In the early 20th century, global power didn’t shift all at once.

First came coordination upgrades: telegraphs, standardized time, modern finance, centralized clearing.

Then came material reordering: coal giving way to oil, steel to aluminum, sail-era logistics to mechanized supply chains.

Britain mastered the first phase. The United States mastered the second.

Investors chased the visible networks—rails, cables, and clearing—while bigger revolutions unfolded beneath the surface: coordination was being standardized at global scale, and materials and energy were being repriced as oil, aluminum, and mechanized logistics rewired production.

The real gains accrued to those who recognized both layers moving at once.

Right now, we’re once again in a two-phase shift.

A new coordination layer is taking shape where systems can settle transactions nonstop, follow clear rules instead of human discretion, and be understood globally without a central authority (AKA, crypto)—at the same time the physical world is re-prioritizing materials and infrastructure that are faster, tougher, and harder to break.

Last week, I laid out the first three pillars of the anti-capsule portfolio—signal (IRDM), collateral (ETH), and time (FEIM): positions designed to thrive when our invisible legacy systems fracture under stress.

The remaining two positions—laid out below—live further down the stack.

These are less about coordination. They’re about matter and resources…

Things systems fall back to when legacy abstractions crack.

As of now, these aren’t official portfolio recommendations, only personal bets informed by where I think the next systemic repricings are most likely to occur.

→ IRDM if/when communication continuity breaks

→ FEIM if/when GPS/timing tech breaks

→ ETH if/when settlement and collateral mobility breaks

Without further ado, here’s the other two…

Pillar Three: Material Uptime

HydroGraph Clean Power (HGRAF), because aerospace and defense procurement is nearing a materials inflection point where ultra-light, high-strength exotic composites move from lab curiosity to accepted standard.

HGRAF sits at the extreme end of the risk spectrum: early-stage, speculative, and entirely capable of failing. Success would be nonlinear.

What makes it compelling: the work itself is genuinely novel—from a modular manufacturing approach, to graphene composites that solve problems earlier versions never could.

Graphene’s history is littered with premature hype cycles because scaling new materials is slow, capital-intensive, and conservative by design—but that same grind is what makes the eventual procurement flip so asymmetric once standards change.

Potential catalyst: NASA or the U.S. Space Force validates advanced graphene composites that outperform titanium in critical performance metrics, triggering renewed procurement interest in exotic and nanocarbon materials.

Right now, the race is on to build superior defense and manufacturing. After a decade of false starts, graphene is re-entering the conversation not as a miracle material, but as an industrial input solving problems legacy materials no longer can.

The next phase of graphene moves beyond miracle sheets that are hard to scale. The new phase is about composite systems that mirror how nature optimizes strength, signal propagation, and energy flow.

Materials revolutions typically register first in technical specs, then in procurement budgets. 2026 could be the year graphene begins to cross that threshold.

Pillar Five: Monetary Uptime

Physical silver, because rising demand continues to stress a thin, leveraged market, turning marginal buying into a scramble for real supply. There are a few underappreciated catalysts that could keep silver screaming higher in 2026.

Tokenization is the dark horse candidate.

The potential catalyst: Tether expands its reserve strategy to include tokenized silver, amplifying global demand for physical metal. The effect is psychological just as much as it is fundamental.

Silver already sits at the intersection of monetary ambiguity and industrial necessity. Tokenization adds a new layer: global exposure with fewer frictions. Tether has already successfully tokenized gold, becoming one of the world’s largest holders. Silver could be next.

That matters because:

• Large populations cannot easily access silver via ETFs or futures
• Industrial demand continues to rise (solar, electrification, AI infrastructure)
• Physical markets are thin relative to paper claims

Silver (like FEIM) already saw big moves in late-2025. While we could see a deeper correction in the short term, the underlying setup still favors higher prices if demand continues to press against a thin physical market.

The Full Anti-Capsule Portfolio

So, in all…

Iridium — Signal resilience. The hardened, always-on communications layer that absorbs traffic when terrestrial networks and high-bandwidth satellites fail under cyber, kinetic, or infrastructural stress.

Ethereum — Collateral resilience. The neutral settlement rail where Treasuries and cash migrate when episodic market plumbing breaks, reframing ETH as financial infrastructure rather than speculation.

Frequency Electronics (FEIM) — Timing resilience. A pure-play supplier of sovereign, non-orbital time sources that become indispensable when GPS timing degrades during solar or geopolitical disruption.

Graphene (HGRAF) — Material resilience. Advanced carbon composites approaching an inflection point, where procurement shifts from legacy metals to lighter, stronger, multifunctional materials.

Physical Silver — Monetary and industrial resilience. A thin, over-levered market where rising industrial demand and emerging tokenization channels can trigger a scramble for real supply.

Those are my crazy bets for 2026.

We’ll return to this later to determine whether this portfolio was prescient, premature, or best recalled with a stiff drink in hand.

Time reveals all.