Today, I had a conversation with someone in person who told me he really likes @elementaldefi .
I appreciated it, of course. But it got me thinking.
Why?
It’s not as if Elemental is packed with flashy features. There’s no gamified interface, no endless list of tokens, no complex strategies to experiment with. In fact, it’s deliberately simple. A few vaults. Clear options. That’s it.
So what makes people connect with it?
Because it does exactly what it says it will do.
If it SAYS 10% APR, it DELIVERS 10% APR.
No surprises. No hidden costs. No fine print buried somewhere you forgot to check.
--> It just works.
And the more I sat with that thought, the more it bothered me.
Because that shouldn’t be impressive. That should be the baseline.
Yet in DeFi today, consistency feels rare. Simplicity feels unusual. Trust feels like a feature, when it should be a given.
We can do better.
We should be building products that people understand without needing a guide. Products that say what they mean, and mean what they say. Products that prioritize clarity over complexity, and consistency over hype.
No fine print. No inflated promises.
Just reliability, delivered over time.
Let's go @solana !
1/
Introducing the Build-A-Bear Hackathon 🧸
Up to $1M in vault TVL seed funding (and more) in prizes.
Build a vault. Beat the bear.
Here’s everything you need to know ↓
Just met a cute girl at the wedding i'm at.
like actually cute. genuinely attractive human being.
we're talking. vibes are good. she's laughing at my jokes.
i'm being charming.
then crypto gets brought up, she says it
"i use solana"
my ears PERKED up
i played it cool. i said "oh nice, what protocols are you on"
she said "i have some SOL on Kraken"
and that's where a normal person would have said "wow that's really cool" and gotten her number
but i am not a normal person
my brain immediately went into autopilot and i said "on Kraken? do you at least self-custody?"
she looked confused
i kept going
"do you have a wallet? do you stake? what's your DeFi allocation. are you actually onchain or are you just sitting on a CEX watching candles"
she said "i bought SOL and i check the price sometimes"
and i said "so you don't actually use solana"
the vibe was GONE
her friend pulled her away. she didn't look back.
i was standing there alone at a wedding holding a drink i wasn't even sipping doing MENTAL MATH on whether someone who's never left a CEX can even call themselves a solana user
my friend walked over and said "bro she was into you what happened"
i said "she holds SOL on a CEX"
he said "so?"
SO???
i would rather DIE alone than let a CEX-only price-checker who's never opened Phantom think we're in the same ecosystem
she had a pretty face but a DISGUSTING onchain history because there IS no onchain history and i simply cannot overlook that
could've had her number
but she knows i'm running DeFi positions across Drift and Kamino at 3am while she's asleep
and honestly that's worth more
solana
Damn. This might be the largest execution yield I’ve ever seen.
~2300% APR 😂
For anyone wondering what you’re looking at: this is the receipt from a ~$190k delta-neutral execution at @elementaldefi.
We spent a big chunk of 2025 building our execution engine with one goal: make it the most performant.
When you set up a delta-neutral position, you need to open opposing positions simultaneously.
Example:
> Buy $SOL spot
> Short $SOL perps
Net exposure = neutral. Market goes up or down, you don’t care. This allows you to farm funding rates.
The catch? Execution costs.
You pay swap fees moving stables into SOL, slippage on fills, and price disconnects between spot and perp legs. For most funds, these costs land somewhere between 0.5%–2.0%, depending on how good (or bad) their execution is.
At Elemental, we’ve pushed this down to ~0.05% for most normal executions. This is an order of magnitude better than even the best competitors.
And on good days?
Execution cost actually flips positive.
Yes - the act of executing becomes profitable.
This is experience, deep expertise, serious engineering, and an unhealthy obsession with making the impossible, possible.
All I can say is: Elemental gud tech.
This attitude, and tech, is going to lay the foundation to many things we will do this year. 2026 is going to be a banger.
Introducing: Drift v3
Drift has built through bull and bear to deliver one thing: a better trading experience.
Today, Drift v3 goes live. A modern redesign with 10x faster execution.
Built to outperform.