Edgy - The DeFi Edge 🗡️

I help busy people cut through the noise in DeFi. Systems driven research without the hype or bs. Partner @Stacks

[Edgy - The DeFi Edge 🗡️ @thedefiedge]

5 of the 6 bottom signals I track says Bitcoin has already found its floor.

The 6th one says we're not even close, and it's the one I care about the most.

Here's what the data says:

• MVRV Z-Score: around -1, back in the same zone that marked the bottoms in 2015, 2018, and 2022

• AVIV Z-Score: also around -1, but prior cycles pushed closer to -1.5 before the real low, so this one still leaves room for another flush

• Sell-side Risk Ratio: just hit a 43-month low, right around FTX territory, which ended up being the last cycle's low

• Fear & Greed: February printed the most bearish reading on record, BTC then made a lower low in June, but fear never followed it down, that's a real bullish divergence

• S2F / 4-year cadence: price stopped tracking this a while ago, but the timing rhythm still roughly holds, we're about 9 months into this bear vs the ~12 month average of past cycles, though ETF demand could easily stretch that window longer than usual

• ETF Flows: record $4.5B in monthly outflows, mostly IBIT.

5 out of 6 are already pointing towards a bottom.

The prob is this drawdown is still way shallower than past cycles (-51% vs -77% to -84%), and ETF flows have been pretty weak so far this year.

If we get another flush, I'm watching the $48k-$58k zone.

What makes me cautious is the on-chain signals only tell you sellers are exhausted.

ETF flows tell you whether buyers have shown up.

Anyways, never been someone who tries to time the exact bottom. If you're not sure, I think now's a good time to dca in.

[Edgy - The DeFi Edge 🗡️ @thedefiedge]

@wiimee yay for the new algorithm updates

[Edgy - The DeFi Edge 🗡️ @thedefiedge]

Competition from Robinhood seems to have lit a fire under them, and these changes are long overdue.

It was frustrating watching Base waste its massive distribution advantage by trying to force creator coins and SocialFi when no one cared.

They should’ve pushed Crypto x AI when Virtuals and Bankr emerged organically. Tokenized assets were another obvious opportunity they left open.

They get a 2nd chance now with Cobie leading the App.

Let’s see if they execute.

Regardless, respect to Jesse. Can't have been easy by any means leading the chain the past few days.

Overall, I'm bullish on Base

[jesse.base.eth @jessepollak]

lots of conversations about base over the last week. wanted to share my candid take after a week of listening and a lot of reflection over the last 6 months.

first off - in case it’s not obvious, the first quarter of 2026 was a punch in the face. I spent 2024 and 2025 making a two pronged bet to bring base to the world: (1) builders would unlock the next wave of crypto adoption; (2) adoption would be driven by new onchain-native social experiences - creators, content, messaging. imo we made the right bet on builders, but obviously the wrong bet on social. builders did drive the next wave of crypto adoption - prediction markets, perpetuals, stablecoins - but social was not at the center of it. in fact, the entire social side of the market that many of us had been building towards - farcaster, zora, miniapps, and yes, creator coins - disintegrated completely. I was wrong - whether it was timing wrong (is $ansem a creator coin?) or fully wrong, only time will tell, but regardless, i was definitively wrong.

the collateral damage was pretty bad! and this year has been an exercise in eating shit. we realized how our focus on social had meant that base had fallen behind in key areas that were now increasingly critical - we had perps (shoutout avantis!) and prediction markets (shoutout limitless!), but both were well behind scaled competitors. and we had a lot of room to improve in unlocking base as a platform for tokenization and payments that really worked for enterprises. people lost confidence, and CT spectators reminded me weekly of all of my mistakes as often as they could. it felt bad man, still feels bad.

but if there’s one thing i’ve learned from the last decade of building in this space, it’s that when things feel the worst, the best thing to do is just put your head down and build. so that’s what i’m doing. I refocused my time and attention back to the chain away from the app, started writing code again, shipped a bunch of stuff (azul, beryl, b20, privacy, ledgers) and questioned a bunch of my assumptions: does crypto need social to grow? does base need an app? can base be bigger than coinbase?

I thought for a long time that social was the only thing that could drive the sort of viral growth to get crypto to a billion people. unsurprisingly, I now believe that’s wrong. It’s clear that better money is more than enough - we are seeing this live with stablecoins, predictions, perpetuals, tokenization and i only expect it to accelerate. I am now focused on bringing a billion people onchain just by making global finance actually work.

on the app, my focus is on building base into the blockchain for global finance. to that end, i’ve handed the base app back to the coinbase mothership, where my now good friend @cobie will be taking it from here to make it the best damn app for onchain you’ve ever seen, including expanding beyond the base ecosystem in ways that tbh i won’t love as the leader of base.

it’s incredibly hard to grow a decentralized network inside of a big public corporation. and i feel like much of the discourse on CT over the last week is downstream of this. the following things can be true: (1) base (and i) love memes and (2) brian probably won’t ever bullpost memes on the tl (this activity is illegal once you’re over 40 years of age). it’s weird and we’re working through it as we continue to decentralize base, which has been our commitment from the beginning.

we’re going to build base into the blockchain for global finance and do everything we can to be the place that the world’s money settles over the next century. we will surely have formidable competitors (welcome robinhood and stripe!) and people may abandon our cause, but we welcome the competition and believe it’s our duty to win the respect and commitment of those who rally to our banner. 

in 2026, this concretely means three things: winning trading, payments, and agents.

[continued in the reply]

[Edgy - The DeFi Edge 🗡️ @thedefiedge]

5 of the 6 bottom signals I track says Bitcoin has already found its floor.

The 6th one says we're not even close, and it's the one I care about the most.

Here's what the data says:

• MVRV Z-Score: around -1, back in the same zone that marked the bottoms in 2015, 2018, and 2022

• AVIV Z-Score: also around -1, but prior cycles pushed closer to -1.5 before the real low, so this one still leaves room for another flush

• Sell-side Risk Ratio: just hit a 43-month low, right around FTX territory, which ended up being the last cycle's low

• Fear & Greed: February printed the most bearish reading on record, BTC then made a lower low in June, but fear never followed it down, that's a real bullish divergence

• S2F / 4-year cadence: price stopped tracking this a while ago, but the timing rhythm still roughly holds, we're about 9 months into this bear vs the ~12 month average of past cycles, though ETF demand could easily stretch that window longer than usual

• ETF Flows: record $4.5B in monthly outflows, mostly IBIT.

5 out of 6 are already pointing towards a bottom.

The prob is this drawdown is still way shallower than past cycles (-51% vs -77% to -84%), and ETF flows have been pretty weak so far this year.

If we get another flush, I'm watching the $48k-$58k zone.

What makes me cautious is the on-chain signals only tell you sellers are exhausted.

ETF flows tell you whether buyers have shown up.

Anyways, never been someone who tries to time the exact bottom. If you're not sure, I think now's a good time to dca in.

[Edgy - The DeFi Edge 🗡️ @thedefiedge]

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[Edgy - The DeFi Edge 🗡️ @thedefiedge]

The best crypto writing this week wasn’t about Bitcoin.

It was about what Robinhood is really building, why equity usually beats the token, whether AI agents need desires of their own, and why Yuga’s CEO is making the case for APE.

Here's the 8 best crypto reads this week:

[Edgy - The DeFi Edge 🗡️ @thedefiedge]

Prediction Markets Deep Dive

Castle Labs covers almost everything: first permissionless wave, curators that won (Polymarket, Kalshi), and the new wave of permissionless prediction markets.

History, challenges, and a market map in one read.

[Castle Labs 🏰 @castle_labs]

https://t.co/laK4Qs55Ys

[Edgy - The DeFi Edge 🗡️ @thedefiedge]

With markets this choppy, investing in protocols with revenue + buybacks can be a sound bet.

But tbh a lot of buyback proposals sound big and don't really move the needle. The percentages are small, and teams quietly drop them when they change their mind.

Jito's JIP-38 caught my eye though:

• This isn't a small slice. 80% of all JTX fees get bought and burned. The other 20% goes back into building the platform.

• Everything bought gets burned on-chain. It's not parked in some treasury where it can leak back out

• They can't redirect the money without a separate governance vote. Meaning it's hard to be sneaky.

Worth keeping in mind that JTX hasn't launched yet. So, it's easy to commit 100% of revenue that doesn't exist. And the buyback period is only for one year (so far).

Whether this moves the needle depends on JTX actually getting some traction.

And the part I think people will miss is that in Q4 2027, ALL the fee streams (JitoSOL, BAM, Block Engine) go up for a vote on whether they get routed the same way.

JTX is basically the test run and maybe real money comes later.

Jito's price has gone up 152% since it's February lows. This could be the catalyst to take it even further imo.

What do you think?

[Jito @jito_sol]

JIP-38 is now live.

Value should live with the Network. This proposal formally establishes Jito as a token-centric network, committing 100% of the Jito DAO's revenue share from @JTX_trade to programmatic buyback and burns of $JTO for at least 1 year from JTX launch.

[Edgy - The DeFi Edge 🗡️ @thedefiedge]

Everyone’s talking about how @RobinhoodCrypto revenue has flipped @base.

There’s a real signal that’s 20x smaller and way more important.

First, the revenue’s impressive. The 2 week old chain is earning more daily revenue than Base with just 4% of its TVL, and it's already doing 70% of Base's DEX volume.

But where’s the Robinhood activity coming from?

Over 80% of Robinhood's TVL sits in lending vaults like Morpho and Steakhouse, and a chunk of the trading spike is from memecoins.

The most interesting part to me is tokenized assets. Both chains are mostly stablecoins, but look at the tokenized stocks:

• Base: ~$5B in tokenized assets, and only 0.2% is stocks. About $10M.
• Robinhood: ~$239M in tokenized assets, but 4.8% is stocks. About $11-12M.

So a chain with 4% of Base's TVL is already holding more tokenized stock value than Base itself.

It makes sense because Robinhood built its reputation from trading stocks. But I’m surprised at how fast the growth is.

What I'm watching is whether the volume holds once the hype fades, or whether tokenized stocks end up being the real story here.

[Edgy - The DeFi Edge 🗡️ @thedefiedge]

The biggest RWA market on Hyperliquid isn't the S&P 500.

It's SK Hynix, a Korean memory chip stock with $609M in open interest.

Total RWA open interest just hit an all-time high of $3.6B.

The top 10 tickers are below.

Not sure anyone had a Korean chip stock at the top of this list

[Edgy - The DeFi Edge 🗡️ @thedefiedge]

Most BTCFi products are built for the wrong type of Bitcoin holder.

The biggest holders won’t give up custody, no matter how good the yield looks.

Muneeb made this exact point here. Everyone talks about bringing BTC into DeFi like Bitcoin holders are one group.

They're not because Institutions, treasuries, and OG holders usually don’t want to give up custody just to earn yield.

$sBTC helps bring Bitcoin into the onchain economy for people who are comfortable using DeFi.

But self-custodial BTC staking is the bigger institutional unlock, because it lets holders keep custody of their Bitcoin while still earning BTC-denominated yield.

And the early base is already forming:

• sBTC hit a $545M TVL peak
• $121M deployed across Stacks DeFi
• Zest has $75.9M TVL in BTC lending
• Bitflow did $67.4M volume in Q1
• Hermetica hBTC showed 5.60% 7-day APY

Honestly, the first lane was always gonna get built.

It's the custody-first lane that decides whether the trillion-plus in idle BTC ever does anything.

Glad to partner with @Stacks to highlight this one.

[stacks.btc @Stacks]

Trust built onchain has a way of moving people from watching to trying.

Stacks is the home for Bitcoin-native finance.

[Edgy - The DeFi Edge 🗡️ @thedefiedge]

Researching some stables yields now.

An interesting one are @pendle_fi PTs, and the reUSD markets.

It's 10.18% or 16.64% fixed until December, depending on which tranche you pick.

The yield comes from real-world reinsurance premiums via @re. Not emissions, not points, not someone else's leverage.

• PT-reUSD → 10.18% fixed, senior tranche, gets paid first if things go wrong

• PT-reUSDe → 16.64% fixed, mezzanine tranche, higher yield because you're absorbing losses before the senior does

So it's basically a question of what you're comfortable holding for 156 days.

I lean senior for the bulk and I'm still deciding if the extra 6% is worth the mezzanine exposure. Honestly haven't landed on it yet.

One thing worth watching are the borrow rates on Morpho.

Right now USDC borrow against PT-reUSD is sitting at 8.87%, so looping the position barely pays. But if that rate drops back to the 4$-5%, the spread reopens and you can leverage the fixed yield.

The risks are the usual PT stack. Exit before maturity and you're selling into whatever liquidity exists (reUSDe's pool is the thinner one). And you're trusting re's reinsurance book plus Pendle's contracts on top of it.

Nothing crazy here, just fixed yield with a known end date, which is kinda rare in a market where every variable rate keeps getting repriced out from under you.

[Edgy - The DeFi Edge 🗡️ @thedefiedge]

If Uniswap believed its liquidity was sticky, the new fee would be the same on every chain.

It isn't.

Here's what the Base discount tells you.

For context: right now LPs keep 100% of swap fees on v4. This proposal changes that across 11 chains.

Part of what LPs earn goes to Uniswap instead, gets converted, and gets burned.

The size of the cut depends on the pool. But to keep it simple:

• On most pools, Uniswap takes around $17-25 of every $100 in fees
• On the lowest fee pools it's closer to $33 of every $100
• LPs keep the rest

And remember, LPs are the ones eating impermanent loss and inventory risk. They're not exactly overpaid.

Now the interesting part.

The tax has one default rate on every chain EXCEPT Base, where it's 70% lower.

Stable pairs on Base pay a third of what every other chain pays.

Why discount one specific chain?

Because Base is Aerodrome's home turf.

It's the one place where LPs actually have somewhere better to go, and Uniswap knows it.

They're pricing like a store that only runs discounts where the competitor opened across the street. And that competitor is moving in.

Aerodrome expands to ETH mainnet this month, so the problem the discount was built for is about to follow them home.

To be fair, there's a real bull case here for UNI holders. The burn hit 186,000 UNI in a single day last month, and that was before v4 fees even existed.

Snapshot runs July 7-12. Onchain vote the week after.

The token holders vote this week. LPs vote with their capital the day it goes live.

Only one of those votes is binding.

[alexander @wagmiAlexander]

Uniswap Labs is officially proposing cutting UniV4 liquidity providers share of fees by up to 33%.

Interesting they’re offering to take less on just one chain: the one @AerodromeFi dominates.

A reality they’ll face on more chains #soon. 🛫

https://t.co/LiT5QL7Nf6