Institutional-grade Derivatives Strategies for DeFi | Stablecoin, RWA, BTC tokenized derivative strategies since 2023 | Real Risk-adjusted Returns at Scale

On-chain
Why looping in crypto is broken, why we stopped, why you're being sold repackaged credit risk as a savings account, and why we don't need it anymore. Thanks to @chameleon_jeff and @HyperliquidX. Before founding D2, we spent a decade in institutional derivatives.Started at Bloomberg, then moved to global multi-billion-dollar hedge funds, and finished with a few years at PAG, a $55B Asian multi-strategy fund, trading volatility as a PM responsible for a multi-billion notional book. Across that span we sat next to some of the best credit teams in the business. So when we say what the market is being sold as "stablecoin yield" looks like a leveraged credit strategy in a wrapper, this isn't theory. It's pattern recognition from watching credit professionals price this class of risk for a living. Nothing inherently wrong with leveraged credit. There is something wrong with selling it as "yield" without pricing the tail. @ethena has executed beautifully on a favorable market setup. Funding has been positive, basis has been wide, delta-hedged shorts have earned. Mechanically it remains a leveraged basis trade that pays until funding flips, liquidity thins, or the short leg breaks. That is not a savings account. That is a credit hedge fund wrapped in USDe. The same logic applies to every looping stablecoin variant: sUSDe loops on Aave, syrup loops on Maple, avUSD, others. Same structure. Borrow cheaper stable, lend richer yield-bearing stable, pocket the spread, repeat 5x. Works until it doesn't. This week we documented two of these positions at -93% and -135% net APY, HF 1.01 and 1.02, ~$1B combined gross exposure. D2's on-chain auditable track record (attached): +3.8% (Dec 2023) +115% (2024) +31% (2025) +3% (2026 YTD) 2.6 Sharpe. 28 of 28 positive months. 200% cumulative. We looped actively in February 2024. Long ETH looped into USDC on @aave , short ETH on @GMX_IO , at funding rates that peaked above 100% APR. One of the trades that made 2024 our best year. Nothing against looping when the risk is properly compensated. In 2025 we did lighter looping on the @fundstrat ‘ ETH run from $1,500. We exited when the setup started to look like a bubble, and rolled the delta exposure into call options on @DeriveXYZ. July expiry paid materially. August expired mostly worthless. Net result: we captured the DAT mania with defined downside. We did not need a crystal ball.We needed convex payoffs.Since then we have not found a looping setup worth taking. Not ideology, the risk-reward no longer clears. The change that matters: Hyperliquid liquidity has made gamma replication, delta hedging, and structured payoffs executable at spreads that do not exist anywhere else on-chain. We can now replicate most of the payoff profiles we like, with defined downside and substantially better risk-reward, without taking liquidation risk at HF 1.01. Do not let zero-fee gimmicks mislead you. Execution happens at the spread, not the fee. Hyperliquid spread is why this works. That is @chameleon_jeff and the team's real contribution to institutional DeFi. For fund managers: if the risk profile of your product is "leveraged credit, short convexity, earn carry until you cannot," that is a legitimate strategy. Label it correctly. Do not package it as a stablecoin and compare it to money market yields. For everyone else: if a product offers you double-digit "stable yield," ask what happens in tail conditions. "We have Umbrella coverage" or "the collateral is fully backed" is not an answer. That is a marketing line. Ask for the funding chart. The liquidity depth in stress. The concentration of the borrower base. The unwind mechanics. We learned looping by running it when it paid. We stopped when it didn't.Looping pays carry until it doesn't. Options pay when it matters. Thanks to @chameleon_jeff and the Hyperliquid team for making this possible. Fade D2 at your own risk. 🫡
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d2HYPE epoch settled: +0.4% in HYPE terms net of fees, about 20% annualized over the short epoch, through the week Binance lost its hot wallets and HYPE printed a new all-time high at 97.11. Since launch the vault is up about 18% in HYPE terms, about 75% in USD terms for anyone comparing against covered-call programs that cap the upside. Thursday 29 October the Binance hot wallets were drained. The same day ICE, owner of the NYSE, announced its partnership with @HyperliquidX's @tradexyz, and HYPE did about $2.6B of perp volume on Hyperliquid, its biggest day. We were long gamma into that squeeze and sold 36% of the vault notional on the way up. By 23:00 UTC Thursday, with the attacker's wallets still live and more than 2M HYPE in a Binance hot wallet, our HYPE delta was zero. Friday morning the market gave the HYPE back and we bought it. The 90 calls on 20,000 HYPE settled in the money at 91.62, @flowdesk_co confirmation on the card. Binance moved 2.41M HYPE from hot to cold on Friday. Bybit moved 250K. Users' capital was flat a day earlier. Next epoch to 18 December, terms in the third post.
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Your capital first, tested from both sides in a month. October's epoch closed on a trailing stop at about 86. HYPE then fell to about 75, so the stop kept the vault out of a further 13% drop. Before this epoch started we set a firm max-loss budget. It was never touched. This time the test came from the other side. As the squeeze started we bought the 30 October 90 calls, so the move would hand us delta to sell rather than delta to chase. When the ICE news and the Binance drain landed on the same Thursday, HYPE ran from about 80 to 97.11, the calls' delta rose with it, and we sold 36% of the vault notional into the move, spot and perp. At about 23:00 UTC Thursday, with the attacker's wallets still live and more than 2M HYPE in a Binance hot wallet, we took the book to zero HYPE delta. Users' capital was out of the line of fire before the venues running billions had moved to cold. Friday morning the market gave the HYPE back and we bought it. The 90 calls on 20,000 HYPE settled in the money at 91.62 while the book was already flat, Flowdesk confirmation attached.
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Exchanges moved later than we did. Arkham, HYPE transfers over $10M, 28 to 30 October: on Friday 30 October Binance moved 2,211,000 HYPE from hot wallet 0x764 to cold wallet 0xf97, then another 199,990. Bybit moved 250,000 from hot 0x580 to cold 0x56d. Our HYPE delta crossed zero on Thursday at 23:00 UTC. Next epoch ends Friday 18 December, quad-witching Friday, the last full-liquidity week of the year, when books get squared and relative value shows up in size. HYPE's second birthday on 29 November and the year-end harvesting flows sit inside the window. d2HYPE runs alongside HYPE++ this epoch. d2HYPE carries the HYPE; HYPE++, our flagship, trades the relative value around it, funding, basis and vol dislocations, under the same risk framework and the same stop. The relative-value set across the HYPE complex is the richest we have seen since launch. We do not project returns; the book has now shown from both sides that the stop comes before the return. 📆d2HYPE New Epoch --> Deposits Open: Now --> Trading Starts: Nov 02 --> Epoch End: Friday 18 December --> Cap 100,000 WHYPE (91,820 already in) Back on green. Capital first. Deposits open.
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Two years ago we asked the same five questions @drwconvexity asks here. Since then we have traded billions of notional on @HyperliquidX, every day since before the token, every position public. Answers from the book: 1) The asset is the margin. Collateral, liquidations and the clearing ledger are public state every block. PnL settles to collateral 24/7 with no wire window. Onshore keeps that and adds a regulated access layer. 2) Our allocators verify the book in real time instead of a monthly PDF. Large trader reporting already goes to the CFTC daily; Hyperliquid sends it to everyone with no lag. Leakage is a sizing and sub-account problem. @standuquesne We would be happy to give you some tips 🫡 3) Aurora colocation sells the same thing by the rack. Hyperliquid prices queue priority from 8 bps of notional, about 45ms per bp, rule published, open to any account. Cancels still beat paid orders and the fees are burned. If Core Principle 9 tolerates the colo cage, it tolerates a posted price list, @ChairmanSelig. 4) Same engine, separate books at launch per the @ICE_Markets release. Merging them is a policy call, not an engineering one. One matching engine with KYC at the access layer is already how Globex works; the FCM is the gate.That test already ran. 5) Coinbase and CME list the centralized version. @tradexyz did $650B on Hyperliquid in a year. Matching costs tens of milliseconds against an hourly funding interval; only the latency arb feels it. The pit asked Globex the same question in 1992. The part that matters for DRW: on Hyperliquid you enter at the same price we did, a wallet, USDC and the public API. No Aurora cage, no cross connect, no FCM tier. Same 8 bps price list for both of us. If DRW can only compete with us on scale, Globex is still open. Otherwise see you on the order book, Don.
Further to my post about @NYSE working to bring @HyperliquidX onshore, major credit to @ChairmanSelig and the Trump administration for making all of this experimentation possible. There’s only one way of finding out if something is useful to the marketplace and I’m excited for us to find out. I do have some questions: 1. What is the benefit of trading perps on-chain on a regulated exchange? Isn’t the main benefit of trading on-chain to operate in a trustless (aka non-kyc’d) environment in order to minimize friction, and/or to be able to enter into atomic transactions in order to receive what you are buying in realtime? Since a perp is not an asset, that obviously isn’t helpful. 2. @standuquesne - are you aware that if you trade on Hyperliquid, the world will be able to track your positions and trades in real time? Do you see that as a benefit? 3. Hyperliquid has priority fees - a mechanism that enables market participants to pay to see information first, or even prioritize orders in front of the queue. Is this consistent with CFTC core principles? 4. Will it be possible to combine the liquidity of the offshore order-book with the onshore order-book? 5. If not, wouldn’t it be better to list perps in a traditional (centralized) order-book on a regulated exchange and not have the inefficiencies that on-chain matching introduces?
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Binance just printed $761M in liquidations in 24h, nearly half the entire market ($1.54B), on a venue where users couldn’t even deposit collateral safely to defend themselves. The only algorithm at @binance that never gets compromised: the one that liquidates its own users while the hot wallets are still on fire. @elonmusk since you’re laughing at the CEX circus: put @tradexyz on X. Intel dumped 24% overnight. Over $4bn of stocks, oil and indices traded while the NYSE was shut. ICE and the NYSE signed up yesterday. The everything app needs the one market that never closes. 🚀
Replying to @elonmusk
I wish everyone followed that advice. The hack is more complex than that, but all hacks generally have a compromised device (or algorithm) at some point.
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More from the D2 desk, 00:30 UTC. 1. Reconciled by @DicksonWuML: 6.28bn out across nine chains including XRP Ledger, 2.80bn frozen, 3.27bn still loose, mostly BTC and ETH. 2. First move was XRPL at 20:04 UTC. The first transfer bounced because the attacker's account did not exist yet. Eight seconds later it did. 3. Attacker funding from Tornado began 07:39 UTC on 28 Oct, 99 minutes after Binance's ETH wallet maintenance window opened. 4. Binance 14 is still delegated. Another 48M swept out at 22:39 UTC. Binance now says it will cover all losses; deposits are suspended too. 5. DefiLlama: Binance 24h net outflow 6.38bn, OKX in 94M, Bybit out 32M. No CEX is catching the flow because users cannot leave. 6. Binance perp open interest 31.6bn sits inside a venue with withdrawals shut. 7. Most mid-tier CEX liquidity is market makers quoting against Binance's book. Tonight that book is closed and their inventory is trapped. 8. Core advice: withdraw from any CEX that cannot show you its books. Self-custody or on-chain until Binance reopens. 9. Attacker sold LINK, AAVE, ONDO and WBTC between 22:34 and 23:19 UTC. 386K ETH and 18,270 BTC unmoved; the first THORChain swap starts the laundering clock. 10. Bloomberg Top News at 11:12 Sydney: 26 stories, none on the largest theft in crypto's history. "Bitcoin is finally a grown-up asset" ran at 08:00.
Quick ones from our side. 1) D2 has no exposure to @Binance. We have never traded there. 2) We pulled our USDC from Aave live-tracking the attacker as he parked 60M USDT in the pool and borrowed 19,762 ETH against it. 3) We are long gamma and trading it. Forensic tl;dr. Eight chains, one signing layer. The attacker held the hot-wallet keys. Binance 14 fell to a 7702 delegation signed over 50 consecutive nonces, which is what you do when the key is yours and the wallet is still processing withdrawals. BTC and Tron went on plain signatures in the same 20 minutes. Gross 5.0 to 5.8bn, 2.4bn frozen, about 3bn clean. Where it sits: 386K ETH across three wallets, 17,270 BTC untouched in 17 wallets, 685M TRX, 970K SOL. The ETH is the laundering leg. Bybit’s went to BTC through THORChain in ten days. As we write, Binance 14 is still delegated to the attacker’s contract and Binance’s own refills were swept again at 21:04 and 21:44 UTC. Three hours in, the automation that feeds the thief is still running. This is the largest theft in the history of the asset class and it ran through one company’s signing layer while that company’s scripts kept topping up the drain. For eight years the industry’s single point of failure has had a logo. Tonight the alternative had its books on-chain, its withdrawals open, and 2.4bn of HYPE perp volume in 24 hours. We have traded there every day since before the TGE. Move.
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Quick ones from our side. 1) D2 has no exposure to @Binance. We have never traded there. 2) We pulled our USDC from Aave live-tracking the attacker as he parked 60M USDT in the pool and borrowed 19,762 ETH against it. 3) We are long gamma and trading it. Forensic tl;dr. Eight chains, one signing layer. The attacker held the hot-wallet keys. Binance 14 fell to a 7702 delegation signed over 50 consecutive nonces, which is what you do when the key is yours and the wallet is still processing withdrawals. BTC and Tron went on plain signatures in the same 20 minutes. Gross 5.0 to 5.8bn, 2.4bn frozen, about 3bn clean. Where it sits: 386K ETH across three wallets, 17,270 BTC untouched in 17 wallets, 685M TRX, 970K SOL. The ETH is the laundering leg. Bybit’s went to BTC through THORChain in ten days. As we write, Binance 14 is still delegated to the attacker’s contract and Binance’s own refills were swept again at 21:04 and 21:44 UTC. Three hours in, the automation that feeds the thief is still running. This is the largest theft in the history of the asset class and it ran through one company’s signing layer while that company’s scripts kept topping up the drain. For eight years the industry’s single point of failure has had a logo. Tonight the alternative had its books on-chain, its withdrawals open, and 2.4bn of HYPE perp volume in 24 hours. We have traded there every day since before the TGE. Move.
quick ones 1) Binance has enough to withstand 3-4x of current hit and still be largely intact. Very likely they will shrug this off and user funds are very likely safu (but like obviously don’t deposit until they sort out what went wrong) 2) Wintermute obv has exposure to binance, but less than 20% of net equity and I don’t see any disruption to our operations on any time horizon in whatever scenario
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Thanks to Andy and the @CIG_Crypto team for including D2's outlook on tokenizing actively managed strategies in the 4Q26 Strategy Outlook, alongside a strong group of contributors. Our view in the piece: 2027 will be a year of innovation and opportunity for forward-thinking asset managers, as actively managed strategies move on-chain at scale.
CIG’s 4Q26 Active Strategy Outlook Magazine is live! This quarter, leading fund managers and allocators shared perspectives on vault diligence, tokenized alpha, and where market neutral returns go from here. 👉 Access the full report here: cryptoinsightsgroup.com/insi…
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We were there day one of @tradexyz. We traded it that first week and have not stopped since. Texas Hedge Epoch 2 ran NVDA vs QQQ, the SPCX pre-IPO listing trade and DRAM on xyz and settled +31.7% net. Hot7 runs its US equity delta on xyz perps against an SPX hedge. Texas Epoch 4 is building the Anthropic listing trade on xyz:ANT right now. All of it sits on the same collateral as our BTC and HYPE book, which is the cross-margin point in the post, live for a fund today. We have run the first multi-strategy hedge fund on Hyperliquid since before the HYPE TGE on one thesis: it is the house of all finance. Today the owner of the NYSE agreed, subject to approvals. Congrats @sershokunin and the xyz team.
trade[XYZ] launched its first market on Hyperliquid 381 days ago. Today, we are joining forces with ICE, parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, to bring perpetual futures on Hyperliquid to U.S. regulated markets. I don’t usually write long posts, but today merits reflection. For years, builders across this industry have worked to show that open, onchain markets could support price discovery, manage risk, and withstand stress to the standards of traditional market infrastructure, all while staying open when and where those markets aren’t. Our achievements stand on the shoulders of those builders. And today, the company that owns the New York Stock Exchange has chosen to build upon the work of every developer, trader, market maker, and user who took a chance on us and our markets. We share this moment with all of you. Markets are shaped by their participants. A new generation of investors trades from their phones, across asset classes, at any hour of any day. Until Hyperliquid, the right infrastructure for those markets didn’t exist. Building these markets was hard. It took novel approaches to pricing, funding, and risk, refined with real capital at stake, in markets that don’t close. It also meant earning the trust of the people trading on them. We’re honored that the community recognized that effort and responded in kind. That trust is what allowed us to grow our volumes to a ~$1 trillion annualized run rate in just over a year, to help pioneer new instruments like pre-IPO perps, and to earn the confidence of storied institutions like S&P Dow Jones Indices. That’s why ICE has chosen trade[XYZ] as its exclusive partner to bring 24/7 perps to the U.S. Shifts in technology have pushed markets toward greater transparency, better price discovery, and broader access: from the coffee house to the curb exchange, ticker tape to the telephone, the trading floor to digital exchanges. ICE helped write that last chapter. In 1997, Jeff Sprecher bought a small power-trading technology business for $1. ICE launched as an electronic energy marketplace in 2000, helped digitize major commodity markets, and acquired the NYSE in 2013. It has grown exponentially because of this appetite for innovation. That’s the partner we wanted: a partner that looks forward and embraces progress. Americans deserve access to the most innovative markets in the world, and the protections of U.S. regulation. With trade[XYZ] and ICE, subject to regulatory approvals, they’ll have both. The difference isn’t just access. Perps don’t expire, so traders never have to roll positions, and liquidity concentrates in a single deep market for each asset. Cross-margining enhances capital efficiency by letting one pool of collateral back positions across stocks, commodities, and crypto. Underpinning it all are atomic clearing and settlement, real-time risk management that enables continuous markets, and universally applied rules that anyone can verify. This is the next chapter we’ll write together. My responsibility, our responsibility, is to now build markets worthy of the confidence our partners and our users have placed in us. Our commitments will not waver: to fair and transparent markets, to diverse markets, to low costs of execution, and above all, to market integrity. All of this in pursuit of one thing: A universal exchange, open around the clock, coming to the United States. We’re proud to have deployed more than 100 markets on trade[XYZ]. But measured against the opportunity ahead, we’ve barely started. There is an enormous universe of assets we haven’t reached, alongside things people want to trade that have no established market at all. Wherever there is demand to trade an asset, we want trade[XYZ] to be where its price is discovered. Global stocks, commodities, bonds, pre-IPO companies, compute, new indices, digital assets, interest rates, equity baskets, volatility products, alt assets… Anything. Anytime. Anywhere. Ultimately, everything you own should work with everything you trade. Picture a headline breaking on Saturday night. You should be able to post tokenized shares as collateral, hedge your portfolio with an index perp, add exposure to oil, and take a view on a company that has not yet gone public. All in one account, all on one risk engine, before any traditional market opens. trade[XYZ] and Hyperliquid were built for this. I hope someone opens their first investment account years from now to find that trivial, and to wonder why their predecessors needed so many separate financial relationships. Getting there will take liquidity, reliability, trust, and prices people have reason to believe. It will take years. I’m prepared to spend them. Finally, a few thank yous. First to the XYZ team: For the tireless nights and for committing to this vision before it was obvious. To Jeff Sprecher and ICE, with special thanks to Michael Blaugrund and Trabue Bland who championed us throughout: You’re a world-class, technology-embracing team that proves innovation and scale are in fact not at odds. To Stan Druckenmiller: For your partnership and helping us turn the next page. To Hyperliquid Labs: For being the best partners we could ask for. You set an impossible standard, one we continually strive to meet. @chameleon_jeff, @iliensinc, @xulian_hl And most importantly, to our users: You traded these markets when no one thought it mattered. Guess what? It did.
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CIG’s 4Q26 Active Strategy Outlook Magazine is live! This quarter, leading fund managers and allocators shared perspectives on vault diligence, tokenized alpha, and where market neutral returns go from here. 👉 Access the full report here: cryptoinsightsgroup.com/insi…
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Replying to @Jason
@jason @GrantCardone we ran both of your calls through the options market. Grant, you are betting $1M that bitcoin trades 126k before Oct 2028. That is 58% above here. Two year options price that at 42%. For it to be 50/50 bitcoin vol needs to be 62. It is trading 46. Jason, you are saying we test 57k in the next 12 months. That is 28% below here. One year options price that at 48%. A coin flip, not a lock. So the market has Grant at 42 and Jason at 48. Neither of you is as right as you sound. We will make a price in either. Size?
I’d take the other side of this bet. the implied vol of the one touch at 2:1 odds is about ~60-62% vol the forward value from BTC futs is about ~$89k fv for the ivol is closer to ~39-40% at $126,210 touch Jason side has about +$220k EV
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Numbers if you want to check: spot 79,625. CME curve runs 5.3% carry, so the Oct 2028 forward is 88.5k and the 12 month forward is 84k. IBIT options 28 Oct, two year vol 46, one year vol 44. Standard one touch formula, no skew. Grant: 38% at 40 vol, 42% at 46, 50% at 62. Jason: 48% at 44 vol, 50% at 45.
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ELI5: the $375M is what the press release said. The 10-K says Coinbase paid $176M. Same deal. Detail from the FY2025 10-K. Consideration $176.0M: $68.0M cash, $108.0M in Class A stock. Closed 8 October 2025. Net assets acquired $23.7M. Goodwill $152.3M, tax deductible. That is the whole entry. Where the other $199M is: either earnouts and retention stock that ASC 805 books as comp over time, and only if it vests, or shares counted at a different price than the press release assumed. Either way it is not on the balance sheet. Crypto deal announcements work like VC capital calls, the number is committed, not wired. @DeribitOfficial shows the same mechanic in reverse. Announced at about $2.9B, booked at $4.295B, because 11M COIN shares got marked at the 14 August close. The attached table is Coinbase’s 2025 deal list, ten names, consideration disclosed on two. Was it a dumb trade, in the summer of 2025, for @brian_armstrong? Not obviously. ETH was $3,763 on 21 July and made its high of $4,946 on 24 August. Sonar had just run Plasma: $50M allocation, $373M committed. 7.4x net assets for the one compliant public sale rail with that order flow. Rich. Defensible. Then 10/10: $19.15B liquidated in 24 hours, $16.69B of it longs. Same wallets that bid Sonar sales. They came back once more anyway. @megaeth on 30 October, over $1B committed on Sonar, 20x oversubscribed, so about 95% of that money went straight back. Coinbase announced on 21 October, between those two prints, and the $375M assumed the commitments were real demand. Probably a bad trade either way. Public sale rails earn in bull markets and carry their headcount through the rest. But the write-off question is on $176M, not $375M, and the 10-K settled that in February. All of it is in the filing and the sale data in the first reply. At D2 every published epoch return ties to an on-chain settlement transaction. Check them. If you accepted @cobie’s date invitation thinking he was worth half a yard, you were probably wrong.
What happened to @echodotxyz, @brian_armstrong? As a shareholder I am quite concerned Coinbase can spend $375mn without utilizing the acquisition $COIN
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Or you start in the put and size up with the short once the thesis is working. Max loss while you wait to be right is the premium. A short has no cap. On a contrarian trade you’re paying vol to be early, not betting on it.
Or you want leveraged exposure and will accept timing risk to avoid margin call risk
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Why normal people still don’t come onchain. Seventeen years in, crypto is worth less than 1% of the world’s listed stocks and bonds: $2.7T against $318T. In a 2026 Harris Poll of 2,014 Americans who hold no crypto, 43% put security and fraud in their top three reasons for staying out. That barrier is avoidable. Products built to extract from the marginal buyer get launched, cheered, and farmed. The public reads the result. Papertrade is only the latest. The cost is a risk premium paid by everyone still building for that public. We pay it. So does @HyperliquidX. Finance protects the retail investor because he is the marginal buyer. SIPC, suitability, and best execution exist so the customer is never the counterparty’s mark. A market that eats its marginal buyer grows only as fast as its insiders can fund it. Crypto inverted the rule. Here the public is the liquidation. FTX’s $8B hole and Terra’s $40B still sit on page one of every allocator questionnaire. Each product sold as safe that was not raises the return the next allocator demands. The premium lands on everyone still building. Papertrade in one paragraph: No order book. Every trade is a synthetic swap against one USDC pool at Hyperliquid’s mid, up to 1,000x, no funding. The pool starts at zero and grows only from losses. Winners above the pool get an IOU that pays when someone else loses. Losing earned a token sold as the claim on the pool’s future excess. $140M came in on those terms. Within twelve days the team said it had no plans to make the token transferable. Its defenders call it an experiment. @laurashin’s episode is the fairest coverage it got. Her guest says the team’s reasoning holds up and still calls it a bait-and-switch for everyone who deposited under the original rules. We started building in 2022, before Hyperliquid’s mainnet, and have settled 33 epochs since. We moved the book here for one reason: a founder who wants to house all of finance on rails anyone can build on, and a team of 11 with no VC that has done trillions in volume on that premise. It is the only version of crypto the public ever joins. The forensics are self-interest. The premium comes down when these things get named early. Naming them is cheaper than paying for them. Papertrade reads Hyperliquid’s prices, settles on its ledger, and markets itself as built on it. The people cheering it are the stick in the wheel of why we cannot have good things for the house of finance thesis.
PaperTrade Attracted $140M, Then Changed the Rules. Was It a Bait and Switch? 🎰 1,000x leverage, no fees, trades against the house, and a token for losing. PaperTrade drew $140M in pre-deposits. Then it shelved plans to make PAPER transferable. I asked @3xliquidated whether @PaperTrade_xyz can come back from that. Timestamps: 🎬 00:00 Intro ⚡ 02:01 What PaperTrade is and why it briefly flipped Nasdaq's daily volume 🎰 06:46 How PaperTrade's house pool pays winners and mints PAPER for losers 🚀 10:32 Launch week: $140M in pre-deposits and a price-feed play on day one 💰 15:12 Nexo: Generate daily interest on your crypto or borrow funds against your assets at unchainedcrypto.com/go/nexo-… 🔒 15:59 Why promise transferability if the risk was already in the docs? 🔄 17:31 Why PaperTrade shelved plans to make PAPER transferable 📉 24:07 Is PaperTrade over after a 93% one-day drop in staking revenue? 🧱 27:52 Why Jason says tokens should be judged like equity in a real business
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hXXI Epoch conclusion + new epoch ✅ 📊 +1.8% net in BTC over 25 days Vault Ratio back at its pre-August high. One 85,000 call written on @flowdesk_co expired out of the money at 82,111. Premium kept. Implied stayed bid into the macro calendar while realized decayed: whoever was blown out of gamma in August was not there to be blown out again. We close two weeks early: implied and realized both collapsed this week and the opportunity set moved. Into the midterms the trade is TradFi vs crypto relative value, where HYPE++, Texas Hedge and Hot7 live, not the Bitcoin surface. BlackRock's PBIT (long IBIT, long put spread, short call) is hXXI's trade in an ETF wrapper. If retirement money piles in, the surface gets a permanent call seller and the premium moves into the spread between BTC and SPX skew. Our HYPE++ already trades that swap and borrows BTC to run it. Next epoch hXXI is the lender ------ 📅 New hXXI epoch --> Deposits: open now --> Trading Starts: Oct 27 --> Epoch ends: January 15, 2027 --> Fees: zero --> Cap: 25 BTC Terms: 3% fixed in BTC + up to 3% kicker if HYPE++ closes above 15% annualized The fixed leg does not depend on how HYPE++ does. The kicker does. One surface trade is binary. HYPE++ runs an ensemble. TradFi is more "fun" than crypto right now. Fade D2 at your own risk.
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We decoded the @initia exploit. One signed tx at 14:59:26 UTC minted 2,000,000 AUSD out of nothing. 153 seconds later a valid @LayerZero_Core message released 1.4M real AUSD from the Ethereum adapter. $2.65M was back on Ethereum within 7m21s of the mint. Three exits, all into 0xDD92…edFA: AUSD: 1.4M from the AUSD OFT adapter, 71% of its balance, 576K left. ETH: 105 from the native-ETH OFT adapter, 96% of its balance, 4.84 left. USDC: 1.08M as fresh mints from 0x0, via Circle's CCTP. The mint was the attacker's own key calling one Move function, 135,888 gas, no bridge message involved. The token is an argument (recipient, token, amount), consistent with one wallet printing AUSD, USDC and ETH. LayerZero's DVNs then attested to burns that really happened, and an OFT adapter cannot check whether burned tokens were ever backed: each Ethereum lockbox pays at par for any Initia-side mint bug. Prep started 6.5 hours before the mint: 0.1 ETH from Tornado at 08:27 UTC, dust sends through @axelar AxelarHandler from 13:14, and a 0.006 ETH deposit at 14:37 into the same ETH adapter it emptied 29 minutes later. Every stable was ETH within 3 minutes of landing via 1inch and 0x, AUSD in 84 seconds. All 1,135.52 ETH (~$2.73M) now sits in a fresh wallet, 0x358e…CAC8. Same shape as Liquid on 6 Sep, where an Elements bug created 4,000 L-BTC and a valid peg-out paid 3,996 real BTC. Initia's DEX holds $3.50M of TVL and did $334K of volume in 24h. Its bridges carried 8x that for one wallet in 7m21s: on Initia, the deepest pool was the bridge.
Initia chain hacked and a bunch of tokens infiniminted. Hacker has cashed out $2.6m thus far with more in flight
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Correction, per @withAUSD: no Agora-issued AUSD was minted. "2,000,000 AUSD" in the hook means the Initia-side LayerZero OFT mirror of AUSD, a third-party product. The 1.4M that left Ethereum was real AUSD held in that product's lockbox. Agora's supply is unchanged.
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