metaForge

@MelonPodcasts Coordinator, father, Arcenal FC fan

[metaForge @metaForg4]

@MelonPodcasts the fee doubling is the underrated part. means the buyback engine doesn't thin out even if hip-3 mostly cannibalizes existing flow. structurally clean

[Melon Podcast @MelonPodcasts]

1/
it's been a month since hyperliquid's hip-3 went live. stake 500k $HYPE and you can launch custom markets backed by the platform's deep liquidity

the result is an exchange where you can long or short almost anything. stocks via trade or felix, commodities, bonds via aura, pre-ipos via ventuals, even pokemon cards via trove

analysis by @SunwooHajin

here's how hip-3 works, and how it hits $HYPE 👇

2/ the mechanism
a deployer stakes 500k $HYPE (~$19.3m at time of writing). they get three markets free before entering an auction for extra slots

for each market they set leverage limits, configure the oracle, and manage the technicals. bad standards risk a slashed stake, though hyperliquid calls that temporary as tooling matures

3/
once live, the deployer earns 50% of their markets' fees, hyperliquid takes the other half. to balance it, hip-3 fees are set at double the standard rate, so @HyperliquidX's cut stays roughly even

most deployers are still building, but one live market already did $1.3b in volume. early, but it rhymes with the hype

4/ what hip-3 does to $HYPE
new supply crunches, more buyback fuel, and potentially more for stakers and traders

5/ locking up $HYPE
every deployer removes 500k $HYPE from circulation. as new deployers show up, that's persistent buy pressure. trove alone raised $20m to buy $HYPE for its launch

treasuries like @HyperionDefi and @HypeStrat are already looking at hip-3, which softens the risk of these vehicles dumping

6/ buyback base
the 50/50 split feeds the assistance fund, which uses 97% of fees to buy back the token. since hip-3 fees run higher, the split doesn't thin the stream. even a handful of markets at sustained volume is a real buyback source

7/ incentive wars
next phase is deployers competing for trader flow. @tradexyz's xyz100 market did $100k in fees before it hit two weeks

expect liquidity mining, fee rebates, staking boosts, and providers like @kinetiq_xyz crowdsourcing $HYPE to lower the cost of launching a market

8/ how it could fail
success needs two things: quality markets launching, and those markets holding real demand

permissionless doesn't guarantee quality. a hip-3 market is only as good as its deployer. stocks and bonds need continuous data and stable pricing, or you get thin liquidity, wide spreads, and traders leaving

9/
oracles like @redstone_defi are building hybrid onchain/offchain feeds to hold pricing even when the base asset isn't trading

but demand is harder. per @felixprotocol's charlie (@0xBroze), most hyperliquid volume comes from five markets, mostly $BTC $ETH $SOL. niche hip-3 assets face a cold-start problem. no early liquidity, no traders, no liquidity providers

10/ final thoughts
hip-3 is another structural bet on decentralization, shifting growth from the protocol to its participants

it doesn't need scale in the traditional sense. per @FalconXGlobal, capturing under 1% of mag7 derivatives trading could mean ~$800m in extra fees

for a team that keeps defying expectations, hip-3 isn't something i'd bet against

[metaForge @metaForg4]

i hate Enzo Fernandez and everything who are playing or played for argentina ever. england was a good team

[Kevin Pietersen🦏 @KP24]

Argentina will play like France played last night

[⚡️🇧🇼 @Priceless_MCI]

This is sending me, there’s literally 70 minutes left 😭😭😭

[metaForge @metaForg4]

if yamal had scored that third goal it would've been a contender for the best goal of the world cup

[metaForge @metaForg4]

simon's tackle was insane

[messi saliba fc @nuetrlp2]

everyone predicting argentina vs france would be so funny if it’s spain vs england

[metaForge @metaForg4]

@MelonPodcasts @david_enim just fired up a listen and david's point about alignment being the real bottleneck > the tech hits different. we spent years thinking the hard part was building the agents lol
turns out it's getting everyone on the same page about how to use them
good ep

[Melon Podcast @MelonPodcasts]

"honestly, i think we're just a few months away"

our host @mariawilliamsmp sits down with @david_enim on how close ai agents actually are to mainstream adoption. not just for builders, but for beginners and everyday defi users

after years buried in technical papers on agent systems, and now building in the space full time, david explains why the timeline keeps compressing

and why the hardest part may no longer be the tech. it's getting people aligned on how to actually use it

[Melon Podcast @MelonPodcasts]

what does it actually mean to co-own ai?

@veryBN sits down with @david_enim, core contributor to olas, on how you move from using ai to participating in it

with olas you can hold tokens, run agents, or operate them as a business. across defi, prediction markets, and other onchain use cases, agents generate value and operators share the upside

[shafu @shafu0x]

crypto gave a ton of people the illusion of a career

[Melon Podcast @MelonPodcasts]

this week on melon: david minarsch (@david_enim), co-founder and ceo of valory

we get into david's path across crypto and ai, from his early work at https://t.co/3EWo1qaTPu to building valory and olas, and what "autonomy" actually means once agents leave the demo and start operating in live markets

we dig into what autonomous agents can already do, where they're genuinely useful, and what breaks the moment you drop them into permissionless adversarial environments like web3

and the hard problems underneath all of it: coordination, incentives, security, reliability, and why open-source infrastructure decides whether agents ever become first-class participants on the internet

[metaForge @metaForg4]

@MelonPodcasts @david_enim where autonomous agents already work, what breaks the moment you drop them into permissionless adversarial environments like web3, and the hard problems underneath: coordination, incentives, security, reliability

[metaForge @metaForg4]

@MelonPodcasts the wallet inside the chat is the unlock here. discord made communities, telegram made distribution, nobody made the chat itself a revenue rail until now. watching this one

[Melon Podcast @MelonPodcasts]

"oxford, computer vision, vr, gaming, crypto, ai. one founder arc across every major tech wave"

our host @M4rcusHale catches up with @ethan_myshell, founder and ceo of @myshell_ai, on how skipping classes at oxford took him from frontier research into consumer products, and eventually into ai x crypto

we get into why researchers so often miss mass adoption, why consumer instinct matters more than ever, and how the next wave of crypto ai products breaks out of the niche

[Melon Podcast @MelonPodcasts]

1/
crypto's social x money wave keeps heating up. content coins, creator tokens, mini-apps, tipping

the latest standout: towns, a group chat app on base where communities (free or paid) earn, trade, and run bots right inside the conversation

if onchain group chats that actually make money sound like the future, this one's worth watching

analysis by @JordanV4le

2/ what is towns
@townsapp is a messaging protocol built on one simple but bold idea. your group chat should be able to move money. your wallet should live inside the chat. and creators should get paid straight by their community

3/ under the hood
a custom l2 chain for messaging, offchain stream nodes for real-time decentralized chats, smart contracts on @base handling payments and memberships, and $TOWNS securing the network through staking

as a user none of that touches you. what you see is discord-style chats with built-in wallets, onchain paywalls, native tipping, and custom bots

4/ why it matters
crypto activity is already social. towns just makes the chat itself an economic space. you don't leave the conversation to transact, you transact inside it

it's also another onchain business model. anyone can spin up a town, deploy bots, and open new revenue rails for their audience

5/ how to try it
head to https://t.co/ETCWTIm70W and log in through privy. it spins up an embedded wallet linked to your google, x, farcaster, or rabby. to fund it, hit the wallet icon top right for deposit and send

6/
explore towns from the discovery hub. surf by recent activity, featured communities, top earning groups, trending projects. some towns are free, some charge a subscription

7/
create your own: hit "+" in the left sidebar, name your town, pick free or paid, deploy. about as hard as making a discord server

want to go deeper: open the "token" tab on the towns site and delegate your $TOWNS to a node operator. check their yield and commission, pick one, stake

8/ the big picture
social platforms spent two decades getting more closed and more extractive. towns runs the other way. open, onchain, programmable, community-owned

whether it becomes the telegram of crypto is an open question. but if you want a fresh corner of onchain social you can jump into today, this is it

[metaForge @metaForg4]

@jpfraneto no, of course not, are you crazy? (they use claude)

[Chris Gilbert @0xgilbert]

Last week, I proposed a hackathon hosted by @blknoiz06 called the $ANSEM Arena to draw more attention and builders to the Solana community, while simultaneously being value-accretive to the $ANSEM holders.

Here's the secret sauce: run the hackathon with tracks that are highly tuned to the KPIs everyone cares about in the Solana ecosystem:
- novel trading markets
- agentic commerce
- depin
- and memecoins of course

The projects would get graded on KPIs the Solana ecosystem actually needs:
- normies onboarded
- onchain volume
- attention
- tvl

To ensure he's delivering value to token holders, additional requirement would be that each submission needs to have an $ANSEM component that would benefit them. A few mechanics that projects could choose from:
- Revenue share to stakers: A percentage of the project’s revenue automatically buys $ANSEM and distributes it to stakers in their platform
- Liquidity/discounted access: The project receives locked liquidity via $ANSEM, keeps the trading fees as revenue, and gives ANSEM holders free or heavily discounted access to the product
- Holders as growth engine: $ANSEM stakers get a basic level of service for free and earn revshare from the projects profits

Other novel mechanics could be submitted, too, but the requirement would be that a) $ANSEM holders don’t get dumped on when the hackathon awards are distributed and b) $ANSEM holders get value out of all of the projects that launch during the hackathon. It would be the most value-accretive thing you could do with the tokens.

Structure wise, it would be done like a playoff bracket, with quarter-finals, semi-finals, etc.. This would make it eminently memeable—a partnership with a prediction market would bring participation from outside the ecosystem via betting, and could help fund the awards as well.

Since my initial tweet, I've started talks with the founders of a major launchpad and hackathon platform--getting them onboard to managing the whole thing, bringing operational experience to the table, ensuring it goes off without a hitch.

All we need now is @blknoiz06's blessing and we're off to the races.

[Melon Podcast @MelonPodcasts]

1/
the privacy trade has been one of the few bright spots in a stagnant market

zec ran to a nine-year high in november, ~28x off its 1y low, then tanked when zcash's core dev team announced their exit over a governance fight. xmr has taken over the privacy trade since

analysis by @veryBN

breaking down how zcash and monero actually differ, ahead of our episode with @zooko next week 👇

2/ origin stories
the core difference is where they started. @monero was born on forums, @Zcash in universities

monero launched in 2014 as "bitmonero" from an anonymous user, thankful_for_today, built on cryptonote. the community took it over early. no ceo, no office, funded entirely by voluntary donations through the ccs. a small core team stewards repos and funds but doesn't set the roadmap

3/
zcash traces back to 2013 academic work at johns hopkins, where cryptographers built the zerocoin protocol. it evolved into zcash, launched 2016 by @zooko wilcox and the electric coin company. unlike monero, zcash chose to work alongside regulators, not against them

4/
those origins shaped their reputations. monero's mandatory privacy made it the darknet default. per @trmlabs, nearly half of new darknet markets in 2024 used xmr exclusively. zcash barely shows up in ransomware or darknet reports

5/
that reputation cost xmr listings. binance dropped it feb 2024, okx jan 2024, kraken pulled it for eu users oct 2024. zcash dodged the big delistings: binance removed its monitoring tag july 2025, okx relisted nov 2025

6/ privacy, simplified
think of a transaction as a message. monero mixes yours into a crowd, you speak at the same time as ~15 others so nobody can prove it was you. zcash's shielded transactions put your message in a locked box only the recipient can open

7/
monero's three tools:
ring signatures hide the sender, mixing you with ~16 decoys already onchain
ringct hides the amount, encrypting values while proving no coins were minted
stealth addresses hide the receiver with a one-time address per transaction

8/
zcash uses zk-snarks. a shielded transaction generates a proof that it's valid without revealing sender, receiver, or amount. you prove you can spend the coins without exposing a single detail

9/ mandatory vs optional
monero: privacy is forced, no transparent transactions. every transaction looks identical, herd immunity. the logic, optional privacy isn't real privacy, because if only "suspicious" people use it, they become the targets

zcash: privacy by choice. zec moves transparent or shielded. still, the shielded pool keeps growing, ~30% of supply now, up from 8.7% a year ago

10/ consensus and supply
monero runs randomx pow, asic-resistant and cpu-friendly for home miners. it has tail emission, infinite supply at ~0.6 xmr per block forever, so miners always have a reason to secure it

11/
zcash runs equihash today, asic-optimized, and is moving to crosslink, a hybrid pow/pos. miners still produce blocks, stakers add finality that makes transactions permanent. like bitcoin, zcash caps at 21m with a halving every ~4 years

12/ what's next
monero is building fcmp++ to replace ring signatures. instead of ~16 decoys, you'd mix with the entire chain history. the anonymity set goes from "crowd of 16" to "crowd of everyone"

13/
zcash has tachyon for scaling plus crosslink for the pos transition, and ux upgrades through new wallets and near intents integration

one note: zcash's privacy layer is quantum-resistant, monero's ring signatures aren't. monero plans to fix that with fcmp++ and later upgrades

14/ different tools, different bets
it comes down to adoption, and adoption rides on organization and reputation

zcash's corporate structure enabled fast r&d and cutting-edge crypto, but the ecc exit exposed concentration risk. monero's decentralized contributor model is slower to coordinate, but no single departure breaks it

15/
on reputation the tradeoffs are sharp. zcash's optional privacy and compliance-friendly design kept it on major exchanges, at the cost of weaker network-level privacy. monero's mandatory privacy made it the darknet leader, and pulled in delistings and regulatory heat

16/
the "one true privacy coin" debate comes down to what you're optimizing for. monero has stronger privacy today but steeper adoption headwinds. zcash has a path to broader adoption but needs users to actively choose privacy, and most don't

both came back from dormant years. now each has to hold the spotlight and prove its architecture can outlast the other