Occasional notes from the desk.

An asset you do not custody is an asset someone else can lose, freeze, or rehypothecate. Crypto sitting on an exchange is not truly yours — it is a claim against that exchange's balance sheet. The old line still holds: not your keys, not your coins.

Inside the Company, long-term positions are moved off exchanges and held in cold wallets — hardware devices kept offline, with seed phrases secured outside of any connected system. Every position is held under formal resolution, in segregated wallets, with documented controls. It is the boring half of the work, and it is the half that matters most when a cycle turns.

Most people spend their earnings on depreciating assets — cars, gadgets, lifestyle purchases that lose value the moment they are acquired — often because they feel the need to "keep up with the Joneses." That is not a moral failure; it is the default of the system most of us inherited. The work of the next decade is to opt into a different default, and put capital into assets that are designed to hold and compound value instead of bleed it.

Donovan Asset Group exists to do exactly that, in a disciplined, structured way: own the foundational rails of the new financial system, hold them through cycles, and let time do the compounding. The vehicle is a private LLC. The horizon is generational. The strategy is patience.

We are not trying to be clever. We are trying to be early, and stay.

The internet rewrote how information moves. That was one revolution, and it produced a generation of durable companies. The current moment is different: we are living through three compounding revolutions at the same time — monetary (digital assets and stablecoins), computational (AI), and agentic (autonomous software acting on a person's behalf).

The convergence point is the interesting one. AI agents cannot open checking accounts, and they will not be transacting in cash. When an agent books your flight, pays for compute, or settles a contract on your behalf, it will do it with programmable money over open rails. That future is not theoretical — the pieces are shipping now.

The investing implication is the same one that worked in 1999: own the durable assets, ignore the noise, and hold long enough for the second-order effects to arrive.

It feels right that the first note published under Donovan Asset Group is about XRP. It is the Company's largest single holding, and that is not an accident — it is a direct expression of the thesis. Finance is entering a new era of real-time, global, twenty-four hour settlement, and the rails that make that possible are being built in the open right now.

Ripple's recent preliminary MiCA CASP approval in Europe is a meaningful signal. Regulated blockchain infrastructure is no longer a fringe idea being debated in committee — it is being granted formal status inside one of the largest regulatory regimes in the world. Combined with the speed, cost, and finality of the XRP Ledger itself, it reflects the increasing role digital assets are going to play in a more connected and efficient financial system.

It also matters that XRP is American made. Ripple is headquartered in San Francisco, and the XRP Ledger has its roots in U.S. engineering. As the next financial system is built, owning American-built infrastructure at the settlement layer is a deliberate choice — not a coincidence.

The Company's view is simple: when the plumbing of global value transfer is rebuilt, the assets native to that plumbing are the ones worth owning and holding. XRP is positioned at exactly that layer. That is why it sits at the top of the book, and why it is the subject of this first note.