Sam Bankman-Fried had the best venture portfolio in history
What SBF bought vs. what it's worth today:
• Anthropic: $500M → $30.4B (+5,980%)
• Robinhood: ~$546M → $5B (+816%)
• Solana: 60M SOL at ~$8 → $5.3B at $89 (+1,012%)
If he did nothing illegal, he'd be worth $40 billion today
Instead he's now he's inmate #37244-510
Next time you feel bad for missing something that mooned
Imagine being SBF:
- Put $500m into Anthropic, which would now be worth $70b.
- Held $60m in $SOL at $8 that would've been worth $2.1b at the top.
- Put $100m into Mysten Labs that would now be worth over $800m.
- Invested in Robinhood and held a 7.5% stake that would now be worth $10b.
Instead, everything got seized before they went up, and he missed out on $80b in profits 😭
As a Backend Engineer in 2026 aiming for Staff, please learn:
1. One language deeply (Go/Rust/Java)
Not “I can write APIs”, but runtime model, memory, concurrency, profiling, GC behavior (if any), and how to read stack traces like a native.
2. Data modeling and storage fundamentals
Relational modeling, constraints, isolation levels, indexes, query plans, locks, deadlocks, migrations, backup/restore, partitioning. Most “scaling” problems are schema + query shape problems.
3. Distributed systems basics that actually show up in prod
Consistency vs availability, timeouts, retries, idempotency, backpressure, message ordering, leader election, clock skew, eventual consistency, and what happens during partial failures.
4. API design and contracts
Versioning, pagination, filtering, error models, idempotency keys, rate limits, backwards compatibility, and how to avoid breaking mobile clients for months.
5. Performance and capacity engineering
Latency budgets (p50/p95/p99), tail latency causes, load testing, queueing theory intuition, connection pools, CPU vs IO bound, and capacity planning with real numbers.
6. Reliability engineering
SLOs/SLIs, incident response, postmortems, alerting that does not spam, error budgets, graceful degradation, feature flags, circuit breakers, bulkheads.
7. Observability like a pro
Structured logs, metrics, tracing, correlation ids, RED/USE metrics, sampling strategies, and how to debug “it is slow sometimes” without just guessing.
8. Security fundamentals
AuthN/AuthZ, least privilege, secrets management, token expiry, OWASP basics, SSRF, injection, secure defaults, audit logs, threat modeling for your own services.
9. Messaging and async systems
Kafka/Rabbit/SQS semantics, at-least-once vs exactly-once (and why “exactly once” is mostly a marketing term), consumer groups, retries, DLQs, replay, dedupe.
10. Caching with correctness
Cache invalidation strategies, TTLs, stampede protection, read-through/write-through, negative caching, and when caching makes bugs harder than latency.
11. Infrastructure literacy
Linux basics, networking (DNS, TCP, TLS), containers, k8s concepts, autoscaling, deployment strategies (blue/green, canary), and what your cloud bill is really paying for.
12. System design, but with tradeoffs
Designing is picking pain. Learn to write down constraints, failure modes, data growth, and operational cost. Staff is judged on tradeoffs, not diagrams.
13. Codebase leadership
Design docs, RFCs, review quality, mentorship, aligning teams, reducing complexity, owning a subsystem end-to-end, making boring systems that do not wake people at 2am.
14. Pick ONE domain to go deep
Payments, search, streaming, identity, infra, data platform, etc. Staff engineers are “the person for a hard area”, not generic API writers.
Stop hopping stacks every month. Pick a lane, build proof of reliability, and become the person people call when prod is on fire. That is Staff.
Hyperliquid
raised $0
ignored every VC trying to throw money at them and self funded instead
VCs who didn’t want to be sidelined had no choice but to buy from the market
did a historic 31% airdrop worth $1.2b at genesis, worth $11b today
built the most efficient business in the universe with just 11 employees. $1.2b total revenue
(nasdaq makes $1.1b revenue with 9,162 employees)
hl revenue goes into the assistance fund for $HYPE buybacks
they already bought back 3.61% of total supply. now holding $1.2b worth of HYPE
on top of that, hyperevm has a HYPE burn mechanism
did $3.4t total volume without a mobile app
because it has no competition in UI/UX, low latency and liquidity
in the perp dex space it has zero real rivals. only centralized exchanges that hate it
with hip-3 they already shipped 24/7 stock perps
and much more is on the way
big part of the team unlocks was restaked a few hours ago
(something you usually can’t even see where it goes in other teams)
sits at a $35b fdv without any major cex listings
honestly, it deserves far more
moon that
The most efficient business in the world makes ~$1.1B/yr net income with just 11 employees.
Their founder, Jeff Yan, is a ~30yo ex-HRT International Physics Olympiad (IPhO) gold & silver from Harvard.
It is a decentralized crypto derivatives exchange called Hyperliquid.
cardano
raised $62m
0 revenue
1 tps
entire “ecosystem” is basically one dex and one lending protocol that maybe 7 people use per day
literally a ghost chain, just guarded by an illiterate cult at the gates
it sits at a $21b fdv
'fixed supply' yet 18% is still not in circulation. staking rewards and governance treasury emissions keep getting dumped nonstop. no burn mechanism either
not that it matters because nobody uses the chain anyway
similar to xrp, joining the ada cult apparently requires being an active member of the flat earth groups on facebook
charles is busy running a farm funded with the tokens he dumped from the treasury
zero
after raising $119M, we decided to raise even more, because nothing feels quite like more
14.95% will be sold through a public auction starting at a $350M FDV, with no max cap
1.93% will go to the sequencer sale
and since more is never enough, we’re also keeping 2.44% for a future Bilateral Sale
in short, we’ll raise at least $60M at a $350M FDV, but probably more, because why not
also, since nothing means everything, the team and VCs will be holding 48% of the total supply, because decentralization matters 😉
tokens will be available after 90 days, if voters decide so otherwise, a 12-month lockup will follow
thanks for your attention to this matter, $AZTEC
USDX, a $680m stablecoin by @stableslabs is undergoing a major depeg ⚠️
Let’s break down what is happening and the cascading ecosystem impact
What is USDX?
Stableslabs describes USDX as “ A delta-neutral synthetic stablecoin that offers:
Delta-neutral stability with 100% crypto collateral and censorship resistance by passing banks. Scalability, yield from crypto arbitrage, and transparent reserves with insurance.”
Why is USDX depegging?
On Nov 4th Stableslabs announced that $1m of liquidity was lost in the Balancer V2 exploit.
https://t.co/JAhhnD8Rr9
The Balancer exploit resulted in a significant contraction of onchain liquidity as various market participants withdrew funds from DEXs and lending markets. This combined with major price pressure across major assets have resulted in meaningful outflows out of various stablecoin farms. This comes with the backdrop of Black Friday, which was a systematic crash across perpetuals markets which triggered an automatic deleveraging (ADL) event which broke numerous delta neutral strategies that were farming the basis trade. Ethena, the largest delta-neutral strategy was unscathed due to bespoke agreements separating their risk which enabled them to avoid major losses from ADL across their exposures. However, interestingly this likely amplifies the ADL for other market participants which has resulted in numerous fund blow-ups.
The first major body to float from this event seems to have been Stream Finance, their XUSD blew up causing a $280m liquidation unwind. As described in further detail here.
https://t.co/7eaK9rkV97
Stableslabs USDX has a very similar name, similar strategy and lost liquidity in the Balancer hack, as a result numerous looping vaults across Euler and Lista DAO in particular were seeing significant outflows. This spiked borrow rates that putting looping trades under-water and threatening liquidations. Lista DAO today passed an emergency vote to process the liquidations on their markets to shield lenders.
https://t.co/IX90H1AZoU
Interestingly, this emergency vote changed the oracle configuration to be market based. Causing a major liquidation cascade on already thin USDX liquidity. As a result of significant outflows, borrow rates have spiked, see below Re7 Labs Clusters on Euler. Borrow APY’s are 300% on Euler and over 800% on Lista DAO. Consequently, a complete unwinding of these looping trades has been occurring the past hours.
The scope and scale of liquidations is in the range of 10s of millions, not massive for a $680m$ synthetic dollar. However, dumping directly into a market with thin liquidity has massively amplified the issue.
As a result of liquidations, peg volatility has been massive, with price dipping as low as 40c, recovering to 80c and now hovering around 60c.
Is the depeg permanent?
At this point we don’t know if this depeg is permanent or temporary because Stableslabs has not yet announced the freezing of their redemption mechanism. If redemptions come through, there is a massive arbitrage opportunity to buy deppeged tokens, however, only available to KYCd market makers.
One scenario is that market makers are simply too busy recovering from the numerous losses throughout the week to properly arbitrage this peg deviation.
The other, in my opinion likely scenario, is that USDX experienced real losses during Black Friday which are yet to be properly disclosed due to lacking transparency. In a sense, the market is pricing in a major haircut to the value of USDX collateral. If that is the case, at some point we should see an announcement of halted redemptions. Radio silence from Stablelabs during the past two days is absolutely deafening. If they do have collateral to back all the redemptions, why not just say it and calm the market?
This is an evolving situation. Please give @robdogeth a follow if you want to stay up to date as it unfolds.
Lessons and path forward
Financial markets deal with risk, farming novel stablecoins can provide high yields, looping such tokens can further amplify the yield, however, also the risk. The challenge is excessive risk taking is currently blowing up in everyone’s faces. We are missing transparency disclosures and risk pricing.
This is why we built @corkprotocol, to provide a liquidity buffer and hedging mechanism for onchain participants to manage and price these risks. Crypto doesn’t need to eliminate risk, it needs to properly internalize the price of risk. There is no free lunch, with yield comes risk, but we must become better at pricing and managing such risks so that we don’t create a house of cards.
This week is brutal not only because of the erosion of trust caused by these numerous blowups, but the fact that they keep cascading. Which is the next body to float?
For crypto to become institutionally adopted and to become the fabric of modern finance, we urgently need to develop risk management infrastructure. This is why I am so bullish on @corkprotocol and I hope as we weather this storm take a moment to reflect and build back stronger.
The future of finance must include risk management.