This has massive implications for not just the global economy, but how people find meaning in life.

I’m referring, of course, to when looksmaxxing streamer Clavicular was “brutally frame mogged” by a “frat leader” at ASU.

As of the time I’m writing this, tens of millions of people have watched this “mogging”:

But where others see a tragedy, I see an opportunity.

Mogging could be the solution to what people will do once AI makes millions of jobs obsolete while also initiating deflation-driven superabundance.

First, for those of you that didn’t spend the 2010s in bodybuilding forums and are totally lost, I’ll translate what happened in the above clip.

Mogging is slang for outshining, dominating, or looking significantly better than someone, originating in PUA, redpill and fitness culture before its usage broadened. So “frame-mogging” in the viral post refers to the “frat leader” (a hilarious characterization in and of itself) having a wider, more muscular frame.

In a way, mogging is the perfect encapsulation of what human achievements won’t be replaced by AI. Mogging requires people to meet in person, a shared physical space, and status rather than material constraints.

Mogging is competitive scarcity. Even in a world where physical resources are infinite, status will still be finite.

The Post-AGI Mog Economy

What if mogging could be the answer to questions about meaning and employment in a post-AGI world? Could you build an entire economy around mogging?

Imagine millions of men using post-AGI abundance to spend their days training in the gym, mewing, and optimizing their peptide stacks. Underground mogging rings would pop up to host mog-offs and establish a ranking. Top ranked contenders might travel the world seeking each other out for mog-offs like some sort of anime.

But why limit ourselves to appearance mogging? Some people might choose to train their vocal chords daily to voice-mog. Others might train grip strength to handshake-mog. There’s no shortage of niche physical traits or skills that people can devote themselves to training.

The mog economy would be built around a never ending series of increasingly obscure competitions and status games.

Why AI Can’t Mog

The beauty of these sorts of competitions is that they stay the same, no matter how good AI gets.

AI will be able to do any number of things better than humans, but when it comes to status, competitions and “mogging”, it won’t matter. It’s been 30 years since the first computer beat a chess grandmaster. In that time, chess has actually increased in popularity. People play and watch chess because it’s a test of human cognitive abilities. It doesn’t matter if a computer can do it better.

Millions of people watch the 100-meter dash at the Summer Olympics, despite the fact that cars, horses, and bicycles can all go faster. The drive towards excellence and pushing oneself to the limit is an achievement in and of itself.

AI can one-shot apps, solve unsolved math problems, and make physics discoveries. But it can’t mog.

Abundance and Status

In a world of extreme abundance, people will occupy themselves with status games.

There’s no shortage of air, an essential material for human survival. In the United States at least, potable water is basically free (for the amount you’d need to survive). Even starvation is extremely rare in the developed world. Millions of people are already living in a post-scarcity world for the bottom rung of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, excluding shelter.

But let’s assume for the sake of argument that AI will solve any lingering issues with physiological needs, while solving health issues and causing deflation across a range of goods. That still leaves self-actualization, self-esteem, and love and belonging. These higher-order needs can’t be satisfied by material abundance alone — they require social comparison, recognition, and competition. In other words, they require mogging.

Beautiful Mice and the Post-Scarcity

We actually have experimental evidence for what happens when material needs are fully met. The famous “Universe 25” mouse experiment tested what mice would do in a utopia with no shortages of food, water, or nesting material. A human providing mice all materials to live might be the best analogy to an AGI providing humans all materials to live.

So what happened in Universe 25? As population density grew, a group of mice, dubbed “the beautiful ones” retreated to the edges of the habitat and spent all their time grooming themselves. Maybe something in mammalian instincts drives us to looksmax when all needs are met.

(Many other things happened in Universe 25 that might be worth learning from, like a complete collapse in birthrate.)

We don’t even need to look at mice to see this pattern in action. Many people already live in a post-scarcity world. Billionaires, old money families, European aristocrats, trust fund kids.

What do they choose to do?

Oftentimes the answer is pursue status, whether that’s through athletics, government, luxuries, accolades, art, or media. Even jobs at a certain level are more about status than survival. Remember the business card scene from American Psycho?

In elite professions, the many trivial (but undeniably human) details that go into getting an edge in status occupy an increasing portion of people’s lives.

My friend rektdiomedes recently summed this up:

In a world where everything is automated, the only scarce resource left is being better than the person next to you. Everyone is wondering what we’ll do in a post-AGI economy. Maybe the answer has been standing in front of us the whole time. We’ll mog.

Try Hyperliquid Here: https://app.hyperliquid.xyz/join/DYNAMO

Timestamps:

0:00 Intro
0:56 What is Hyperliquid
1:53 Market Cap vs Revenue Analysis
3:44 Market Share Deep Dive
5:01 Learn More About Hyperliquid and Investments Early
5:19 Unlocks Update
6:18 Hyperliquid Growth Opportunities
9:41 Bringing It All Together

Subscribe now

Related Articles:

This year, I’m planning to deploy time and capital into 7 distinct areas that I believe offer asymmetric upside. Some are massive megatrends that everyone sees coming. Others are overlooked niches where I think I have an edge. One isn’t even a financial instrument, but I think its ROI will be just as high as the others. Several of these aren’t even easy to copy unless you’re me; they’re a snapshot of where I’m personally putting time, attention, and money in 2026.

Subscribe now

1) Digital Properties

“First time founders focus on product. Second time founders focus on distribution.”

This year, one of my main focuses is going to be on building digital “real estate” to control distribution. By digital real estate I mean niche social accounts, websites, YouTube channels, Facebook groups, Telegram news feeds, etc. Anything that gets eyes online.

Controlling digital property is like owning property with a storefront. Rather than walking by, users encounter the property in searches, from LLMs or on social media. Like a storefront, their attention can be redirected to products, either that you own yourself or that you’re advertising.

I’m going to be blunt here. If you haven’t started building an audience already, you’re at a disadvantage. AI has dramatically lowered the cost of content creation, flooding the Internet with slop.

It’s more difficult to build an audience than it was 5 years ago. However, it’s only going to become more difficult from here. I suspect in another 5 years, we’ll look back on how easy it was to build an audience in 2026.

If you’re just starting, here’s my recommendation:

1. Choose a niche with enough of an audience to get feedback, but that isn’t oversaturated.

2. Start. ←The most important part

3. Iterate on what works.

Nowadays, most web traffic goes through a small number of sites. Building out pages and groups on other sites is likely a better use of time than building standalone sites.

In particular, I think groups on Facebook and X are underrated as a distribution mechanism. I already started a DeFi group on X that has over 18K members. I plan to acquire or create more groups in 2026.

I’ve also already started the process of creating niche DeFi tools, content sites, bots, and social accounts. Some of these will be tied to my name. Some won’t be.

By the end of the year, I intend to have dozens of digital properties in the finance and crypto niches. These will compound with each other and enable me to more easily launch new properties and businesses in the future.

AI makes it easier than ever to launch and maintain content and micro-saas pages.

Earlier this year, I vibe-coded a few geography games and then left them alone. Now they organically get nearly 1K plays per week. And that’s without any marketing.

Nothing is stopping you from cooking up something interesting except for yourself (more on this in investment 6).

By the way, if you aren’t already, subscribe to my Substack and YouTube for more strategies on building digital property in the future.

Subscribe now

2) Uranium and Those That Mine It

Uranium is one of the most reflexive, explosive assets in the world.

The AI boom demands energy and nuclear is one of the cheapest, most reliable ways to provide that at scale.

Despite being critical to operations, uranium is actually only a fraction of the cost for nuclear plants (~10-20%). As a result, demand for uranium tends to be highly price inelastic, while supply faces severe constraints.

The structural supply deficit is projected to widen after 2025, pushing prices up further.

Now the US is likely starting a strategic uranium reserve, adding more demand pressure.

There are a few ways to speculate on uranium:

1. Invest in the spot uranium via the Sprott Physical Uranium Trust (SPUT).

2. Invest in an ETF of Uranium miners through URNM. Miners tend to act as beta to the spot uranium price as price increases lead to margin expansion.

3. Invest in specific miners.

My main position in uranium miners (and my largest equity position in any industry) is in (Energy Fuels). I’m expecting the US strategic uranium reserve to prioritize US miners. Energy Fuels operates the only conventional mill in the US and is also a play on domestic production of rare earths.

US production of uranium is down significantly from a decade ago.

Energy Fuels combines a national security related mandate with a structural supply deficit that is pushing prices higher. Full disclosure, I first-invested in years ago when it was much cheaper, though I’ve added more to my position on the recent dip.

I wrote my thesis on uranium in more detail here.

3) Revenue-Generating DeFi Protocols

Yes, I’m still investing in crypto.

But not just any cryptos. Cryptos that are linked to profitable Decentralized Finance applications. DeFi is mature enough that certain teams are leveraging the global distribution of crypto and backend automation of smart contracts to generate huge profits with a small headcount. Identifying and investing in those teams is the single best opportunity in the industry right now.

You can easily track revenue data for crypto apps through DefiLlama. I look for applications that have generated significant revenue over multiple years and that pass on that revenue to tokenholders either in the form of dividends or buybacks. At this point, too many tokenholders have gotten shafted by bad tokenomics from protocols that appeared successful on paper, which is why unlike previous years, I’m planning to be highly selective with my investments.

I will only be investing in protocols that have proven their ability to operate and are generating real revenue. In general, to be considered, a protocol will need to meet these criteria:

• Producing significant revenue compared to its market cap today

• Value accrual to token holders

• Strong performance over multiple years

• Teams that have a proven ability to execute

Two projects qualify at the moment: Hyperliquid and Aerodrome.

Despite competitors with airdrop programs and well-funded backers, Hyperliquid’s share of Perp DEX OI has remained remarkably steady over the past 3 months.

Moreover, Hyperliquid ended December as the highest-revenue perp DEX by far, generating over $56M in revenue.

Barring a total collapse of the perp DEX market or a competitor that produces a materially better product, I still believe it is one of the best fundamental plays in the industry.

Aerodrome, the leading DEX on Base has also demonstrated a remarkable ability to generate revenue, year-after-year. They have generated over $1m in revenue for tokenholders every month for over 2 years now. They’re expanding to Ethereum mainnet, providing more growth potential in the future.

This year, I’ll be covering these investments, how to earn yield on them, and any more I decide to buy in my newsletter.

Subscribe now

4) Space & Satellites

I’m fighting the urge to dump my entire portfolio into SpaceX post-IPO and focus on other pursuits than investing for a decade.

Even based on the fundamentals today alone, the space industry has phenomenal fundamentals. The cost per kg of sending items to space has dropped from around $54k/kg on the Space Shuttle to $1.5k/kg on Falcon Heavy. Estimates have this dropping below $1k/kg on the Starship, potentially even below $100/kg. Every drop in cost, dramatically increases the range of extraplanetary ventures that are profitable.

Starlink added 4.6 million users in 2025 to reach 9.2 million active subscribers. This along with the burgeoning data center satellite business can push the space industry far beyond its current size.

But even this understates the unbounded, massive upside of space.

What’s the potential upside of controlling all orbital and interplanetary logistics? What’s the potential GDP of the Solar System? Most investors are vastly underestimating the scale of space and how quickly things could accelerate.

Robotics will allow mining and manufacturing to begin on the Moon, Mars, and asteroids even before humans have a significant presence there.

Elon recently wrote this:

(Mass drivers are electromagnetic catapults that offer promise as an alternative to rockets in spacelaunch). He usually thinks about a decade in the future. So I’m expecting mining and manufacturing on the Moon to ramp up before then.

I don’t want to get too fancy here. My plan is to start buying SpaceX post-IPO and keep buying it until this thesis has played out or changed.

5) Mycological Pursuits (Mushroom Farming)

Mycology is one of the most understudied, highest potential fields to exist in 2026.

Fungi have huge potential:

Mycoremediation: Some fungi can break down oil spills, plastics, and even radioactive waste.

Medicine: Numerous medicines are already created from fungi. Penicillin, Cephalosporins, lovastatin, Ergotamine, and many others. This is with the vast majority of fungi species unidentified or unstudied.

Estimates are that 2-13 million species of fungi exist. Around 150,000 have been described. And fewer than 10,000 have been studied in depth. AI will enable a step function in how quickly species can be identified and studied for medicinal use.

Recently, studies have also suggested that psilocybin has promise for PTSD treatment and longevity.

And these are just the technologies that are within reach today. Fungi has also been proposed for more futuristic uses like bio-mining, extraterrestrial agriculture, mycelium-based construction materials, and bio-computing.

Even without these moonshot applications, the US mushroom market is projected to grow at 9.4% CAGR through 2030. This is primarily driven by demand for exotic foods and alternatives to animal products. I believe that with new industrial uses of mushrooms, the ceiling is much higher and not priced in.

I don’t know exactly how I’m going to invest in mushrooms yet. But I trust myself to figure it out, likely in the second half of the year. To start, I’m planning to learn a lot more about mycology and the mushroom industry. I’ve started growing lion’s mane (a nootropic mushroom), reading books, and reaching out to mushroom farmers.

I have an advantage here in that I live relatively close to the mushroom capital of the US and can drive there to learn more about the industry. But I always say it’s good to maximize your advantages. This is also part of my motivation for dabbling in this field as I believe my geographic advantage increases my likelihood of finding an edge.

6) Courage-maxxing

This one isn’t an investment in the same way as the others, but I believe the ROI will be just as high.

In a world where AI can generate anything, the new barrier to entry is agency. Most frequently, the missing ingredient in agency is courage.

In the modern world, we’re often divorced from actions that require courage. And perhaps that’s why so many things that ought to be done, are not.

Courage is a muscle like anything else. And, like a muscle, it needs to be trained. Do combat sports, start a business, become a volunteer firefighter, speak in public, take an unpopular position.

This year, I am going to invest significant effort into actions that require courage. Although this might seem like the least important item on this list, I actually consider it the most important. Because, it’s only through courage that my more ambitious goals are possible.

7) QQQ

For most people, just DCAing into the NASDAQ is the best use of time.

I’m not enough of an expert in AI to have any edge and my attention is already spread too thin with all of the above investments. I do know that AI and tech more broadly are going to eat the world over the next decade. The NASDAQ is the simplest, lowest effort way to get exposure to that.

Final Word

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed this, I publish more research and thoughts like it on my Substack regularly

It’s the time of the crypto cycle when people start quitting, leaving, crashing out. Declaring that crypto is over. Regretting the years they spent in this industry. Arguing the tech will never be used for anything beyond crime and speculation.

You see this every few years.

This is not a vague call for “alt season.” But it is a call to be optimistic and understand that this is the best environment in history for building a real business in crypto. In this piece, I’ll share ideas that are waiting to be built and that have potential that extend beyond the normal Crypto Twitter silo. This is a list of ideas that are actionable, grounded, and capable of having real-world impact immediately.

First, an important disclaimer, because this type of post is usually written by VCs.

I am not a VC. I am not an investment fund of any kind. I am not an angel investor.

To put it more clearly, I cannot help you fund these ideas.

If you reach out saying you want to build something, I’ll genuinely be happy the article inspired you. But I won’t be able to give you money.

At most I may be able to pass you a retweet or a strategic introduction if I happen to know someone.

What I am is someone who built a successful DeFi media business. One of the larger DeFi YouTube channels. And someone who built out the recurring revenue program at one of the largest DeFi data companies.

That matters, because many of the ideas in this article come from opportunities I’ve seen firsthand.

I’ve been a heavy user of DeFi products for about half a decade. Between that and my work in the industry, I’ve developed strong views on what works, what doesn’t, and where there is actual opportunity.

Some people may reasonably ask why I don’t build some of these ideas myself. For one thing, I’m already having a sizable impact on the industry by running revenue and growth for @DefiLlama. For another thing, I actually would like to build several of these ideas. Part of me is hoping that no one who reads this chooses to build those particular ideas. But I thought they were too perfect to leave out and ultimately I’ll be happy to see someone else turn them into reality.

Subscribe now

Starting From First Principles

To figure out which ideas would actually be useful, and not just appeal to crypto speculators, it helps to start from first principles.

And by first principles here, I mean something very simple: Why is crypto actually useful?

What are its inherent advantages over traditional finance?

Once you’re honest about that, you can work from first principles to come up with ideas that provide value without relying on the fact that they’re “crypto for X” and without relying on token incentives for people to use apps they would otherwise never dream of opening.

You stop forcing crypto into places it doesn’t belong. And start identifying businesses that actually make sense on crypto rails.

For this, I’ll start by identifying the core value propositions that would make crypto rails preferable to traditional rails. Among these are:

Global access to capital. With crypto, there are no forex fees or restrictions moving money across borders.

Instant settlement, 24/7. There’s no need to wait X business days for transfers.

Privacy. Not every crypto has this. Those that do enable true uncensorable applications.

Low fees. In addition to the straightforward advantage of this (i.e. payments without a credit card fee), this opens up an entire array of applications like streaming payments that aren’t possible with a higher fixed fee.

Programmability and composability. Because digital assets are bearer assets controlled by code rather than intermediaries, they can be used across decentralized applications and deposited into smart contracts which make them more useful.

Permissionlessness. Anyone can access crypto, anywhere, at any time. This makes the technology ideal for those at risk of debanking to fundraise and for testing out financial products that would normally need to jump through a lot of regulatory loopholes.

Transparency. Tracking things like ownership and onchain financials can happen in real-time with crypto, allowing for automation of normally intensive corporate processes.

I’ve divided the ideas in this article into 5 buckets, each of which taps into several of these value propositions of crypto:

1. Internet capital markets: global access to capital, programmability and composability, permissionlessness

2. Censorship resistance: privacy, permissionlessness, global access to capital

3. DeSci: global access to capital, programmability and composability

4. Stablecoins: all value propositions

5. Onchain Corporate Governance: transparency

Subscribe now

Internet Capital Markets (And Why the Term Got Confused)

A large part of the future of crypto, and part of the future of finance and the internet in general, is internet capital markets.

This term has gotten a bad name recently. Mostly because it’s been used to apply the meme-coin model to things that were barely different from meme coins. Much of that involved poorly designed tokenomics and framing speculation as ownership.

Honestly, we may need new, fresh terminology. But the framework itself is correct.

Here’s what I think Internet Capital Markets actually are:

True Internet Capital Markets are not about speculation-first tokens. They’re about making cash flows natively investable on the internet.

You can imagine a future where not just onchain DeFi apps, but everything, has its cash flows tokenized.

That includes real world cash-flowing businesses, dividend producing equities, royalty streams, real estate, your friend’s HVAC roll-up, apps, micro-SaaS portfolios, and onchain and offchain products.

These become investable, tradable, organizable into entirely new financial products. Globally, permissionlessly, with minimal fees.

That’s what real Internet Capital Markets are.

I believe that each of these markets is ripe for someone to create applications for raising capital and distributing cash flows to investors onchain:

1. Small businesses

2. Micro-SAAS and Information Products

3. Royalty streams

4. Creator revenue

Capital Formation in a World Where “Friends and Family” Is Breaking

Traditionally, when people started businesses, they raised money from friends and family. That’s still largely true for small businesses and small real estate deals.

But the social reality has changed. People have smaller families. Friends are global. Friends are often in different countries.

It’s no longer trivial to ask friends to contribute capital, do it legally, or even to logistically collect capital.

Internet Capital Markets make this possible again. But globally. Across many asset classes.

Even more interesting, cash flows from those investments can then be repackaged, combined, and used in other financial products. Once millions of businesses and products have their cash flows tokenized, it’s possible to use primitives that have already been stress-tested on crypto-native DeFi to create new products on top of those assets.

Censorship Resistance Is Not Optional

Another core aspect of crypto assets is censorship resistance.

This comes down to permissionlessness and privacy.

Public blockchains already give us permissionlessness. Privacy has been largely neglected.

And I say this as someone whose current work depends on onchain transparency. But for many applications, privacy is preferable or mandatory.

The Line Between Allowed and Disallowed Is Moving

You may think you don’t need censorship resistance, but can you be so sure that you won’t tomorrow?

You can already see this in parts of Europe: crackdowns on dissidents, bank accounts being closed, people arrested over social media posts.

The next step seems obvious: political movements losing access to fundraising, bank accounts frozen, payment rails cut off entirely.

When that happens, how do those movements continue to function?

The obvious answer: crypto-based networks.

There are several products in this niche that crypto is perfect for:

1. Censorship-resistant fundraising for political groups. European governments are increasingly cracking down on populist political parties. It’s only a matter of time before the ability for those parties to use the banking system is hamstrung. Crypto-based solutions would allow them to raise and store funds without fear of debanking. To avoid reprisals against members, privacy is also preferable here.

2. Uncensorable crowdfunding. Even crowdfunding platforms that espouse the virtues of censorship resistance are ultimately at the mercy of payment processors. And activists and governments in the past have tried to shut down fundraisers by pressuring payment processors to threaten those platforms. Moving to crypto rails solves this problem instantly. If payments are on a decentralized network, there’s no one to pressure. The enemies of free speech can only screech into the void.

DeSci: Where AI and Internet Capital Markets Intersect

AI is making it easier than ever for individuals and small teams to conduct original scientific research.

You’re already seeing this with protein folding and other scientific breakthroughs. AI can ingest massive amounts of literature and data to find connections that might take decades to discover manually.

But discovery alone isn’t enough. Bringing ideas to market still requires capital.

This is where DeSci fills a real gap.

The Problem DeSci Solves

In a prior life, I worked at a pediatric cancer research nonprofit. The opportunities for DeSci to add value in medical grants and research are numerous.

If you look at smaller or lesser-known diseases, they’re often too small for pharma or not profitable in the near term. As a result, they rely on leftover drugs or receive minimal funding.

With permissionless global capital markets, you can find people who actually care.

When combined with AI, small teams or individuals can realistically attempt research.

One of the saddest scenarios is to encounter people with extremely rare diseases (i.e. they’re 1 of 20 people with this diagnosis). Research towards a cure is 0. The probability of research occurring is also basically 0.

This makes it realistic that someone might try anyway. And might even succeed.

This also applies to diseases with a large footprint, but which are deprioritized by big pharma companies.

Returning Capital in DeSci

Funding is only half the stack.

You also need a way to verify results and, in some cases, return value to funders, to package IP and royalties, to distribute returns.

Onchain milestone-based unlocks reduce admin overhead and push more money into actual research. This increased transparency also allows contributors to know where money is going, increasing the amount of capital they’re willing to contribute.

One opportunity to make these sorts of DeSci projects more investable would be to borrow the portfolio model from VC and film financing. One breakout can fund the rest.

One might construct a portfolio of 10 moonshot projects. Investors are funding a basket of research projects, increasing the surface area for breakthrough discoveries. In the event that a treatment is developed, AI tools could also help to identify other areas it could be commercialized.

Stablecoins: The Least Controversial Opportunity

The Stablecoin supply is already over $300B. Hundreds of billions added in the last two years.

Treasury forecasts put it near $3T by the end of the decade. That’s only 4 years away in case the last few years were a blur for you.

Conservatively, hundreds of billions more will move onchain. Optimistically, trillions.

And that doesn’t even account for what’s already onchain and underutilized.

Two Stablecoin Business Categories: Savings and Spending

A. Savings

People globally want to hold dollars. Especially in developing markets.

Despite flaws, the dollar is still stable, liquid, and the global trade standard.

But there are many saving products that can be built with stables that would far exceed what’s possible with tradfi. For example, one can imagine savers preferring custom currency and commodity baskets with yield from LPing forex pairs.

B. Spending and Use

Stablecoin advantages include instant settlement, no cross-border fees, minimal transaction costs, and always-on availability.

Several businesses already prove this works.

Here are a few fields ripe for stablecoin payments to be implemented:

1. Gig platforms. Labor arbitrage often involves cross-border payments and cumbersome transfers between accounts.

2. Remittances. Money wire services are probably the first businesses to be adversely affected by crypto. But there’s room for improved services that bridge the final gap between cash and crypto payments.

3. Disaster relief. Stablecoin distributions to mobile wallets can be used to bypass bureaucracy, corruption, and banking failures in disaster and warzones.

Programmable Money and Streaming Payments

Another key benefit of stablecoins is that they’re programmable.

This enables continuous payment streams, not discrete pay periods. LlamaPay is a great example of this.

There are many other products that could be built on this concept:

1. Streamed payments could be linked to payroll software. Clock in, pay stream starts. Clock out, pay stops. Paid up to the exact second instantly. No waiting two weeks for a paycheck and no uncertainty about whether you’ll be paid (an issue in some jurisdictions).

2. Pay-as-you-go SAAS. The world has subscription fatigue. Subscriptions to software and APIs could be linked to streaming payments, enabling users to pay only as they’re using a product, creating a cleaner link between usage and revenue and avoiding the need for invoices, billing, etc.

Onchain Corporate Governance (Beyond DAOs)

DAO governance has (justifiably) become a meme.

But corporate governance onchain may be one of crypto’s most transformative uses.

Even traditional finance leaders have acknowledged that onchain voting reduces massive overhead. Blackrock CEO Larry Fink wrote, “Tokenization makes that easier because your ownership and voting rights are digitally tracked, allowing you to vote seamlessly and securely from anywhere.”

DAO governance failed because people tried to implement direct democracy, which is a terrible way to run a business.

What Governance Should Look Like

Token holders fear their tokens don’t mean anything. That fear is often justified.

But the solution isn’t voting on everything.

Governance should mimic corporate structures, encode rights, protect minority shareholders, elect boards, and let management manage.

Day-to-day decisions should never be made by shareholders or tokenholders. Instead, tokenholders should elect a board that appoints management. Or, if a board carries too many legal connotations, shareholders could elect a CEO directly, who oversees company operations. There are ways to encode this onchain, such as allowing a majority of tokenholders to vote to take control of the treasury.

A product that replicates this corporate structure onchain is waiting to be built.

From Crypto Governance to Real Companies

Thousands of existing protocols are a sandbox. If this works, it can be stress-tested, proven, and iterated.

Eventually, it can be applied to real public companies with onchain equity and onchain shareholder voting.

In this way, there’s a clear path from niche DAO tooling to public equities market infrastructure.

Other Corporate Governance Products

As an ecosystem of companies conducting corporate governance onchain is built out, there is room for a variety of other related products:

• Quarterly and other financial reporting. A lot of pain and uncertainty could have been avoided in the crypto market over the past few years with standardized financial disclosures, treasury movements, token emissions, buybacks, and material events. All of these tools can later be applied to other businesses that move onchain.

• M&A tooling. As crypto teams run out of runway, expect a wave of consolidation and acquisitions. There’s an opportunity for a platform to execute this in a way that accounts for existing tokenholders: allowing token-for-token swaps, payouts, treasury consolidation and more, transparently.

• Public company onboarding. Tools for public companies to experiment with and phase in onchain voting without breaking existing structures.

• Compensation management. Tooling to manage performance-based bonuses (verified by onchain milestones), vesting, and other compensation management.

The Compounding Effect

One beauty of the next few years is that each real cash flow and payment stream brought onchain makes DeFi rails more useful and increases the value of other primitives.

All of the ideas in this article could add real value today. But the real magic comes when thousands of real businesses exist onchain and the DeFi primitives that have been stress-tested the past 5 years can be repurposed for those exogenous cash flows.

Subscribe now

Back with another Friday Q&As as well as some perspective on recent market moves.

Read more

How we got here

I first created this Substack to provide a source of reliable information on the crypto market: the most interesting articles, onchain insights, upcoming events, and tools.

Later, I added the paid substack to provider deeper onchain insights and add a source of signal amidst the noise that is the crypto market. The idea was to focus on which narratives were forming and driving the market, based on the onchain metrics.

And I couldn’t be more grateful for everyone that’s supported this publication over the years. I mean that from the bottom of my heart.

More recently, a few things have changed:

First, crypto went much more mainstream. When I started this newsletter almost 3 years ago, the idea that major payment processors and banks would be betting the farm on the digital asset industry seemed far-fetched. Now, billion dollar acquisitions in the industry barely make the news.

Second, the crypto industry diverged more sharply into institutions and hyper speculation.

The old meta of trading new narratives or chains has largely been solved or abandoned. As a result, hype cycles tend to burn out in hours, if they exist at all. Think about how many new L1s have raised at huge valuations pre-launch and then bled out post-launch.

Simultaneously, numerous other opportunities have arisen for altcoin traders to earn outsized returns. Prediction markets for one. Equities for another: certain sectors like quantum computing and batteries have posted altcoin-level returns, but without the perception that there’s nothing underlying their value.

The end result of all of this is that, despite digital asset adoption doing better than ever, Dynamo DeFi has not benefited from that growth. Something has to change.

What next?

As a result of this, I’m making a few major changes to this newsletter:

1. Dynamo DeFi will no longer be producing regular weekly newsletters

2. Instead, I will focus on original, unique analysis and evergreen resources

My plan for these new posts is a healthy mix of video and articles. The overarching theme of them will be to provide maximum value and to help you navigate the digital asset space whether you are a beginner or expert.

These premium posts will focus on targeted onchain analysis. Answering questions like:

• How do I see this industry evolving based on concrete evidence?

• Do airdrops lead to long-term user growth?

• Which DeFi categories capture the most revenue?

You can find an example of the type of content I’ll be putting out in the future here:

I’m also planning to do Q&As every Friday. This will be a chance for paid subscribers to ask questions about anything related to crypto, finance or business that I’ll answer quickly:

I’m also planning to create more free evergreen resources like this prediction market tools list:

In addition to ending this publication’s weekly newsletter, I am also deprecating the Dynamo DeFi Discord. Unfortunately, as a one-man operation, I no longer have the resources to moderate it and, with altcoin trading and DeFi farming slowing down significantly, activity has plummeted anyways. The Telegram group for people on Sovereign Member plans will remain unaffected; however, I’ve disabled renewals of this plan.

I also generally want to bring more things onto Substack itself since this platform is growing rapidly and adding new features. So I’ve activated the subscriber chat for paid subscribers to chat about DeFi, digital assets, and investing strategies there. My hope is that this chat, the Q&As, and possibly more will be able to do an even better job of helping subscribers to navigate the digital assets market.

Subscribe now

What about YouTube?

Long-time subscribers probably know that I have more subscribers on YouTube than here. Significantly more in fact:

I’m planning to keep my YouTube active and will experiment with different topics. Most of those will focus on DeFi, but I may venture into adjacent topics as well.

With AI poised to decimate white collar work as we know it, the US Dollar slowly rolling towards a crisis, and a world after fiat looking like a reality in our lifetimes, we’re in the midst of one of the biggest economic transitions in recent memory. I’ll focus my content on helping people to navigate and understand that change.

I’m also always open to suggestions. Feel free to comment here with what sort of videos you’d like to see.

Final Thoughts

I don’t want you to take away from this post that my long term conviction in this industry and asset class has changed. In fact, recent news, like Stripe going deeper into stablecoins, only confirms my thesis that huge portions of financial activity will move onchain.

The future of finance is onchain, everything is going digital, and the economy is shifting in unprecedented ways. I plan on publishing content to help people navigate this change for as long as I’m able to.

Until next time,

Patrick

Dynamo DeFi

The tools are organized into sections as follows:

1. Analytics

2. Trading Bots, Terminals & Automation

3. Arbitrage Tools

4. Alerts & Notifications

5. Portfolio Tracking & Copytrading

6. News & Educational Resources

7. Parlay Platforms

8. API & Developer Tools

9. Aggregators & Search

10. Subscribe now

Analytics

Parsec

Real time analytics terminal for Polymarket

Website: https://parsec.fi/

X: https://x.com/parsec_finance

Pizzint Watch

Polymarket map and OSINT market tracker to see geopolitical positions

Website: https://www.pizzint.watch/

X: https://x.com/pizzintwatch

DefiLlama

Analytics on prediction market volume, deposits and open interest. Other fundamental onchain metrics for related markets.

Website: https://defillama.com/protocols/prediction-market

X: https://x.com/DefiLlama

Token Terminal

Volume and other metrics for prediction markets.

Website: https://tokenterminal.com/explorer/markets/prediction-markets

X: https://x.com/tokenterminal

Tremor

Data terminal for prediction-markets, monitors live Polymarket & Kalshi markets for big moves

Website: https://www.tremor.live/

X: https://x.com/tremorsh

Hashdive

Comprehensive platform for Polymarket and Kalshi analytics, ranging from smart users to market analysis

Website: https://www.hashdive.com/

X: https://x.com/hash_dive

Polymarket Analytics

Market and traders analysis on polymarket as well as activity analysis

Website: https://polymarketanalytics.com/

X: https://x.com/poly_data

Polysights

AI-powered polymarket analytics page, including insiders and leaderboard for traders

Website: https://app.polysights.xyz/

X: https://x.com/Polysights

Monitor the Situation

Institutional-grade dashboard aggregating live orderbooks and cross-market spreads on Polymarket/Kalshi/Limitless

Website: https://monitorthesituation.lol/

X: https://x.com/monitor_labs

PredictFolio

Polymarket trader-analytics tool, tracks and compares wallet stats, PnL, volume, historical performance

Website: https://predictfolio.com/

X: https://x.com/PredictFolio

Forcazt

Prediction market analytics platform powered by AI

Website: https://forcazt.xyz/

X: https://x.com/forcazt_xyz

Metaforecast

Search engine for probabilities that compiles predictions from a variety of sources

Website: https://metaforecast.org/

X: https://x.com/metaforecast

Wethr

Weather charts and analytics for trading weather markets

Website: https://wethr.net/

X: https://x.com/Wethrnet

PredictShark

Creating combo trades on Polymarket

Website: https://www.predictshark.io/

X: https://x.com/predictshark

Polytrend

Prediction market positions analytics platform

Website: https://www.polytrend.xyz/

X: https://x.com/Poly_trendAI

Predicting Top

Leaderboard for prediction market trader (currently featuring Kalshi and Polymarket)

Website: https://predicting.top/

X: https://x.com/predictingtop

EventWaves

Prediction market positions analytics platform

Website: https://www.eventwaves.io/

X: https://x.com/EventWavesIO

Predicts.guru

Polymarkets wallet analytics platform

Website: https://www.predicts.guru/

X: https://x.com/predictsguru

PredScan

Monitor Twitter KOLs on Polymarket

Website: https://predscan.io/

X: https://x.com/PredScan

PolyWallet

Polymarkets wallet analytics platform

Website: https://polywallet.info/

X: https://x.com/poly_wallet

FirePolymarket

Spotting markets with low probability but high capital invested

Website: https://firepolymarket.com/

X: https://x.com/FirePolymarket

PolyTrack

Analytics for tracking and measuring wallet strength on Polymarket

Website: https://polytrack.cash/

X: https://x.com/polytrackerr

Prediction Hunt

Analyze and spot opportunities across prediction markets

Website: https://predictionhunt.com/

Wandly

Arbitrage finder across prediction markets

Website: https://wandly.xyz/

X: https://x.com/wandly_xyz

PolyTimer

Advanced polymarket analytics browser extension

Website: https://polytimer.fun/

X: https://x.com/PolyTimer

Subscribe now

Trading Bots, Terminals & Automation

TradeFox

Trading terminal for prediction markets

Website: https://thetradefox.com/

X: https://x.com/tradefoxai

Tryokbet

Prediction market telegram trading bot

Website: https://tryokbet.com/

X: https://x.com/tryokbet

Flipr

Social front for prediction markets, trade on Polymarket and Kalshi with leverage and risk tools

Website: https://flipr.bot/

X: https://x.com/fliprbot

Polytrader

AI-powered companion for Polymarket

Website: https://www.polytrader.ai/

X: https://x.com/polytraderAI

Polymtrade

Mobile trading terminal for Polymarket

Website: https://polym.trade/

X: https://x.com/polymtrade

Stand

Terminal for trading, with live feeds and tools for trading multiple markets simultaneously.

Website: https://www.stand.trade/

X: https://x.com/StandDOTtrade

Predictify

Telegram prediction-market bot aggregating Polymarket and Solana markets

Website: https://t.me/Predictify_bot

X: https://x.com/Predictifybot

Pigeon

AI-powered prediction markets trading bot

Website: https://pigeon.trade/

X: https://x.com/pigeon_trade

PolyBot

Polymarket trading bot

Website: https://polybot.trading/

X: https://x.com/TradePolyBot

Predicton

Trade prediction markets on Telegram

Website: https://predicton-guide.gitbook.io/

X: https://x.com/predicton_tbot

PolyScope Bot

Telegram bot for tracking polymarket trader real time

Website: https://t.me/PolymarketWalletBot

X: https://x.com/PolyScopeBot

PolyFocus

Polymarket copy trading bot

Website: https://t.me/polyfocusbot

X: https://x.com/PolyfocusBot

PolyXBot

Polymarket Twitter trading bot

Website: https://www.polyxbot.org/

X: https://x.com/PolyXbot

AIXBET

AI-powered terminal for prediction markets to know what smart money are doing

Website: https://www.aixbet.ai/

X: https://x.com/aixbet_ai

Sharpe Terminal

Research + trading terminal for prediction markets

Website: https://beta.sharpeterminal.com/

X: https://x.com/SharpeTerminal

Arbitrage Tools

ArbBets

Prediction market Arbitrage bot

Website: https://getarbitragebets.com/

X: https://x.com/ArbBets20

Eventarb

Manually calculate arbitrage

Website: https://www.eventarb.com/

Polytrage

Real-time Polymarket arbitrage alerts

Website: http://t.me/polytrage

X: https://x.com/TGpolytrage

PolyScalping

Real time detection of arbitrage and scalping opportunity across all polymarket market

Website: https://polyscalping.org/

X: https://x.com/PolyScalping

Subscribe now

Alerts & Notifications

MobyScreener Predictions Feed

Live feed of smart money buys on prediction markets.

Website: https://www.mobyscreener.com/predictions-feed

X: https://x.com/mobyagent

PolyAlertHub

Real-time alert tool for Polymarket, sending instant price, whale, and top-trader notifications

Website: https://polyalerthub.com/

X: https://x.com/PolyAlertHub

Nevua Markets

Live-watchlist and alert tool for Polymarket

Website: https://nevua.markets/

X: https://x.com/nevuamarkets

Polyprophet

AI-powered predictions for Polymarket

Website: https://polyprophet.com/

X: https://x.com/polyprophet_com

PolySpy

Notifications for new markets

Website: https://t.me/PolySpy_bot

X: https://x.com/PolySpybot

PolyIntel

Native polymarket trading on Telegram

Website: https://t.me/PolyIntel_bot

X: https://x.com/noctus91

PolyPulse

AI News Insights for Polymarket browser extension

Website: https://www.polypulse.tech/

Portfolio Tracking & Copytrading

Polyburg

Tracking profitable polymarket trader’s wallets

Website: https://polyburg.com/

X: https://x.com/polyburg

PolyCopy

TG bot for tracking Polymarket wallets

Website: https://polymark.et/product/polycopy#

X: https://x.com/PolyCopy_bot

Polymarket Bros

Track and copytrade Polymarket traders

Website: http://brosonpm.trade/

X: https://x.com/BrosOnPM

Paperhand Checker

Paste your wallet to see how much you have missed out on Polymarket

Website: https://paperhanded.online/

Polycool

Track and copy polymarket traders right from TG

Website: https://polycool.live/

X: https://x.com/PolycoolApp

Prediedge

Real-time Polymarket whales tracking

Website: https://polymark.et/product/prediedge#

X: https://x.com/prediedge

PolyInsider

Polymarket whale tracking

Website: https://polyinsider.io/

X: https://x.com/PolyInsider_

News & Educational Resources

Polyfacts

AI-powered research and real-time news for Polymarket / Kalshi

Website: https://www.polyfactual.com/

X: https://x.com/polyfactual

Adjacent News

Platform combining prediction-market data and contextual news

Website: https://adj.news/

X: https://x.com/AdjacentNews

Prophet

Crypto-prediction-market platform for event markets and forecasting

Website: https://www.prophetnotes.com/

X: https://x.com/prophet_notes

Prediction News

News + educational platform for prediction markets

Website: https://predictionnews.com/

X: https://x.com/PredictionNews

Polynews

Real-time news derived from Polymarket position odds

Website: https://polynews.in/

X: https://x.com/thepolynews

The Oracle by Polymarket

Elaborate news about Polymarket positions

Website: https://news.polymarket.com/

X: https://x.com/polymarketinfo

PolymarketGuide

Polymarket study guide

Website: https://polymarketguide.gitbook.io/

X: https://x.com/PolymarketGuide

Parlay Platforms

Clutch

Decentralized parlay and prediction-market platform

Website: http://ape.clutch.market/

X: https://x.com/clutchmarkets

BetStack

Stack sport bets

Website: https://alpha.betstack.app/

X: https://x.com/BetStackapp

API & Developer Tools

Dome

API for real-time market prices, historical candlestick data, wallet analytics, order tracking, and cross-platform market matching

Website: https://domeapi.io/

X: https://x.com/getdomeapi

Aggregators & Search

Converge

Cross venue search engine for Prediction markets

Website: https://converge.market/

X: https://x.com/ConvergeMarkets

Second week with this new format where I take questions from paid subscribers here on Substack. Ask anything from in-depth questions about fundamentals to basics about where to find opportunities onchain.

Also, I have some more posts coming soon. Here’s what’s on the horizon:

1. The Future of Dynamo DeFi: I’ve changed up the Substack format rece…

Read more

I’m trying out a new format where I take questions here on Substack. This is intended as a place to ask anything from in-depth questions about fundamentals to basics about where to find opportunities onchain.

Read more

For the past 5 years, tokens have enjoyed what I like to politely call “speculative demand in excess of fundamentals.” Less politely, they’ve been way overvalued.

The reason why is straightforward: there haven’t been that many liquid assets in the crypto industry with good fundamentals. So investors have been reduced to getting exposure via the only assets they can, which tend to be Bitcoin or altcoins. Add to this retail traders who heard stories about Bitcoin millionaires and wanted to throw money at replicating those returns on newer, smaller coins.

This created a demand for purchasing altcoins which far outstripped the supply of altcoins with actually solid fundamentals.

The first order effect? You could buy anything when sentiment hit a low and a few years later you’d make incredible returns.

The second order effect? Most industry business models, if you can call them that, revolved around selling their own tokens rather than actual revenue streams tied to their product.

Subscribe now

Three things happened in the past 2 years which were cataclysmic for the altcoin market:

1. Pump fun and other launchpads commoditized the launch of new tokens. This spread attention across millions of assets, prevented the top few thousand tokens from receiving the concentrated money flows that they usually do, and disrupted the usual wealth effect that Bitcoin halvings create.

   

2. Select crypto assets developed real fundamentals. These include both tokens like HYPE and new IPOs like CRCL. It becomes difficult to bet on whitepapers when you have other assets backed by fundamentals.

   

3. Tech equities outperformed crypto. In many cases, equities linked to AI, robotics, biotech, and quantum computing have outperformed the crypto market. Retail investors may be left wondering why they’d risk their capital on altcoins when “real” companies offer better returns for seemingly less risk. Even the NASDAQ has outperformed both Bitcoin and altcoins YTD.

   

The result of all of this is a graveyard of underperforming altcoins, teams competing over an increasingly scarce pool of capital, and seasoned crypto investors running around like headless chickens, unsure how to invest in this new regime.

Things become much clearer if you stop viewing tokens as indecipherable and start treating them as an asset that represents future cash flows from a business.

“But Dynamo” you might protest, “Some tokens don’t give you the right to future cash flows. Some tokens are U-T-I-L-I-T-Y tokens. Some protocols have both a token and equity.” That’s where you’re wrong. Those tokens still do represent future cash flows; the cash flows associated with them just happen to be $0.

At the end of the day, tokens either provide a stake in a business or are valueless. They aren’t some magical new thing that receives value just from existing or from a “community” as many people like to say. Caveat: this doesn’t apply to network coins like BTC, which share many characteristics of commodities; I’m talking about protocol tokens here.

In the near future, the only DeFi tokens that have any meaningful value will be those that act as pseudo-equity with (1) claims to protocol income, (2) the protocol income to make that an attractive value proposition.

Subscribe now

Retail is Done with Crypto (for now)

Retail is done with the vast majority of tokens for the foreseeable future.

In addition to the reasons I outlined above, a large part of this is that people are simply sick of losing money:

1. Tokens became overinflated on promises that failed to materialize

2. The number of tokens became oversaturated due to memecoin launchpads

3. Extractive tokenomics and industry toleration of absolute trash means that retail correctly thinks they’re set up to lose

The result? People that would have previously bought crypto find another outlet for their gambling addiction: sports betting, prediction markets, stock market options. None of these are necessarily good ideas, but then again, neither is buying most altcoins.

And can you really blame people?

Leading KOLs talk about “crime is legal” and then act surprised when people don’t want to be a victim of said crime.

This apathy amongst the public to crypto is reflected in interest in the space. The enthusiasm of this year never reached the heights of 2021, despite fundamentals being better than ever and regulatory risk being lower than ever.

I’d also argue that ChatGPT and the ensuing AI boom have dampened the enthusiasm for crypto by showing a new generation what a true killer product looks like. For a decade enthusiasts have been talking about crypto being a new “Dot-Com Moment.” It’s tougher to convince people of this when they’re seeing AI reshape their world everyday in much more visible, obvious ways.

Compare the interest in crypto and AI on search engines. The last time crypto had more interest on Google was during the FTX collapse:

Could anything bring retail back?

Yes.

Arguably they are being back to prediction markets today, but they’re buying binary options on when the government shutdown will end, not altcoins. To get them to buy altcoins in large numbers again, they’ll need to feel they have a reasonable chance to make it.

All Token Value Accrual Comes from Protocol Income

In a world where tokens can’t count on a never-ending stream of buyers based on speculation, they actually have to stand on their own value.

After 5 years of experimentation, it’s become painfully clear that there’s basically one meaningful form of token value accrual: claims to protocol income (past, present, and/or future).

All of these various forms of real value accrual come down to claims on protocol income or assets:

• Dividends

• Buybacks

• Fee burns

• Treasury control

This doesn’t mean that to be valuable, protocols necessarily need to do one of these things today. In the past, I’ve received much criticism for saying that I wish protocols I believed in would reinvest rather than do buybacks. But they need to have a switch to turn on this value accrual in the future, ideally based on a governance vote or clear criteria being met. Ambiguous promises are no longer enough.

Fortunately for savvy investors, these fundamentals are readily available for thousands of protocols on platforms like DefiLlama.

A quick look at the top protocols by 30d revenue shows a clear pattern: Stablecoin Issuers and Derivatives dominate, while Launchpads, Trading Apps, CDPs, Wallets, DEXs, and Lending are also represented.

A few takeaways from this:

• Stablecoins and Perps are the two most profitable businesses in crypto today

• Trading, more generally, is a very profitable business to support. In my view, there is significant risk to revenue in trading-related activities if the market enters a prolonged bear, unless protocols can pivot to trading RWAs, as Hyperliquid is attempting to.

• Controlling distribution is as important as building the underlying primitives. I suspect there’s a strong contingent of hardcore DeFi users who would have argued vehemently that a Trading App or Wallet would never be among the top revenue generators because users could save money by using protocols directly. Meanwhile, in the real world, Axiom and Phantom are hugely profitable.

More generally, what I want you to take away from this is that some crypto apps are generating tens of millions in revenue a month. If your protocol of choice isn’t there yet, that’s okay. I know very well that it takes time to build a product the market is willing to pay for as I run revenue for DefiLlama. But there needs to be a path to profitability. Playtime is over.

Investment Frameworks for the Value-Based Crypto World

When looking for tokens to invest in over the next few years, strong performers will meet these criteria:

1. Claims to protocol income or a clear, transparent path to claims on protocol income

2. Consistent and growing revenue and earnings

3. Market caps at reasonable multiples to past revenues

Rather than ramble about what this means theoretically, here are a few concrete examples:

Curve Finance

Curve has accomplished steady, consistent revenue growth over the past 3 years, even as FDV has dropped. The result is an FDV which is less than 8X Curve’s annualized revenue from the past month. Due to bribes for locked Curve stakers and a long period for token releases, token’s actual yield is much higher. Watch to see whether Curve maintains its revenue in the coming months.

Jupiter

Jupiter has cemented itself as one of the main beneficiaries of the Solana ecosystem boom. They’re the most used DEX aggregator and perp DEX on that chain. They’ve also made numerous strategic acquisitions, which allow them to use their distribution to expand to other onchain markets. Their annualized revenue that goes to token holders is actually quite high at nearly 25% of circulating market cap and over 10% of FDV.

NOTE: I hold positions in neither of these protocols and there are other considerations, like the team and competitive landscape, before making an investment.

Other protocols which fit these criteria are Hyperliquid, Sky, Aerodrome, and Pendle.

Subscribe now

The White Pill

Good news is that teams which care about their own survival are realizing this quickly. I expect that in the coming years, the pressure of not being able to endlessly dump tokens will push more DeFi projects towards developing revenue streams and connecting their tokens to those streams. The future is bright if you know where to look.

⚡In This Edition

• Hyperliquid’s ecosystem bounces back

• 65% APY stablecoin farm

• Live Stream covering Monad, privacy & MetaDAO

• Portfolio Update for October

Subscribe now

⚡Metrics Snapshot

Top 100 Coins at a Glance (7d)

Fear & Greed Index: 51 (Neutral)

Project Mindshare (7d)

Historical Bitcoin Performance This Week (Week 44)

DeFi Market Metrics: Global TVL & DEX Volume

3️⃣ Things to Know this Week

The biggest headlines moving the market and what it means for you

1. Fed: Rate Cuts and QT Wind-Down

Markets are focused this week on the FOMC decision set for October 29. A 25bps rate cut is widely expected, marking the second cut of the year.

The Fed could potentially announce the end of Quantitative Tightening (QT after shedding over $2.2 trillion from its balance sheet. With inflation softening and the labor market cooling, liquidity is poised to return.

What This Means

If QT ends, the drain on liquidity does too. And markets may feel it fast. Expect a more supportive environment for crypto, gold, and risk assets heading into 2026. Rate cuts may be priced in, but QT relief is a fresh tailwind.

2. Trump’s Asia Tour Sets the Stage for U.S. & China Reset

Trump’s return to the global stage included a ceasefire deal between Thailand and Cambodia, new trade pacts with ASEAN nations, and a key upcoming meeting with Xi Jinping at the APEC summit in Busan.

The White House is pitching the trip as a bid to lock in U.S. influence across Asia.

What This Means

Markets are rallying on de-escalation hopes. If Trump and Xi seal the proposed “framework” agreement, it could unlock hundreds of billions in trade flows and pause further tariffs.

It’s a bullish backdrop, but still fragile. Don’t underestimate how fast rhetoric can flip.

3. IBM Launches Institutional Digital Asset Platform

IBM just unveiled Digital Asset Haven, a full-stack blockchain platform for governments, banks, and corporates. The platform, built with Dfns (a wallet infra provider), offers custody, compliance, cold storage, and programmable governance across 40+ blockchains.

What This Means

Another blue-chip giant is going deep into digital assets. While this doesn’t move token prices directly, it signals where things are headed: tokenization, compliance-first custody, and regulated platforms designed for the real world at scale.

Get curated data dashboards & onchain metrics sent straight to your inbox each week.

Get the Pro DeFi Newsletter

📖 Recommended Reads

⚡a16z State of Crypto 2025 Report

The year crypto matured

⚡Dynamo DeFi framework for picking investments

Current holdings & the goal of investments

⚡TVL is a terrible metric for lending

DeFi’s scoreboard is broken

⚡What you can learn from a 30yo Charlie Munger

If you’re feeling like you’ve wasted time, read this

⚡Everything you need to know about x402

The internet finally found its payment layer

⚡Get More Crypto Edge

Each week Patrick sends out a comprehensive DeFi report that includes:

• Custom metrics & fundamentals of the strongest projects

• Protocol revenue analysis & aggregated cross-industry analysis

• Market thoughts & onchain insights

Some of the Pro Report is free. Give it a read right here.

To get the complete reports sent to your inbox each week (and much more), join Dynamo DeFi Pro.

🔢Onchain Analysis

Hyperliquid Leads Chain Growth

There are 13 chains with over $1b in TVL. 9 of them have seen positive growth over the last 7 days.

Hyperliquid L1 takes the cake with a nearly 18% boost in 7d TVL.

TVL peaked at over $5b in mid-September. When Aster launched, Hyperliquid TVL proceeded to drop 28%.

As TVL climbed back to $4.6b, the 10/10 crash sparked another TVL outflow. This time, the drop was more visible in Hyperliquid’s onchain stablecoin market cap, with stablecoin market cap dropping over $1b in less than a week.

For the first time since 10/10, Hyperliquid’s stablecoin market cap has flipped upward and appears to be growing again.

Taking a closer look at Hyperliquid protocols, many are up 20%+ in 7d TVL.

TVL growth can typically be directly attributed to the rise in HYPE token price. For every HYPE token put to work in the ecosystem, as the tokens increase in value, so does TVL.

In this case, many Hyperliquid protocols are at TVL ATHs denominated in HYPE, which shows this surge isn’t just because of HYPE’s token price.

Onchain users want exposure to the Hyperliquid ecosystem - over 5 of the top 10 protocols have points systems but haven’t launched tokens yet. The race for airdrops is back on.

🚜Farm of the Week

Hyperbeat USDT

Hyperbeat’s USDT vault offers 65% APY on USDT0 deposits.

If you don’t have USDT0, you can swap for it on Hyperbeat’s MasterSwap page.

This vault is attractive because:

• Yield is high

• TVL is high, lowering risk

• Points are earned from 7 protocols

• The vault is hands-off; no adjusting or LPing necessary

How it Works

Head to Hyperbeat, acquire USDT0 and hit Deposit. You’ll begin earning yield and ecosystem points.

Risk Level: Medium

Risks

• Smart Contract Risk

• Protocol Layer Risk

Subscribe now

⚡Onchain Metrics Masterclass: How to Spot Trends & Track Fundamentals

🛠️Tool Spotlight

Dune Analytics: Community-Built Custom Dashboards

Dune makes querying blockchain data easy, allowing anyone with a bit of SQL knowledge to create in-depth dashboards.

Two helpful tools here:

1. List of trending blockchains that are seeing lots of activity

2. Trending dashboards, usually created to capture current events (like data on the MegaETH token sale)

More helpful DeFi Tools: The Dynamo DeFi Crypto Tools List

📅Key Events This Week

Macro Events

📊 Fed Interest Rate Decision - October 29th

📊 Fed Chair Powell Press Conference - October 29th

📊 President Trump Meets President Xi - October 30th

📊 October MI Consumer Sentiment data - October 25th

📊 ~20% of S&P 500 Companies Report Earnings (including Microsoft, Alphabet, Mea, Apple & Amazon)

Token Unlocks: $400m Unlocking This Week

🔓YCG (1.25%) - October 27th

🔓SIGN (21.48%) - October 28th

🔓SOPH (1.53%) - October 28th

🔓GRASS (73.44%) - October 28th

🔓AURO (0.51%) - October 29th

🔓TREE (6.12%) - October 29th

🔓ZORA (4.55%) - October 30th

🔓REZ (8.79%) - October 30th

🔓KMNO (5.99%) - October 30th

🔓GUN (7.25%) - October 30th

🔓IMX (1.24%) - October 30th

🔓OP (1.71%) - October 31st

🔓W (1.26%) - October 31st

Launches & Updates

Note that these launches are mostly unvetted by the Dynamo DeFi team and this isn’t an endorsement of any of them.

🚀 Legend of YMIR launch - October 28th (Source)

🚀 MegaETH sonar ICO goes live - October 27th (Source)

🚀 Hong Kong first $SOL ETF launch - October 27th (Source)

🚀 Monad early airdrop reveal - October 28th (Source)

🚀 $INJ token burn commences - October 29th (Source)

🚀 Neo legacy network shutdown - October 31st (Source)

⚡Favorite Resources

If you want to dive deeper, here are some of my favorite resources:

🛠️ The Dynamo DeFi Crypto Tools List: A comprehensive list of 100+ crypto tools to help with portfolio tracking, analytics, airdrops and more.

📈 Kraken: Ranked the best crypto platform in 2025, Kraken’s simplicity and top-tier service make it the best place to trade crypto & stocks. Get $50 for simply signing up and trading $200 with this link.

🛡️ Ledger: The smartest way to secure your crypto. Buy & sell crypto with full control over your assets.

For more frequent content, follow me on Twitter and YouTube.

Subscribe now

Until next time,

Dynamo DeFi

⚡In This Edition

• four.meme activity & BNB Chain’s attempt to keep the party going

• 150% APY LP farm on Base

• Live Stream covering Monad, privacy & MetaDAO

• Portfolio Update for October

Subscribe now

⚡Metrics Snapshot

Top 100 Coins at a Glance (7d)

Fear & Greed Index: 29 (Fear)

Project Mindshare (7d)

Historical Bitcoin Performance This Week (Week 43)

DeFi Market Metrics: Global TVL & DEX Volume

3️⃣ Things to Know this Week

The biggest headlines moving the market and what it means for you

1. AWS Outage Crashes Base, Coinbase, and More

Amazon Web Services went down Monday morning, breaking transaction capacity on Base (only for about an hour) and caused outages across Coinbase, Robinhood, Infura, and several other services.

Even stablecoin bridging and RPC endpoints were hit, grinding parts of crypto to a halt.

What This Means

The industry still leans heavily on centralized web2 infrastructure. Until decentralized infra becomes standard, outages like this will continue to reveal what’s really running things are under the hood.

2. Ondo Finance Challenges Nasdaq’s Tokenization Plans

Ondo Finance published an open letter urging the SEC to delay Nasdaq’s tokenized securities rollout. Their concern is a lack of transparency from Nasdaq’s Depository Trust Company (DTC), which could give incumbents an unfair edge.

Others argue that delaying could halt tokenization progress altogether.

What This Means

This is the first real public disagreement over how tokenization happens in the US. The outcome may define whether onchain finance mirrors Wall Street or truly decentralizes it.

3. Stripe-Backed Tempo Raises $500 Million for Payments Blockchain

Stripe and Paradigm’s new blockchain, Tempo, raised $500 million at a $5 billion valuation Series A round.

The project is focused on stablecoin payments and has recruited Ethereum researcher Dankrad Feist to help build it.

What This Means

Tempo is already shaping up to be a major contender in the stablecoin infrastructure wars. With big backers and OG crypto talent, it’s another reminder that the future of payments is being rebuilt from the ground up.

Get curated data dashboards & onchain metrics sent straight to your inbox each week.

Get the Pro DeFi Newsletter

📖 Recommended Reads

⚡Why I’m still all-in on DeFi

We’ve crossed the chasm

⚡Dynamo DeFi framework for picking investments

Current holdings & the goal of investments

⚡Ownership Coins are Coming

ICO launches & a mechanism to save DAOs

⚡Hyperliquid 2026 Thesis

Re-evaluating Hyperliquid from the ground up

⚡The Healthy Competition Between Kalshi & Polymarket

Markets don’t just price assets, they price truth

⚡What Happens to the Crypto Market Next?

• What happened during the 10/10 crash & what does it mean moving forward?

• Who are the privacy coin leaders and what are their strengths?

• What are Ownership Coins and why are MetaDAO ICOs doing so well?

Patrick covered all of this and more in the latest Pro Live Stream.

Get the full recording and research slides right here.

Pro Members received the research slides and can watch the full presentation anytime

🔢Onchain Analysis

Four.meme Activity Surges

We mentioned in last week’s newsletter that we were watching volume trends after an explosive week of DEX volume to see if the trend would sustain itself.

For now, it has. DEX volume had another very strong week last week. A good sign.

This time last year, BNB Chain was only transacting a fraction of total DEX volume.

Over the past several months, Ethereum, Solana & BNB Chain have facilitated near equal amounts of volume.

BNB Chain experienced a meme season recently, and four.meme was at the epicenter.

Four.meme is a memecoin launchpad platform only on BNB Chain. The platform saw $3.5b in 30d volume and is ranked 6th in 30d revenue.

Last week the meme season began to lose steam and BNB Chain & Four.meme teamed up to launch a $45m Reload airdrop directly to 160k+ BNB Chain wallets.

It’s a valiant effort, but it remains to be seen if the initiative will have the desired onchain wealth effect to keep the party going.

While four.meme volume has fallen from its peak, it’s still 7-10x higher than it was a month ago.

🚜Farm of the Week

WETH / USDC on Aerodrome

Aerodrome powers DEX volume and liquidity on Base.

Given recent volatility and elevated DEX volume, there are opportunities to earn yield by providing liquidity.

This pool is currently earning over 150% APY with the ability to earn fees on a 30% ETH price range.

A widened price range minimizes the possibility that ETH price rises or falls outside the range, meaning LPers earn fees on broader price action.

How it Works

Head to the pool’s page on Aerodrome.

Select your desired price range - 15% has a good yield and captures more volatility, while 3% & 8% ranges have higher yield (capturing less volatility.

You’ll just need ETH and USDC. If you don’t have either, you can swap for them here.

Connect your wallet, select your range and deposit amount, then deposit.

Risk Level: Medium

Risks

• Smart Contract Risk

• Impermanent Loss Risk (although minimized)

Subscribe now

⚡Why I’m Still All-In on Crypto (Despite the Market)

🛠️Tool Spotlight

Track DAT Inflows

Track inflows and outflows to Digital Asset Treasury companies using DefiLlama’s dashboard.

The dashboard displays each company’s total holdings value, their stock price, mNAV and cost basis.

More helpful DeFi Tools: The Dynamo DeFi Crypto Tools List

📅Key Events This Week

Macro Events

📊 US Crude Oil Inventory data - October 23rd

📊 September Existing Home Sales data - October 24th

📊 September CPI Inflation data - October 25th

📊 October Services PMI data - October 25th

📊 October MI Consumer Sentiment data - October 25th

📊 ~10% of S&P 500 Companies Report Earnings

Token Unlocks: $185m Unlocking This Week

🔓FTN (4.61%) - October 20th

🔓KAITO (3.47%) - October 21st

🔓MBG (11.97%) - October 22nd

🔓TON (1.45%) - October 23rd

🔓TORN (2.41%) - October 23rd

🔓MANTRA (9.11%) - October 23rd

🔓INIT (2.89%) - October 23rd

🔓AVAIL (7.13%) - October 23rd

🔓REZ (12.09%) - October 23rd

🔓NEWT (1.92%) - October 24th

🔓NIL (4.16%) - October 24th

🔓H (3.01%) - October 24th

🔓VENOM (33.19%) - October 25th

🔓XPL (4.97%) - October 25th

Launches & Updates

Note that these launches are mostly unvetted by the Dynamo DeFi team and this isn’t an endorsement of any of them.

🚀 Axie infinity codex launch - October 20th (Source)

🚀 Ethereal mainnet alpha - October 20th (Source)

🚀 EleveX mainnet launch - October 22nd (Source)

🚀 Forte mainnet launch - October 22nd (Source)

🚀 Zilliqa 2.0 mainnet - October 22nd (Source)

🚀 TradingView agent launch on Delysium - October 22nd (Source)

🚀 Meteora MET TGE - October 23rd (Source)

🚀 Bitmart DEX launch - October 23rd (Source)

🚀 Flux fork - October 25th (Source)

⚡Favorite Resources

If you want to dive deeper, here are some of my favorite resources:

🛠️ The Dynamo DeFi Crypto Tools List: A comprehensive list of 100+ crypto tools to help with portfolio tracking, analytics, airdrops and more.

📈 Kraken: Ranked the best crypto platform in 2025, Kraken’s simplicity and top-tier service make it the best place to trade crypto & stocks. Get $50 for simply signing up and trading $200 with this link.

🛡️ Ledger: The smartest way to secure your crypto. Buy & sell crypto with full control over your assets.

For more frequent content, follow me on Twitter and YouTube.

Subscribe now

Until next time,

Dynamo DeFi

Futarchy is a governance idea dreamed up by economist Robin Hanson in 2000.

It fuses democracy with betting: people vote on what they want (values, like “make the economy stronger” or “improve community welfare”), but then prediction markets decide how to get there (beliefs, like which policy will actually work best).

This turns governance into a market that rewards accurate predictions.

Instead of “should we do X?” polls, futarchy asks, “Will X actually boost this metric the DAO specifically asked for?”

Traders put real tokens on the line, so only those with skin in the game (and reasonable intel) shape the outcomes.

If you think this sounds like something well-suited to crypto, you’re right. Sometimes ideas need the right technology for their time to come:

1. DAOs are great for efficiently collecting votes, while historically struggling with decision-making due to a combination of indecision and special interests.

2. Small, niche betting markets are tough to spin up with traditional payment rails

Futarchy is basically tailor-made for crypto DAOs.

For DAOs, futarchy boosts engagement, leans on wisdom of the crowds, and forces DAOs to be crystal clear on their goals & outcomes.

The leading example is MetaDAO on Solana. The platform helps tokens ICO with a promise to provide more transparency and improve outcomes for both token holders and founders.

MetaDAO and Colosseum are also trying to rebrand futarchy to “Ownership Coins.”

Several high-profile Solana projects are testing MetaDAO’s Futarchy infrastructure.

Liquidity is still low on many markets.

For projects raising through MetaDAO, however, attracting investment has not been an issue. Privacy protocol Umbra on Solana ICO’d and the project’s $750k fundraising goal was 20,000% oversubscribed. Total raise: $150m.

Important to note: this was just a raise, so no futarchy was involved yet (the eternal crypto user continues to be more interested in investing than actually using the technology). But each ICO is required to set aside funds for futarchy markets, so it’s likely we’ll see more markets in the near future.

The amount of contributed capital raised shows people are paying attention.

We’re in the early days of this implementation, which means things could go awry, but this is the most serious attempt to make DAOs work that I’ve seen recently.

It’s worth keeping an eye on this implementation. If it can meaningfully improve DAO decisions & outcomes, it could help DAOs scale into self-perpetuating, functional online organizations. There are a number of benefits to decentralized organizations, so if they can crack this nut, they could easily start to penetrate other realms, like politics as well.

For now, at least we know ICOs are back with strength.

MetaDAO launches have been quite successful, YieldBasis on Legion was successful, Echo & Sonar provided Plasma investors with 30x returns. MegaETH is up next.

The new round of ICOs is a notable improvement from those of previous cycles. More is required of investors through KYC & barriers to entry, and more is demanded of projects looking to ICO, but these elevated requirements have resulted in success for both participants and projects.

In this newsletter:

1. Dynamo’s Thoughts

2. Market Outlook

   1. Market Health - as determined by metrics

   2. Category & Chain Trends - which categories and chains are winning?

3. Onchain Metrics

   1. Digital Asset Fundamentals

   2. Onchain Highlights - Curated charts from the past week showing fast-growing DeFi protocols

If you’re looking for a more comprehensive overview of trends driving the market, check out our monthly Zoom call from this month:

🔭Market Outlook

We’ve heard your feedback from last week’s poll that you want more trending altcoins. We’ll be introducing several new newsletters each month:

1. Top 5 altcoins based on fundamentals that month. 3 will be free and 2 will be paywalled.

2. Portfolio updates. For paid subscribers, I’ll provide a monthly update on what I’m holding, based on fundamentals. Here’s our portfolio update for October.

Subscribe now

Market Health

Total DeFi TVL

Less than two weeks off an ATH, total DeFi TVL has fallen back to $216b.

Fear & Greed Index

I created a website to track Fear & Greed with more detail. Check it out here.

The index was steadily falling into the Fear category a few weeks ago, then pushed up to very high levels of Greed on October 6th.

From there, it’s been down only. Current reading: 22

Stablecoin Market Cap

Total market cap continues to climb, despite price action in the broader crypto market.

USDT saw a $3.4b increase in market cap this week.

ETF Flows

After an early October surge in flows, weekly flows are negative.

-$800m BTC

-$80m ETH

IPOR Stablecoin Indices

The IPOR Index is a benchmark reference interest rate sourced from other DeFi credit protocols and is published onchain based on the heartbeat methodology.

Think of it like the LIBOR or SOFR in traditional finance. It’s a composite of the interest rates from multiple credit markets.

We can use these rates to indicate onchain leverage and activity.

Rates for both USDC & USDT have seen spikes - USDC specifically saw the highest index rate since February.

The USDC rate is currently elevated, USDT is below its monthly average.

For reference, here are last week’s numbers:

Category and Chain Trends

Category TVL Changes

Treasury Mangers are up due to the category’s inclusion of kpk, a protocol that DefiLlama just started tracking.

OTC Marketplace growth comes from Figure Markets Exchange, which saw a spike in TVL several days ago.

Yield Basis has been added to Leveraged Farming and already has over $150m in TVL.

Polymarket TVL is climbing, setting new highs steadily, leading to a growth in the Prediction Markets Category.

Fastest Growing Chains ($100M+ TVL)

Only three major chains saw positive 7d growth. Several more have experienced growth over the last 30d.

Kraken’s L2 Ink is up due to the launch of Tydro, a lending protocol powered by Aave.

Provenance’s growth comes from Figure Markets.

Fastest Growing Chains ($10M-$100M TVL)

Gala & Abstract lead this week, with ENI’s 200% 30d growth continuing.

📊Onchain Metrics

Digital Asset Fundamentals

This section dives deeper into the fundamentals behind digital assets with unique visuals to help you explore the intrinsic value of different tokens.

Below you’ll find 3 visuals:

1. Chain Valuation Ratios Matrix

2. Protocol Revenue Analysis

3. Protocol Fees, Revenue, and Holders Revenue Treemaps

Read more

In this month’s call we discussed:

1. Outlook

   1. Macro

   2. BTC & ETH ETFs

   3. DeFi Metrics

   4. 10/10 Crash

2. Ecosystems & Protocols

   1. Monad

3. Trends & Narratives

   1. Privacy

   2. Futarchy

4. Q&A

Slides available here:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1AGHiV6VYmSPwJvf5DpfVs…

Read more

We’ll cover the recent flash crash, DeFi metrics, the recent privacy trend, and more.

Read more

⚡In This Edition

• One of the largest liquidations in crypto’s history & what it means

• Record DEX volume & what to watch for

• Portfolio Update for October

Subscribe now

⚡Metrics Snapshot

Top 100 Coins at a Glance (7d)

Fear & Greed Index: 38 (Fear)

Project Mindshare (7d)

Historical Bitcoin Performance This Week (Week 42)

DeFi Market Metrics: Global TVL & DEX Volume

3️⃣ Things to Know this Week

The biggest headlines moving the market and what it means for you

1. One of the Largest Liquidation Events in Crypto History

After a week of massive inflows, a massive selloff triggered by renewed US–China trade tensions led to $16+ billion in liquidations across crypto markets.

Perp DEX open interest fell nearly 50 percent. Some assets temporarily crashed to zero. Even seasoned traders were wiped out.

There’s reason to believe one or more major players may have been liquidated.

Meanwhile, fear metrics spiked, but so far, ETF and stablecoin outflows remain minimal.

What This Means

Flash crashes are part of the game, but this one was fast, violent, and likely systemic.

Watch for signs of contagion in the coming weeks, and expect volatility to remain elevated. Investors should focus on protocols with real cash flow or growing network effects, not speculative assets with weak foundations.

2. Institutional Inflows Continue Despite the Crash

Digital asset investment products saw $3.17 billion in inflows last week, even as prices dropped.

This brings year-to-date inflows to a record $48.7 billion. Friday alone saw all-time high ETP trading volume at $15.3 billion.

Bitcoin led inflows at $2.67 billion. Ethereum drew in $338 million, despite being the most sold on Friday. Solana and XRP flows slowed compared to previous weeks.

What This Means

Despite short-term turbulence, institutions are still allocating. That suggests confidence in the long-term thesis.

Perma-DCA bids from TradFi offer a steady counterweight to retail volatility and reinforce the trend of structural adoption.

3. Prediction Markets Go Global

Kalshi raised $300 million at a $5 billion valuation and expanded to 140 countries.

Polymarket disclosed $205 million in prior funding ahead of its $2 billion deal with NYSE parent ICE, which valued the firm at $9 billion post-money.

Kalshi now commands over 60 percent of global market share, and prediction markets are gaining traction with major platforms like Robinhood and Webull integrating them.

What This Means

Backed by top-tier VCs and major exchanges, prediction markets are becoming a core part of financial infrastructure.

Expect wider distribution, new use cases, and a wave of tokenized prediction products entering mainstream investing. Especially if Tom Brady is going to keep shouting out Polymarket during nationally televised football games.

Get curated data dashboards & onchain metrics sent straight to your inbox each week.

Get the Pro DeFi Newsletter

📖 Recommended Reads

⚡How to be good at crypto

Building edge and developing skills

⚡Dynamo DeFi framework for picking investments

Current holdings and the goal of investments

⚡Crypto after the Crash

What happened, where we go from here, what to watch

⚡BNB Chain announces $45m ‘Reload’ airdrop to onchain users

160k+ addresses are set to receive the airdrop. Keep an eye out for scams

⚡Upcoming DeFi Launches

Monad, Flying Tulip, HIP-3 and more

⚡Are You Missing an Edge?

We’re going live Wednesday to present market research & answer your looming questions surrounding digital assets.

Wednesday at 5:30PM EDT ae’ll cover:

• Fundamentals of the strongest projects

• Hottest ecosystems

• Aggregated cross-industry metrics

• Market thoughts & onchain insights

Here’s a sample of September’s presentation. Watch it. If you think the presentation would be helpful, we’d love to see you on Wednesday.

To receive an RSVP for the live presentation, join Dynamo DeFi Pro.

Join Dynamo DeFi Pro

Pro Members receive the research slides and can watch the full presentation anytime.

🔢Onchain Analysis

Record DEX Volume Breakdown

Last week was a record for DEX volume: $177b in total.

Previous record volume weeks were typically dominated by a single chain, like the TRUMP memecoin launch in January hurling Solana volume to all-time highs.

This time, volume was evenly split across Solana, Ethereum & BNB Chain.

Zooming in to individual protocols, Uniswap had its first $10b volume day and nearly a $50b week, which has never happened before.

Uniswap and HumidiFi are the only DEXs in the top five to have record weeks, although PancakeSwap had its largest week of DEX volume since May of ‘21.

Momentum, a ve(3,3) DEX on Sui broke into the top 10 DEXs last week, facilitating $5b in weekly volume.

It’s encouraging to see an onchain spike in activity, although it’s unfortunate that it was accompanied by such heavy liquidations. There’s likely a cohort of onchain users that tried their hand at perps trading and are heading back to the onchain domain.

DEX volume has been steadily trending up since April. What we don’t want to see is a directional change of that trend after an explosive week. That could signal onchain users packing up and leaving, at least for now.

We’ll be watching DEX activity closely for volume trends and to see which new or existing DEXs are seeing outsized activity.

🚜Farm of the Week

Own the House: JLP

We mention JLP often because it’s been a great asset to own for over a year now.

JLP is made up of a basket of Solana, Ethereum, Bitcoin and USDC.

It earns yield from trading fees and PnL on Jupiter Perps.

Given last week’s volatility and liquidations, it’s likely that the 15% APY shown here (updated weekly) will jump, at least in the short term.

How it Works

Head to Jupiter Perps Earn page and deposit USDC, SOL, ETH or WBTC to swap for JLP. Yield begins accruing immediately and you’ll retain exposure to the underlying tokens.

Risk Level: Medium

Risks

• Smart Contract Risk

• PnL Risk - if traders win big, JLP loses

Subscribe now

⚡Aster vs Hyperliquid: Which Perp DEX has the Best Fundamentals?

🛠️Tool Spotlight

Crypto Fear & Greed Index

I created a website to track the Fear & Greed Index, which analyzes market volatility, momentum, sentiment & search trends.

The index can be used to inform decisions: if investors are too worried, there could be a buying opportunity. If investors are too greedy, there may be a correction coming soon.

Use the time series & distribution charts to track F&G value overtime.

More helpful DeFi Tools: The Dynamo DeFi Crypto Tools List

📅Key Events This Week

Macro Events

📊 OPEC Monthly Report - October 13th

📊 Fed Chair Powell Speaks - October 14th

📊 NY Fed Manufacturing Index - October 15th

📊 Philly Fed Manufacturing Index - October 16th

📊 NAHB Housing Market Index - October 16th

📊 ~10% of S&P 500 Companies Report Earnings

Token Unlocks: $250m Unlocking This Week

🔓DEEP (114.5%) - October 14th

🔓STRK (5.64%) - October 15th

🔓XCN (0.82%) - October 15th

🔓SEI (1.15%) - October 15th

🔓ARB (1.99%) - October 16th

🔓TRIBL (1.28%) - October 17th

🔓ZK (3.49%) - October 17th

Launches & Updates

Note that these launches are mostly unvetted by the Dynamo DeFi team and this isn’t an endorsement of any of them.

🚀 Alvara’s BSKT launch - October 14th (Source)

🚀 Snake8 hardfork - October 14th (Source)

🚀 $MON airdrop claim portal opens - October 14th (Source)

🚀 OpenxAI public release - October 16th (Source)

🚀 Governance Advisor launch on Delysium - October 16th (Source)

⚡Favorite Resources

If you want to dive deeper, here are some of my favorite resources:

🛠️ The Dynamo DeFi Crypto Tools List: A comprehensive list of 100+ crypto tools to help with portfolio tracking, analytics, airdrops and more.

📈 Kraken: Ranked the best crypto platform in 2025, Kraken’s simplicity and top-tier service make it the best place to trade crypto & stocks. Get $50 for simply signing up and trading $200 with this link.

🛡️ Ledger: The smartest way to secure your crypto. Buy & sell crypto with full control over your assets.

For more frequent content, follow me on Twitter and YouTube.

Subscribe now

Until next time,

Dynamo DeFi

We had an entirely different newsletter created with a write-up on MetaDAO, Futarchy, and the usual onchain metrics that we share in this newsletter. We’ll still publish that at some point soon. But given the insane crash on Friday, I thought it was better to address that.

For those who missed it, this was one of the biggest (perhaps THE biggest in $ terms) crypto liquidation event in history. Some coins got liquidated down to literally zero:

The immediate cause was announcements about a new round of tariffs and export controls between the US and China. But the suddenness and severity of this crash caught even many experienced crypto investors off guard.

Some traders, such as “Bonk Guy”, who had successfully survived multiple downturns over the past few years, were wiped out.

Let’s put some numbers to the chaos.

Total Open Interest on Perp DEXs dropped by about 50%:

The Fear & Greed Index plummeted to Extreme Fear, its first time doing so since April:

Over $16b was liquidated (the real number may be even higher):

My initial impression is that this looks worse than it was. Many people have been farming Perp DEXs heavily with large nominal positions, but low principal (due to those exchanges allowing high leverage). The actual amount of money lost was far less than was reported.

That being said, the extreme severity of this crash leads me to think something more is going on. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn in the coming weeks that one or multiple major players were wiped out. Be on the lookout for that and play it cautious when rumors surface; oftentimes there is no downside to derisking based on rumors and being wrong, but heavy downside to not derisking.

Looking to the future, what can an intelligent crypto investor do to avoid being carried out on a stretcher in situations like this and to position themselves for the future:

1. Be smart about leverage - If you’re heavily levered, a flash crash can zero you out. Simple as that. And for many people it’s best to stick to spot; if you have to ask whether that’s you, it probably is. But also note that I said “be smart”, not avoid entirely. There is a place for modest leverage if done right. A smart way to use leverage, for example, is to hold assets with a multi-year timeframe and borrow against them as they go up in price.

2. Focus on cash flow or network effects - There are really only two types of cryptos that interest me at this point. The first are those that produce cash flow. These are the real businesses and liquidity pools. If you have cash flow, dips are exciting. If you have cash flow, dips mean buying more of your favorite tokens at a discount. If you don’t have cash flow, dips just mean that your assets are down. The second type of crypto I’m interested in are those that benefit from growing network effects. For example, Hyperliquid benefits from more dapps launching on HyperEVM, Zcash benefits from more ZEC moving into the shielded pool, Ethereum benefits from more RWAs coming onchain.

3. Cut losers - There’s no nice way to put it. Some charts look dead. If a coin is at a multi-year low even after this bounce and has no convincing catalyst, it’s worth considering whether it may be a weak horse that’s worth cutting.

Follow these rules and you’ll already be better off than most market participants.

And as far as what to watch for in the future, I’m laser-focused on whether liquidity continues to enter the space or begins to leave:

Total stablecoin market cap dipped ever so slightly by just under $1b today.

This is nothing to worry about yet. And coming on the heels over over $100b in inflows, it feels almost ridiculous to even comment on it. Watch in the coming days to see whether stablecoin outflows pick up or if inflows resume.

ETF flows are the other big liquidity movement to watch. On Friday, BTC and ETH ETFs saw very small outflows, but this was before the massive liquidation event.

The big number to watch in the coming days is whether capital outflows intensify and how long it takes for inflows to resume. In the past, outflows have rarely continued beyond a few weeks.

My theory on this is that many people are now permanently DCAing into Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs, independent of price. This changes the nature of these markets and makes them less reflexive to price than they have been in past years. As a result, when a major event happens, you might have some initial selling, but as panic selling subsides, the perma-DCA takes control again and inflows resume.

Finally, I’ll be keeping an eye on Digital Asset Treasury purchases. These have slowed down considerably in recent weeks.

Here I’m looking for two things:

1. Do capital inflows from DATs resume? These have been a huge driver of price this year.

2. Do any DATs start to liquidate assets? If this happens, it could spell bigger trouble.

While I still believe we’re in the mid-stages of a long-term secular adoption curve, I’m not ruling out the possibility that we’re near the end of a cyclical bull-run. If that’s the case, expect some near-term dips before fundamentals take over.

Announcements

A few quick announcements for our readers:

1. We’ve heard your feedback about wanting more trending altcoins. Last week, we published a portfolio update and we have a list of the top fundamentals altcoins coming soon:

2. This Wednesday at 5:30pm we’ll hold our monthly group Zoom. Find details to join here:

3. We’ll be back to our normal newsletter format soon. Hoping for fewer unexpected crashes ahead.

Subscribe now

📊Onchain Metrics

Digital Asset Fundamentals

This section dives deeper into the fundamentals behind digital assets with unique visuals to help you explore the intrinsic value of different tokens. Note that these metrics were collected prior to this weekend’s crash, but most are still relevant.

Fees & Revenue Treemaps

Read more

He picks companies.

But that wasn’t always the case. When he was young, he learned technical analysis. He focused on whether stocks would go up or down rather than on whether the companies they represented ownership in were fundamentally sound.

Crypto investors are following that same evolution today. In the past, analaysis of “tokens” dominated crypto analysis. Technical analysis. Whale purchases. Exchange flows. This was because it was one of the only ways to assess where tokens would move.

When there are no fundamentals, you can’t invest based on them. If you were looking for investable onchain businesses, you would have kept looking forever.

That’s no longer the case.

DeFi apps are now generating millions of dollars a month in revenue.

And, in many ways, DeFi is even better suited to fundamental analysis than TradFi:

In TradFi, you only receive earnings quarterly.

In DeFi, you get real-time data on app usage, revenue, and deposits.

The Dynamo DeFi Approach to Digital Asset Investing

In past Bitcoin cycles, I was guilty of trading too many short-term narratives. This time around, I believe we’re at the start of a long-term secular adoption curve. Rather than catching the “runner” of the day, my approach is to focus on a few assets that I am comfortable holding for the long term.

The goal is to invest in the Apples and Amazons of digital asset adoption and to find assets that will produce consistent returns over a multi-year horizon.

JLP

The Jupiter Liquidity Pool (JLP) token is a liquidity pool on Jupiter’s perp DEX that exists as a counterparty to perp traders. When a levered position is opened, the leverage comes from the Jupiter Liquidity Pool.

Jupiter perps have processed at least $15b per month in volume for a year now.

While not a investing in a specific dapp like the other tokens on this list, JLP checks a lot of boxes for the portion of my portfolio dedicated to “majors".

First, it’s essentially an index. The JLP token consists of SOL, ETH, WBTC and USDC.

Second, it’s income-producing. The yield varies, but trading fees and PnL go directly to the JLP pool.

It’s one of the most pure form “own the casino” options available.

Here’s what JLP looks like over the last two years:

Denominating in USD doesn’t tell the full story. We want to benchmark against easier, less risky exposure to the crypto market: Bitcoin.

Read more

⚡In This Edition

• Andre Cronje’s new project raises $200m with unique token mechanism

• Perp DEX wars rage on

• Binance rolls out CaaS (Crypto as a Service)

• Top airdrop opportunities right now

Subscribe now

⚡Metrics Snapshot

Top 100 Coins at a Glance (7d)

Fear & Greed Index: 50 (Neutral)

Narrative Mindshare (7d)

Historical Bitcoin Performance This Week (Week 38)

DeFi Market Metrics: Global TVL & DEX Volume

3️⃣ Things to Know this Week

The biggest headlines moving the market and what it means for you

1. Andre Cronje’s Flying Tulip Raises $200M to Build Full-Stack DeFi Exchange

DeFi pioneer Andre Cronje is back with Flying Tulip, a protocol that aims to combine spot trading, lending, derivatives, stablecoins, and insurance in one onchain system.

The project just raised $200 million at a $1 billion valuation, with plans for another $800 million public raise.

The raise has a unique feature: all token buyers (private and public) are granted a put option via “onchain redemption rights,” letting them burn their tokens and reclaim their original principal at any time.

What This Means

Flying Tulip is a vertically integrated DeFi platform, architected with hard lessons from Yearn and Sonic. The perpetual put is a first-of-its-kind design, a welcome upgrade in capital protection and sustainable tokenomics. If successful, it could change how large DeFi raises are structured moving forward.

2. BitMine Now Holds 2.65M ETH, Eyes 5% of Total Supply

BitMine Immersion, the largest ETH DAT, now holds over 2.65 million ETH (more than 2% of total supply) and has a treasury worth $11.6 billion across ETH, BTC, cash, and venture positions. Their stated goal is to reach 5% of ETH’s total supply.

What This Means

This playbook has been successful for BitMine. Just last week, the company acquired 234k ETH. The company has another $400m in cash. BitMine’s thesis is that ETH will anchor the financial rails of AI, stablecoins and tokenization.

3. Binance Launches Crypto-as-a-Service for Traditional Finance

Binance is rolling out Crypto-as-a-Service (CaaS): a turnkey backend for banks, brokerages, and fintechs to offer crypto trading, custody, compliance, and settlement using Binance’s infrastructure.

Institutions keep their own branding and customer relationships, while getting plug-and-play access to Binance’s liquidity and global order book.

Features like internal order matching and segmented client dashboards look like a white-label Robinhood built on Binance rails.

What This Means

Binance is moving upstream; embedding itself into traditional finance as the backend for the next wave of crypto apps. If this gets real adoption, Binance’s moat will grow significantly.

Get curated data dashboards & onchain metrics sent straight to your inbox each week.

Get the Pro DeFi Newsletter

📖 Recommended Reads

⚡Underrated DeFiLlama dashboards to take your research to the next level

Yield overviews, custom dashboards, correlations matrix and more

⚡Our favorite airdrop opportunities checklist

Use these to potentially qualify for the biggest airdrops this year

⚡Hyperliquid Hypurr NFT collection goes live, hits $70k floor price

$45m in volume already traded

⚡Polymarket Ecosystem Landscape

Directory of builders on Polymarket including analytics, DeFi, trading & AI agents

⚡Aethir Announces $344m DAT

NASDAQ-listed Predictive Oncology (POAI) launched a $344m ATH DAT

⚡Get the Pro Report

Each week, Patrick sends out a comprehensive DeFi report that includes:

• Custom metrics & fundamentals of the strongest projects

• Protocol revenue analysis

• Aggregated cross-industry metrics

• Market thoughts & onchain insights

Some of the Pro Report is free. You can give it a read right here.

To get the complete reports sent to your inbox each week (and much more), join Dynamo DeFi Pro.

Join Dynamo DeFi Pro

🔢Onchain Analysis

Perp DEX Wars Rage On

After a surge in volume, Aster has now flipped Hyperliquid on both 7d and 30d volume.

Total perp volume is at record highs over the last two days, 5x higher than justearlier this month.

Open Interest, which measures liquidity as opposed to volume’s activity, is tougher to fake and also at an all-time high. Hyperliquid still dominates open interest by a wide margin.

The promise of upcoming airdrops on several platforms and Lighter’s fee-free trading are proving to be attractive to traders.

Hyperliquid has done well to keep traders on the platform, and Hyperliquid’s product is still great.

But the protocol is not immune to competition.

TVL on the Hyperliquid L1 has been up-only since April, with more projects being built within the Hyperliquid ecosystem and users speculating on ecosystem airdrops (here are the Hyperliquid airdrop opportunities that we like).

Over the last 10 days, TVL on Hyperliquid has fallen from $5.2b to $4b. That’s a quick 24% decrease. Money has been flowing out of Hyperliquid projects over the last week.

Hyperliquid’s product, tradfi acceptance and strong team make it a tough competitor to beat. Aster & Lighter know what users want: lower fees and airdrop. And they’re trying to steal as much market share as they can.

The question is, can they retain their newfound users in the long run? Or are they attracting temporary mercenary farmers?

Either way, perp DEX volumes are increasingly growing against CEXs. This perp DEX battle shows how important perps are as a product. DEXs increasing their market share vs CEXs is a huge win for DeFi.

🚜Farm of the Week

16% Stablecoin Yield in One Click

New deposit incentives for lending PYUSD on Kamino mean 16% APY is up for grabs for PYUSD depositors.

How it Works

Kamino makes depositing very easy. Head to Kamino’s lending dashboard and deposit PYUSD to start earning APY immediately.

If you don’t have PYUSD, you can swap for it using Kamino’s Swap aggregator here.

Risk Level: Low

Risks

• Smart Contract risk

• Protocol Layer risk

• Lending risk

Subscribe now

⚡How to Lend & Borrow Crypto on Solana

🛠️Tool Spotlight

Find Delta-Neutral Yields on DeFiLlama’s Dashboard

If you’re looking for yield without price risk, you can search & filter delta-netural strategies across any chain and token of your choosing.

Search anything from stablecoins on Ethereum to LSTs on Solana, and set TVL minimums or select which specific protocols you’d like to search.

More helpful DeFi Tools: The Dynamo DeFi Crypto Tools List

📅Key Events This Week

Macro Events

📊 August JOLTS Job Openings data - September 30th

📊 CB Consumer Confidence data - September 30th

📊 September ADP Nonfarm Employment data - October 1st

📊 September ISM Manufacturing PMI data - October 1st

📊 Initial Jobless Claims data - October 2nd

📊 September Jobs Report - October 3rd

Token Unlocks: $260m Unlocking This Week

🔓ZORA (4.65%) - September 29th

🔓OP (1.74%) - September 30th

🔓SUI (1.23%) - October 1st

🔓DYDX (0.58%) - October 1st

🔓EIGEN (6.7%) - October 1st

🔓IMX (1.26%) - October 3rd

Launches & Updates

Note that these launches are mostly unvetted by the Dynamo DeFi team and this isn’t an endorsement of any of them.

🚀 Onyxcoin gorilla testnet - September 30th (Source)

🚀 zkVerify mainnet - September 30th (Source)

🚀 DoubleZero mainnet - October 2nd (Source)

⚡Favorite Resources

If you want to dive deeper, here are some of my favorite resources:

🛠️ The Dynamo DeFi Crypto Tools List: A comprehensive list of 100+ crypto tools to help with portfolio tracking, analytics, airdrops and more.

📈 Kraken: Ranked the best crypto platform in 2025, Kraken’s simplicity and top-tier service make it the best place to trade crypto & stocks. Get $50 for simply signing up and trading $200 with this link.

🛡️ Ledger: The smartest way to secure your crypto. Buy & sell crypto with full control over your assets.

For more frequent content, follow me on Twitter and YouTube.

Subscribe now

Until next time,

Dynamo DeFi

Aster flipped Hyperliquid in both 24hr & 7d perp volume this week. Lighter, with its fee-free trading, also had a great week.

The result of this intensifying competition: the single largest week of perp volume ever, nearly doubling the previous record.

Volume isn’t actually the best metric however, as it can be easily faked and is extremely volatile.

Open interest is a better metric, showing liquidity for traders. Total open interest has exploded over the last three months.

And in terms of open interest, Hyperliquid still remains supreme (although Aster and Lighter have grown significantly).

Aster, Lighter and EdgeX have quickly closed reached parity with Hyperliquid in terms of volume. Three questions remain:

1. Can these new upstarts maintain their volume?

2. Can they reach parity in terms of open interest too?

3. What will it ultimately take for the winner of the perp DEX wars to build a moat?

While Hyperliquid has a significant edge, I see one counterintuitive weak point: Hyperliquid has spent hundreds of millions of dollars buying back the HYPE token.

This was incredible as the HYPE token rose from single digits to over $50. Holders were happy, the price appreciation served as marketing for the platform, and Hyperliquid kept earning more and more money to repeat the positive feedback loop.

But now Hyperliquid is losing both market share and absolute volume.

Looking back, can you really say that buying back their token was the best way to spend over $500M?

Hyperliquid could have acquired an equities brokerage, a prediction market, a stablecoin issuer. Any of these would have made them more resilient against newer perp DEXs than a higher price on HYPE.

The Hyperliquid L1 saw a $600m drawdown in TVL this week, while competitors are all up.

There’s good news amidst all this: you don’t need to choose.

Investments aren’t sports teams. There’s nothing stopping you from farming multiple points programs or holding multiple perp DEX tokens.

Perp DEXs are a growing category and not a zero sum game. Moreover, there may not be a winner-takes-all game in the long term. Look at centralized exchanges: there is no “single best” option.

What to do then?

The numbers, despite their volatility, tell the story: there are still only a handful of perp DEXs in the upper echelons of the category. There’s no reason someone bullish on the sector can’t get exposure to multiple of them.

In a way, the Perp DEX wars are already over. And you, the investor/user won.

In this newsletter:

1. Dynamo’s Thoughts

2. Market Outlook

   1. Market Health - as determined by metrics

   2. Category & Chain Trends - which categories and chains are winning?

3. Onchain Metrics

   1. Digital Asset Fundamentals

   2. Onchain Highlights - Curated charts from the past week showing fast-growing DeFi protocols

If you’re looking for a more comprehensive overview of trends driving the market, check out our monthly Zoom call from this month:

🔭Market Outlook

We’ve heard your feedback from last week’s poll that you want more trending altcoins. We’ll be introducing several new newsletters each month:

1. Top 5 altcoins based on fundamentals that month. 3 will be free and 2 will be paywalled.

2. Portfolio updates. For paid subscribers, I’ll provide a monthly update on what I’m holding, based on fundamentals.

Subscribe now

Market Health

Total DeFi TVL

Total DeFi TVL fell this week to $220b from the $250b ATH two weeks ago.

Fear & Greed Index

I created a website to track Fear & Greed with more detail. Check it out here.

The index dropped sharply overnight to 28, the lowest reading since April.

Stablecoin Market Cap

Stablecoin growth marches on.

Stablecoins added $4b over the last week. Half of that growth belongs to USDT.

PayPal USD (PYUSD) market cap is up 43% this week, adding over $500m to its market cap. The payments giant announced a partnership with Spark to grow its stablecoin.

ETF Flows

Both BTC & ETH ETFs are currently experiencing outflow weeks, worth about the same amount: -$500m each.

The month of September is likely to shake out +$3b for BTC, -$150m for ETH.

IPOR Stablecoin Indices

The IPOR Index is a benchmark reference interest rate sourced from other DeFi credit protocols and is published onchain based on the heartbeat methodology.

Think of it like the LIBOR or SOFR in traditional finance. It’s a composite of the interest rates from multiple credit markets.

We can use these rates to indicate onchain leverage and activity.

USDC rates hit their highest point since February but have since dropped off to below the monthly average. USDT rates remain more elevated and are currently above the yearly average of 5.77%

For reference, here are last week’s numbers:

Funding Rate Heatmap

The Funding Rate Heatmap from Coinglass displays funding rates across some of the largest crypto assets.

Brighter colors indicate elevated funding rates for longs, and darker colors indicate low or negative funding rates (indicates large short positions).

Aster funding was red-hot for the last few days, but funding has dropped to a more reasonable 37% APY. XPL also experienced elevated rates, but only for a day.

SOL currently has slightly negative funding.

Category and Chain Trends

Category TVL Changes

RWA lending is continuing up in a straight line. USD AI, RWA Lending’s largest TVL contributor saw another big jump in TVL last week.

On the Stablecoin Issuer side, M^0 TVL added $250m in a week.

Chain GDP / Chain Ecosystem Fees

Chain GDP, also known as Chain Ecosystem Fees, measures the sum of fees spent on all applications on a chain.

I built a dashboard to show this over time by chain before it was available elsewhere: https://dashboard.dynamodefi.com/

Off Chain ecosystem fees saw a massive spike this week, thanks to Aster earning $50m in fees.

EdgeX saw another large week of CEF, out-earning Arbitrum and Avalanche.

Fastest Growing Chains ($100M+ TVL)

Plasma’s launch came with nearly $3b in existing TVL - it’s already a top 10 chain ordered by TVL.

Last week, Goat and Movement were at the top of the growth list. This week, it’s the same story.

Only seven chains above $100m in TVL saw positive TVL growth this week.

Fastest Growing Chains ($10M-$100M TVL)

Similar story for smaller chains. Only 4 saw TVL growth this week.

📊Onchain Metrics

Digital Asset Fundamentals

This section dives deeper into the fundamentals behind digital assets with unique visuals to help you explore the intrinsic value of different tokens.

Below you’ll find 3 visuals:

1. Chain Valuation Ratios Matrix

2. Protocol Revenue Analysis

3. Protocol Fees, Revenue, and Holders Revenue Treemaps

Read more