Do I still need to play nice?

After the 2024 stocklist viewing, I proposed WhyDRS take a more formal presence at industry events. I effectuated that point by representing the Association at SFVegas 2025. After the event, I started recognizing some of the more personal misalignment I had with the industry approach I'd been following, which I worked out these last 10 months in personal notes.

I was inspired marginally over these years in Vegas by the insider information I received, partly around regulators. The Commission was a big focus of the trade organization that put that event together, so we consistently had leadership, if not Commissioners themselves, which helped me build a strong intuition on policy direction coming into the new Admin. More relevantly, I proposed somewhere in the Discord that 6days continue his physical traveling efforts by attending the STA Industry conference in Florida.

While discussing the matter, I cited how the 2024 meeting had a public agenda which linked a DTCC event disclosing the deployment of new blockchain infrastructure. This matriculated into substantial professional releases announcing a wide swath of the DTCC's roadmap within 2 weeks of the event. I posited that we could have had the news far and before the mainstream media should we have had a presence at the conference.

I experienced a similar conundrum at Consensus, which was just exhausting.¹ Today, the Foundation announced their "partnership" with DTCC, as much as we can call it that with them not using any specific chain as a master securityholder record. While I understand that members of SDF have and continue to work with the surviving Securrency team and its expansion, I'm not sure how much of a win we can call this for the network due to the agnostic approach seemingly championed by development leadership.²

While you could've guessed the H1 2027 timeline pretty easily off their no-action letter, I had a chance earlier this month to get a much more authoritative source of this information. As discussed in the DUNA chat on May 6, I spoke with Dan, who laid out the roadmap, timing, and vision of DTCC's moves in detail. Shoutout to Tomer and Rob for the help there.

The question on my mind since '24 was whether or not all this political effort is really worth it. This event and those interactions cost me 5 full days of work.³ And, more substantially, it required a lot of masking that took a lot out of me.

I believe I needed to execute that trade for the sake of SCF politics and back-scratching, as their allocation culture has not responded well to straight engineering. But would I do something like this again? Travel incentive-free into what seems like an active war zone for the sake of feeding a constituency I already distanced myself from?

There are good people in the community who do great politics. I have the capacity to walk alongside them, but I just don't want to. Being ahead of the news by a few weeks just takes far too much for what really is not much gain.

More broadly, I am adjusting my workflows to be more active and independent, rather than reactive to market feedback. I have come to understand that it will not be possible to convince everyone of the substance and meaning of my work. I really wish there was another way where we all stayed on the same page, but I simply cannot execute my ideas in any reasonable period of time if I wait on the world.