Author: cleanshave

Milk Run on the AT

The Sawyer water filter had been hidden in my backpack since February, when I got off the Florida Trail and disappeared into the digital exile of Cancun. I’d never bothered to backflush it or check its flow rate, and somehow had managed to avoid filtering water for my first thirty miles back on the Appalachian […]

Readjusting to the Trail

The Appalachian Trail’s shelter system makes a potentially overwhelming journey manageable by breaking it up into small segments. Each day becomes simple, just make it to the next shelter. One after another. Until you reach your destination, whatever or wherever that might actually be. Wiley Shelter surprised me with its nonexistent mice population, hosting only […]

Feet in the Fire

I woke up in an empty Airbnb ready to do something else, booking the cheapest flight I could find. 24 hours later I landed in Newark, with the vague plan of hiking the Appalachian Trail north into Massachusetts. With no definite plan, there’s nowhere to go, nothing to do. I drifted, taking the AirTrain in […]

Synthetic Leverage Tokens as High-Beta Growth Assets

It had been raining for days. The kind of rain that sits on your skin like an old friend. Someone I missed during my long Mexican retreat. Everyone in the house was sick, curled under blankets and breathing through their mouths, and I found myself in a chair that had lost its shape, watching water […]

Synthetic Leverage through locked AMMs on Stellar

Volatility as Structure: Pairing With Forgotten Meme Tokens There’s a particular kind of silence that settles over an abandoned token. No announcements. No trades. No interest. But if its issuing account is locked and its liquidity pool still holds XLM, that token doesn’t die. It becomes dormant. A sealed container of asymmetric value waiting to […]

A Room Outside Time

The fluorescent lights hum their familiar tune above me, a soft electrical lullaby that never changes pitch or rhythm. I’ve heard this sound for so long now that silence would feel like deafness. The examination paper crackles as I smooth it across the table, each wrinkle a small protest against order. Then I hear them, […]

Donationless Funding: Glo Dollar on Stellar

Imagine being able to fund a charity just by holding a stablecoin. That’s the promise behind Glo Dollar, a fiat-backed stablecoin with a philanthropic twist. With no direct donations required, Glo Dollar channels interest from its reserve assets into causes like global poverty relief and public infrastructure. But what does this mean for users on […]