Anthropic pre-IPO is now live on Markets. Anthropic is preparing for a major IPO expected in late 2026, with implied pre-IPO valuations ranging between $1.6 trillion and $2 trillion. Tradable with up to 6x leverage.

This trader deposited $10k one month ago and turned it into $100k purely by trading perps on the Markets App. You can follow Igor’s journal and trades in real time here: After seeing his success, we’ve been researching how to identify good directional traders like him, and we’ve put together a list of traders with very similar profiles and track records. If you want to know who they are, join our Telegram channel in the next post and stay tuned.

Building for Hyperliquid, Not Against It: Inside Kinetiq’s $2.5 Billion Rise In this episode of Drops, I sit down with @0xOmnia, co-founder of @kinetiq_xyz, to discuss how a pseudonymous team of just 20 people built one of the fastest-growing platforms in Web3, attracted nearly $2.5 billion in deposits, and became the largest protocol in the Hyperliquid ecosystem. Omnia explains how a former hotelier found his way to the edge of digital finance, why his team chose to build around Hyperliquid before its rise looked inevitable, and why Kinetiq is now expanding beyond liquid staking through @Markets_xyz and Elysium. Underneath it all is a much bigger question: what does it take to build infrastructure that strengthens an ecosystem rather than simply extracting value from it? From Hospitality To The Bleeding Edge Of Finance Before digital assets, Omnia wanted to become a hotelier and worked at several high-end hotels, an experience he credits with shaping his understanding of professionalism. He began experimenting with crypto around 2017, gradually becoming more interested in digital assets and finance until a layoff from hospitality forced a change in direction. That transition eventually led him to a digital asset hedge fund where his experience experimenting with young and unfamiliar ecosystems at the time, such as Solana and Avalanche, differentiated him from other candidates. That experience shaped an idea that still informs how he approaches markets today: “reading is an edge.” But reading alone is not enough. His real advantage came from going one step further and actually using emerging products before most people had decided they were worth paying attention to. Seeing Hyperliquid Before The Consensus Formed That same instinct led Omnia and his co-founder Magnus to Hyperliquid in 2023. At the time, excitement across crypto was muted. Omnia recalls questioning whether he even had the energy to join another Discord server. What caught his attention was an interview with Hyperliquid founder Jeff Yan and, specifically, the team’s decision to build a custom chain for perpetual futures rather than placing another trading product on top of existing infrastructure. Once Omnia and Magnus gained access to Hyperliquid’s closed alpha, they approached the product differently. One explored HLP while the other pushed leverage aggressively. Between them, they learned the platform from multiple angles. By 2024, when HyperBFT and HyperEVM expanded what could be built around Hyperliquid, the opportunity had changed. The team was no longer simply looking at a promising exchange but the beginnings of an ecosystem. How Kinetiq Turned Staking Into A Distribution Engine Kinetiq began with liquid staking, which allows users to stake an asset while receiving another liquid representation that can continue to be used elsewhere in DeFi. The growth was extraordinary. Kinetiq attracted $1 billion in deposits within three weeks, reached $2 billion shortly afterward, and eventually capped deposits at nearly $2.5 billion. The protocol now represents Hyperliquid’s largest staking account and became the third-largest liquid staking protocol globally by total value locked. But Kinetiq’s team didn’t stop there. They began treating its base of more than 29,000 stakers as a distribution network. That thinking led to markets_xyz, which operates both as a HIP-3 deployer and as a trading front end for Hyperliquid assets. What the Kinetiq Token Actually Represents Omnia argues that crypto investors have often struggled with the separation between equity ownership and token ownership, particularly when a protocol generates revenue, but token holders have little direct connection to that value. Kinetiq chose a different structure. Most of Kinetiq’s revenue is used to purchase its token $KNTQ, with those purchases happening transparently on Hyperliquid. Rather than burning the purchased tokens, Kinetiq distributes them to users who stake the token. That revenue comes from several parts of the business, including liquid staking, its HIP-3 activities, trading through its front end, and commissions paid by validators participating in Kinetiq’s active validator set. Omnia’s argument is that as Kinetiq expands into more products, token holders who stake are positioned to participate in the economics generated across that broader ecosystem. Why Kinetiq Can Win Alongside Trade_xyz Rather than trying to displace @tradexyz, Omnia sees an opportunity for the two platforms to benefit from each other. Trade_xyz can focus on deploying markets, while Kinetiq uses markets_xyz and its existing user base to bring traders to those markets. When a Kinetiq user trades a market deployed by Trade_xyz, Trade_xyz gains additional volume while Kinetiq earns from the transaction through its front end. Kinetiq still operates as a deployer itself, so there is some overlap between the two businesses, but the larger strategy is based on distribution rather than direct competition. Instead of needing to own every market, Kinetiq can benefit by owning the relationship with the user and directing trading activity across the Hyperliquid ecosystem. Building Elysium Around Hyperliquid’s Biggest Limitation Hyperliquid has become extraordinarily strong at perpetual futures, but Omnia argues that HyperEVM was never designed to support the same level of high-frequency activity. That creates friction for developers trying to build sophisticated general-purpose applications around the ecosystem. Kinetiq sees that limitation as an opportunity. Elysium, the team’s planned Layer 2 network, is intended to give developers a higher-performance environment while remaining deeply connected to Hyperliquid. Omnia is notably skeptical of many L2 models because they tend to move economic activity away from the base ecosystem they were supposed to help. Elysium is being designed around the opposite idea. If developers can build faster options protocols, vaults, order books, and other financial applications close to HyperCore, those products could generate additional trading activity that ultimately flows back into Hyperliquid. Instead of competing with Hyperliquid’s core exchange, Elysium is supposed to extend what can be built around it. Omnia describes HyperEVM and HyperCore almost like cousins. Elysium would give one side more room to build while preserving its relationship with the liquidity and activity happening on the other. The Bigger Idea Behind Kinetiq Kinetiq’s story is not simply about reaching $2.5 billion quickly. The more important idea is how the team chose to position itself within a growing ecosystem. From liquid staking to markets_xyz and now Elysium, Kinetiq has repeatedly looked at what Hyperliquid does well, identified what is still missing around it, and built into those gaps. Omnia describes Kinetiq as a “labor of love” designed to amplify Hyperliquid and strengthen its ability to compete with centralized exchanges and other Layer 1 ecosystems. That is ultimately what connects the different parts of Kinetiq’s strategy. The goal is not to build a separate ecosystem or compete with Hyperliquid for the same activity. It is to make Hyperliquid more useful by expanding what users, traders, and developers can do around it. 👉If you enjoyed reading the summary, head over to When Shift Happens on YouTube or your favorite podcast platform to access the full convo.