Nic

Institutional crypto research. Ex Apollo Global Management.

[Nic @niconomicsx]

Guess Insurers are fucked ?

They are mostly invested in fixed-income bonds which are becoming worthless

Even if they hold to maturity, the short-term hit can pressure solvency metrics before higher reinvestment yields help later

[Ben Hunt @EpsilonTheory]

Not to be all alarmist or anything, but a) this move in 10yr and 30yr isn’t oil or Iran related, and b) something in financial-world is going to break.

[Nic @niconomicsx]

@FroehlichThors1 Guess the thesis is that S&P500 is just driven by the AI trade while the rest struggles

If the AI trade fails to deliver, stocks will go down

And so RE, as you finally have forced RE sellers when their stock portfolio melts

[Nic @niconomicsx]

Take away forward guidance and suddenly the bond market is a ship without a compass, mistaking every wave for a tsunami

The Fed still need to focus on prices but also on job market

Yet bonds are reacting as if debasement is around the corner

[Citrini @citrini]

The last time I was this tempted to buy US treasuries we were only one near-collapse of the entire gilt market at the hands of levered pension funds away from the bottom.

[Nic @niconomicsx]

Interesting to see ethereum:0x232ce3bd40fcd6f80f3d55a522d03f25df784ee2 falling sharply after Robinhood announced that its U.S. perpetual futures will be offered by Robinhood Derivatives through Bitstamp, effectively bypassing ethereum:0x232ce3bd40fcd6f80f3d55a522d03f25df784ee2, which currently powers perps inside Robinhood Wallet.

The funny part? Robinhood is both a major source of Lighter’s perp volume and an investor in the company

CANNIBALIZATION

[Jeff Dorman @jdorman81]

This shouldn’t be surprising. “Fat Protocol Thesis” did more damage to this industry and common sense than anything else.

L1 protocols are a race to zero fees, have no barriers to entry, and are inflationary (if there is a token).

The apps built on these chains accrue all of the economic value.

No serious investor should be surprised by this anymore. L1s are not investable.

[Nic @niconomicsx]

Funny data

robinhood:0x39dbed3a2bd333467115de45665cc57f813c4571 actually makes (or used to make) more than 2x daily fees than Robinhood chain itself

[Nic @niconomicsx]

Daily transactions on Robinhood Chain are declining, but that’s largely because fewer tokens are being launched: less garbage, less extractions

Time for a flight to quality: artificial-inu-3:native , cash-cat:native and robinhood:0x39dbed3a2bd333467115de45665cc57f813c4571

[Nic @niconomicsx]

The data isn’t fully up to date, but it shows why @vladtenev and @RobinhoodApp will keep investing in their chain:

It simply makes too much money.

[Nic @niconomicsx]

People filming themselves to train robot

Dystopic, but interesting project

[Nic @niconomicsx]

@HANDOLabs Love what you’re building here! when will there be a way to invest in hando directly?

[Nic @niconomicsx]

Is it possible to make money on @Polymarket ?

Probably no, research shows that only bots make profits

Also, average returns were mostly all negative. Just a few large winners generate the aggregate profit

[ Joshua Della Vedova, June 30, 2026. "Who Profits from Prediction? Execution, not Information" ]

[Nic @niconomicsx]

Crytpo has fundamentals

Top 7 factors that drive best returns:

1st - Quality: real on-chain activity
2nd - Value: cheap on-chain valuations
3rd - Reversal: recent losers bouncing back
4th - Funding: perpetual futures funding rates
5th - Market: the broader crypto market
6th - Size: smaller tokens
7th - Volatility: unusually volatile tokens (the worst performer)

The takeaway? In this study, actual usage was a stronger signal than excitement alone

[ Source: Babayev & Aliyev, Crypto Has Fundamentals (2026) ]

[Nic @niconomicsx]

Crypto class of 2016 vs. 2018 vs. 2020

- very few players beated investing in T-bills
- Lot of players dead
- median return extremely negative
- But market-capitalisation-weighted returns are stellar

Another demonstration that it is winner-takes-all market and positive returns are concentrated among a small number of dominant assets (assets with largest market cap)

[Nic @niconomicsx]

One major risk to hyperliquid:native that I rarely see discussed: a hack or protocol exploit

Here what went wrong in the past, and what to be careful of:

Dec '24
Addresses linked to Lazarus (North Korean hacking group) traded on the platform. This caused ~$250M net outflows (perception risk)

Mar '25
A trader using 50x leverage opened a $200M position on Ethereum, then withdrew collateral, forcing a liquidation onto Hyperliquid's own MM vault. MM absorbed ~$4M loss; trader profited ~$1.86M; maximum leverage subsequently cut (mechanism design risk)

Mar '26
The JELLY memecoin was manipulated, squeezed 400%+, forcing a losing short position onto MM. Peak unrealized loss of ~$12–13.5M before validators halted and delisted the market; MM's position was then settled at $0.0095/JELLY, leaving it with a final realized profit of ~$703K rather than a loss (Manipulation risk that exposed validator power to freeze the market)
- five validators related to Hype foundation still control approximately 49% of staked HYPE (down from over 81% in early 2025), with the remaining roughly 51% spread across 22 independent operators. This concentration is sufficient to freeze and delist a market unilaterally: this is a governance risk

Sep '25
Hyperdrive, a third-party lending app built on Hyperliquid's technology, suffered a router exploit. ~$782K drained. But this was an external app

2025–2026
Phishing / stolen-credential incidents. Individually $12K–$21M; user-side losses. But this was off protocol, cause by user security issues

TLDR:
So far, documented losses have involved compromised users, failures in market design or governance, or third-party apps, not a hack of Hyperliquid’s core protocol. Hopefully we can continue like that

Hyperliquid

[Nic @niconomicsx]

LONG ecosystem on $HOOD pushing $1.5B through stock pairs since July

Still ~39% of launchpad × RWA flow and ~16% of all tokenized-stock trading

Stock TVL in the pools is now ~$16.5M, roughly a tenth of onchain equity float

This looks so clean

robinhood:0x2e8c31162b855a2ffa90f6f8634643ad6f111e18 / NVDA is clearly the best way to be exposed to the ecosystem: a live book for tokenized NVDA, it trades on weekends, it holds a real slice of onchain NVDA supply, and gets persistent arb vs. the oracle feed

Fees stay inside the system. They lock robinhood:0x2e8c31162b855a2ffa90f6f8634643ad6f111e18 , burn robinhood:0x2e8c31162b855a2ffa90f6f8634643ad6f111e18 and buy more stock into the same vault

LongX turns a leveraged NVDA position into a token you can trade in that same market

LONG 500 routes fees from every new stock pair are back into the robinhood:0x2e8c31162b855a2ffa90f6f8634643ad6f111e18 reserve

NVDA is no longer sitting there as collateral, but It became the quote asset. Liquidity is building around $NVDA and not around whatever meme launched this week

This is starting to look like a standing market for tokenized equity. And its token is robinhood:0x2e8c31162b855a2ffa90f6f8634643ad6f111e18

[Nic @niconomicsx]

How many bitcoin:native do you need to retire?

If you are 25 years old with $75k spend per year, you just need 10 bitcoin:native

Assuming 12% arithmetic expected real Bitcoin return and 45% annual volatility

[Nic @niconomicsx]

https://t.co/NAZY4Cdnak

[Nic @niconomicsx]

A reminder of $HYPE value capture mechanism

Not that different from $ENA with the recent governance change (when USDe supply hits $ 7.5bn, 95% revenue will be directed to $ENA buybacks + team is buying some VCs bags)

The real question is if $ENA buybacks will outpace inflation

That really depends on USDe growth and revenue

That’s the $ENA bet, finally a more pure product bet vs. what we had before (i.e., infinite inflation and no real value capture mechanism for $ENA holders.. essentially it was destined to zero)