I've been digging a bit deeper into @Trueo_ 's onchain activity. I asked @DefiLlama to track the number of markets created, daily swaps (essentially bets) and unique traders directly from the blockchain. > Daily swaps peaked at 261 on September 24. The latest spike reached 632 last week, with 436 yesterday. > Daily active traders reached a new ATH of 64 yesterday. > 20 new prediction markets were created yesterday. 64 daily traders might sound tiny, but attracting users to a new DeFi protocol is incredibly difficult. What I particularly like is that activity isn't just coming from a few large trades. We're also seeing more unique users and faster market creation. I love following protocols at such an early stage and watching how their adoption evolves.

I was looking at which stablecoins survived and growed outside USDT and USDC. If you look at stablecoin supply since 2020, many of the former leaders have either collapsed or lost almost all their market share. Launching a stablecoin is one thing. Maintaining its supply over several years is a completely different challenge. Look at some of the major alternatives today: > PYUSD - PayPal > USD1 - World Liberty Financial > USDS - Sky > USDG - Paxos > RLUSD - Ripple What do many of them have in common? Strong financial backing, distribution and the ability to fund incentives. And I think that's increasingly what determines which stablecoins survive. You can design an excellent stablecoin, but without distribution, liquidity and incentives, sustaining meaningful supply is incredibly difficult.

I thought Hyperliquid would capture a significant share of prediction market volume. So far, I was wrong. Market activity on Hyperliquid largely disappeared after the World Cup. But one project is starting to catch my attention: @Outcomexyz. It's currently generating around $3–4M in daily volume. Still tiny compared to the market leaders: • ~0.3% of Kalshi's volume • ~0.72% of Polymarket's volume Its share has roughly tripled over the past three months. There's clearly a lot of room to grow. Hyperliquid focuses on what it does best, while others experiment with new markets thanks to HIP-4. Let's see whether Outcome can turn this early traction into something meaningful.

Collective intelligence in financial markets is absolutely fascinating. > Brazil's elections: Markets anticipated the impact of Lula's victory over Bolsonaro, with Brazilian equities reacting sharply. > Ballon d'Or: Prediction markets were pricing Harry Kane as the winner days before the official announcement. > Oil: When oil moved more than 0.5% over a weekend, Hyperliquid's markets reportedly anticipated the correct direction in 30 out of 32 cases. When movements were smaller, accuracy dropped considerably, suggesting that speculative positioning can distort prices. Of course, collective intelligence isn't perfect. Election markets have also made some very wrong predictions like the Brazilian one. But the idea that thousands of traders can collectively price information while traditional markets are closed is incredible. I did a video on that. Check it out 🔴

Hyperliquid is becoming a serious competitor in lending. @aave V4 has been attracting deposits for months, but Hyperliquid's lending markets have reached comparable levels in a surprisingly short period. Hyperliquid currently supports fewer collateral assets, and borrowing is mainly limited to USDC and USDT. But the biggest difference is pricing. > Aave V4 borrowing rate: ~3.4% > Hyperliquid borrowing rate: ~5% That's roughly 32% cheaper borrowing on Aave. Hyperliquid's rates also spiked last week as utilization increased, which can help attract additional lenders. I'm not convinced they can compete with Aave on borrowing costs yet. But reaching this scale so quickly in a completely different business vertical is pretty impressive. Really curious to see whether it can sustain this growth.

AERO's price action looks like a sell the news event. The token went from almost $1 to around $0.66, a correction of more than 30% and maybe it's a good time to accumulate. @aeroxyz launched on several new chains just days ago, and look at the DEX market share it's already captured: > Ethereum: 4.1% > Robinhood Chain: 8% > Arbitrum: 7.3% And the growth trajectory is what excites me most. I'm very curious to revisit these numbers in a month, or even six months. Let's see how this plays out.

Aave V4 has officially surpassed $1.5B in deposits. One important distinction: that's total deposits, not net TVL. On DefiLlama, TVL reflects deposits minus outstanding borrows. I was looking at how V4's liquidity is distributed across chains: > Ethereum: 68% > Arbitrum: ~25% > Avalanche: ~5% V4 started growing in March 2026, and its share of @aave 's total TVL has gradually increased from practically 0% to around 4%. Still relatively small compared to V3, but the growth has been consistent. And I think this is just the beginning.

Aero's multichain expansion is off to a pretty impressive start. Just look at how DEX volume has evolved since October 22: > Ethereum: $10M → $56M (+460%) > Robinhood Chain: $24M → $59M (+146%) > Arbitrum: $3M → $14M (+367%) Base still dominates in terms of fees, but what's particularly interesting is that Ethereum and Robinhood Chain are already generating more activity than Optimism, where @VelodromeFi has been operating for years. The chart uses a logarithmic scale, but the growth is still pretty insane. Really impressive to see how quickly @aeroxyz is gaining traction across multiple chains.

Interesting chart from @TaikiMaeda2 's thesis comparing Zcash's market cap to Bitcoin's. At its 2017 peak, ZEC was worth 1.15% of BTC's market cap. Today, that ratio has reached 1.43%. After such a strong rally, I wouldn't be surprised to see some consolidation before another run-up. I also added an other image on metrics I like tracking. Meanwhile, Zcash keeps improving its technology. NU7 is expected in early November, potentially bringing faster blocks and 60% lower fees. I like seeing fundamentals evolve alongside the growing privacy narrative. Curious to see what's next.

I find @Trueo_ new prediction markets around hacks really interesting. The idea is simple: let people trade based on whether they believe a protocol will get hacked. This reminds me of older DeFi experiments like Y2K Finance. I think market-based risk pricing could become an interesting alternative to traditional DeFi insurance. Just look at @NexusMutual. Back in 2021, it had over $1B in capital, but the following years were much more challenging as the industry faced major exploits and insurance claims. And rebuilding confidence and capital has been difficult. The problem with traditional DeFi insurance is that underwriting complex smart contract risks is incredibly hard. Prediction markets offer a different approach: let market participants price those risks directly. That doesn't make them effective insurance products. But I love seeing experimentation in this area.

Banks are not needed to solve duration mismatch. The market will solve it in one of these two ways: 1. Person-to-person (Morpho Midnight, Liquid Lane): an orderbook to price credit. 2. Person-to-pool (Royco): A sustainably incentivized pool of always-on buy-side liquidity.

I like to revisit my investment thesis for ETH. Ethereum is increasingly behaving like a scarce monetary asset, with inflation close to Bitcoin's. Back in early 2024: > Bitcoin supply growth: ~1.7% > Ethereum: temporarily deflationary Then two important things happened. > Bitcoin's halving reduced its annual issuance to around 0.8%. > Ethereum introduced blobs, significantly reducing transaction costs for L2s but also lowering ETH burns. Today, Ethereum's annual supply inflation is around 0.83%, almost identical to Bitcoin. And among the major networks, BNB is one of the few with an even lower net supply growth rate. Of course, scarcity alone doesn't make an asset a good investment. But I think it's worth remembering that ETH's monetary properties remain interesting, even when the market narrative isn't particularly exciting.

Ember has surpassed $14M in deposits, and a big part of its growth is from Sui. Look at these numbers: > Sui DeFi TVL: ~$500M > SUI market cap: ~$4.08B > Nearly 50% of SUI supply still to be distributed That's a massive amount of potential incentive capital relative to the size of its DeFi ecosystem.nAnd we're already seeing how powerful those incentives can be. On Suilend, @EmberProtocol vaults can be used as collateral to build leveraged loops with incredibly attractive yields. These kinds of opportunities are much harder to find across more mature DeFi ecosystems. Ember has already become one of Sui's largest protocols, ranking around sixth with over $30M in TVL. It's a great example of what happens when a protocol builds useful products in an ecosystem with strong incentives and distribution.

Merkl ran 1,726 incentive campaigns in September. The platform has become incredibly dominant in DeFi incentives, and even though protocols aren't spending as aggressively as they used to, the market is still massive. Just look at September: > 1,726 campaigns > $19M distributed > $228M annualized at that pace And I don't think incentives are going anywhere. Traditional businesses have always used incentives to acquire customers and drive growth. DeFi is no different. The real question is whether those incentives create sustainable activity or just attract mercenary capital. Understanding that difference is something I'm actively working on at @roycoprotocol. I'd actually love to connect with people who specialize in incentive design and optimization. If that's your area, I'd be really interested in learning from you.

I've always been a big fan of @LiquityProtocol, especially V2. The business model scales better than V1, and BOLD is showing some encouraging signs. Supply has recovered from $29M at this year's lows to $38M today, an increase of roughly 31%. And there's a lot you can do with BOLD, including Stability Pool wrappers and strategies built on top of them. But what caught my attention is the upcoming friendly fork on Robinhood called @FlorinProtocol. It will allow users to borrow against tokenized stocks using a CDP model. And I think that's a massive advantage. @aave and @Morpho can support tokenized stocks as collateral, but they still need lenders to provide liquidity. With Liquity's model, stablecoins are minted directly against collateral without needing lenders. Debt ceilings, collateral requirements and borrowing costs still matter, but if rates remain competitive, this could be a more scalable way to bring tokenized equities into DeFi.

Some data worth sharing from Aave v3. Lately, I've been pretty impressed by how well @aave is executing. But despite the market recovery, DeFi still has a long way to go. There's an interesting trend in Aave V3: capital utilization. Back in July 2022, utilization was around 60–70%. After a wave of liquidations, it collapsed to roughly 30%. Since then, it's been recovering gradually. Today we're at ~41%, with recent peaks approaching 50%. I think this reflects a more mature DeFi market, with users becoming more sophisticated in how they manage leverage and borrowing. And with improvements in capital efficiency and growing institutional adoption, especially around Bitcoin, I wouldn't be surprised to see utilization continue climbing.

I've been reviewing how things are going for Pendle and Boros. Revenue has dropped over the past months, partly because DeFi has become a bit boring lately. But the economics are looking much healthier. Back in early 2025, @pendle_fi peaked at around $8.6M in monthly revenue, but was spending $3.3M on incentives. Now, following the tokenomics changes, those costs have dropped massively. Look at September: > Revenue: $554K > Incentives: $50K That's over 10x more revenue than incentive spending. @boros_fi still represents a tiny part of the business: > Pendle V2: ~$520K/month > Boros: ~$34K/month But I think the potential is interesting, especially as they keep adding more CEXs and funding rate markets. We're still talking about a new primitive that most people don't understand. I'm really curious to see how this evolves.

I had the chance to speak with the @boros_fi team. I've always been a big fan of @pendle_fi, but hadn't explored Boros in depth until now. You can lock in 20–30% yields by trading funding rates across CEXs, although execution requires four trades and Boros liquidity is still limited. To simplify this, they've launched markets where you can trade the funding rate spread between exchanges directly, reducing execution from four trades to three. For example, the Binance vs Gate spread currently trades around 3%, despite the underlying funding rate difference being closer to 7%. And here's the interesting part: instead of executing the full strategy to lock in yield, you can simply long or short the spread. The discount partly exists because funds are willing to accept lower returns to lock in their yields. But how far can they compress the spread before it stops being profitable? You can also scale into positions with limit orders and exit if the spread widens. Honestly, at these levels, I almost find trading the spread more attractive than executing the full strategy. Really interesting primitive. Definitely want to explore it further.