My timeline used to be lots of happy and wealthy $HYPE bulls. Recently it's been polluted by lots of salty $SOL/RHC trenchers. Massive discrepancy in vibes. 🙃 I can at least respect a 🏳️‍🌈🐻, because every bear is a bull at some price. But some of you are just jaded beyond repair at the whole industry after only choosing to participate in the worst parts of it. The same guys complaining that there's no on chain runners anymore are the same ones selling at $100k mcap. You're part of the very problem you're complaining about. Not every team is scamming, not every project is a rug, not every token unlock will get dumped etc. Some cool people just genuinely want to build cool shit and maybe make a little money along the way. If your experience in crypto has left you this jaded and toxic, why stick around? Is it just chasing the schadenfreude of hoping the rest of our bags go to zero too? You have to be able to reconcile that there's simultaneously world changing tech being built here, and that it's all one big casino. But most of life is one big casino. And there's no crying in the casino.

Elysium isn't even live yet and @AscendLaunch is already doing nearly 8 figs annualized kinetiq:native buybacks... Fwiw, this is over twice what I was forecasting in my kinetiq:native "bull thesis post"...before the chain is even live...after a self admitted somewhat messy launch Will be very interesting to watch how this number scales up when Elysium is fully online, and how sustainable the revenue proves to be in this new launchpad model.

Just so you clowns know, this is the exact same dynamic as when Robinhood went with Bitstamp until @Lighter_xyz gets CFTC approval... ICE will use $HYPE Robinhood will use $LIT If you're selling the news that neither of them can until CFTC approval (obviously)... Idk feels like a dangerous game when that can be announced any day now in the next few months. I'll keep buying lower, you'll probably buy back higher 🤷🏼‍♂️

We get to watch Druck liquidate Machi in real time now on @HyperliquidX, what a time to be alive Institutional users is way more bullish to hear about than just institutional investors for hyperliquid:native

Great analysis by @CamKhosravi on kinetiq:native here, very in line with my own price model At $0.30, kinetiq:native is either a slightly overpriced LST/ $HYPE beta play or a massively underpriced $HYPE L2 ecosystem play with half a dozen lines of revenue. Risking ~50% downside for 5x+ upside, can't really ask for a better asymmetric bet than that.

More serious retrospective on kinetiq:native airdrop as I sober up post F1 1. I stand by the fact that communications could have been clearer, and expectations could have been better managed. Always room for improvement there. 2. The community received what is now $12.5m worth of kinetiq:native for $8.81m. $3.7m of PNL distributed against a $100m mcap token is extremely fair for a S2 airdrop imo. 3. More importantly, the team raised $8.81m. This is ludicrously bullish. More ammo for partnerships, talent acquisition, infrastructure, marketing, incentives etc. I know buybacks are all the rage these days, but smaller projects need working capital, especially with how ambitious @Enter_Elysium is. Extremely high conviction that @0xOmnia can put this money to work in such a way that is very accretive to tokenholders. 4. Interesting that 16.3m kinetiq:native went unclaimed given the spread was still reasonably large at the end. I assume this is more an indication of how much attrition there has been in crypto in the last year as opposed to the claim window being too short. Maybe extending the window a week or two to the Elysium launch date means a few more % gets claimed, but I'd guess most of the unclaimed tokens would have gone to market participants who have since checked out. This is actually extremely good insight for other projects. Why give 1/3 of the airdrop to currently inactive users? A filter for activity likely just saved @Kinetiq_xyz millions of useless dillution. 5. Seeing some people say that the remaining 16.3m kinetiq:native should have been burned instead of being returned to the foundation. You need to fundamentally understand that you're invested into a project that's in full growth mode right now. Burning those tokens is a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of kinetiq:native Elysium will burn. I look forward to seeing what @0xOmnia decides to do with those tokens, but my mental model is that intelligently directed kinetiq:native incentives can burn several multiples over via increasing Elysium activity. 6. For a new investor looking at kinetiq:native, it's hard to overstate how good the outlook is. What was a potentially huge dillution event has just passed, a bunch of tokenholders and community members have sized up at a $0.26 cost basis that should act as strong support moving forward, and the team has way more money to tackle the challenge of building an on-chain ecosystem worthy of @HyperliquidX. I had previously given @Kinetiq_xyz a C+/B- on the airdrop, but after seeing the results, I'd upgrade to a solid B+/A-. Team got millions of dollars to put to work, community got millions of dollars of PNL, existing tokenholders didn't get rugged by massive dillution. Might not be as popular as giving a bunch liquid tokens out, but this is probably the correct way to handle post-TGE airdrops going forward.

base:0x940181a94a35a4569e4529a3cdfb74e38fd98631 looks primed to rip higher over the next 10 days before the Aero upgrade I had previously weighted base:0x940181a94a35a4569e4529a3cdfb74e38fd98631 slightly lower in my core positions because I worried that the tokenomics were too complicated for institutions and whales to understand and feel comfortable bidding. @citrini not only included base:0x940181a94a35a4569e4529a3cdfb74e38fd98631 in their token basket, they had it at the same weight as $HYPE and nearly twice the weight of ethereum:0x1f9840a85d5af5bf1d1762f925bdaddc4201f984. Don't think the market has fully digested how much that stamp of approval means. I also worried that there could be some last minute delay, as the previous Aero launch date delay led to a considerable nuke. With the greenlight for launch on 10/21 and the recognition from Citrini, both of those risks are removed, and I now feel considerably higher conviction on base:0x940181a94a35a4569e4529a3cdfb74e38fd98631. Previously to the Citrini piece, I expected most people to stay sidelined and wait for the flywheel to fundamentally prove itself post Aero upgrade. @wagmiAlexander expects spot volumes to roughly double by EOY, so that was my timeline where a rerating would organically occur without speculative fervor. I'm now of the opinion that this recent bit of attention will cause price to lead fundamentals, and we might actually get a real pre-upgrade breakout. The early August 2025 price action where base:0x940181a94a35a4569e4529a3cdfb74e38fd98631 doubled from $0.75 to $1.50 in just 10 days is a good example of what I think could happen in the pre-upgrade window. Due to how much supply is locked in LPs and veAERO, base:0x940181a94a35a4569e4529a3cdfb74e38fd98631 is naturally extremely reflexive. It's very difficult to justify why ethereum:0x1f9840a85d5af5bf1d1762f925bdaddc4201f984 is trading at 5x the market cap of base:0x940181a94a35a4569e4529a3cdfb74e38fd98631. I don't expect parity until after the upgrade, but I do think there's a world where base:0x940181a94a35a4569e4529a3cdfb74e38fd98631 rerates to 50% of ethereum:0x1f9840a85d5af5bf1d1762f925bdaddc4201f984 market cap as the sidelined scramble to get exposure prior to the 10/21 upgrade. This coincides nicely with a run at the previous base:0x940181a94a35a4569e4529a3cdfb74e38fd98631 ATH of ~$2.30.

I've been trying to emphasize this for a while now. We've just been beta testing and PvP'ing our way to having on chain businesses that are actually investable and demonstrably superior to TradFi alternatives, and the sidelined TradFi money is finally starting to form conclusions on the real tokens worth a punt. TradFi career risk has materially shifted from those who invested in crypto too early to those who don't have a 6-12 month outlook on tokenization, stablecoins, etc. Nobody wants to be caught flat footed. Guys who laughed me out of the building two years ago are hitting me back up and showing a genuine desire to understand the space. You'd be shocked at some of the tickers these guys are dropping. The conversation has shifted from "Why should I invest in this industry", To "What should I invest into in this industry" But they want to bet on clear winners. Expect dispersion to get worse; the name of the game is to identify what the crypto Mag7 will be. Resist the temptation to get too creative in the trenches. It's a pretty good time to be one of a thousand Buzz Lightyear.

Closing out most of my $UNI short legs here. Great hedge against my $AERO long, down from $9.40 to $7. Not particularly bullish $UNI still, in fact I find it very vindicating that @citrini also has $AERO at nearly twice the weight of $UNI in his basket. But this dip is generally worth buying and I think I can re-short $UNI higher on a bounce. Keeping the $AERO longs unhedged for now, especially into the big Aero upgrade in 2 weeks. I still believe it'll end up being a buy the news event rather than a sell the news event, at least medium-long term.

This portfolio construction looks awfully familiar 🤨 @citrini is a certified ball knower, very impressed he has ethereum:0xb1d1eae60eea9525032a6dcb4c1ce336a1de71be at the #1# spot Pretty clear what the winning bets are in crypto now. If you look forward 6-12 months and your TAM isn't expanding several multiples from agentic trading and on chain RWAs/tokenization, you're just not that interesting of a bet to take when those are so clearly the upcoming catalysts. Your biggest risk as a crypto allocator right now isn't quantum, it's the opportunity cost of being stuck in stale and outdated tokens that generate no revenue and garner no institutional bid.

Don't even take my word for it, actually watch the interview rather than read misleading headlines and jump to conclusions. Jeff's part starts around 4:48:00. The headlines made it sound like Jeff called up @nickforster on stage and said "It's my world and you're just living in it" while being flanked by the 20 new ex-SIG options traders and quants he just hired running a live demo of options trading straight on Hyperliquid. In reality he said, "on chain options are cool, hopefully people build them on top of us". These crazy headlines are a gift for people who felt sidelined on $DRV

After listening to Jeff's DAS interview, my $DRV bull thesis is unchanged, and possibly strengthened. No, this isn't cope. Strap in for a long one. First off, it was framed in a terribly misleading way by CoinTelegraph for clickbait (shocking). Jeff was asked if we he wasn't forced to be focused on perps infra, their core business, and was instead a 3rd party builder, what would he find interesting to build. His answer was that he'd look for whatever hadn't really been built yet, and mentioned options as a good example. He then added that they're tremendously important as an instrument in TradFi, so figuring out why that hasn't translated over to crypto would be an interesting problem to solve. He then added that HIP4 is already their attempt at building the infrastructure to allow teams to build options on @HyperliquidX. There are dozens of teams building binary options already using HIP4 infrastructure. There are several teams building vanilla options on top of Hyperliquid already. None of these products have taken a meaningful bite out of @DeriveXYZ market dominance yet, and they are live right now. He didn't say that they were building options in house, he just said that someone should build options on chain because there's a massive gap between the success and traction they've had on chain vs in TradFi. This is extremely validating of the $DRV thesis. People need to realize and remember that @DeriveXYZ wasn't specifically written off for all these years, the entire sector of on chain options was deemed as impossible and uninvestable. We've heard, "Options can't exist on chain, options are obsoleted by perps, no retail crypto traders will learn to trade options, etc etc". Jeff negated all of the FUD that on chain options have received over the years and basically said it was the place to be right now. Jeff did specifically say that no on chain options protocol has reached "escape velocity" yet. So if you read between the lines, he's basically saying that on chain options are interesting and necessary as a tool, that they're nascent in their growth as compared to TradFi TAM, and that it's one of the most interesting spots of the market to be focused on building right now. $DRV pumping 10x and having insane hockey stick volume growth YTD isn't "escape velocity" in his eyes, and he's right. $DRV is still cheap and early relative to the market it's expanding into. Job's not finished by any means. It's important to highlight that unlike Vlad from @Lighter_xyz who explicitly says they are building options in house, Jeff said nothing of the sort. Hyperliquid sees themselves as building the neutral infrastructure layers of liquidity for builders to come and build on top of. Look at TradeXYZ and HIP3. He didn't say that they hired a team of 20 ex-Optiver and ex-SIG guys to be their internal options trading desk, he didn't insinuate a launch date, he didn't say HIP-5 is vanilla options. He basically said, "On-chain options are cool and underexplored, I hope teams come and build them on top of our existing infra". Sidenote, I actually think his description of priority fees was actually way more signal and very bullish $HYPE. Way more bullish priority fee growth and obviously AQAv2 fees than anything HIP4 related. At the end of the day, none of what he said is new information. I always have stated in my $DRV bullposts that they will not maintain their current 90%+ market share in 2027. This is an entire primitive that does quadrillions of dollars in volume in TradFi. The on chain pie will grow massively. There will inevitably be more competition for that pie. $DRV could lose half their market share to @Lighter_xyz and @HyperliquidX and still be cheap here at these prices when on chain options volume 10x's or more. I'd also like to point out the irony that I'm long $HYPE and $LIT calls on @DeriveXYZ right now, and I still can't long $DRV perps on Lighter or Hyperliquid. I just refuse to subscribe to this notion that I should sell a phenomenal asset today because maybe there will be competition tomorrow, or next month, or next year. When they have live products, I'll reaccess the situation. Until then, competing against non-existent products that are just presumed to be superior is an unfair standard that seemingly only $DRV gets held to, and irrational selloffs like today, especially based off misleading headlines, are just better entries for me in the long run.

Super bullish @Kinetiq_xyz event at Token Good to see that community vibes remain entirely intact; the ecosystem is incredibly vibrant and everyone wants to design their projects in ways that are highly accretive to kinetiq:native and $HYPE Extremely bullish @AscendLaunch too, they are gonna burn so much kinetiq:native. Very clever move on their part to adopt kinetiq:native as their token imo. They inherit the wealth effect from kinetiq:native while also having a token that has heavily diversified streams of income. As a result, they are less likely to be victims of the usual boom and bust cycles that most launchpads with tokens tend to experience I might sound like a delusional bull now, but I think Elysium might redefine what chain wide tokenomics and inter-protocol relationships look like with kinetiq:native as the unifying value accrual mechanism. Very positive sum ecosystem under construction.