Austin King

CEO @Nomina
Computer science @Harvard
Previously sold Strata Labs to @Ripple

[Austin King @AustinKing]

@jacqmelinek @TokenRelations @StrataMedia_ Most people don't even know what this team is cooking up over the next couple months

[Austin King @AustinKing]

@heturis @HyperliquidX We'll scale access in accordance with maturity of the platform, helps in the earliest stages to keep it limited as features are built out and bugs are pruned

[Austin King @AustinKing]

It's now been 9 years that I've been a founder in the crypto space.

Roughly 10 months ago I think everything changed.

@HyperliquidX broke the collective hallucination this industry was living in. This breakdown is showing itself in slow motion in one extremely simple way: the current altcoin market conditions.

What does an industry do when nearly every single top altcoin makes absolutely marginal revenue in relation to their multi-billion dollar valuations, and then 1 single project comes along and shows it all was a facade?

I think the first thing it did was denial.

People had significant capital invested in projects that generated no value. We were all living in this distorted reality where somehow something can be worth billions, yet it is hard to precisely describe the value it brings to the world.

Therefore there was significant financial incentive from millions of altcoin holders worldwide to propagandize their existing bags, and they did exactly that.

However, you can delay the market becoming rational but you cannot forever avoid the arrival of market participants capitalizing off mispriced assets.

We are seeing this play out in slow motion right now. We have had almost a full decade of convincing ourselves that these networks are somehow different, and don't need to actually generate quantifiable financial returns downstream of their operations.

At this point I can say the following with complete confidence: it is inevitable that crypto projects with poor economics that generate little revenue will die. It does not matter how strong their community is.

All of this happened while I found myself as a founder of a network that specifically had failed to generate sizable revenue. That project was called Omni Network.

I've always worked on interoperability, chain abstraction, whatever you want to call it. It's just been clear to me since 2017, since the founding of my first company and my final year at Harvard that it's too difficult for people to actually work across the onchain financial system.

Omni was an attempt to fix this. Transparently, it mostly failed.

We had a lot of projects build on us during testnet (later we realized this was not because of the product, but because people thought we were good at marketing and wanted to get amplified) and as we had launched mainnet it was grueling trying to convert projects to mainnet deployments.

So in May of 2025 I found myself as the cofounder of a project that simply can be described in many ways as the opposite of @HyperliquidX. Little usage, little revenue and no PMF.

Seeing the amount of revenue that Hyperliquid was able to generate as a blockchain made it very clear the standard had been elevated and the project needed to achieve PMF or it would die.

Downstream, I stopped behaving like a more traditional crypto founder that writes posts optimized for crypto twitter and tries to generate hype around his project to incentivize other builders to launch on his platform.

Instead, I worked in a more traditional non-crypto founder way and defined a hyper specific customer segment and talked to hundreds of people that fit that mold. Specifically people who have a net worth of $400k - $2m and make multiple onchain transactions per day.

This started in May of 2025, and it took about 4 months for us to clearly understand the problems that segment was experiencing and deliver the first version of our product that had a clear path to substantial revenue.

This is when we officially pivoted to Nomina publicly.

It's been 6 months now and I think the traction we have built has definitively proven the hypothesis: that this customer segment is willing to pay substantial amounts of money not only for superior onchain execution, but simply for it not being a huge pain.

Onchain markets are still incredibly immature, and if you're coming from traditional finance trading these markets feels absolutely primitive.

Many people currently think of Nomina as a trading terminal, but the goal really was to prove out the hypothesis that people would be willing to pay for simplified execution of trades across multiple platforms.

Moving forward, less of our work is going to be on the terminal as that was primarily a way to validate this hypothesis.

What people primarily care about is the core engine that abstracts away all the nuances of each venue. They just want to talk to one system and place their transactions.

We're going to be expanding our work and launching products on top of the core engine we have built, and as time progresses the unified API will be available for early build partners to launch their own businesses.

Altcoin markets will continue to get pulverized. Almost every single project in this industry has absolutely hollow economics.

However, if you look carefully there are a few projects out there right now that are actually making incredible progress despite the market conditions and will be the key winners over the next bull cycle.

[Nomina @Nomina]

Today we are publishing the new whitepaper for the Nomina Network and the corresponding $NOM token.

We processed over $350,000,000 in volume during our private beta stage, and this whitepaper outlines the future roadmap you can expect as the network scales.

Link below ⬇️

[Austin King @AustinKing]

@wolfface173047 @HyperliquidX 🙏

[Austin King @AustinKing]

@wolfface173047 @HyperliquidX Gladly sir, wishing you all the best.

[Austin King @AustinKing]

@yesheng31965690 @HyperliquidX Thank you!

[Austin King @AustinKing]

@spamisham65981 @Nomina @HyperliquidX Yes all venues that pick up enough traction to become a top requested exchange from our users are eligible for integration

[Austin King @AustinKing]

@yesheng31965690 @HyperliquidX https://t.co/3Nu1VNz4t7

[Austin King @AustinKing]

@nmtinh @Nomina Because I have worked on this project for years and do not intend to stop.

[Austin King @AustinKing]

@PressieMoonBoy @HyperliquidX Yessir will DM

[Austin King @AustinKing]

@KentonPrescott Respect homie, all the best in what’s next

[Austin King @AustinKing]

@debamit007 fwiw i am just ceo of a development company, nobody is ceo of a blockchain

I do actually very strongly agree with your point that blockchains fundamentally are just a tech for digital property rights. I think most people don't understand that but we are aligned there.

[Austin King @AustinKing]

tl;dr: yes all the tokens are in your wallet, stakers didn't need to do anything to receive them

comms throughout time on this matter:
- initial announcement (https://t.co/5DVGo505nV)
- status update (https://t.co/5i98sTVDKl)
- publication on blog on conclusion of migration (https://t.co/CV3hTuXT8i)

[Nomina @Nomina]

Migration successful ✅

[Austin King @AustinKing]

@jisannur3 @nmtinh @Nomina Thank you for the support, it is much appreciated 🙏

[Austin King @AustinKing]

@AardvarkTornado @HyperliquidX tl;dr:
- scaling terminal over past 6 months went very well
- expect more products to be built on top of core engine that aggregates defi protocols

[Austin King @AustinKing]

@TonyHB121 @HyperliquidX Appreciate it sir, likewise keep cooking!

[Austin King @AustinKing]

@wolfface173047 @HyperliquidX No, $NOM is the sole value accrual mechanism. Team members + investors only ever received $NOM (not equity) to ensure every party was fully aligned on value accrual to the network instead of some company.

[Austin King @AustinKing]

@Mega_Fund @HyperliquidX Ya it is interesting how many HL EVM projects got slapped. I think it was because ecosystem participants had such a strong preference for dumping other tokens to buy more $HYPE

[Austin King @AustinKing]

@defidegen22 @HyperliquidX Sir we aren't competing against HL in any way, our product is actually strictly synergistic with HL as it was one of the first venues we integrated and helped people arb across HL and other exchanges

I'm an HL megabulla if its not clear from the post

[Austin King @AustinKing]

@haojun222 @HyperliquidX @tachyon_fi Will DM sir, would love to discuss

[Austin King @AustinKing]

@crisnguyen99 @Nomina @HyperliquidX Over the past half year we built a terminal that processed over $350,000,000 in volume with no incentives.

Wishing you the best with SpeedGrowth. https://t.co/wT5kDubWin

[Speedgrowth.ai @speedgrowth_ai]

Speedgrowth is just another so-early start up.

[Austin King @AustinKing]

@nmtinh @Nomina Because I have worked on this project for years and do not intend to stop.