Simplifying DeFi & AI. | Class of 2021. Expert insights, deep dives, and a touch of humor with regular shitposting and cryptic larping. 🥩
In the trenches
Joined November 2022
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Hyperliquid's Unique Positioning: Not Just Another EVM Chain
I believe many are overlooking a crucial fact:
Hyperliquid's EVM is not just another EVM chain. Those expecting to follow the same old L1 playbook will be in for a surprise.
This EVM is not focused on the general categories of crypto; instead, it aims to be the chain where unique and disruptive financial applications are built.
Why L1?
Hyperliquid began as a DEX with a focus on perpetual trading.
The development of their L1 aims to expand this into a broader financial ecosystem, leveraging their infrastructure and dedicated user base they've already established.
Hyperliquid’s L1 is uniquely positioned imo because it already has a strong user base, cult community and significant liquidity—3 of the hardest elements to establish in a new ecosystem.
Typically, the path for many chains involves securing huge funding and attempting to incentivize users with the promise of airdrops.
However, they often fail to create a true ecosystem, lacking a defining dApp that gives the chain a soul.
Instead, they try to consolidate users by rehashing what’s been done on other chains, tweaking the UI/UX slightly, and importing their brand themes into regular dApps—just look at the metrics of projects like Blast.
Hyperliquid’s goal is to build on its foundation, aiming to create a comprehensive DeFi ecosystem.
Hyperliquid evm composes natively with L1 state, meaning that builders will be able to atomically achieve the state with their existing HIP-1, HIP-2.
The atomic nature of the transfer means that the token balances on the L1 and the EVM are so called fungible and can be exchanged or transferred in a single, indivisible operation.
This eliminates the need for complex bridging solutions and ensures that users can move assets between the L1 and EVM environments seamlessly and atomically.
Why a Native Token?
The native token for the L1 is crucial, primarily for staking within a proof-of-stake system.
While it’s often associated with gas fees, the core necessity of the $HYPE token is to enable staking, secure and decentralize the network.
Decentralization of the entire financial applications in the universe and beyond is the end game.
Competitors and Industry Position
Hyperliquid operates in a unique niche, with no direct competitors attempting to achieve exactly what they are doing, imo.
This allows them to innovate without the pressure of mirroring or outdoing others in the same space.
They believe that constantly focusing on what others are doing can limit creativity and lead to incremental improvements rather than groundbreaking innovations.
The bull case for Hyperliquid is that it can become the single composable chain for finance.
Their vision is to consolidate financial applications on a single composable chain, just imagine.
By not taking external funding and avoiding short-term profits from protocol fees, they aim to create a neutral, long-term platform—much like Bitcoin—where there are no insiders with disproportionate control or benefits.
One interesting observation is that while Hyperliquid doesn’t focus on competitors, they do pay attention to successful practices in the broader market.
For example, they study how centralized exchanges like Binance have maintained user trust and volume, but they use this information to inform their own distinct strategies rather than to compete directly.
Study how they refunded lots of users back in the time because of market turmoil wicks and paid liquidations that are below Bybit standard, study how after that event HL started to perform better at mark prices, wicks and MMing.
Innovation Matrix Perspective
I’m quite fond of the below matrix and have been contemplating its implications for our industry and where different use cases fit within it.
While we might blame meme tokens for dominating this cycle or express frustration with VCs and endless rotations like the "$TRX pump season," these are reflections of the choices our builders make in this space.
In 2021, we witnessed countless disruptive and radical innovations—new DeFi primitives, LB protocols, insurance, fixed interest, derivatives, yield aggregators, and more.
This cycle, however, there is only one protocol that has truly disrupted the status quo with its focus on yield tokenization and yield trading (long yield-short yield): $PENDLE .
"Hyperliquid’s L1 is designed to expand beyond just trading, into a broader financial ecosystem.” - @chameleon_jeff
This reflects an ambition to create a new market with their L1, beyond existing trading platforms. It’s not just an incremental improvement but an entirely new home with broad financial applications.
Now it’s crucial to understand what Hyperliquid L1 aims to achieve: to become the center of financial applications to be the home of Pendle(s) that can disrupt the status quo and achieve composability on a universal level within a single chain.
"We are focused on first-principles thinking rather than studying and emulating competitors." - @chameleon_jeff
This approach is indicative of Radical Innovation, where the goal is to develop entirely new technologies and markets.
By not focusing on existing competitors, Hyperliquid is paving its own path and creating new opportunities within the ecosystem.
Hyperliquid L1 is what we’ve been missing—Hyperliquid’s vision embodies what was lost since 2021.
It’s a project dedicated to performing radical, disruptive innovations that can bring the masses on-chain.
DeFi has been in a slump, and what we need is a kickstart.
We’ve tried to awaken the space with incremental, superficial innovations and failed.
Hyperliquid is the one that can kickstart DeFi, and you should be ready.
Degen Maker retweeted
Expanding on why I believe "ETH as store of value (SoV)" makes much more sense to focus on than "ETH as fee-burning token".
Three primary reasons:
1. ETH as fee-burning token never was as strong as it seemed
2. Optimizing for ETH as fee-burning token would demand Ethereum and ETH function in ways that are very hard to make compatible with decentralization and capture resistance.
3. Meanwhile, optimizing for ETH as SoV is aligned with Ethereum focusing on its unique strengths (decentralization and CROPS)
EIP-1559 (including its burn) is fine and good, we should keep them. But we should not feel sad if fee burn is < 10% of breakeven indefinitely; the value of ETH comes from elsewhere.
The core idea: the big thing that people appreciate about Ethereum is decentralization and CROPS. The main pragmatic benefit that these things translate into is stability. SoV is the category where that is not an unneeded extra we merely put effort into for ideological reasons, but rather a pragmatic strength from the perspective of people putting in their assets. And in the era of AI disruption, stability will be highly valued.
Degen Maker retweeted
look the foundational problem with ethereum protocol design is that most of the people designing the protocol don't actually use ethereum themselves. you can't fix the right things if you don't use your own fucking product. you don't have enough skin in the game if you don't personally depend on the system you're designing & stand to lose money when it breaks. i understand, everything looks great from an ivory tower lol. things look very different when you're actually on the ground dealing with the consequences. if you don't use ethereum yourself but still think you're qualified to design its protocol, you're playing god with a system you don't have to live with and whose consequences you don't have to suffer.
Degen Maker retweeted
these are my fav moments because 90% of CT defaults to panic vs thought
which is your edge
- this is on a bridge to near, it is not near itself
- 3M is tiny for a bridge exploit + was made whole & patched in only 1h
- if vulns were everlasting, then ETH & BTC would be 0 td
Earlier today NEAR Intents services were stopped after a security incident was detected. The incident was caused by a bug in the Omni deposit and withdrawal infrastructure interaction with NEAR Intents smart contract.
The preliminary report indicates the total loss of approximately $3.8M. These funds will be compensated in full.
The contract-side vulnerability has been patched. The operations of the NEAR Intents and near(.)com are expected to resume within 1h.
Deposits and withdrawals on the following networks will remain unavailable for an additional ~12 hours while fixes to the Omni infrastructure are completed: BSC, Polygon, TON, Optimism, Avalanche, Stellar, Monad, LayerX, Adi, Scroll and Plasma.
In case users hold any assets from these chains inside NEAR Intents (for example, in HOT wallet or on near(.)com), they will be able to swap them into other assets once NEAR Intents is back up (in ~1h).
The incident has been reported to law enforcement, and we are working with security and blockchain analytics partners to trace the funds and pursue recovery. A detailed report will be shared publicly in the following days.
Bro liquidate yourself and give us a rest please
Anyone staking on the Alphaticks node should move their stake to another validator.
Those staking on Alphaticks are basically paying to lower the value of their own $HYPE holdings at this point.
This was apparent during the previous L event too, L only kept staked a specific amount to remain in the active validator set... Those rewards & commissions only get sold off.
Hyperliquid.
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Degen Maker retweeted
Lots of discussions around Aave so I want to clarify a few things:
• First off, there is NO WAY we’d sell AAVE at a 70% discount lol.
• 100% of Aave Protocol and GHO revenue goes to the $AAVE token. This was established in the Aave Will Win proposal.
• AWW also applies to all product revenue, including the Aave App, Aave Pro, and Swaps.
• No protocol or product revenue goes to Aave Labs, which is a service provider to the DAO responsible for building and growing Aave.
• Aave Labs owns an allocation of AAVE that multiple market participants have discussed purchasing, directly or indirectly, through deeper long-term partnerships. The article’s framing is inaccurate.
• Aave is currently generating $134M in annualized revenue, which goes to the Aave DAO.
• As defined in AWW, all intellectual property, including the Aave brand and any software built for Aave, belongs to $AAVE.
• We haven’t shared much on this yet, but the Aave team is designing Aavenomics 3.0, which includes a new automated and non-discretionary buyback mechanism. More on this later.
• Aave is building not only for the crypto TAM, but for the entire finance asset TAM, including RWAs.
• Everyone at Aave Labs and Aave DAO works for $AAVE.
We’ll be hosting our quarterly call in the next couple of weeks. Join us if you want to catch up on what we’ve been working on and get some cool updates on the Aave roadmap.
Degen Maker retweeted
Some of my perspective on where the @ethereumfndn is going.
First of all, this is only my own view. The board is not just me, and I have no extra special powers on the board that the other board members do not. @aerugoettinea is the one executing much of this transition. My input has been largely on technical questions. The board is in the process of expanding, and my own power within the org will continue to decrease, which is honestly what I want.
The 2025 era brought many important improvements to EF and its ability to execute. Many issues were resolved, and EF continues to benefit from its improved efficiency and greater focus on concrete goals to this day. And so with those problems resolved, early this year, the largest remaining hole that I perceived was something different nagging at me: I would regularly spot people saying things like "vitalik says these beautiful things about ethereum needing to be decentralized, and have privacy, and be a sanctuary technology, but why do the EF's actions not reflect that?"
Now, you may have been hearing something different. You may not have been sensing a feeling of crisis at all, and maybe were hearing people saying that finally we were taking execution and BD seriously and the main task for us is to keep going that way and be even better and faster. Then probably there is genuine difference between you and me, in what kinds of criticism I take most seriously, and what kinds of critics through their criticism are most able to make me feel pain.
As an analogy, let's briefly switch over to a different domain.
One belief you can have about Google is that it is a success story, and has brought a lot of good to humanity in organizing the world's information. Another belief you can have about Google is that they had a beautiful idealistic beginning, but at some point the corruption of mainstream corporate attitudes seeped in, and they slowly bit by bit completely abandoned the "don't be evil" slogan.
My belief on Google specifically is probably somewhere between the two. BUT, if you had taken me back in time to ~2008, and offered me a button to press to make Google one or two standard deviations more "dogmatic", eg. give Richard Stallman permanent veto power over some key policies, I would immediately press it.
Why? Because a choice for one company is not a choice for the world, or even one country. Google existed and exists in the context of a technology industry generally drifting away from early idealistic don't-be-evil roots and toward greed for financial gain, totalizing visions of accelerated superintelligence, infiltration by sociopaths, and craven capitulation to (or worse, active participation in) government pressure for ideological control, surveillance and war. And so *one company* doing something different, positioning itself to be what George Bernard Shaw calls the Unreasonable Man, resisting the trend of the times, would have been better for freedom, balance of power and stability of society as a whole, than *all* large companies bending to dominant trends. This is a part of my version of pluralism.
This line of thinking is not just mine, but I also is not too far off from what Aya and others had in mind with the Mandate.
Now how does this all get to the role of the EF?
EF is not a "center of Ethereum", rather EF is "one node, with a defined purpose, alongside other nodes". We've always said that the EF should be the latter, but many in the Ethereum ecosystem (and even within the EF) wanted us to be the former. Now, we are taking action to ensure that we will be the latter.
This is particularly important because EF is a limited organization, with limited resources and limited organizational capacity. The EF has only ~0.16% of all ETH (less than many other individual ETH holders), whereas among other blockchains it's common for "the central foundation" to have 10-50%. Fiscally, the EF was originally designed to fulfill a limited work scope defined in the token sale docs and other pre-launch materials (building the chain software; getting through Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, Serenity), which was fully completed in 2022; it was not designed to be an eternal steward.
And so today, the EF is choosing to use its remaining resources to pursue longevity over breadth (yes, this means we sell less ETH). The EF focuses *specifically* on those activities critical to the success of ethereum as a censorship/capture-resistant, open, private and secure system, that would not happen otherwise. This means making hard choices, and in some cases even activities that we highly approve of and people that we highly respect becoming outside of the EF. People of great technical talent, public respect and even alignment with the mission and CROPS being outside of the EF is in fact necessary if we want important tasks to be able to attract outside capital. This also means the EF taking opinionated stands culturally.
This is all intended in cooperation with all other parts of ethereum. We recognize that many other parts of the ethereum world highly respect CROPS and related values. But highly respecting is not the same as choosing to specialize and totally dedicate to a domain (Compare in a different domain: I think reducing animal cruelty is important, and I like vegan food, but am not full unconditional vegan myself)
EF is still in a transition period, and we expect its new long-term form to stabilize over the next few months. What are the guiding principles of this new form? Again, I am only one person, but I can give my answer from a technical perspective (there are also critical non-technical aspects).
At the core, *Ethereum must be impressive*. We are living in an age of highly intelligent AI and all kinds of other technological acceleration. "Status quo EVM, with a hard fork or two a year to optimize for short-term needs of users" is not interesting.
To some, "impressive" means: 250ms latency and 1M TPS. I think Ethereum trying to go that route is a mistake. Being as fast and as scalable as possible, and only a small epsilon more decentralized than the others, is a route to mediocrity, and if we try it we will lose.
I think Ethereum should scale. But I think Ethereum should strive the hardest to be deeply impressive in a different dimension: the CROPS dimension. This means things like:
* Provably bug-free Ethereum. This is a goal that all cybersecurity researchers would have thought is absurd and impossible, up until roughly 6 months ago. Now, it's on the cusp of being possible, thanks to AI-assisted formal verification. So we should be frontrunners in doing this.
* Available chain consensus. Ethereum is, and with lean consensus will cotninue to be, the ONLY chain that has both (i) traditional-BFT style properties that it's safe under asynchrony up to a high level of fault tolerance, and (ii) the bitcoin PoW-style property that under synchrony it's safe up to 49% attackers. As far as I can tell, literally no other chain has this or is planning for it; bitcoin goes for (ii) only and most other chains go for (i) only. Some will remember I fought hard for this, Unreasonably insisting that it is not OK for ethereum to rely on social consensus and hard forks to rescue ethereum from 34% of nodes going offline. It's OK for chains like hyperledger, bnb, solana, tempo, etc. It's not OK for bitcoin or ethereum or eg. zcash.
* Intermediary minimization. The fact that smart contract wallets, protocols like railgun, etc have to send transactions through intermediaries to get included onchain is honestly embarrassing, and it's a constant point of fragility. Hence the work on FOCIL and EIP-8141 (and 7701 and years of work before) to make transaction sending intermediary-minimized with public mempool and strong inclusion properties, in a truly general-purpose way, that covers not just eg. secp256r1, but also privacy protocols and much more. Kohaku is pushing intermediary minimization at the user layer, pulling Ethereum away from the dystopian status quo world where our wallets don't even verify the chain, send our private data out to a dozen third-party servers, and toward a brighter CROPS future.
Some of these goals are Unreasonable - maybe Ethereum would be "fine" getting only 50% of the way - what if we depend on intermediaries, but make it easy to switch? But going 50% of the way would not make Ethereum Deeply Impressive in the CROPS way. So we push for 100%.
Fortunately all these goals are compatible with high TPS, this is a major focus of research (esp. on scaling the state). Well-designed L2s can also help, especially L2s optimized for specific applications (eg. high-volume trading, privacy...). These goals are even compatible with significantly lower slot times, thanks to Raul's work on erasure-coded P2P, and many other optimizations.
The most high-value "product" of the ethereum blockchain, financially speaking, is ETH the asset. Ethereum secures $250 billion of ETH. The types of properties of Ethereum that I mentioned above are very good for ETH the asset. Nearly 90% of my net worth is in ETH, and most of the remainder is ~$40m of onchain fiat of which every dollar has already been allocated for some open-source biotech or software or hardware initiative. That said, there are aspects of supporting ETH the asset - *necessary* aspects even - that are outside the scope of the EF. This is where we need other heroes (some of whom hold more ETH than the EF does) to step in and help. EF has been recently thinking more about how it will relate to other such organizations, and give them needed initial support.
EF will be a smaller ship than in previous years, a more opinionated one - in some cases more opinionated in ways that might be difficult to comprehend - but a longer-lasting one, and one suited to making sure that ethereum brings something meaningful to the world. We are grateful to all those inside and outside the EF who are helping to make this happen.
Degen Maker retweeted
This is insane 🤖🤖
Great real-world showcase of the intersection between robots, life, USDT, WDK (Wallet Development Kit).
The showcase: a simulated workflow for a @ServeRobotics delivery robot navigating Seoul on NAVER Maps, settling onchain through @WDK_tether on Solana
A robot accessing a real-world digital service, making a real-time decision, and getting paid for it
No human in the loop
All verifiable onchain — check out the blog for links to transactions and wallets, with a video for illustration
Degen Maker retweeted
USDC will become an aligned stable, meaning 90% of cost-adjusted reserve yield on USDC supply accrues to Hyperliquid.
At the current $5B USDC base, that could imply $137M–$160M in annualized rev at a 3%–3.5% yield, or a 22%–26% step-up vs current annualized revenue.
Hyperliquid
Coinbase has announced its plan to activate AQAv2 on USDC as the treasury deployer, with Circle serving as the technical deployer responsible for CCTP and native cross-chain infrastructure. Both Coinbase and Circle have committed to stake HYPE to activate AQAv2. As part of this transition, Native Markets has agreed to terms granting Coinbase the right to purchase the USDH brand assets. With Coinbase, in its role as treasury deployer, sharing the vast majority of reserve yield revenue with the protocol, USDC will become the most aligned stablecoin on Hyperliquid. As a result, canonical outcome (HIP-4) markets will use USDC as the quote asset in a future network upgrade.
User and builder feedback has been consistent that fragmentation leads to degraded experience; now, the community no longer needs to choose between liquidity and protocol alignment.
The pioneering work of Native Markets in launching USDH as the first production-scale stablecoin sharing yield directly with a protocol in a purely onchain implementation made AQAv2 possible. The learnings and mechanics pioneered by USDH will live on in AQAv2.
The Hyper Foundation will give grants to eligible HIP-3 deployers, HIP-1 deployers, and builders who integrated USDH, supporting teams through migration over the next months. These grants reflect an ongoing commitment to teams who choose to build on Hyperliquid and align with the protocol. USDH markets are fully functional but will sunset over time. USDH remains fully backed, with feeless conversions to USDC and fiat available to users during this transition.
Degen Maker retweeted
In August 2025, stablecoins shared little to no value with the platforms they integrated with.
By September, the ticker competition had teams tripping over each other to offer Hyperliquid users the most value.
USDH’s inception resulted in the following:
1. User-first stablecoin economics are validated.
2. The lion’s share of yield from all USDC on Hyperliquid now flows to The Assistance Fund.
3. Users can continue to trade with familiar collateral.
One year ago, Hyperliquid was cut off from the value created by its underlying stablecoin. Today, nearly $5B of stablecoins have been activated for the benefit of users.
If this is the legacy of USDH within the Hyperliquid ecosystem, frankly I’m proud of it.
TLDR:
BTC is basically an IGV/software trade now. Correlation is insanely high.
The interesting part is software has kind of detached from the AI/semis trade, got nuked, and now looks washed enough for a mean reversion / upside repricing.
At the same time, the Saylor printing machine is entering banana zone. STRC/SATA issuance, tokenized AUM, all of it is going parabolic.
As long as the flywheel works, it’s bullish
But parabolic issuance is not just bullish. It’s reflexive. It gives you stupid upside convexity, but it also makes the whole thing more fragile.
Especially because we’re sitting in a super low-vol regime right now.
My take is we probably keep printing first.
Saylor parabola + IGV/software mean reversion + BTC being glued to software = upside continuation / blow-off setup.
The dangerous part comes after. Vol expands, AI/software risk-on cracks, the market starts questioning the Saylor machine, issuance slows or gets expensive, spreads widen, and the positive loop flips negative.
So I don’t think the trade is this is fake and it dies now.
It’s more like: ride the parabola while the machine is alive
Top probably forms when BTC rips on software repricing, vol starts expanding, and Saylor issuance turns from rocket fuel into systemic fragility.
First banana. Then blow-off. Then, if/when the AI/software bubble breaks w upcoming ipos, the Saylor machine breaks with it and the downward spiral starts.
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This has been aged well since then but the gap btw real and perceived has merged again + $HYPE seen as safe asset again.
I would normally dump my stack here that I bought at $25 and load again when below will present itself again however I believe rally is close for general market so taking a risk to hold on to my stack
✅ ✅ Capitulation from retail traders who think HYPE is a “safe asset.”
✅ A widening real-value vs perceived-value gap again.
Av entry: 24.5 and have some powded till 19
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Degen Maker retweeted
Hyperion is the first to launch on Rysk Premium.
Rysk Premium brings institutional volatility income on-chain.
Transparent execution. Maximum composability. No counterparty risk.
@HyperionDeFi deploying through Rysk Premium reflects a broader shift on Hyperliquid toward housing all finance on-chain.
Hyperion DeFi is proud to announce the first Institutional Volatility Income Vault built in partnership with @ryskfinance, native to the HyperEVM. Through this vault, Hyperion DeFi and its institutional partners will be able to utilize HYPE LSTs and stablecoins as collateral for on-chain options strategies, generating additional yield beyond staking income.
Participants will be gated through HiHYPE (Hyperion Institutional HYPE), which is minted exclusively by staking HYPE to the ‘Kinetiq x Hyperion’ validator.
Rysk it all.
ir.hyperiondefi.com/news-eve…
You value HL as its another exchange equity, your framing is the whole problem at this point, let me explain you.
Hyperliquid’s bull case isn’t perps fees deserve a CME multiple. It’s that HL Stack becomes the on-chain home for finance
Unified liq+users+innovation on a single composable settlement env.
That is not a nasdaq or hood cosplay that is like building the financial OS where all finance resides, note that HL is essentially a 2-sided marketplace
Go here for HL business overview; teapawt.net/degenmakerhl/status/19…
Go here for HL innovation strategy; teapawt.net/degenmakerhl/status/18…
This has been written before HL becomes HL btw ;)
You’re forcing HYPE into a mature, regulated, saturated market template and then concluding it needs $6B revenue.
But HL isn’t trying to be a slightly better exchange. It’s trying to be the chain where unique and disruptive financial applications get built. See hip-4?
Your other point being ; High margins aren’t a good thing is a lazy generalization imo.
High margins can also push;
to keep improving matching / risk / execution quality
to deploy incentives when needed
to outspend competitors on the only thing that matters: better markets
The moat is liquidity network effects + execution quality + distribution
Regarding it might bring more competition
margins can compress over time I agree and that’s normal.
But pretending margin compression kills the thesis is like saying Amazon was doomed because retail margins are low.
HL is building a two-sided marketplace / financial OS: liquidity + traders + builders + issuers — all plugging into the same stack, compounding into a flywheel.
So I believe you get HL’s edge as a high margin here which is not the case at all.
Also HL already has what most L1s spend years trying to buy with airdrops and that is real users, real volume, real liquidity.
You can not really beat that as a competitor so easily you have to pay a price for the switching cost which is getting higher everyday as well as you have networking effects in play for HL to beat as a wind.
2030 mature exchange multiple models miss the upside by construction.
HL has massive embedded optionality:
•new on-chain primitives (Pendle-level disruptions) but with atomic native settlement
• tokenized equities/commodities also in spot and real-world financial instruments
• HIP-4, prediction markets
•the flywheel: more products → more traders → more liquidity → more builders
Current multiples nowhere near priced-in for HIP-3 growth, upcoming HIP-4 and its growth etc.
The core everyone miss: they think HL is an exchange it’s a two-sided marketplace
Market makers + traders inject liquidity and volume → better execution → more activity.
Builders + issuers create new instruments → attract more traders → deepen liquidity.
Everything plugs into the HL Stack → flywheel effect.
You are valuing a mature exchange in 2030 brother I am modelling a chain that becomes the house of all finance.
$HYPE
In the most aggressive scenario, I think you need a bit under 30% annual returns to hold HYPE through 2030.
I think the most aggressive assumption of true supply of HYPE is ~60% of fd, so its $20bn marketcap assuming no future airdrops.
You need to believe that the expected value of HYPE is $56bn EOY 2030 to own it today. Putting aside the 25-75% probability skew that it somehow dies between today and 2030, you're assuming it gets to the Nasdaq's current valuation.
The market of non-fundamental analysts will point to the high margins, low team number etc... as a sign of strength, when in reality having a high margin isn't a good thing for future business defensibility. Not arguing its necessarily bad, just to say its objectively not a good thing.
So the question is then, what is the terminal margin for HYPE in 2030 if it succeeds, what's its success worth, and what's the multiple on 2030 earnings that you can pay today.
Let's say there's 25% probability of failure, and in the rest of the scenarios HYPE gets to $75bn marketcap (required to be ev nasdaq 2030), on a mature company, the correct earnings multiple for an exchange with high margins and high business defensibility is 20-25x (average of CME, ICE, NDAQ, etc...). Let's say they exit with 50% margins (high end of comps) and trade at 25x (high end of comps) , you need $6bn of revenue.
I'm giving you aggressive assumptions partially anchored to the last century of financial history around competitive dynamics of all markets.
I understand that people will say "margins are going to be higher than 50%" or "it's doing $800mm of revenue, and was doing over $1bn earlier, so $6bn isn't hard to get to" but that requires the future to differ from the past of financial history in ways that none of these people have attempted to form a coherent argument for. There's recency bias that lets people believe that the current metrics are sustainable, but the most likely outcome is that high margins and large enough revenue opportunity invite competition. In order to defend business, it will have to sacrifice margin by lowering pricing or spending more to differentiate from competition. Competition may not be crypto-native. It will involve regulated entities competing with more resources than crypto incumbents.
I'm willing to buy $HYPE at a relatively high price vs. what most non-crypto valuation focused people would pay, but that doesn't mean that the current price is the right price. The most likely explanation is that there's still on average overvaluation across tokens, and many people who feel forced to allocate to crypto feel the need to have HYPE exposure because some of the other largecap alternatives are relatively worse ev.
Degen Maker retweeted
Jump Crypto received a 9,284,890 $LIT airdrop (≈ $24.2M).
They began market-making on Lighter in mid-November.
Of the 9,284,890 LIT, 323,956.6 LIT was distributed to newly created wallets, which likely represents the portion earned directly for market-making activity. This implies Jump was effectively paid 9,284,890 LIT to market-make on the exchange.
That equals ~0.93% of total supply and ~3.72% of circulating supply, which honestly seems cheap for a Jump contract. Congrats to them.
Accounts:
652598 - 652609 - 668453 - 652594 - 668570 - 668510 - 668489 - 652616 - 652565 - 668504 - 652603 - 652600 - 652564 - 652613 - 652618 - 652587 - 652611 - 652619 - 652615 - 652607 - 668516 688859 - 688862 - 688864
Lit per account:
439,871.6 - 440,034.8 - 442,110.4 - 445,360.4 - 480,049.2 - 479,938 - 471,835.2 - 461,293.6 - 459,902.4 - 452,146.8 - 451,924 - 448,076 - 446,404.8 438,364.4 - 436,626.4 - 435,981.6 - 435,919.2 - 435,852 - 432,059.2 - 428,13 - 156,61 - 57,916 - 39,002.2 - 70,428.4
Degen Maker retweeted
This entity deposited ~$5M USDC into LLP around 9 months ago, split across 5 wallets, and received 9,999,999.60 LIT from the airdrop (~$26M) - a perfectly round number. This excludes LLP yield, which adds another $1–2M in returns.
This represents 1% of total supply and ~4% of circulating supply.
They used 5 different clusters and consistently split the LIT evenly across 5 wallets.
Of the 9,999,999.60 LIT (~$26M) received, 2,760,232.88 LIT (~$7.18M) has already been sold since TGE.
Check the screenshot for the full wallet list and supporting data.
Main wallets used to deposit into LLP:
0x30cD78B301192736b3D6F27Bdad2f56414Eb6164
0x9A6D9826742f1E0893E141fe48defc5D61866caD
0x7c5d228B0EB24Ad293E0894c072718430B07Dfe3
0xc0562d68b7C2B770ED942D28b71Bc5Aa0209bbee
0xfdBf615eC707cA29F8F19B7955EA2719036044bf
Degen Maker retweeted
only 25% of the supply is left for all future $LIT airdrops
the same people saying there’s no point to trade on HL with 42.888% left for future HYPE airdrops will be the people farming lighter S3
and the same people who were fudding HL for the <23.8% (a significant portion of this is for future hires) team allo of the HYPE supply beginning vesting will be the ones saying the 50% team/investor allo of the LIT supply beginning vesting on 30/12/26 is bullish because they’re “wallstreet diamondhands”
glighter
Degen Maker retweeted
Users on the Lighter are currently unable to withdraw funds normally, with the error message “Too many L2 Withdrawals” appearing. The issue appears to stem from the Lighter Prover falling behind the Sequencer in processing speed. The most recent committed block is 137759879, which was finalized approximately 4 hours ago. The official team has not yet issued any statement or response regarding this matter. app.lighter.xyz/explorer/blo…
