One of the big wins of DeFi in 2024 has been the tokenization of the widespread “Cash and Carry” trade as the synthetic dollar USDe by Ethena Labs. USDe supply has ballooned to $2.7B within 10 months, and the protocol has crossed $100M in fees collected. A huge opportunity exists to bring such essential but proven trading strategies fr... Read more

Last year in our Infrastructure Year Ahead report (linked below) I had a section called “The L2 Wars” where I laid out what I was seeing in the rollup landscape and how that would change over the coming year. The whole post is still worth reading imo but the main points were: Blast was a full bastardization of rollup architec... Read more

UMA provides an optimistic oracle that Prediction markets rely on for resolution. I dislike UMA’s system for a variety of reasons that all circulate around it being an easy attack vector. The process for a market on Polymarket to be initialized and resolved is the following: Decide the market structure (binary, categorical, continuous... Read more

Wasabi is a asset-backed leverage trading protocol specifically designed for long tail assets. Their cap table for their seed round was relatively large, with participation from Electric Capital, Alliance DAO, and many angels.  The idea behind Wasabi is that synthetic indices are inefficient for long tail assets that have infinite... Read more

MEV is one of the biggest hurdles to widespread DeFi adoption right now. If left unchecked, we face a shrinking user base, with remaining participants slowly bleeding funds to MEV bots and validators. However, this scenario is unsustainable even for these bots profiting from MEV. As DeFi’s health deteriorates due to value extraction, it w... Read more

Renegade is among the first crypto dark pools to go live since we covered the whole design space in our report here. A dark pool or a private exchange has some key design considerations. What level of privacy does it promise pre-execution? How does it match orders privately? How does it source liquidity privately? What level of post-exec... Read more

If you asked me this question a year ago I would say, without a question, DEXs. My reasoning was simple — switching costs are much higher across DEXs. If I switch from Uniswap to some longer-tail DEX, I am guaranteed to experience more slippage and worse net execution. Conversely, I will get the same execution on 0x versus some other long... Read more

The Liquity v2 codebase was released today, along with details of LQTY’s role in v2. LQTY will power a Protocol Incentivized Liquidity (PIL) model, allowing LQTY stakers to direct subsidies made up of protocol revenue. Staked LQTY will retain the same roles and benefits of v1, in addition to its PIL role in v2. We have previously discuss... Read more

Limitless is a social prediction market on Base. Having interacted with the team and been watching them closely, I can attest that they are capable of building a product that can compete with Polymarket. The goal is for the platform to support permissionless market creation, however right now in their infancy stage creation is permissio... Read more

Before joining crypto full time, I spent a good number of years investing in consumer internet companies in the US and APAC. For all intensive purposes, this meant marketplaces. From 2010 – 2021, there was arguably no better risk-reward on planet earth than as a series C+ growth equity investor in marketplaces. The game was rigged t... Read more