The deluge of “highest since 2007” headlines continued over the past couple weeks, as sovereign debt yields around the world continued to spike to alarming levels. Most notably, the US 10-year breached 4.8% in an upward impulse that ranked as the fastest move since the current rate hiking cycle began, before finally retracing some of this move in the last few days. The ongoing selloff in the bond complex has prompted a variety of stories in the mainstream press about the precarious position of US public debt and interest payments, a stark reminder that deficits don’t matter until suddenly they do.
While the foundational assumptions of the world’s reserve asset were being thrown further into question, the Ten31 team spent the week at our annual portfolio retreat in Utah with nearly 40 portfolio company representatives diving deep on topics ranging from AI and the lightning network to banking, custody, and mining. This year’s event was even more successful than last year’s inaugural retreat and has already led to many synergistic relationships and new opportunities for intra-portfolio collaboration within and across all major verticals of the bitcoin and freedom tech ecosystems. We see the retreat as just the latest example of the power of open networks, where innovations by one company can easily cross-pollinate to benefit a whole portfolio in a way that simply isn’t possible in most legacy investment platforms...