Delphi Digital

A research-driven firm dedicated to making crypto happen sooner and better than it would without us.

[Delphi Digital @Delphi_Digital]

A new episode of Hivemind is out now!

This week the team discusses whether AI is a debt bubble, what quantum risk means for bitcoin, what’s next for the Hyperliquid ecosystem and more.

Timestamps
00:00 Intro
00:44 Has Crypto Bottomed?
03:05 BTC’s Morning Seller Is Gone
04:32 Token Unlocks Into Year End
07:14 Do the Midterms Matter?
09:23 Is AI a Debt Bubble?
10:40 The Trillion AI Capex Math
15:53 Anthropic’s Revenue Is Exploding
19:10 The Reflexive AI Demand Risk
25:00 Why This Isn’t 2000
33:51 Crypto’s Goldilocks Case
36:01 Who Gets Satoshi’s Coins?
37:59 Quantum Fear Lifts ZEC and Pearl
41:49 Has Quantum Changed Your BTC Bet?
48:13 Two Big Themes for Next Year
50:12 Papertrade’s Token Problem
59:11 Kinetiq and the HyperEVM Bet
1:09:31 Why Hyperliquid Users Stay Loyal
1:12:30 PUMP vs FOMO
1:16:29 The Rise of Anti-Social Trading

[Delphi Digital @Delphi_Digital]

José on why AI growth has no precedent.

“Frontier lab revenue three years ago was $2 billion. Now it’s $100 billion. That’s never happened. Anthropic went from $5 billion in Q1 to $16 billion in Q3. It’s never happened before.”

[Delphi Digital @Delphi_Digital]

A new episode of Hivemind is out now!

This week the team discusses whether AI is a debt bubble, what quantum risk means for bitcoin, what’s next for the Hyperliquid ecosystem and more.

Timestamps
00:00 Intro
00:44 Has Crypto Bottomed?
03:05 BTC’s Morning Seller Is Gone
04:32 Token Unlocks Into Year End
07:14 Do the Midterms Matter?
09:23 Is AI a Debt Bubble?
10:40 The Trillion AI Capex Math
15:53 Anthropic’s Revenue Is Exploding
19:10 The Reflexive AI Demand Risk
25:00 Why This Isn’t 2000
33:51 Crypto’s Goldilocks Case
36:01 Who Gets Satoshi’s Coins?
37:59 Quantum Fear Lifts ZEC and Pearl
41:49 Has Quantum Changed Your BTC Bet?
48:13 Two Big Themes for Next Year
50:12 Papertrade’s Token Problem
59:11 Kinetiq and the HyperEVM Bet
1:09:31 Why Hyperliquid Users Stay Loyal
1:12:30 PUMP vs FOMO
1:16:29 The Rise of Anti-Social Trading

[Delphi Digital @Delphi_Digital]

View the sector dashboard for free here.
https://t.co/4FLZejbi4i

[Delphi Digital @Delphi_Digital]

Altcoins remain a mixed bag.

60% of alts are down this month on our sector dashboard, but a handful of sectors are climbing.

Top Sectors
• SOL DeFi (+17%)
• DePIN (+6%)
• Modular (+2%)

[Delphi Digital @Delphi_Digital]

Yan on why the midterms aren’t a big factor for crypto.

“Maybe you get a sell-off going into them a little bit, and then it happens and everyone’s like, all right, fine, event behind us. We’ve had just so many massive negative events, and crypto has held up pretty well.”

[Delphi Digital @Delphi_Digital]

A new episode of Hivemind is out now!

This week the team discusses whether AI is a debt bubble, what quantum risk means for bitcoin, what’s next for the Hyperliquid ecosystem and more.

Timestamps
00:00 Intro
00:44 Has Crypto Bottomed?
03:05 BTC’s Morning Seller Is Gone
04:32 Token Unlocks Into Year End
07:14 Do the Midterms Matter?
09:23 Is AI a Debt Bubble?
10:40 The Trillion AI Capex Math
15:53 Anthropic’s Revenue Is Exploding
19:10 The Reflexive AI Demand Risk
25:00 Why This Isn’t 2000
33:51 Crypto’s Goldilocks Case
36:01 Who Gets Satoshi’s Coins?
37:59 Quantum Fear Lifts ZEC and Pearl
41:49 Has Quantum Changed Your BTC Bet?
48:13 Two Big Themes for Next Year
50:12 Papertrade’s Token Problem
59:11 Kinetiq and the HyperEVM Bet
1:09:31 Why Hyperliquid Users Stay Loyal
1:12:30 PUMP vs FOMO
1:16:29 The Rise of Anti-Social Trading

[Delphi Digital @Delphi_Digital]

View the crypto options dashboard for free here.
https://t.co/TQFdnmit7w

[Delphi Digital @Delphi_Digital]

Nearly half of tracked SOL options volume is in contracts expiring within 24 hours.

Share of 24h volume on Delphi’s cross-venue dashboard:
• SOL: 47.5%
• ETH: 30.1%
• BTC: 24.2%

Those expiries generated ~$1.1B in combined notional volume across the three assets.

[Delphi Digital @Delphi_Digital]

Grass Founder @0xdrej explains why AI labs are racing against the clock.

“The work that goes into taking huge amounts of data and turning it into what you want to actually train your model on is massive, and it takes time. And time is probably the most valuable resource right now in AI.”

[Yan Liberman @YanLiberman]

New Delphi Podcast with Andrej Radonjic @0xdrej, founder of Grass

To a website, Grass looks like normal users browsing. Behind it is millions of opted in residential nodes and a data platform that has delivered exabytes of web data to the frontier labs

We get into how AI flipped the hard part of search upside down. The index used to be the moat, and crawling was free. Now AI tooling makes the index cheap, while AI crawlers have pushed the web into blocking everything. The hard part is getting the page at all

Training data is already a profitable business for Grass with most of the top labs and multiple Mag 7 companies as customers. Crawling for that data also means mapping the entire internet, which is what puts Grass in a position to build search on top of it. Contents API is live, Search is next, and multimodal grounding follows

00:00 Intro
00:43 From Nuclear Physics to Web Scraping
03:38 The Pandemic Signal Everyone Missed
07:31 The Smart TV Proxy Scandal
09:10 Why the Internet Is Blocking AI
11:56 Training Data vs Live Data
16:05 Mapping the Entire Internet
18:03 Delivering Exabytes to AI Labs
21:48 What AI Labs Really Pay For
24:43 How Robots Learn From Web Video
33:02 When Labs Change Direction
35:57 One API Call for Any Website
41:58 AI Flipped Search Upside Down
47:03 Can the Network Keep Up?
49:52 The Defense Tech of AI Data
52:58 Why Data Is the Alpha
57:08 Why AI Labs Won’t Buy Slop
59:17 The Metric That Matters Most
01:02:35 The $100 Billion Data Market
01:05:07 Who Actually Owns Grass
01:08:18 What a Real Moat Looks Like
01:13:16 What Happens Next

Disclosure. Delphi Ventures holds $GRASS

Full episode

[Delphi Digital @Delphi_Digital]

Jason explains how to build loyalty in crypto.

“The best way to build loyalty in crypto is to make people rich on your protocol. It might be passé to say that but it’s obvious. That’s how you build community. It’s how you build reputation. It’s how you build loyalty.”

[Delphi Digital @Delphi_Digital]

José on why the AI trade is different from past bubbles.

“I think 2000 is very different because there was just no revenue on any of these things. Whereas here, no one believes the revenue. All these things are trading so cheap that you have to just not believe that there’s going to be any growth.”

[Delphi Digital @Delphi_Digital]

The platforms behind speculation never have to pick a winner.

All they need is volume. In the 1840s a railway prospectus and a betting shop were different buildings in different parts of town. Now a 25-year-old can take a view on a chipmaker, gold, a football match and a Fed decision from the same app.

The platforms have moved to meet that demand. Same-day options hit a record 66% of S&P 500 options volume in July. Robinhood made more from event contracts in Q2 than from equities or crypto. Oil kept trading on Hyperliquid while CME was shut on the Saturday the US and Israel struck Iran.

Crypto has made new markets almost free to create. Launching a token on Pumpfun costs under $2, and only about 1% of the 19M+ made since January 2024 ever make it past launch. Pumpfun makes money on the trading whether or not they last.

The platforms aren’t immune. FTX went to zero, and revenue falls hard when the crowd goes home. But busts tend to leave the infrastructure standing. Britain kept its railways after the 1840s crash, and this cycle should leave behind AI’s data centers and crypto’s 24/7 markets.

[Delphi Digital @Delphi_Digital]

A new episode of Hivemind is out now!

This week the team discusses whether AI is a debt bubble, what quantum risk means for bitcoin, what’s next for the Hyperliquid ecosystem and more.

Timestamps
00:00 Intro
00:44 Has Crypto Bottomed?
03:05 BTC’s Morning Seller Is Gone
04:32 Token Unlocks Into Year End
07:14 Do the Midterms Matter?
09:23 Is AI a Debt Bubble?
10:40 The Trillion AI Capex Math
15:53 Anthropic’s Revenue Is Exploding
19:10 The Reflexive AI Demand Risk
25:00 Why This Isn’t 2000
33:51 Crypto’s Goldilocks Case
36:01 Who Gets Satoshi’s Coins?
37:59 Quantum Fear Lifts ZEC and Pearl
41:49 Has Quantum Changed Your BTC Bet?
48:13 Two Big Themes for Next Year
50:12 Papertrade’s Token Problem
59:11 Kinetiq and the HyperEVM Bet
1:09:31 Why Hyperliquid Users Stay Loyal
1:12:30 PUMP vs FOMO
1:16:29 The Rise of Anti-Social Trading

[Delphi Digital @Delphi_Digital]

Watch the full episode here.
https://t.co/0eDf8DXjaa

[Delphi Digital @Delphi_Digital]

Jason explains how to build loyalty in crypto.

“The best way to build loyalty in crypto is to make people rich on your protocol. It might be passé to say that but it’s obvious. That’s how you build community. It’s how you build reputation. It’s how you build loyalty.”

[Delphi Digital @Delphi_Digital]

José on why the AI trade is different from past bubbles.

“I think 2000 is very different because there was just no revenue on any of these things. Whereas here, no one believes the revenue. All these things are trading so cheap that you have to just not believe that there’s going to be any growth.”

[Delphi Digital @Delphi_Digital]

A new episode of Hivemind is out now!

This week the team discusses whether AI is a debt bubble, what quantum risk means for bitcoin, what’s next for the Hyperliquid ecosystem and more.

Timestamps
00:00 Intro
00:44 Has Crypto Bottomed?
03:05 BTC’s Morning Seller Is Gone
04:32 Token Unlocks Into Year End
07:14 Do the Midterms Matter?
09:23 Is AI a Debt Bubble?
10:40 The Trillion AI Capex Math
15:53 Anthropic’s Revenue Is Exploding
19:10 The Reflexive AI Demand Risk
25:00 Why This Isn’t 2000
33:51 Crypto’s Goldilocks Case
36:01 Who Gets Satoshi’s Coins?
37:59 Quantum Fear Lifts ZEC and Pearl
41:49 Has Quantum Changed Your BTC Bet?
48:13 Two Big Themes for Next Year
50:12 Papertrade’s Token Problem
59:11 Kinetiq and the HyperEVM Bet
1:09:31 Why Hyperliquid Users Stay Loyal
1:12:30 PUMP vs FOMO
1:16:29 The Rise of Anti-Social Trading

[Delphi Digital @Delphi_Digital]

Read the full report for free here.
https://t.co/4WnGDQeoPv

[Delphi Digital @Delphi_Digital]

The platforms behind speculation never have to pick a winner.

All they need is volume. In the 1840s a railway prospectus and a betting shop were different buildings in different parts of town. Now a 25-year-old can take a view on a chipmaker, gold, a football match and a Fed decision from the same app.

The platforms have moved to meet that demand. Same-day options hit a record 66% of S&P 500 options volume in July. Robinhood made more from event contracts in Q2 than from equities or crypto. Oil kept trading on Hyperliquid while CME was shut on the Saturday the US and Israel struck Iran.

Crypto has made new markets almost free to create. Launching a token on Pumpfun costs under $2, and only about 1% of the 19M+ made since January 2024 ever make it past launch. Pumpfun makes money on the trading whether or not they last.

The platforms aren’t immune. FTX went to zero, and revenue falls hard when the crowd goes home. But busts tend to leave the infrastructure standing. Britain kept its railways after the 1840s crash, and this cycle should leave behind AI’s data centers and crypto’s 24/7 markets.

[Delphi Digital @Delphi_Digital]

Grass Founder @0xdrej explains how AI flipped the hard part of search from engineering to data access.

“Now the internet’s blocking everything. And if you want to become a new player in this space, you need the ability to go and actually extract that data without getting blocked.”

[Delphi Digital @Delphi_Digital]

Why are AI labs are so secretive about their training data?

[Yan Liberman @YanLiberman]

New Delphi Podcast with Andrej Radonjic @0xdrej, founder of Grass

To a website, Grass looks like normal users browsing. Behind it is millions of opted in residential nodes and a data platform that has delivered exabytes of web data to the frontier labs

We get into how AI flipped the hard part of search upside down. The index used to be the moat, and crawling was free. Now AI tooling makes the index cheap, while AI crawlers have pushed the web into blocking everything. The hard part is getting the page at all

Training data is already a profitable business for Grass with most of the top labs and multiple Mag 7 companies as customers. Crawling for that data also means mapping the entire internet, which is what puts Grass in a position to build search on top of it. Contents API is live, Search is next, and multimodal grounding follows

00:00 Intro
00:43 From Nuclear Physics to Web Scraping
03:38 The Pandemic Signal Everyone Missed
07:31 The Smart TV Proxy Scandal
09:10 Why the Internet Is Blocking AI
11:56 Training Data vs Live Data
16:05 Mapping the Entire Internet
18:03 Delivering Exabytes to AI Labs
21:48 What AI Labs Really Pay For
24:43 How Robots Learn From Web Video
33:02 When Labs Change Direction
35:57 One API Call for Any Website
41:58 AI Flipped Search Upside Down
47:03 Can the Network Keep Up?
49:52 The Defense Tech of AI Data
52:58 Why Data Is the Alpha
57:08 Why AI Labs Won’t Buy Slop
59:17 The Metric That Matters Most
01:02:35 The $100 Billion Data Market
01:05:07 Who Actually Owns Grass
01:08:18 What a Real Moat Looks Like
01:13:16 What Happens Next

Disclosure. Delphi Ventures holds $GRASS

Full episode

[Delphi Digital @Delphi_Digital]

The AI boom is feeding speculation from both directions.

The four biggest hyperscalers plan to spend $720B to $745B on capex in 2026, more than double the telecom boom’s peak as a share of GDP. That is the construction story traders are chasing.

AI feeds the lottery engine too. Its data centers are driving up power bills for the 67 million people on the PJM grid. Their demand alone added $9.3B to that grid’s costs in a single year.

Entry-level jobs are thinning as well. Employment for 22 to 25 year olds in the most AI-exposed roles is 19% below where it would have been had it kept pace with less-exposed peers.

AI hands young people both a story to chase and a reason to chase it.