
Subscribe to my DeFi blog to get ahead of the curve 👉 https://xitter.cf/t.co/7O0WAdXUnT Co-founder of @PinkBrains_io DeFi Creator Studio
Joined February 2017
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He is right:
My Grok Agents constantly scan my Telegram/Slack chats, DAO votes, trades with mock money (for now), looks for new protocols etc.
The tasks running in background will only increase
If someone asked me for advice on getting into crypto, I'd tell them to stay away from CT, TikTok and YouTube crypto content.
better get paid subs to ChatGPT and Claude to learn the basics and think through a strategy.
A noob joining CT will (!!) end up rekt by Pump. fun/FOMO cabal.
They WILL lose money on bundled tokens promoted by KOLs who use their followers as exit liquidity.
There's little to learn from CT now.
One needed CT as crypto was technical and entry barriers were high: how to unstuck tx on Metamask by changing nonce or how to bridge and get gas tokens etc.
Entry barriers are GONE.
All one needs is to identify growing protocols, which tokens benefit from it and then mid-to-long term conviction on them.
AI chatbots/AI agents can do it better than CT.
BTC would be at $100k already if bitcoiners were better story tellers as in the past:
International order disintegrating, countries going bankrupt, social unrest worsening, privacy eroding, private property might be up for grabs when/if things get even worse...
BTC is a perfect asset for this period yet somehow bitcoiners fail to promote it
Perhaps Tradfi boomers will end up pushing this story with blackrock leading the charge.
Learn the lesson: price is not market cap!
A few things from this DeFi chart:
• HYPE passed UNI's 2021 peak: $24.43B vs $22.59B. DeFi can still produce new winners while many OG tokens struggle to recover.
• 10 of the 20 tokens peaked in market cap in 2021. UNI, AAVE, COMP... five years later and those highs still haven't been beaten.
• MORPHO reached its price ATH of $4.17 in Jan 2025. Its MC went higher later as more tokens entered circulation, while buyers near the price ATH were still underwater.
• Unlocks and emissions make 'getting back to ATH' harder. If circulating supply triples, reaching the old price requires 3x the old market cap.
Disclaimer: Made with Chatgpt-6 Astra Ultra
Inspiration from post and copied design lol xitter.cf/MaisonGhost/status/211…
TL;DR on the five Defi protocols:
• @mezzanine_fi: Yield vaults where you choose more yield and more risk, or less yield with other depositors taking losses before you.
• @Infinit_Labs: Let managers trade for you on Hyperliquid. Their own money takes the first losses.
• @iris_credit: Borrow using Aave/Morpho liquidity at a fixed interest rate. You know what you'll pay upfront.
• @risextrade: A fully onchain perps exchange. Other DeFi apps can build on it, combining borrowing and trading in one tx.
• @boros_fi: Bet on funding rates going up/down, or lock in the funding rate on your existing perp positions.
$FLUID is the best performing DeFi token over the last 30 days.
Who's buying?
Gossip says someone keeps TWAPing it on CEXs :)
But the fundamentals look good:
• Best weekly revenue in 4 months
• $1.77B active loans, now the 3rd largest onchain money market
• Jupiter Lend: 6 biggest fee days in a row ($1.14M from Oct 11 - 17)
Not all green tho as buybacks are paused while the treasury rebuilds.
Big catalyst is DEX V2: soft launch is live now. Polygon first for testing, Ethereum this month
Also Fluid will launch on Sui: Hashi mainnet launches with $500M in capital backing, and Anchorage Digital joining
FLUID been one of my longest conviction trade since... years
Notice how Papertrade uses Across for cross-chain swaps?
Wonder why they picked Across among other choices. BD skills? Relationship from the past?
In any case, DEX aggregators need to be integrated into apps to survive. They can't rely on their UIs only anymore
$PAPER will launch:
-> announce no PAPER transferability
-> rug all pre-TGE perps
-> all perps closed
-> launch token
quite smart
A note on transferability.
Papertrade is a complicated primitive, and managing it from a risk standpoint is a complicated problem. The PAPER token is far more integrated into the economics of the primitive than most tokens are in their respective protocols today, and, broadly, was designed to act as a counter insolvency incentive coupled with a rebate mechanism to losing traders. Market makers and exchanges are by far the two most profitable businesses in crypto, and our goal was to try and externalise as much of their margins back to users as possible. We are now just over a week into the life of papertrade and we are becoming increasingly confident that this is both possible, but also a likely outcome as agentic led software becomes the norm.
As it stands, the paper token traded as a perp becomes a leveraged bet on bankroll solvency - and being able to short bankroll solvency materially changes the payoff curve of a manipulation attack. The target number goes from the bankroll, to the bankroll + short side exposure on paper. We can, and do limit bankroll size specifically to control this payoff curve and ensure it never becomes existentially problematic, but external perp markets are not something we would have any control over if left to float of their own accord. For example, if our bankroll is $10m, an attack costing $15m manipulating the price of bitcoin or ether is not viable. You simply lose money. If however you were also able to put on $10m of PAPER short side exposure, suddenly an attack costing $15m is very viable indeed.
If we were to make the token transferable at this point, we are confident we would quickly enter a state too dangerous to allow any material exposure to be taken on papertrade, an end result that benefits no party beyond the wolves who have done the math on the short and are waiting in the wings with sharpened knives.
We would also like to thank the various perps teams who have reached out about pre-market listings for their understanding and patience regarding this issue, and especially to the paragon team who, despite jumping the gun on us, have behaved with the utmost integrity and transparency once a dialogue was opened.
Perps on PAPER will always act as a self-limiting exposure ceiling for a token with this type of utility, and we think it would be a shame to limit the growth of papertrade to the extent that allowing perps would necessitate. As such, at this juncture we do not have plans to allow off-contract token transferability.
Structurally, papertrade is limited by the quality of the data it receives from hyperliquid, but we strongly believe that hyperliquid has a very large part to play in the future of global exchanges, and expect their books to continue to thicken and strengthen over time.
A note on fees.
Papertrade launched with a deadband fee from entry of 0.2bps. This means you don't earn anything until the price has moved by 0.002% in your favour. Over the months before launch, we played around with many different curves and fee structures affecting exclusively positions closed very close to entry price in order to try and devise a structure that removed the edge against the bankroll low time frame scalp bots have, whilst also minimally impacting the traders around which and for whom the product was devised. We were never able to find anything we were absolutely happy with and so decided to stay with the 0.2bp deadband fee through launch. This has however meant we have had to be very restrictive when it came to certain parameters, such as OI caps.
Now, however, we have enough live data to fully understand exactly which strategies work, and to make the necessary changes to stop them. The changes we are making will have an on hours and off hours fee mode to account for the relative differences in liquidity the hyperliquid books see between these two time periods, and the ease with which low time frame moves are signalled. The changes we are making will only affect positions closed within 6bps of entry (0.06%) in on hours, and 10bps (0.1%) in off hours. Any trades closed above these threshold price shifts will see no change to their fees at all. On a look back to launch basis, these changes affect the profitability of bot strategies roughly 15x more than they do normal traders, for whom a very small proportion of overall winnings come from within this band.
These changes should serve to flatten much of the edge our microfee structure necessarily creates on low time frames, and will help with long term exchange sustainability. This should hopefully allow us to open up parameters such as OI caps a little more so those of you who wish to can put on the size you want to, when you want to.
It is possible these changes are still too lax, and that further revisions to this structure may be necessary going forwards. If so, we will notify users ahead of time.
A note on paper tokenomics.
In conjunction with the fee changes, we will also be implementing a change to the token issuance curve.
Going forward, every $1 lost mints a fixed share of PAPER's supply at that moment, roughly 0.1% of supply per $1M lost (the exact number depends on the mint rate at the time the contracts are upgraded). PAPER minting in and near insolvency will also change, switching from a flat 100 per $1 of loss, to a time weighted multiplier on the curve growing over time, effectively acting as the house running a discounted auction on its own future cash flows. This change also removes the risk of the paper-mint-straddle-attack, temporarily pushing the protocol insolvent by closing only the winning side of a large straddle position and then attempting to mint as much paper as possible.
In the immediate term these changes will only have a very subtle effect on PAPER minting, but in the long run will structurally change the outlook of the system beyond the first few weeks, serving to slowly dilute out older holders and leaving more recent users with an advantage. Reconstituting the PAPER system into something much closer to the exchange rakeback it was intended to be.
We have been very reticent to touch this particular aspect of the system for obvious reasons, but ultimately we believe that these changes provide all users with the optionality to take a smaller piece of a potentially much larger pie than the current dynamic might necessarily allow.
Other, miscellaneous notes.
These contract upgrades will include a few other contract changes, including the addition of builder codes so that builders can utilise papertrade in whatever capacity they choose to. This will be a whitelist only to begin with and we will have more for you later in the week on where/how this will be rolled out. A small change to contract permissions on the reward distributor and a change on how below bust closes are processed by the exchange are also included, largely to block gas griefing attacks.
These changes will be pushed to docs in full over the coming day, and we will further announce once the changes are queued into the timelock pending final security passes, scheduled to go live 24 hours after that point.
Final note.
We'd like to thank everyone that has tried out papertrade over the last 10 days. It has been a labour of love building this product and both of us have been taken aback at all of the positive feedback we have received. We'd also like to thank all those of you who have spent considerable time musing on the system we have built, and much of your advice has been taken onboard and will likely affect the colour of what papertrade becomes going forward. We know some of these changes will be unpopular with some, but we would not be making them if we did not feel them to be absolutely necessary.
- blurr, jez
Always made my best money by being early: $YFI farming, $LIT referrals etc.
Only 9 days in, and I'm not early to Papertrade anymore.
Early farmers got 100 PAPER per $1 of eligible losses. Now just ~11.
Just feels like I'm an exit liquidity. No?
A $1000 losing trade now gets me ~10.7k PAPER.
Stake it and I'd get ~$2.60 to $4.90 per day if recent payouts continued.
200 to 385 days just to recover my loss. And that excludes new issuance diluting my share.
So once PAPER becomes transferable, some traders might prefer selling to recover losses instead of waiting for yield.
Soooo... The BIG BET on PAPER is whether traders keep gambling after farming stops making sense.
At the end, the product needs to be worth using even when the incentives aren't enough.
For losers, yeah, they get the token.
But winners pay an 'asymmetric-impact haircut' BEFORE the additional 2% fee.
(There are no funding or notional trading fees, so the cost comparison isn't so simple)
How many are here for the product vs deliberately losing because they expect PAPER to pay them back?
That is what one needs to answer.
As Galaxy Research posted:
'Once PAPER becomes transferable, the market price will determine how much farming happens, and that, in turn, will determine long-term revenue.'
So PAPER dumping could mean less farming -> lower payouts -> less reason to hold.
Got rekt from this kind of down spiral a few times.
My next opportunity might be buying from farmers selling to recover losses.
But only if the price makes sense on payouts AFTER farming slows.
So I will treat PAPER as a "revenue token" if it sustains it after a while.
Trading PAPER once it's transferable seems easier to me than trading on Papertrade itself.
Down 50%+ on the degen portfolio after two weeks offline.
Naively hoped the stock meme / casino narrative ( $PONS, $STONK, reward coins like $ZCAT etc) would at least hold valuations while I was away.
But revenue went down bad:
• StonkFun weekly revenue: $5.24M → $1.02M (-80%)
• Pons: $1.57M → $502k (-67%)
• ZCAT's two main pools: trading volume down ~66%
It's risky to hold on degen bags when you can't monitor them 24/7 since sentiment shifted on CT quickly.
The good news: tokenized stocks are actually fine: TVL on Solana and RH are stable-to-recovering
The only bad thing is volumes still down on both.
But if BTC & majors hold, I don't bury the idea that the degen bags can recover.
And the first thing to follow will be increase in volumes that will bring back LPs, better revenue and buybacks with it.
Nothing makes my heart race faster than opening X on a long trip and seeing Ledger hack.
Thankfully these Ledgers seem to be tampered by 3rd party.
Always buy via official website. Stay safe.
Back to my trip. See you in a week.
Ledger is investigating reports of loss of funds from users in South East Asia who purchased products from a reseller named CryptoBillis. As a precaution, and pending the results of our investigation, we have asked CryptoBilis to pause all sales and shipments of Ledger devices. We recommend Ledger users who purchased from this reseller in the last 90 days to not initiate set up if you have not done so yet. If you have set up your Ledger device, consider moving assets to a new Ledger signer (with new seed). We will continue to inform customers of updates as the investigation progresses.
Reach out to Ledger customer support through official channels with any questions: support.ledger.com/
11 of these 15 token sales are underwater.
BUT! Putting equal $ into every sale would leave you break even.
Thanks to $CAP's +610%
Without CAP: down ~44%.
Still not the ICO season?
I think we still under-estimate the importance of pre-IPO and private assets trading onchain.
I bet hedge funds & banks already check perp charts before negotiating a deal.
But with liquidity growing and especially with private equity funds listing onchain, crypto becomes the 'IPO' venue...
And I think in this future, the role of Ethereum grows:
If tradfi 'exits' onchain first, they will need top security because potential rollbacks of chain halts could be costly.
So, my eyes are wide open for companies that decide to not only tokenize there shares onchain but PREFER crypto over tradfi exit.
Tokens looking to bid:
- New ponzitokenomics experiments
- OG teams forgotten by the market but still building
- New projects with disproportional revenue & buybacks
- Tokens that have value accrual from Institutional adoption
- Organic memes
What else? Pls share
People assume higher trading volumes -> superior product.
Yet if volumes are artificially inflated* it distorts the image of popularity.
When I worked at a Korean CEX, remember how much competitors wash traded volumes in Korea but also China etc.
because they would charge higher listing fees (and most token teams had little knowledge on wash-trading).
Following the recent Kalshi drama, I am now unsure how reliable is to use trading volumes for PMs.
*Not saying Kalshi does since I didn't do research myself
Q3 'losers'
Notable ones:
- base:0x98d0baa52b2d063e780de12f615f963fe8537553: despite launching Kaito Pulse and Aura points
- solana:jtojtomepa8beP8AuQc6eXt5FriJwfFMwQx2v2f9mCL: I thought JTX perps could help it but nahhh..
- Canton $CC: Who knows
- $BONK: Struggling to compete with pump, stonk and pons. Upbit delisted it.
- $MEGA: Struggling to reinvent itself. Don't see them more on my timeline :(
Also $XPL despite being 'green' is outperforming btc. Revenue issue? Unlocks too strong?



























