cryon

do doo da, doo doo doo doo da | prev. community and growth @Talus_labs

[cryon @cryonct]

https://t.co/WimNrnvUzP

[cryon @cryonct]

why is every single black and white cat called oreo

[cryon @cryonct]

@BL_labs_xyz HYPERLIQUID

[cryon @cryonct]

I made more money from trading stocks than crypto and that's sad

[cryon @cryonct]

@MacroMate8 @jasonrodrigues @cesto_co is building this

[cryon @cryonct]

@dee_centralized @solana @ramzyyalii where can I listen

[cryon @cryonct]

@aadith_gbd what filters are you thinking about

[cryon @cryonct]

311 fundraising rounds. $7.9bn raised. And we're only in May.

I went through the full 2026 crypto fundraising data, so here's what stood out:

> prediction markets are serious money

Kalshi raised $1bn, Polymarket raised $600m. Two deals, one sector, $1.6bn out of a $1.97bn total. A category that barely existed in mainstream conversation two years ago is now attracting the kind of capital that used to go to L1s and DeFi protocols. The bet is that people want to put money on outcomes rather than assets. Turns out conviction is more interesting than price action for many.

> DeFi is fine, VCs are not sure

DeFi is still the most active sector by deal count at 51 rounds in five months, but the median raise is $9m with no mega-rounds anywhere in sight. Lots of small bets spread across lots of teams. It reads less like conviction and more like portfolio hedging. VCs are staying in the room without committing to a seat at the table.

> AI need to find better PMF and convinction

AI in crypto is busy but underfunded. 24 deals, $164m total, $8.6m average per round. Everyone is talking about AI x crypto but the funding data says the market is still figuring out what it actually means. No breakout round, no clear winner getting the big cheque. Lots of pre-seed and seed noise. The Series A moment hasn't happened yet. I think something will come up from the agentic payments narrative.

> ETH vs SOL - will it flip?

@ethereum vs @solana is closer than the narrative suggests. Among deals that specified a chain, Ethereum got 20 mentions and Solana got 15. Ethereum still leads on raw developer count but its share of new builders is shrinking fast. Solana is now where the activity-hungry teams go, and Hyperliquid is carving out its own lane entirely.

> HYPERLIQUID

16 projects raised on @HyperliquidX in 2026 so far, already 3x the capital of the entire H2 of 2025. Builders are moving past DeFi basics like lending and liquid staking into serious trading infrastructure. @liquidtrading and @BasedOneX, backed by Paradigm and Pantera, are two good examples and I know of a few others coming up. TradFi is definitely moving onchain

> CeFi is back??

Centralised exchanges are consolidating quietly. 10 deals, $1.29bn raised, $129m average deal size, the highest of any sector. @krakenfx, Dunamu, @BitGo all did large rounds.

> who are the most active VCs?

@cbventures wrote 23 cheques in five months, roughly one deal every six or seven days. @animocabrands sits at 16, @a16zcrypto at 12. Coinbase Ventures is playing volume, averaging $9.5m a ticket across payments, infra and prediction markets. a16z and Paradigm write far fewer deals but average $34m and $45m respectively, concentrating on infra and L1s.

One last thing, 23% of raises (71 deals) had no disclosed amount. So the real number is bigger than $7.9bn.

Sources: @DefiLlama and public fundraising data.

[cryon @cryonct]

@MaksimXBT 67 seed rounds vs 53 strategic and 37 Series A, so alot of the deals are first-time bets

[cryon @cryonct]

@therosieum do you think they studied us?

[WSJ Markets @WSJmarkets]

Hyperliquid, a decentralized crypto platform, is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The exchange has emerged this year as a go-to spot for Wall Street’s weekend warriors. https://t.co/3RFisC8oso

[cryon @cryonct]

@kasperloock gkiko

[cryon @cryonct]

being left handed is performative btw

[cryon @cryonct]

@katiabanina and that's the goal, not an easy life but a remarkable one. I want to make sure I got enough stories to tell my grandchildren and it sounds like your grandad has lots

[cryon @cryonct]

@GRITCULT why is claude chat empty?

[cryon @cryonct]

@nonfungiblek @0xBel_ nice use of free will

[cryon @cryonct]

JUST IN: @Polymarket to leave @0xPolygon and migrate to @berachain

[Josh @devjoshstevens]

This is my 3rd week as VP of Engineering DeFi at @Polymarket , and I'm going to be straight: the traction @Polymarket has seen has massively outpaced our infrastructure, and we haven't done nearly enough to scale to keep up. I hear you, and fixing this is our entire focus. We're a major company now, and we need to engineer like one. Here's exactly what we're doing:

- Onchain data latency. We're working on making this near-instant so the experience is incredible.
- Chain migration. We need more block space, cheaper gas and much smaller block times so settlement is instant.
- Transactions are getting cancelled. We understand this is one of the most frustrating issues right now, and we have a complete fix coming very soon.
- Massive focus on the website to make it faster, more responsive, and with better UX.
- We added observability everywhere. Proper alerting so we catch issues ourselves, market makers should not be the ones telling us something is down. That's been unacceptable, and we know it.
- E2e tests throughout, starting with the CLOB, so issues get caught in CI before anything ships.
- CLOBv2 is not a rewrite. It won't improve performance or stability on its own; it's an upgrade that unlocks us to move fast right after. We'll do better with communication next time.
- We are rebuilding the CLOB from the ground up. Most important thing we're doing. Without it, we can't be the best DeFi exchange in the world. We know it, we're on it, it's mission critical.
- Unified TypeScript SDK for all APIs, which is shipping soon.
- Unified API. One WS connection for everything, with a schema that's actually readable.
- New Polymarket contract in the works that unlocks things that are simply impossible on the current protocol.
- New hires: Head of QA Automation, Head of Dev Tooling, Head of Internal Tooling, Head of Data Engineering.
- Smaller, dedicated teams. Fewer focus points per person, clearer ownership. People do what they're good at and are accountable for it.
- Working closely with customer support to give them real debugging tools so any user issue gets properly diagnosed, not lost.
- Proper communication with marketing and market makers so everyone knows what's coming and when, and MM can submit feature requests with a clear path to get them into engineering and shipped.
- Working with 4 security teams daily to ensure we're super secure and that funds are always safe.
- Perps incoming. Brand new contracts and a backend built from scratch in Rust. We're proud of this one.
- A lot of other fixes are running in parallel right now.

Starting next Friday, I will be posting weekly engineering updates.

I joined because I genuinely believe in what @Polymarket is trying to do. @shayne_coplan built this so the world has somewhere to go to find out what's actually going to happen, not what the media thinks, not what a pundit says, but what thousands of people are willing to put money on. But right now, our engineering isn't living up to that. We've let people down, and I'm not going to dress that up. I came here to fix it, and that's exactly what we're going to do. The next few months are going to speak for themselves. Stay with us.

[cryon @cryonct]

@nonfungiblek @0xBel_ why are you seeing this now 😭

[cryon @cryonct]

@Amystreet oh you got them mad mad

[cryon @cryonct]

@neuralunlock crypto is not dead at all if you look closely enough

[cryon @cryonct]

I just installed lineage0S on an old phone of mine which battery used to last less than a day and now it lasts 4 days without any issue