Rochard

3x VC-backed exits (logistics, fintech/DeFi) | Ex-VC Partner | Delivered $200M+ gold & iron ore projects | Engineering and Economics | BTC/ETH ’13. DeFi Summer

[John Arnold @johnarnold]

There should be a word in English with the same meaning as schadenfreude. Taking pleasure in someone else's troubles is a common, natural, but still deeply troubling trait.

I used to have a strong case of it. I cared as much about my relative standing as my absolute position. Life was a race and if someone else stumbled I felt I was better off.

The field of trading is particularly susceptible to the trait. Markets are viewed as zero-sum. Performance is inherently relative. Still, it's possible to be ultra-competitive, to get joy out of your own success, and not get enjoyment out of other's pain. It took me a while to learn that.

The same instinct plays out far beyond markets. I think schadenfreude is at the root of much of today's political dysfunction. Too many people are more upset by someone else's success than they are happy about their own. Since there will always be someone more successful, living that way is a recipe for discontent. That gets reflected in the voter booth.

I eventually grew out of the emotion. Maybe self-awareness of my personal faults helped me overcome it. Maybe I just had enough professional success to where my confidence rose enough. I like to think it was the former.

Either way, I'm happier that I overcome it. When someone stumbles, I'm just bad for them. Spending emotional energy celebrating others' losses is a lousy way to live.

[Lobo Tiggre @duediligenceguy]

June inflation reprieve already reversing...

[Will @WClemente]

Implied volatility for BTC nearing its lowest levels on record, with front end nearing 30%, which for context is roughly 1/3rd of "hot" assets like Kospi. Meanwhile trading volume at multi year lows. Bear market apathy things.

[Rochard @0xRochard]

If you're just looking at technology today rather than utility within a set of morphing assumptions, it is easy to reach that conclusion. Anyone that has lived across multiple jurisdictions and interacts with the borders daily is different. Excited today more than ever. As nations seek walls, the tools that remove bricks await.

[Rochard @0xRochard]

@bneiluj Populism needs a populace. Individualism feels dumb in the moment and only retroactively feels validated for a mere instance.

[Pratik Kala @PratikKala]

Speculation:
Citadel bought SALP books at a discount to current mkt price

Say its 20% discount

They are not going to sit in 10B of exposure in tickers they don't want

They will have internal rules to TWAP out at certain levels -- slow at some levels and aggressive at others depending on volume

HYNIX is up 30% today -- I would expect them to offload a fair chunk

Pod shops are not in the yolo game - they follow rules - and a 30% intraday move is a rare event

[Kyle @zeroxkyle]

The Situation Thus Far (30 July)

- SA exited all its public equity trades
- SA has sold half of Anthropic stake
- SA was up 439% net YTD through June before losses
- SA was 4x levered at times
- SA points to Anthropic IPO as 2H recovery catalyst
- SA seeks to raise capital

[Pratik Kala @PratikKala]

My thought process is:

After a crash like this and timeline crying

Dip buyers step in and stabilise

One or two days of 10% rallies and the same momentum bots that sold before start to dial back in

People get fomo and think this was the opportunity they were waiting for and chase

If we get a 5-10% rally in most watched AI names today then Korea open should be positive tomorrow

2-3 days of green and fomo comes back

No evidence of this just gut feel of trading similar charts before

[Rochard @0xRochard]

"Every interesting AMM idea that's been stuck in someone's research paper for 5 years can now be deployed as a hook"

[Rune @RuneCrypto_]

everyone's talking about @Uniswap v4 Hooks and most of CT has no idea what they actually are

let me explain why this might be the most important thing happening on EVM right now

- What hooks actually are:

Uniswap v4 turned the protocol from a DEX into a platform

in v2 and v3, every pool worked the same way. same math, same fees, same behavior. you could change the fee tier or the price range but the core logic was identical for every single pool on the protocol. you were trading on uniswap's rules, always

v4 hooks change that completely. a hook is a smart contract that plugs into a pool and runs custom code at specific moments: before a swap, after a swap, before liquidity is added, after it's removed, when fees accrue. every single touchpoint in a pool's lifecycle can now have custom logic injected into it

this means anyone can build their own AMM design inside uniswap. inside uniswap itself, with all of Uniswap's liquidity infrastructure, routing, aggregator integrations

you're not building a DEX competitor. you're building a plugin for the biggest DEX that already exists. your custom pool gets routed through the universal router, indexed by 1inch, cow swap, paraswap, and every aggregator. your weird experimental AMM design gets the same distribution as Uniswap's core pools. permissionlessly.

that's insane and most people haven't realized what it means yet

- what's already been built:

the first wave of hook tokens proved the concept:

$01 (https://t.co/1Vv4dHGcWN): currently the biggest V4 hook token. pay-to-mint bonding curve, hook-enforced so nobody can bypass the price, immutable from launch. but this one keeps what you pay. every buy locks USDS into a reserve held as sUSDS, and the yield only ever raises the buyback floor, never leaves. 0.25% burned on every trade. then it goes past all of them: a real Zcash-style shielded pool for private holdings, lending against your bag, and USD0, a dollar backed 1:1 that moves in private. bonded at a $2M reserve, trades around $40M, no owner, no team, no off switch. ~5000 holders, almost all Chinese, and still barely on the timeline.

$SATO: same pay-to-mint bonding curve with permanent locked reserves and deflationary burns. peaked at $40M mcap. the hook enforced the mint price curve, meaning nobody could bypass it. the rules were baked into the pool itself, immutable from the moment it launched, but it had an error

$uPEG (Unipeg): every time someone swapped, the hook generated a unique 24x24 pixel NFT fully onchain. the swap itself created art. no external server, no IPFS, just code running inside the pool. hit $34M mcap in two weeks from zero. the CMO of OpenSea bought it

Slonks: AI-generated distorted CryptoPunks. buy the token, the hook mints you an NFT. burn the NFT plus tokens to upgrade to a rarer version. the pool itself was the game engine. 60x from mint price in 6 days

Dogeshit: you couldn't even call the contract directly. you had to type "mint me some shit" into a Claude AI chat, and a relayer executed the mint through the hook. EIP-7702 + AI + v4 hook working together

each of these is a completely different mechanism. completely different economic model. completely different user experience. all running inside Uniswap v4. all permissionless. all immutable once deployed

- why this is bigger than a memecoin meta:

the v4 hook tokens that ran were creative experiments. they proved the technology works. but the real story isn't the memes, it's what the technology enables

every single one of these is a different financial product running inside the same protocol. and anyone can deploy one without permission

- what to look for:

the first wave was creative memecoins with novel mechanisms. the second wave will be actual financial infrastructure

the v4 hook tokens worth paying attention to aren't the ones with the funniest name. they're the ones with mechanisms that couldn't exist anywhere else. tokenomics that are enforced by the pool, not by trust. economic models that are immutable from deploy. new ways of distributing value that only work because the hook makes them automatic and unstoppable

the power of hooks isn't deploying tokens: it's deploying mechanisms. new financial primitives that live inside the most liquid DEX in existence

every interesting AMM idea that's been stuck in someone's research paper for 5 years can now be deployed as a hook. every custom trading mechanic that would've required building an entire protocol from scratch can now be a plugin. every experimental tokenomics model can now be enforced by code instead of promised by a team

[Rochard @0xRochard]

@mhonkasalo Indeed. However the narrative chasing volatility hounds could not feed themselves on this accurate narrative.

[Rochard @0xRochard]

@LefterisJP Congratulations. The world is better for it mate.

[Rochard @0xRochard]

@OptimusDelta The differentiation between operators and copy writers.

[Rochard @0xRochard]

@INArteCarloDoss Similar to the Bernanke antics, Citadel says “rate hike”. Seeing and hearing many boomer tantrums as they can no-longer suckle on forward guidance. Many boomers emotional today.

[Matt Hougan @Matt_Hougan]

Two take-aways from the Warsh press conference:

1) Warsh exudes both competence and reasonableness. Everyone should feel good with him at the helm.

2) This is a more modest Fed. We've been trained over the past 15 years to think the Fed is the most important actor in the market. It's obviously still important, but I don't think it's going to jerk markets around like it has in the past. It will let the market lead.

[Rochard @0xRochard]

Little appreciation for the lag in pricing. Worth eyeing Warsh's pet project that he seeks to be remembered by; renewed data quality. There is a scenario where he surprises those waiting for his reaction to price (inflation), with earlier cuts. Caveat being oil and energy supply disruptions.

[Rochard @0xRochard]

@Nebraskangooner True. The game is to not be in the game.

[KKGB @INArteCarloDoss]

FOMC: It’s actually a great result in and by itself that a massive de-grossing unwind happened going into it. It’s also a great achievement that there is such a wide spectrum of views, in absence of the usual pre-signaled move. Fear, volatility and uncertainty are fundamental
1/4

[mhonkasalo @mhonkasalo]

Market is signaling the top projects going forward — they are already multiples up from the bottom.

FYI if you had not noticed.

[Rochard @0xRochard]

@haydenzadams Agreed, the uniswap volume dominance speaks for itself on DeFi Llama - Dex volume by protocol.

[binji @binji_x]

Robinhood have $307B in platform assets as of April 2026, and they seem determined to tokenize all of it on their Ethereum L2.

This will improve global access, make the assets programmable instead of static numbers on an order book, and help them cut down on management costs.