- Below is the latest edition of w3w, my free newsletter about emerging technology, including AI, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and more . If you would like to receive it in your inbox every Sunday, please subscribe here.
- I used several AI apps to assist production of this edition of w3w. Final edit 100% by me. For fuller detail, see the newsletter's commit history on GitHub.
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In a gold rush, sell shovels.
So goes an old saying that probably originated in California's famous mining boom of the mid-nineteenth century. But it's also a handy metaphor for the tech industry's most cutting-edge product categories right now.
Witness the stock-market milestone that chipmaker Nvidia hit on Wednesday, becoming the first public company in history to reach a $4 trillion valuation.
Of course, the company has achieved its record run by becoming a major benificiary of the boom in AI. But Nvidia isn't creating the best large language model, the most clever algorithm, or wrestling with the ethics of when a bot truly qualifies as sentient.
It just makes components for the powerful computers everyone else needs even to pursue breakthroughs in these areas in the first place. Whether any individual AI competitor fails or actually succeeds — ergo strikes gold — is mostly immaterial to Nvidia. They get paid up front by selling everyone tools for the attempt.
Over in crypto world, we can see a similar dynamic right now in Ethereum, where the share of native ether tokens staked to the network just hit a record 29.4%.
That means more token holders are making their ether available to provide computing capacity and security for decentralized applications that run on the Ethereum network. In return, they get paid a small yield on their staked tokens.
Do the tokenholders need to build any applications themselves to get this payment? Nope. Does it matter if any of the applications that other people build become as big as Instagram? Nope.
Staking is pure selling shovels.
Want handy counter-examples to further illustrate the point? Check out any product-focused company run by Elon Musk right now.
Tesla saw its market cap tumble $68 billion in a day after Musk recently announced plans to launch a new U.S. political party. Shareholders are increasingly fed up with such political activities as a distraction from his management of Tesla.
Meanwhile, X/Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino resigned Wednesday after a tumultuous two-year run during which the social platform's valuation was off 70% at its low. And X/Twitter has faced a PR firestorm since its integrated AI bot Grok started spewing hateful comments and referring to itself as "MechaHitler."
In other words, there are a lot of downsides here that aren't present in the shovel business. Instead, Musk's companies for now are more akin to gold prospecting that's only turning up gravel and weeds.
Five Things: July 6-12, 2025
The week's top headlines about emerging technologies and trends reshaping the web:
- Bitcoin set new all-time highs near $120,000, propeled by a wave of buying late in the week that has continued going into Monday's trading. Investors have been piling into Wall Street's listed bitcoin funds in particular, emboldened by an improved U.S. regulatory outlook and continued pressure from tarriffs on the dollar's role in global trade.
- Robinhood has begun offering European customers tokenized U.S. stocks. Ironically, such trading hasn't yet been approved in America itself. But the big crypto exchanges are lobbying federal regulators to OK it.
- More U.S. regulatory updates: Florida's state attorney general is investigating the impact of Robinhood's payment-for-order-flow model on the pricing of customers' trades... Grayscale sent a letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission pushing back against the market watchdog's recent decision to put a pause on a multi-crypto fund proposed by Grayscale... Coinbase sued Oregon's governor for public release of documents related to the state's policy shifts on crypto trading there.
- President Trump's personal crypto ventures are mushrooming. Forbes reports that World Liberty Financial just raised $52.1 million through private sales of its crypto token — likely sending tens of millions of dollars to the Trump family. Separately, the New York Times reports that Trump Media & Technology Group is increasingly pivoting to crypto as a moneymaker in lieu of its unprofitable Truth Social platform. The company has recently raised $2.5 billion to invest in bitcoin, with plans to offer exchange-traded funds (ETFs) pegged to crypto as well.
- Public companies' crypto strategies are no longer limited to bitcoin only. Upexi raised another $200 million to add to its stash of Solana tokens... Meanwhile, SharpLink Gaming bought 10,000 ether tokens from the Ethereum Foundation for its corporate cash reserves. The transaction marks the first time a listed company has directly acquired ether from Ethereum’s main steward.
Market Snapshot
A quick look at some major indicators as of Friday's market close on Wall Street. For fuller detail, including additional indexes and asset classes, see my spreadsheet here.
| Indicator | Close | Weekly % | YTD % |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bitcoin | $118,029.49 | +7.5% | +25.8% |
| Nasdaq 100 | 22,780.60 | -0.4% | +8.4% |
| Gold | $3,364.00 | +1.0% | +27.9% |
| USD Index | 97.87 | +0.7% | -9.8% |
| 10-yr U.S. Treasury Yield |
4.423% | +0.08 | -0.15 |
Looking Ahead
- It's "Crypto Week" in Washington. The House is poised to take up the stablecoin-focused Genius Act and the Clarity Act, which would create a broader regulatory framework for the trading of digital assets in the U.S. The former bill has already been passed by the full Senate. If the House approves it as well, President Trump is expected to sign it into law quickly. (Decrypt)
- The Wall Street Journal's Christopher Mims warns that other countries may soon benefit from a reverse "brain drain" of foreign-born entrepreneurs, engineers, and other high-skilled workers away from America due to increasingly strict immigration policies and cuts to research funding here.
- Science fiction author Martha Wells tell Scientific American she believes humanity is still "years and years and years away" from creating sophisticated, generally intelligent bots along the lines depicted in her dystopian novels.
Odds & Ends
- Salon's Andi Zeisler refuses to surrender her beloved em dash to AI. The punctuation mark has recently garnered criticism as a telltale sign of AI-generated content. But Zeisler points out — correctly so — that many of us 100% human writers were fans of the em dash long before AI apps went into mass usage.
- Slate's Sam Kean reports there is an active enthusiast community still building giant medieval catapults known as trebuchets. Some modern iterations can hurl boulders 125 miles per hour. Handy!
That's it for now. Thanks for reading the newsletter today! If you want to know more about w3w's history and (ahem) the author, that info is available here.
If you need to reach me directly, please email peter[at]w3w[dot]media.
Best wishes for a healthy and productive week ahead. 😊