stsoen

Web3 ivestment and onchain analytics since 2017

[Pavel Paramonov @paramonoww]

Top reasons to be bullish on Hyperliquid or at least consider learning about it more:

1. HYPE is one of the only investable assets in the whole world at the moment.

2. Hyperliquid never raised capital. Having no investors allowed founder to do whatever he wanted with the company. Team utilizes the time very efficiently.

3. No true competitor to the symbiosis of Hyperliquid and HYPE token. Look out for competitors in 2-3 years minimum (explain why in the article).

4. The token's value accrual (via buybacks) flows more directly between the protocol's usage and the community/team holding the token, there's no separate stakeholder class.

5. Founder was good enough to earn millions of dollars trading on his own. Trading is the most bad ass skill you could have: pure measurement.

6. Lighter has no advantage over Hyperliquid (enjoy being part of the sci-fi novel chains), and Aster was a fast attempt to conquer Hyperliquid, but no lasting financial infrastructure is built fast and out of envy.

7. If you look at Hyperliquid, even if you don't trade perps, you might still be interested in owning HYPE.

8. I use Uniswap and Aave on almost a daily basis, but why should I be interested in buying their tokens? To stake them and get even more (ouroboros), or vote in governance where private investors always have the majority of the voting rights? Thanks, I don't need that.

9. Hyperliquid is far from integrating the majority of trading instruments, currently there are only perps and binary options (prediction markets) live. Integrations of vanilla options will be one of the biggest and rewarding events.

10. Hyperliquid is positioned to keep pulling crypto traders away from Binance, Bybit, and OKX, while also drawing in commodity traders from traditional exchanges, potentially dominating this segment of the options market entirely.

11. Hyperliquid never invested money into marketing, and more importantly, into building its own ecosystem. The ecosystem play has always been the scam people have been falling for over the years.

12. People who want to use Hyperliquid or build on it don't need to talk to the Hyperliquid team directly. Smart decisions about setting a bar for market creation, no spam on the network.

13. Hyperliquid has a world-class team. Not in the sense that they hired the best people, but in the sense of management style. Don't think of Google, Meta, or Apple, think of Rockstar, Telegram, Valve.

14. Hyperliquid is a prime example of the "Zero to One" philosophy from Thiel's book. The idea of building a perp DEX is not new, but the idea of ruthless execution and literally not giving a damn about anything else is indeed new.

15. Another important thing to remember is that Hyperliquid emerged after the FTX crash, so you don't have to convince people about the benefits of self-custody, as this is now pretty self-explanatory.

16. Funny how conversations about "DEX vs. CEX" back in the day were pretty lopsided, and then the conversation changed to "Hyperliquid vs. CEXes" and became very serious.

17. $PURR and Hyperliquid Strategies are the only treasury companies in the world with a positive P&L.

18. If Hyperliquid's funding rates on perps undercut what's available elsewhere, capital flows in regardless of whether participants care about crypto.

19. Hyperliquid is both an open, composable protocol (like DeFi infrastructure) and a polished, sticky consumer product (like a well-run exchange app). Most projects are one or the other, in Hyperliquid's case, you don't have to pick a side.

20. Hyperliquid didn't feel the competition with other perp DEXes and started competing with crypto CEXes and major CEXes. That alone says everything you need to know.

[stsoen @stsoien]

@banteg Do you think Ethereum is in for some big changes and will evolve? Or the contrary?

[stsoen @stsoien]

Good idea! But actually, it’s worth clarifying: the issue with DeFi on the EVM might be that it doesn’t support continuous millisecond-level price updates. And Ethereum (Mainnet) still has throughput issues, creating arbitrage opportunities due to the time lag.

[Barter @BarterDeFi]

https://t.co/yMWCzIjKCk

[Angus Lamps @0xLamps]

the cool thing is LayerZero’s DVN and multisig could be 100% compromised across all signers & instances, and your application on the LayerZero protocol could remain 100% unaffected working perfectly fine with 0 losses if you just set up your config properly.

🤷🏼‍♂️

[Hayden Adams 🦄 @haydenzadams]

People might accuse me of grave dancing for saying it

But we have to stop letting centralized things call themselves DeFi

Admin key can drain all funds? CeFi

Otherwise DeFi means nothing and it’s brand is destroyed

No admin key can drain any version of Uniswap for a reason

[Lemniscap @Lemniscap]

https://t.co/NflnZYL8tI

[stsoen @stsoien]

2/ The crypto is saturated and no longer drives hype around tokens.

Products with real utility (banking, payments) generate profits from real value, not tokens.

The era of “making money off tokens” is over. Now it’s about building products comparable to Web2 startups.

[stsoen @stsoien]

1/ The problem is that NFTs and tokens are often built mainly to make money in the market.

The fact is, most crypto projects don’t need tokens; they need real usecases.

These are simply different approaches: building a high-quality product vs creating a product with a token.

[hieu @0xk2_]

I’m leaving Web3.

After years building (40+ products/apps), I’m done pretending this space is something it’s not.

Most NFTs are down 90-99%. Not “cooling off” completely dead. And the second price goes, the community vanishes. Because it was never community, it was people watching a chart.

We dressed up speculation as culture and called it innovation.

Let’s be real the majority of users aren’t here for products. They’re here to gamble. Every new launch is the same cycle:
- hype
- rush in
- dump on the next person

Early just means finding someone dumber to be exit liquidity.

Builders say “we’re building for the future” but most of these products only exist to extract revenue from the same rotating pool of users.

No users. No retention. No PMF.
Just extraction.

We’ve financialised everything so aggressively that real users never had a chance to exist.

And the worst part? Everyone knows it. No one says it.

Because as long as there’s a chance of another cycle, people will keep playing along.

I’ve seen enough to know how this ends.

I’ll be open sourcing 40+ projects. Games, infra, wallets, experiments. Take it, fork it, do whatever you want.

I’m out.

[Hydromancer @hydromancerxyz]

https://t.co/csFqRel9aM

[Vadym @vadymnx]

https://t.co/XiIYaxM6Xl

[Tay 💖 @tayvano_]

A product is the thing you use to solve your problem or get a job done. People use products. Products thus serve those people. Not all people. Just the people with the specific problem the product aims to solve.

The best products focus. If you have a loose screw, you reach for a screwdriver. Not a hammer. Not a penny. Not a multitool. A fucking screwdriver.

A platform is a foundation for products. It's the technology, the infrastructure, the tooling, the resources. Eventually it is the ecosystem of people and APIs and libraries and other products and network effects.

People do not use the platform. People build products on the platform. They build products that serve their users. The platform is the foundation. It is not the product.

The best platforms are ones where every builder can build whatever they want without any blockers. You don't need approval. You know your users and their needs and you solve their problems. The platform unlocks and enables you to do that better, cheaper, more easily. If the platform does not allow you to create more value with the platform than without it then you don't use the platform. It's very simple. See: Base v OP Stack.

The second-worst platform is a product that calls itself a platform. That non-platform end ups not empowering anyone while also not bothering to solving any problems or serving any user needs. It's bad, but mostly harmless (unless you are an employee there lol)

No, the absolute worst platform is one that is actually a platform that actually has products built on it but suddenly fancies itself a product.

If you are building on a platform that shifts to serve end-user directly, you should RUN THE FUCK AWAY. Their mission is no longer to empower anyone to build anything. It's to deliver their own products and solve their own user's needs. They will happily ignore/deprioritize/rug every other competing product. As they should.

You cannot build a great product while building someone else's product at the same time.

You cannot build a great platform if you are building a solution to a specific problem and specific user need.

The EF is not building a product.

[stsoen @stsoien]

Great article!

For a deeper look at the interactions, optimizations, and side flows within the ecosystem around @CurveFinance and @ConvexFinance, welcome to my research: https://t.co/eyfBM7datc

[CrediBULL Crypto @CredibleCrypto]

https://t.co/rXQ8sOYXEZ

[stsoen @stsoien]

@theintern_alpha @stakenode_dev @Web3foundation I have one simple question for you: why does Gav call himself the founder of Ethereum? He is not. The founder of Ethereum is Buterin.

And that's just a small part of the fantasy world.

[stsoen @stsoien]

@paramonoww 3/ And yes, in the end, large capital receives too little return on volatile assets. If Lido APR is around 2.5%, where can they get a return higher than that?

I still remember the “you'll get 10%” manipulation, but in reality it was 3-4% lol (restaking!)

[stsoen @stsoien]

@paramonoww Another aspect in addition to the previous three is that the idea of restaking is based on an absolute loss for those who are supposed to be customers: give away your tokens so that others can earn money. This creates an initially falling tokenomics.

[stsoen @stsoien]

@paramonoww I think the problem lies deeper:
1) There is too much money in Crypto, and no new money is coming in.
2) Validators in all chains are generally stagnating.
3) Why restake when you can launch a centralized L2?

Without this, restaking could not grow.

[stsoen @stsoien]

@0xgoku_ It is surprising that Polkadot did not move toward payment systems and financial infrastructure. As the last two years have shown, PayFi, derivatives, financial instruments, and DeFi optimizations are the drivers of progress.

He himself was essentially talking about finances.

[stsoen @stsoien]

@ivangbi_ @ethereumfndn Wow! That's awesome! Congratulations!

[stsoen @stsoien]

@0xsamgreen Looking at where things were six months ago vs. now, has the number of AI agents in Web3 actually grown much? It feels pretty stagnant to me.

[stsoen @stsoien]

@everestchris6 But what about possible hallucinations? It looks like a cumulative process: at first imperceptible, but over time more and more pronounced.

Are there mechanisms to recognize hallucinations and checks to determine how accurate the results are? This is critical for payments.