Right now everyone is chasing the nth perp DEX, aping into any shitcoin CZ engages with, or chasing the flavor of the day via perps. These are the current metas.

And yet, even still, money has flowed back into $PUMP, which pulled back ~45% from its Sept 14 peak (~0.009) down to ~0.005 on Sept 26.

This was, a very healthy move. Weak hands

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Welcome back to Market Matters – September edition from Montenegro!

Since our last discussion, markets have been a slog, chopping bulls and bears while grinding sideways and lower. This was not to be unexpected, however, given our outlook with respect to macro and liquidity conditions as we marched towards Q4.

Despite this grind, BTC and

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The common critique of zero-fee trading venues is that the business can’t be profitable.

Below I explain how free trading venues are profitable and why they can offer tighter spreads, by highlighting flow segmentation and latency speed bumps.

What is PFOF?

Payment for Order Flow is a system where a trading platform (broker or exchange) ro

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Tomorrow, September 30, 2025, zkVerify is launching its mainnet and native token VFY. On the consulting side, we’ve covered zkVerify for the better part of the past year. Our thesis is simple. ZK is eating infra and apps but verifying proofs on Eth... Read more

“Sell me this Q4”

Q3 ended with crypto lagging equities, but the headline story isn’t a hidden liquidity shock. Rather, it was the temporary cooling of ETF flows that removed crypto’s key marginal bid just as Treasury liquidity tightened. With the TGA refill nearly complete, stablecoin balances high and several structural tailwinds emergi

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Some thoughts on Plasma and the XPL token post-TGE

The Plasma TGE exceeded my expectations right out the gate, assuming we would see a sell-off following a ~14x from public sale. But I think there was plenty of momentum from traders speculating on XPL being the next ASTER trade, along with a perfectly executed launch while airdropping 4-5

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I remain bullish on Zora and the idea of Zora, but a belief perserverooor I am not. Here is a recap of Zora news since my report and an update on the Zora thesis. There have been some controversial Zora incidents that CT ran with but ultimately not a huge deal:

• Tyson Fury & Sahil Rug: Tyson Fury launched a Zora creator coin. It was boost

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When scrolling through Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino’s Twitter, one is met with the regular bullish updates expected of a leader of one of the most successful companies today. However, one new development has seemingly gone unnoticed thus far: Tether’s latest venture, QVAC.

QVAC@QVAC_tether pic.twitter.com/mMae1GT3E2

— Paolo Ardoino 🤖 (@pao

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One thing I’ve been watching closely is the Fed’s overnight reverse repo (ON RRP) program. Some of you have seen me flag this before, but it’s worth highlighting again because the pattern has been surprisingly consistent (see below for an example; I’ve also linked related articles below for a deeper dive)

ON RRP volumes tend to weaken i

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What made DeFi summer so special?

It wasn’t merely a cyclical inevitability—that was the dog coins. DeFi Summer’s secret sauce was the multitude of projects arriving simultaneously, delivering a strong proof-of-concept for a BIG idea. These projects were typically:

• Composable and synergistic
• Liquid, often bootstrapped tokens: Instant fee

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