industry where token launches routinely precede working products by months or years, Playnance is attempting something unusual: launching its G-Token into an ecosystem that already functions.
\ Playnance, a Tel Aviv-based Web3 infrastructure company announced that its "Be The Boss" partner program has distributed more than $2 million in real cash to 2,567 active partners, while the broader platform has generated $5.3 million in total revenue. The G-Token launch, now imminent, does not create the ecosystem. It is being built on top of one.
\ That distinction matters more than it might seem. The crypto sector has a long memory for projects where token issuance preceded utility—and where, once the speculative energy dissipated, the underlying product was found to be empty. Playnance is betting its reputation on reversing that sequence entirely.
\
\ \ The Be The Boss program is where the numbers become tangible. For a symbolic $1 entry fee, any creator or community operator can spin up a fully branded social gaming platform on PlayW3, Playnance's flagship consumer product. The backend, blockchain settlement, player support, game catalogue, liquidity, is handled entirely by Playnance. The partner, or "Boss," focuses on audience-building. Revenue is split 50/50, paid automatically each day directly to the partner's on-chain wallet. There are no lock-up periods, no token vesting schedules, no promises of future value. The $2 million distributed to date is real money.
\ \
We designed the token to serve a working ecosystem, not the other way around. The foundation is already in place.
Pini Peter, CEO, Playnance
\
\ The G-Token, referred to in earlier company materials as "G Coin", is not an add-on to this structure. It is the plumbing. Every platform interaction on PlayW3, every game played, every payout processed on Up vs Down and other Playnance products, runs through the token as its settlement and utility layer. Daily earnings distribution to the 2,567 Bosses is denominated and settled in G-Token. Demand for the token is therefore not manufactured by marketing campaigns or speculative listings; it is a direct function of how many people are playing and how many Bosses are operating platforms.
\ This feedback loop—Playnance's own term, though their language describes it as a "compounding economic loop", is the central claim of the G-Token thesis. More Boss platforms bring more users. More users generate more on-chain transactions. More transactions create organic, usage-driven demand for G-Token across gameplay, reward mechanics, and settlement flows. The payout track record then attracts the next wave of Boss operators. The company says the Boss count has more than doubled in recent months, a data point that suggests the loop is already turning.
\
\ The architecture behind these numbers is deliberately invisible to end-users. Playnance has built what it calls a non-custodial, on-chain system that sits beneath a Web2-style interface. Users onboard without needing to understand wallets, gas fees, or token mechanics. Every transaction is nonetheless recorded on-chain, providing the transparent, verifiable activity data that underpins the G-Token's claimed utility. At 1.5 million daily transactions, Playnance is operating at a throughput that rivals mid-tier centralised exchanges—an unusual credential for a consumer gaming platform entering its public token phase.
\ The critical question, as with any token-powered ecosystem, is whether the loop holds under scrutiny. The $2 million in fiat payouts is the most defensible number: it is real money that left a bank account or wallet and arrived in someone else's. The $5.3 million in total revenue is a company-reported figure, unaudited at the time of publication. The 1.5 million daily transactions include all platform activity, not merely financially material events, a metric that, in gaming contexts, warrants examination of what proportion represents genuine user engagement versus automated or incentivised activity. Playnance has not yet published a third-party audit of its on-chain data.
\ What the company has published is a track record of paying its partners. In a market where token promises have so frequently substituted for product, $2 million in actual cash distributions is an uncommon form of proof. Whether G-Token becomes the connective tissue of a genuinely scaled consumer blockchain ecosystem or whether the loop stalls as distribution broadens and marginal Boss quality declines, will depend on execution through 2026. The infrastructure, for now, appears real. The test is whether it compounds.
\ Don’t forget to like and share the story!
2026-03-02 03:07:59
Bitcoin is on pace for a fifth straight monthly loss, its worst streak since 2018, and every XRP price prediction for March is getting more cautious. CoinDesk reported Bitcoin crashing below $64,000 after US and Israeli strikes on Iran wiped $128 billion from total market value. XRP fell to $1.29 in the sell off. But the smartest XRP price prediction strategy is not choosing between large caps and presales. It is holding both, using XRP for recovery and Pepeto for asymmetric upside no large cap can deliver.
Any serious portfolio needs more than a single large cap, and the best XRP price prediction strategy accounts for that by pairing Ripple's steady recovery potential with a six zero entry that could deliver 150x before XRP moves 3x. That is exactly where Pepeto fits, and the capital flowing into this presale tells the story before any headline does.
The project raised above $7.36M while the rest of the market bled, stages are closing faster than any round before, social mentions tripled in February alone, wallet registrations keep climbing daily, and fake tokens impersonating Pepeto flood decentralized exchanges because scammers only clone what is about to explode. And that demand is not random, because behind it sits the first integrated trading infrastructure designed specifically for the $45 billion meme coin economy. PepetoSwap is approaching launch as a zero tax cross chain trading engine connecting Ethereum, BSC, and Solana so meme coin traders can move between chains without bleeding fees on every swap. Pepeto Bridge is being built to handle cross blockchain transfers in seconds, removing the friction that forces traders through slow third party services. And the Pepeto Exchange will give new meme coins a dedicated listing hub this market has never had, creating structural demand for the token every time a project lists or a trade executes.
An original Pepe cofounder is behind this project, dual security audits from SolidProof and Coinsult returned zero critical issues, and the presale sits at $0.000000186 with 70% of the allocation already filled. The Pepeto official website shows the kind of accumulation that defined the earliest days of every meme coin that went parabolic. At that price a $10,000 entry at 150x becomes $1,500,000. On top of that, staking at 211% APY generates $57.81 per day, $1,758 per month, and $21,100 per year on that same $10,000, but the yield is just the holding bonus while you wait for the listing. The real play is the price. SHIB reached $40 billion with no swap, no bridge, and no audit. Pepeto has all three approaching launch.
CoinMarketCap shows XRP near $1.29, down from its 2025 peak above $3. The XRPL Foundation patched a critical ledger vulnerability before mainnet, but price action remains muted with lower highs and fading buyer conviction. Bullish forecasts cap XRP between $3.50 and $5.00 by late 2026, representing 3x to 5x upside. That makes XRP a reliable portfolio base, not the whole strategy.
Solana enters March after dropping 31% in February. Weekly DEX volume fell 62% and long term holder accumulation dropped 92% according to Glassnode. Support sits at $80, but a head and shoulders breakdown points toward $59. Spot SOL ETFs pulling in $900 million remain the only bright spot.
The best XRP price prediction approach in 2026 is pairing large cap recovery with presale asymmetry. XRP gives you 3x to 5x. Pepeto at $0.000000186 gives you 150x. The presale is 70% filled. $7.355 million raised. The whales recognized this setup before. They're inside Pepeto now. Visit the Pepeto official website before six zeros disappear permanently.
Click To Visit Pepeto Website To Enter The Presale
What is the XRP price prediction for 2026?
XRP trades near $1.29 after the Iran crash. Bullish forecasts project $3.50 to $5.00 by late 2026, representing 3x to 5x upside from current levels.
How should I build a crypto portfolio with XRP and Pepeto?
Pair XRP's steady recovery with Pepeto's asymmetric 150x potential at $0.000000186. The combination balances established large cap exposure with early stage upside. Visit the Pepeto official website for details.
How much could $10,000 in Pepeto return at 150x?
A $10,000 entry becomes $1,500,000. Staking at 211% APY adds $57.81 per day, $1,758 per month, and $21,100 per year.
Is Solana a good buy after the February crash?
Solana dropped 31% in February with DEX volume down 62%. ETF demand provides some support, but the technical breakdown toward $59 suggests more downside before recovery.
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:::tip This story was published as a press release by Tokenwire under our Business Blogging Program.
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:::warning This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Cryptocurrencies are speculative, complex, and involve high risks. This can mean high prices volatility and potential loss of your initial investment. You should consider your financial situation, investment purposes, and consult with a financial advisor before making any investment decisions. The HackerNoon editorial team has only verified the story for grammatical accuracy and does not endorse or guarantee the accuracy, reliability, or completeness of the information stated in this article. #DYOR
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2026-03-02 03:00:02
Moving from an individual contributor to a manager to a leadership role not only brings an overwhelming increase in responsibilities, but also significantly increases the size of your team. You’re no longer responsible for yourself or just a small group, but a large number of people count on your leadership.
\ Whether it’s org restructuring, sudden layoffs, budget cuts, or a natural part of your career growth, handling 2x or 3x more people can be a big challenge. As complexity shoots up, more decisions need to be made, meetings fill up your calendar, chat messages pile up, and 1:1s multiply. The sheer volume of things that demand your attention can feel like an avalanche—you may feel overwhelmed and buried with tasks, messages, and unresolved problems.
\ Without a proper strategy to manage the increased scale, an increase in responsibilities and expectations can feel unmanageable, diminishing your ability to manage and lead effectively. Every day can feel like drinking from a firehose, making it hard to focus and keep up with the demands of the job. Days end not with a sense of accomplishment, but a feeling of relief as you barely manage to survive and get through the day without completely losing your mind.
\ But you can’t operate like this forever—without scaling yourself, you’ll eventually feel drained, exhausted, and burnt out. To manage a leadership avalanche without feeling buried, you need to be strategic in your approach.
\
Leadership at scale—and leadership as you scale—means you’re constantly adapting and evolving. You can’t follow a single style or approach. You’re always leading through transitions. Your company is always changing around you. And this means you’re naturally going to have a very resilient kind of leadership, producing a resilient team and company.
― Reid Hoffman
\ Managing large teams requires a thoughtful approach to how you prioritize, what you communicate, where you spend your time, and which processes need to be eliminated as they’re no longer serving you well. You need to be flexible in your approach—rigidity can make scaling up harder as you refuse to learn and adapt along the way.
\ Here are the 5 strategies you need to adopt to scale your leadership when tasked with the responsibility to handle a large team:
When working with a small team, you may be quite involved in day-to-day responsibilities, be part of team discussions, and have regular feedback conversations with them. Over a period of time, this builds a certain expectation around your involvement—when to reach out, when to ask for advice, and when to seek your approval. People get used to a certain way of working, as every interaction with you shapes their thinking.
\ Weekly one-on-ones
Instant reply to chat messages
Getting your inputs without scheduling a meeting
\ These may be the perks when you’re dealing with a small team. However, as your responsibilities multiply and team size increases, you can’t continue operating in the same way. You can no longer hold weekly one-on-ones with each team member. You may not get the time to reply to their message as you’re held up with back-to-back meetings. Getting your inputs may require blocking a slot on your calendar, as ad hoc meetings may no longer be a possibility.
\ These changes, unless communicated verbally, can turn into a source of distress in the team—not getting the attention they’re used to can be quite upsetting and demotivating. You’ve to reset your team’s expectations. You’ve to clarify the changes required to function with a large team. You’ve to make them understand that old ways of operating will no longer be effective.
\ Proactively reset their expectations so that the team is attuned to them from the beginning:
\
Effective scaling depends on believing and living a shared mindset throughout your group, division, or organization.
― Robert I. Sutton
\ Any promises you made earlier to your team—directly or indirectly—may no longer be relevant when dealing with a large team. Breaking them without resetting expectations can lead to decreased morale, frustration, and a lack of trust in the team. As soon as your team size multiplies, discuss changes around your involvement and seek their alignment.
Communication problems are the biggest source of misery in most organizations. They lead to confusion, misalignment of goals, and even friction between people. Long debates, unnecessary meetings, and issues drag on when people in the team aren’t clear on their goals, or they conflict with priorities across other teams and functions. Time and energy are wasted. Deadlines are missed. Blame games and finger-pointing become the norm.
\ With a small team, communication problems are still manageable as you can give your attention to every issue that crops up and fight your way through it. However, as your team size multiplies, you can no longer rely on a reactive approach. You’ll not have the bandwidth to attend to every issue that shows up or even resolve it in a timely manner. You may not even know about the problems till they have become a big issue. Reacting to communication problems instead of solving them proactively can turn into a nightmare—as you try to keep up and play a catch-up game.
\ You can’t avoid all communication problems, but you can definitely minimize the gap by adopting practices that can make communication less painful and more productive for everyone. To do this:
\
Over-communicating is the glue that holds a high-performing team together and keeps them focused in the same direction. And, it circles back to clarity. Without good, consistent communication, you don’t have clarity.
― Lee Ellis
\ Communication can be less chaotic in a large team when you’re proactive—clarifying goals, seeking alignment, handling conflicts, and repeating important information often to ensure it doesn’t get missed. Stay on top of your communication game—it can keep you afloat even during the most challenging and stressful times.
When working with a small team, you may be involved in the nitty-gritty of every project and every task, enabling you to delegate work without losing your sense of control. You may keep a close watch over every task, be involved in how each one is done, and step in at the right time to unblock people and help them make progress on their goals.
\ However, as your team scales, you can no longer pay attention to every detail. You can no longer be involved in every issue or each decision. You need to shift from a 10-foot view to a 100-foot view—you have to start assigning not just the task, but a larger scope of work. You have to delegate not just what needs to be done, but also how it must be done.
\ You can achieve this only by empowering your team—helping them build the essential skills to make decisions, solve problems, navigate complexity, and take accountability for their actions. Trying to micromanage will prevent your team from building the essential skills to learn and grow, limit your team's collective outcome, and cause you to feel stress and burnout. This requires letting go of control and a mindset shift from doing to leading others.
\ To delegate responsibly to a large team:
\
Delegate responsibilities, not tasks. In Start, you are delegating tasks, since you’re still involved in all the decision-making. But here in Scale, you’ve got to stop delegating tasks and instead move entire responsibilities to members of your team so that you’re not having to think about every item every day.
― Colin C. Campbell
\ Trying to keep a tight control over your team by dictating every task, every decision, and their every move will prevent you from scaling and achieving org goals. Instead, invest in building your team’s skills. Trust them to handle bigger and better responsibilities. Coach them to think and act independently.
You may establish a set of processes when working with a small team that enables them to be efficient in working together and getting things done. For example: A stand-up meeting every morning, design discussions with the entire team, conducting pre-mortems for every project, or multiple levels of code reviews.
\ These processes that worked well with a small team can tremendously slow down a large team—people in the team can waste a lot of time and energy by sticking to old methods of working that no longer keep them efficient. Whether it’s tech processes, collaboration practices, or communication methods, you can’t stick with them just because they worked in the past. You’ve to identify the elements that can create unnecessary drag and reduce your team’s productivity instead of speeding it up.
\ Reduce and declutter superfluous processes by following these steps:
\
A great process isn’t designed; it is evolved. So, the important thing isn’t your process; the important thing is your process for improving your process.
― Henrik Kniberg
\ Pay attention to how your team operates on a day-to-day basis—what makes them go full throttle and what adds useless pauses to their momentum. By safeguarding your team’s time and channeling it towards constructive processes, you can reduce the mental clutter and create a positive work environment.
When the scope of work is small and interactions limited, you may not feel drained at the end of each day. You may find yourself with plenty of energy to make decisions, solve problems, and guide your team.
\ However, as your team size increases, the number of decisions you have to make in a day shoots up. A series of these small decisions scattered throughout the day may seem harmless as they demand only a small fraction of your mental energy, but as the day goes on and you continue to expend from this seemingly reserved pool of energy, your mental capacity to make decisions starts depleting.
\ Unlike physical fatigue, which you can feel and instantly express, the mental fatigue that comes after making multiple decisions is not visible to you. It makes you reckless—you start acting impulsively instead of taking the time to think through the consequences of your decisions. You look for the safest and the easiest option, which is to stick with the status quo, and resist the idea of a change since it’s uncomfortable and demands a lot of energy.
\ A tired mental machinery also makes it hard to process information and separate noise from signal. This may lead to overthinking—the tendency to think too much and move back and forth on ideas without the ability to give them a specific direction. When fatigued, your brain’s regulatory power weakens, causing you to lose control over your emotions. This makes everything around you feel more intense than normal—small mistakes can make you furious, disagreements may cause irritation, and you may react aggressively to things that are not in line with your expectations.
\ Not managing your energy—both mentally and physically—can feel quite suffocating as depleted energy makes it hard to focus and handle the demand and pressure of the job. To conserve your energy and use it well:
\
Managing energy, not time, is the fundamental currency of high performance. Great leaders are stewards of organizational energy. They begin by effectively managing their own energy. As leaders, they must mobilize, focus, invest, channel, renew and expand the energy of others.
— Jim Loehr
\ Trying to save time without optimizing for energy can be useless, as you may have plenty of time left, but not the energy to be effective. By consciously adopting practices and routines that minimize energy consumption and maximize outcomes, you can achieve the desired scale.
\ This story was previously published here. Follow me on LinkedIn or here for more stories.
2026-03-02 01:00:03
When a new, disruptive technology comes along, fearmongering is never far behind. Writing was said to erode our memory, yet most of you still somehow managed to remember to put underwear on today. Movies and television were supposed to destroy our imaginations, yet the Star Wars and Harry Potter universes are bursting with human imagination, and the sheer volume of their wildly inappropriate fan fiction likewise proves so. Smartphones supposedly eradicated our attention spans, yet… wow, that’s really shiny! I’m sure I don’t need to tell you how disruptive AI is, so naturally, the fearmongering has followed.
\ The thing is, this particular brand of fearmongering around AI has escalated rather quickly, even in the face of both absurd and hyperbolic arguments, such as AI destroying our critical thinking, collapsing our institutions, and ending our world. Even better, there’s an unspoken thread in this fearmongering that implicates you, the user of AI, as part of this destruction because, apparently, you’re just too damned incompetent.
One of the supposed negative side effects of AI use is the destruction of critical thinking. It seems we are going to be so enamored with AI that we’re going to use it to supplant much of our thinking. No longer will you have to sit and have a think because you can simply have your AI do it for you. Don’t know what’s for dinner? Ask AI! Unsure of the moral implications of capital punishment in a contemporary society? Just ask AI! Is there life after death? AI, my friend. AI.
\ The argument basically boils down to this: because AI is so ubiquitous, we are going to be unloading so much of our cognitive effort that our critical thinking skills will diminish. It’s the old “use it or lose it” idea. But if the logic is inventions that reduce cognitive effort therefore reduce critical thinking, why didn’t the invention of writing prevent the invention of books, which should have prevented the invention of adding machines, which should have prevented the invention of computers, which should have prevented the invention of AI, whose creation required some of the most arduous collective critical thinking ever undertaken by humanity? Hint: It’s not true.
\ It seems as though the best evidence for this brand of fearmongering is that students who use AI to write their papers are not engaging their critical thinking. Unfortunately, even this claim can’t be supported. What can definitively be said about students using AI to generate their papers is not that their critical thinking skills are degrading, but that they are spending less time writing. Do we need a reminder that writing is not critical thinking? Because if it is, Socrates was an idiot, as he didn’t write. So while writing can certainly be tied to critical thinking, it is not critical thinking itself.
\ The problem is, many of these arguments use writing as a measure for critical thinking, demonstrating a deep lack of critical thinking. Not that it needs to be said, but two things can be true at once: you can be a good critical thinker and a crap writer. You also don’t have to think critically to write a paper. As a community college instructor, I’ve seen plenty of papers that are bereft of even a grain of critical thinking, but somehow, there were still a bunch of words printed on paper. So my students broke reality in addition to my hopes for them.
\ No, the best claim that can be made is that many students are spending less time writing, so it’s possible there might be a reduction in time spent on critical thinking. But even then, it would be a leap to assume none ever occurs. Am I to understand that students using AI to write papers are not even going to see what the AI wrote and use critical thinking to evaluate the essay? Are they completely unaware that AI hallucinates and makes errors? If all that is the case, it’s not the AI that is preventing critical thinking, now, is it? As surprising as it is, cheating predates AI.
\ Wait a minute… I must wholeheartedly apologize. I am absolutely unqualified to think about this critically, as I was in the top 1% of users who sent messages to ChatGPT in 2025. Therefore, I will start acting appropriately: Derrrrrr! Duh, AI good!
Our beloved civic institutions will also fall due to AI. An infamous paper recently made its way around the AI doom circles on this exact topic, How AI Destroys Institutions, and it proposes that this is going to happen through three mechanisms: deteriorating expertise through cognitive offloading, interfering with our decision-making, and isolating humans from each other.
\ Much like the argument for critical thinking, our professional skills are going to be eroded because of skill offloading from AI. It’s not that we might get worse at that specific thing AI is doing for us; rather, it’s that our professional skills will degrade. This is why I can never use an LLM for classroom content as an English as a second language instructor—my English skills would degrade, I wouldn’t be able to speak English anymore, and I’d be out of a job. Thanks, AI!
\ So we are to believe that professionals, people who have invested time and money into education and building up careers, are simply going to let important skills get unknowingly chipped away at because of AI? Are lawyers just going to become people who bring Claude into court? So all these people who’ve been highly trained won’t notice they’re not as effective at their jobs as they used to be? Their bosses won’t? The clients who pay for competent services won’t? That’s an extremely dependent and extraordinarily unlikely inverted pyramid made from a lack of self-awareness.
\ So I guess I won’t notice the degradation of my accountant’s skills when I have to pay six times more in taxes because of their mistakes, and I guess the parents of students won’t notice their children’s grades slipping because the teacher used AI and therefore sucks at teaching. Apparently, AI functions as a global blindfold. It’s fun when you find unintended uses of products!
\ Apparently, we’re also just going to have AI make our difficult moral choices for us because we’re just so damned lazy. We’re going to outsource our morality and judgment, all hidden behind an unknowable algorithm. No one will ever hash it out and come to a better agreement because we’re just going to outsource all of that to AI. I know how eager the public is to outsource our ethics, judgment, and morality to AI. Thank goodness there’s never, ever, ever been any pushback on this idea. Like ever. I guess Catholics will ask for repentance through Grok rather than through priests.
\ In order to collapse our civic institutions, such as education and the justice system, AI will also erode human relationships. Now, it is true that AI will displace some relationships; there’s a good chance the relationship you had with your assistants will be a faint memory when AI replaces them. Honestly, I still haven’t replaced the relationship I had with my ice block delivery man or the horse he rode on. Gosh, I sure do miss the 80s… The 1880s, that is.
\ And of course, all of this destruction of human relationships will happen only because of AI. If you thought it started happening with the decline of the monoculture as digital technology ramped up, well, you’re just wrong.
\ Additionally, people will become isolated because, with AI being so agreeable, there’s less reason to hash stuff out with others in an uncomfortable manner. I get it; people are conflict-averse. That’s why when I turn on the news, I only see stories about rainbows and puppies rather than wars and protests. Humanity is so harmonious!
\ So yeah, our beloved civic institutions will crumble. Damn you, AI!
If destroying our society wasn’t bad enough, AI is also going to contribute to the end of the world. The Doomsday Clock by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has been moved to 85 seconds to midnight, in part because of the threat from AI. Biological, nuclear, and informational warfare AI upgrades are pushing us closer than we’ve ever been. And while these threats do actually have some merit, the hyperbolic conclusion still leaves this firmly in the fearmongering camp.
\ The fear of’ biological warfare is that AI will create a new, dangerous pathogen that people have no defense against. For nuclear warfare, AI’s implementation could mask the decision-making process, increasing the chances of error with a devastating weapon. And for informational warfare, it’s more about sowing chaos through deepfakes and the like.
\ I’ll be the first one to admit that these particular threats do seem a bit more compelling, though I’m still unsure that inching us toward doom is the appropriate conclusion. It is very conceivable that AI could design an extremely dangerous pathogen, but to be fair, we’ve kept plenty of dangerous pathogens for many years, so I’m just going to continue keeping my fingers crossed.
\ For nuclear warfare, technology in general typically reduces the need for human judgment, and it’s easily argued that it reduces errors from human judgment, so the doom argument seems like a wash at best. As for informational warfare with deepfakes, yeah, that one’s hard to refute. Society is just going to have to figure that one out as we did with other disruptive technologies, though again, contributing to the end of the world seems a bit of a hyperbolic conclusion in the meantime.
While AI doom slop has always annoyed me, it wasn’t until I sat down and thought about what binds them together, somehow without the help of AI, that I found the thread: humans are too incompetent to use AI responsibly. See, the allure of AI is simply too great for humanity, so naturally, the result is a degradation of our critical thinking, the collapse of our society, and even the destruction of our world.
\ We must first acknowledge that for any of these doom scenarios to come to fruition, it requires an incredible amount of human failure stacked on human failure stacked on human failure. We’ve already been warned by the doomers who seem immune to AI’s negative effects, yet we’re just not going to do anything to mitigate these potential disasters? Is AI not going to improve in any marked way? The companies that create AI have no incentive not let it destroy the world? I had no idea profits continued to percolate to the afterlife.
\ It seems parents and educators will simply shrug and accept that their children won’t be very good thinkers. The institutions that prop up our societies apparently can’t do anything in the face of AI to save themselves from ultimate destruction. And the great powers of the world would certainly never do anything to mitigate the risk of world destruction, even though the primary goal of conflict is to not be destroyed, but whatever. Remember, humanity is incompetent. They won’t say it outright, but it’s an implicit requirement in all of these predictions.
\ Plus, while we may be a bit late to the party, historically, we have always recognized the dangers of technology and done our best to minimize the risks. Cars now have seatbelts and airbags, houses now have circuit breakers and grounded outlets, guns have safeties, and even the Three Mile Island, Chornobyl, and Fukushima disasters produced increased nuclear safety. I wonder which magical property of AI makes it resistant to our inevitable improvements.
\ What can actually be stated with confidence is that it’s possible we might become too reliant on AI for problem-solving. It’s possible AI will collapse our institutions, but the sheer number of required failures to get there makes it virtually impossible. It’s also possible AI will be participating in the destruction of the planet, but if over 80 years of humanity having nuclear technology is any indication, we’re about 23.95 hours till midnight rather than 85 seconds.
\ To be clear, none of this means we shouldn’t be cautious; caution with a new disruptive technology should be a requirement. However, we all know the claims being made aren’t advising caution; that’s gone out the window, and they’re predicting disaster.
\ I suppose AI Will Erode Our Critical Thinking is a bit catchier than AI Will Erode Our Critical Thinking If We Simply Do Nothing But Twiddle All Our Thumbs As It Happens. How AI Destroys Institutions is a bold and head-turning title whose cup overflows with hyperbole; AI Has The Possibility To Generate Some Negative Effects On Our Institutions, So Let’s Prepare Ahead Of Time isn’t nearly so bold. AI Is Pushing Us Closer To Global Doom naturally gets many clicks; AI Is A New Tool, So Let’s Proceed Cautiously doesn’t, even if it’s more accurate.
So, what can be learned from these AI doom stories? Well, it seems they think you’re incompetent and can’t use AI responsibly. They think you’re not going to do anything to mitigate any potential problems from AI. They also think you are simply going to use it in a manner that is ultimately destructive. So really, what we’ve learned is that the soft bigotry of low expectations has come to the world of AI.
\ Oh joy.
2026-03-02 00:09:23
It’s fair to think that this could only be a myth, but it's actually not. There have been people who have become millionaires with Bitcoin and crypto investments. Does this mean you will do it, too? Who knows. The reality is more complex than just a little investment, and without a doubt, the crypto market is much more complex now than it was before.
What we do know, though, is that the stories of these people are real. The stats are real, and their luck or conscious decisions were real. At this point, when we say “crypto millionaire,” we mean someone who holds (or held in the past) at least one million US dollars in cryptocurrencies, measured by market value. Probably, this amount was initially just a few cents or dollars that grew with time and patience.
Let’s explore this idea of crypto millionaires and what they did to become one.
Most cryptocurrencies have public chains, so we have public stats. We know which addresses are richer, and how many. The Henley and Partners Crypto Wealth Report 2025 estimated that over 241,700 users worldwide held at least one million dollars in crypto assets at some point during the previous year. That count included around 145,100 Bitcoin millionaires alone, reflecting Bitcoin’s dominant share of total market value. We can even see that list in real time with percentages and USD equivalents.
To include some names, we have some reports of the top Bitcoin holders in 2026. Besides Satoshi Nakamoto and institutions like Binance, Robinhood, Bitfinex, Tether, and the US government, we also have unknown whales around, with millions and up to billions in BTC holdings.
Market capitalization and historical prices aren’t a myth, either. We can travel back to 2013, for instance, when the total crypto market cap was around $1.6 billion, and the Bitcoin price was about $135 per coin [CoinGecko]. By January 2026, the total market cap surpassed $3 trillion, and the Bitcoin price was at $86k (not to mention previous records of over $126k). That represents increases of 187,400% and up to 93,233%, respectively.
In other words, if you had bought $1,200 in BTC in 2013 and held on for dear life (HODL) all these years, you would have over one million dollars today.
Besides stats and anonymous addresses, we have some well-documented cases with names and stories. Likely the younger millionaire here is Erik Finman, who invested in Bitcoin when he was barely 12 years-old. His grandma gave him $1,000, and he bought BTC at $12 per unit in 2011. He founded an educational startup with his earnings in 2014 and sold it for 300 BTC in 2015. So, thanks to Bitcoin, he was a millionaire before turning 18.
https://youtu.be/MESDxMFmJ_I?si=1hVSVZDoX1rvDLZE&embedable=true
Dadvan Yousuf is another young investor: he sold some of his toys to invest in Bitcoin when he was just 11 years-old, in 2012. He also bought Ether in 2016 and made himself a millionaire with his crypto trades. Now, also speaking about Ether, Dan Conway is worth mentioning. He bet his life savings and family house on buying ETH in 2016, when the currency was barely known. The result was $13 million by 2017. He did his research, but of course, doesn’t recommend trying this extremely risky move at home (or with your house).
The Pineapple Fund isn’t exactly a non-anonymous case, but we know that the person behind it’s an early Bitcoin miner. This charity fund appeared in 2017, revealing plans to donate more than 5,000 BTC to ONGs and some individuals in need. That was between $55 and $86 million at the time. The organizer, “Pine,” explained that the coins had been acquired quietly years earlier and left untouched while Bitcoin climbed. They had more money than they could ever spend.
More recently, we can mention the case of two middle-aged brothers from New York. Tommy, James, and several of their family members bought about $8,000 in Shiba Inu (SHIB), a memecoin, before the price exploded in 2021. They ended up making up to $9 million.
Well, not every crypto millionaire around just bought and sat to wait. Some of them are familiar faces who became wealthy by building infrastructure or companies related to digital assets. Among them, Changpeng Zhao (CZ), founder of Binance, is also known for having sold his apartment to buy Bitcoin in 2013. He launched the exchange in 2017 after a successful Initial Coin Offering (ICO), and now, according to Forbes, he’s the 23rd richest person in the world, with a net worth of around $78.8 billion.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/rINtJN1v6f8
Jihan Wu is another good example. He co-founded Bitmain in 2013, one of the largest manufacturers of ASIC machines for Bitcoin mining. In 2021, he also launched Bitdeer, which is among the largest Bitcoin miners by computing power. Wu’s net worth has been estimated at around $2.3 billion.
Around 2013 as well, when Bitcoin was young and Ethereum didn’t exist yet, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss turned a famous $65 million legal settlement over Facebook into a huge cryptocurrency presence. They used about $11 million to buy Bitcoin when it was roughly $100-120 per coin, giving them 1% of all Bitcoin in existence at the time. Some years later, in 2014, they founded the regulated crypto exchange Gemini. This platform became one of the biggest U.S. exchanges for buying, selling, and storing digital assets. Forbes lists each twin with a net worth of around $3.7 billion as of early 2026, largely from crypto holdings and Gemini’s growth.
At this point, there are plenty of predictions. The dream of every crypto investor is to see Bitcoin reach one million per coin. If that’s even possible, we don’t know yet. If you can buy a memecoin for a few cents today and see a price explosion of 100,000%+ tomorrow, only luck can tell. All investors mentioned above went in before mainstream awareness, when prices were low, and uncertainty was high. Holding through sharp drops mattered just as much. This is really a mix of research and faith, but we need to remember that cryptocurrencies aren’t just speculation.
They were created as a way to get rid of middlemen like banks and governments. It’s free money (as in freedom) available for everyone, everywhere, anytime. If you have your keys, no one else can have your coins. In Obyte, we have our own Top 100 Richest List of addresses (for GBYTE holdings), but what really matters is that no middleman can take your coins away.
Without miners or “validators,” Obyte offers a multipurpose platform where you can trade and invest your crypto holdings without censorship concerns. At the end of the day, the first real step to becoming a millionaire is having complete control over your assets.
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:::info Featured Vector Image by macrovector / Freepik
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2026-03-02 00:04:06
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