PUMP Update: While PUMP continues to grind higher, two headwinds have capped further upside: 1) risk-on capital rotating into the privacy/AI narrative, and 2) competition risk from Stonk, which we flagged in our original report and has now materialised. Despite an initially positive v2 launch of custom quote assets, Stonk has regained dominance in that segment. Trailing 24H: 1. Custom-quote bonding-curve volume: Pump 17% ($13.3M) vs Stonk 83% ($65.2M) 2. All quote assets incl. SOL/USDC: Pump 63.5% ($117.6M) vs Stonk 36.5% ($67.7M) 3. Growth vs previous 24H: Pump +12.2%, Stonk +54.5% Losing these volumes cost Pump roughly 70% in potential revenue, a hypothetical $19M per week. Pump has also failed to launch on Robinhood Chain. And, while RH volumes have fallen, failure to act is again indicative of the Pump team not responding aggressively enough to defend its monopoly. That said, the launchpad sector continues to perform well. Pump still leads all launchpads in revenue ($11.6M over September 15-21) and ranks second among protocols excluding stablecoin issuers (behind Hyperliquid, $16.6M). Our muted-selling thesis also keeps playing out: September-to-date, tracked distribution-linked wallets sold or sent to exchanges 1.51B PUMP ($6.31M) versus 3.59B PUMP ($14.84M) in buybacks, 2.4x the identified outflows. Given this, still bullish on Pump, however, as Stonk continues to show resilience, it is worth considering adding Stonk alongside Pump to better express a long view on launchpads: it broadens exposure, hedges Pump's execution risk, and likely offers more asymmetric upside given even lower multiples and potential catalysts such as CEX listings.

We've revamped the Blockworks Research newsletter. Every day one of our analysts publishes focused coverage of the themes, tokens and trends they are watching. Check it out! ( when Kunal says something will rip, I tend to believe him)

To anyone who lost interest during the bear market and left to trade equities: welcome back to crypto, where you can speedrun 20+ years of TradFi returns by simply holding the right tokens.

HYPE at $92 Hyperliquid Strategies has continued its aggressive accumulation of HYPE. Over three weeks, it added 4.28M HYPE ($385M), 1.4% of circulating supply and 7.5x what the Assistance Fund bought. What stood out, however, was HYPE's weakness despite this bid, with price falling from $89 to $76. Even positive news, such as Kraken's HIP-3 announcement, had little effect. Aggressive DAT buying with weak price action indicated a lack of marginal demand beyond PURR, with holders distributing into its bid. That made the range around $80 extremely important. 33.4M HYPE, 11% of circulating supply, changed hands inside it as sellers took profits into PURR's bid, with PURR's additions over those three weeks equalling roughly 15% of Hyperliquid's spot volume. A downside break with the main buyer stepping away would have been reflexive, likely the end of this move to the upside. Instead, the opposite happened. HYPE reached all-time highs, sellers are exhausted, and Hyperliquid Strategies is better capitalized than three weeks ago, with cash up to $245M and a 1.24x mNAV. For the near term, HYPE looks very positive. Still, there is one thing I want to point out. Over the course of covering HYPE, the asset has very clearly shifted from an undervalued value play that the majority of our industry was sidelined on to very much consensus. It is clear we are pricing in a lot of growth, as revenues are down almost 50% since August last year while price is up 2x. Within crypto, a lot of optimism is now baked into the price of HYPE. The counterpoint is that TradFi, the marginal capital, will allocate to HYPE because it expresses all the key themes of crypto (perps, spot, lending through portfolio margin, stablecoins through AQAv2), and other assets (e.g. ETH, SOL) have reached much higher multiples. Both can be true. How you position depends on your outlook and how much risk you are willing to take. But if you entered lower on the thesis that HYPE was fundamentally undervalued, much of that valuation rerating has already happened. As the risk profile changes, it may be worth rebalancing to realise some of those gains while remaining positioned for further upside from growth and TradFi flows. Hyperliquid

Legitimately an essential tool for any serious investor. Agentic detection gives you an army of 24/7 agents tracking the protocols you care about, from X posts to GitHub updates, so you're always in the loop.

Hyperliquid is coming to the US for the first time, via Payward. By deploying HIP-3* markets through Bitnomial, its CFTC-regulated exchange and clearinghouse, Kraken's parent gives Hyperliquid a path to become infra for 6.6M accounts and $103B in monthly volume. Hyperliquid

AI monitoring experiment working surprisingly well so far, caught some interesting things including @standard_rsv flagging their TGE. The bottleneck now is the accounts (just a bunch of VCs), but pretty confident if I expand the tracking list to around 1k high quality accounts there'll be very little it misses. Alongside that the agent curation needs to improve. Right now it's a quick summary + catalyst from their most recent posts, but the end goal (at least for the ones tracked by multiple accounts) is a deeper dive: agent looking onchain at metrics, scraping TG for updates, etc with depth ultimately only constrained by model cost. But looking like pretty soon it's gonna be a valuable tool.

Anyone building a 24/7 agent for idea generation? Something like: 1. Trader side: monitor a curated list of accounts, what they post and who they start following. Protocol side: track accounts plus gitbook and github updates. 2. Each valid idea fires off a subagent that pulls Dune and onchain data, reads the docs, joins the TG and scrapes dev announcements. (process likely different for the type of asset) 3. Delivers the highest conviction ideas as notes at set intervals. Should work well because although agents still have very poor taste, they are elite tier at digging onchain, which gives you the context to apply your own judgment and turn it into trade ideas. Would love to compare notes if anyone else is working on it.

Definitely contrarian, but constructive on PUMP at these levels. Hard to condense the thesis, but with a deeply entrenched business (revenue in SOL at ATHs) + a consumer layer up 5.6x, while buying back 17% of circ supply a year with muted insider sales, PUMP is cheap at 2.8x sales. IMO it's a highly reflexive asset too few people are positioned for if we get another period of prolonged risk-on (pre Pons/Stonk it was leading the market). To illustrate, because Pump has since added PumpSwap and the consumer layer, a return to ATH launchpad activity puts Pump at $280M/month. Suggest reading the full report for our detailed thoughts and outlook.

Must read below on the advantages of a stablecoin-first neobank. The core idea: whoever issues the dollar earns the revenue on the reserves behind it. A neobank holding USDC or USDT is a distribution business because the yield stays with Circle or Tether. Ethena issues USDe, so through USDe and sUSDe it captures that revenue itself. Robinhood made ~34% of 2025 revenue from net interest, Revolut ~22%, and Robinhood still splits that with partner banks. Ethena Pay's bet is that owning issuance gets you that NIM, and more of it, without a bank charter. Zooming out, banks, superapps, brokerages and now stablecoin issuers are all trying to become neobanks, and all of them are trying to win the customer's primary financial relationship. Our map of the four neobank archetypes, updated for issuer-owned models:

Pumpfun's push to own the consumer layer in addition to its infra is working incredibly well. Growth on trailing 30 days: -$400M routed through Terminal, +81% -$295M traded on mobile, +110% -23.1K daily mobile traders, +78% in the last week

For anyone surprised by the Kraken announcement, our note from 10 days ago covering their testnet regulated HIP-3 DEX and our US-regulated Hyperliquid primer should get you up to speed. All free on @blockworksres, your support means a ton! Hyperliquid