SVIATOSLAV GUSEV

Happy 250th birthday to my country. Independence Day 🇺🇸 I won't write long speeches, everything I wanted to say has already been said. But I want to share a video of one of my favorite actors, Matthew McConaughey. In this greeting he captures exactly what's on my mind. And a special thank you to the Donald Trump administration for making America great again. I'm truly proud to have become part of the United States. Happy Independence Day 🇺🇸

I never do business with unmarried girls or with guys who cheat on their women. In the business world, I've met a huge number of people while building an ad agency, a neobank, and our other products. I've seen all kinds: poor, rich, super-rich, smart, dumb. Different partners — some good experiences, some not so much. From all that experience, here's what I can sum up. If a woman or a man can't control their animal instincts and, the moment they make a little money, start a business or become a blogger, they go off the rails and cheat on their partner. Especially when there are kids in the family. Such a person betrays not only their partner — they betray themselves and their family values. And those are the most valuable things in life: family, love, kids, relationships. You can't be friends with, or build a business with, someone who lies to the face of the person they sleep next to under the same roof. A sneaky thought can pop into anyone's head. But whoever gives in to that impulse for a fleeting bit of pleasure is a very weak person.

Currently in Switzerland on a business trip. Decided to meet up in Zurich with my friend and partner 🇨🇭 Switzerland is famous for its banking ecosystem, and for good reason: here they understand that you can't endlessly pile up liabilities around a single volatile asset. Such a structure breaks at the first liquidity outflow — I wrote about this when I broke down deleveraging. Right now the market is delivering a live stress test. The largest corporate holder of bitcoin is funding purchases through synthetics with an 11.5% coupon and a target near par. The mechanism is supposed to stabilize itself: price drops, coupon goes up, fresh liquidity comes in. They raised the coupon, the price didn't recover. The stabilizer didn't work. 🥹 From here two outcomes: burn cash on payouts or cut purchase volumes. There's no third option in the model.

I own two companies and hold three licenses across two continents in total. 🇪🇺 As of July 1st, MiCA is in full force, and operating in the EU without a license is no longer possible. The regulatory framework has shifted from a grey-zone formality to a strict bureaucratic filter. The number of licensed crypto companies in the EU has grown to 280. ESMA updated the MiCA register, adding 37 new providers at once, including Standard Chartered and market maker FalconX. Recently I discussed this topic with my personal manager Alexander from Binance and with Mark from Bybit: both exchanges have already restricted access for European users and rerouted them to alternative solutions. The forecast: up to 80% of crypto platforms won't be able to meet the new requirements. Which, in turn, will affect more than 10 million users.

AFSA in Astana has issued Central Asia's first license for tokenizing real-world assets. First case — grain in elevators. A farmer pledges a token for short-term financing, sells in spring, and the smart contract pays off the loan itself. 📁 This is exactly the RWA mechanism I've been talking about for months: an asset with no cash flow gets cash flow and turns into working collateral in literally one transaction. Not token speculation, but direct monetization of goods that were just sitting in a warehouse as dead weight.

Telegram relatively recently added a feature that lets bots interact with each other. Cool idea, but I haven't seen a practical and effective implementation anywhere yet. 🐻 An example of a good implementation is integrating staking into a mobile neobank. The rest of the implementations I've come across so far are just API or someone's SDK integrations without any know-how. 🔢 Also, some AI-based chatbots have added the ability to download content from social media with transcription of audio or video content.

Fun fact: I've got relatives in England, and I actually speak with a British accent. Because of that, half the people in Europe don't understand me — I speak English too fast 🙈 I'm actually thinking about taking some extra lessons: brushing up on the German I studied at school, and the French I learned in lycée. I feel like the bare minimum — speaking three foreign languages — is almost as essential these days as knowing your multiplication table. Especially for a man. It's like cooking, which, in my opinion, you should master with the same finesse as running a business. There's a good saying: how you do anything is how you do everything. So, in my humble subjective view, whatever you're truly passionate about, you should do first-class. Or don't bother with it at all.

In a month the IRS will issue an ITIN I accept your congratulations in the form of reactions to my posts 🤩 🇺🇸 Being American means investing in democracy, freedom of speech, liberal values! That's exactly why we built our own VPN back in the day. Set yourself one big goal in one business vertical and move toward it no matter what. For the sake of peace and the future of our children!

💸 On unicorn startups and unbelievable returns People outside the VC industry usually get all starry-eyed about it after hearing tales of someone tossing in a couple of bucks and ending up with a billion-dollar company, making the investor unfathomably rich. Let's set aside the microscopic odds of actually building a business like that and just look at how much money you have to pour into the system to get that kind of scale on the other end. Turns out — no magic. Per the Crunchbase Unicorn Board as of July 2026, today's private unicorns have collectively raised $1.52T, with a combined valuation of $8.7T. The math is simple: every dollar invested turned into roughly $5.7 of paper valuation. Not profit. Not cash in the investor's account. Not a guaranteed exit. Just paper value based on the latest round. If you roughly spread that paper multiple across 7–10 years, you get about 19–28% annually. That's a great result for large-scale capital. But it's no x1000. 🎁 The average unicorn isn't a "tossed in a couple of bucks" story. It's the story of dumping around $175–180M into a company's furnace and waiting 7+ years. Want a $10B valuation? Be ready to raise, on average, about $1.7B. VC only looks like magic in a handful of legendary early-stage cases that get sold to the wider public. In bulk, it's just an expensive, slow, ultra-risky game with a solid but very down-to-earth return at the end.

A man, just like a woman, is shaped by his environment. It's no accident the Bible says: "Bad company corrupts good character."