I’ve been very critical of crypto recently but I do have a problem with allocating my capital to accrue interest due to brokerages and the color of my passport.
And this one particular time I did find a solution in crypto. Sure, the casino is always winning but sometimes you can have some stock in a casino. I think risk-reward here is compatible with SPY.

This is as much real alpha as you will get from this channel, take it or leave it.

https://www.dlnews.com/articles/people-culture/vitalik-buterins-billion-shib-donation-to-india-went-through-alameda/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
Normally, I redact these utm links out, but this one was from chat GPT which is kinda cool.
On the peak of last bull market, SHIB founders famously donated half the tokens to Vitalik and they probably didn’t expect him to touch it.
But he instead burned most (effectively forfeiting like 70% of his NW!) and send $7B paper worth to India’s Covid Relief Fund.
I was randomly curious today what happened to it and what was the real story from the fake magic internet money and found this surprisingly interesting article.

You might have not heard of it, but yesterday markets surged on a fake news of tarrifs postponement. SPY jumped +10%, that’s already trillions in paper market value.

Fake news came via tweet from moderately popular free news aggregator https://x.com/DeItaone
(Esp popular among crypto folks).

And then White House denied it one hour later, everything dropped down only style back to the initial price. Lol.

https://fortune.com/2025/04/07/trump-tariff-pause-walter-bloomberg-fake-report-debunked-markets/

https://x.com/zachxbt/status/1836752923830702392
I heard a bunch about some 19yo kids stealing tons of crypto and spending it on mansions/supercars/free birkins until they were caught, but I never connected the arrest to ZachXBT, mostly just because I forgot about him.
But the thread is crazy and interesting, highly recommend, Zach is a saint.

https://x.com/chameleon_jeff/status/1929753039969440212
Jeff (Hyperliquid founder) post on transparent exchanges

Lesson in there

Recently Hyperliquid spot whale was doing 3 things at a very large scale ($1.5B BTC sold today I believe):
1) deposit BTC, sell it
2) buy spot ETH, withdraw and stake
3) long ETH perps
Both BTC and ETH markets were not nearly liquid enough for that kind of orders so they both depegged for 1%+. Eventually, market adapted and slippages went lower and these huge TWAPs became the norm.
People (me included) thought he was irrationally rushing to get exposure but that’s only halfway true — it was actually just an intended way of using financial swap contracts to achieve desired position faster. He actually decreased his market impact using that uncertainty and this tweet implies that market figured it out and reacted to it — uncertain buy pressure suddenly collapsed into a concrete number but not the moment when whale stopped buying but the moment when he stopped hedging future purchases!
I wonder if it’s a correct interpretation of the market and not the random noise, would be lit if that’s the case.
https://x.com/mlmabc/status/1959734324082659423

tldr: Hyperliquid announced a validator vote to choose the owner of a USDH ticker which is, pretty much, worthless by itself. What is really being awarded here is a chance to align towards Hyperliquid success by gaining a nod of approval from the Hyperliquid validators (and thus, somehow, community around Hyperliquid as a whole). Turns out that costs a lot:
Paxos, FRAX, Circle, Ethena are all offering 95%+ of the potential profits and, somehow, lots more in other ways for a chance to be a stablecoin issuer chosen (again, the ticker gained is, essentially, symbolic!).

This is also hilarious because we live in a unique deregulation era where two worlds of modern finance finally collide: degenerate crypto gambler who cosplays as a cat and also recently bought a tank meets the wall street billionaires with ivy league education who talk about compliance and lobbying a lot. And the cat better like him because billionaires want to win and cat helds significant amount of votes (and, also, a tank)!
https://x.com/0xbreadguy/status/1965235405667926492

https://x.com/kirbyongeo/status/2018228268890255647
Hyperliquid:
1) Eating crypto trading marketshare, prob will end up the only relevant crypto native exchange
2) Very successful permissionless equities product, pretty much the only one that matters, hip-3 silver did 1B volume last week, 2% of global volume at way above avg markup too
3) Prediction markets are obv the future, both Polymarket and Kalshi are not very good, can easily see hyperliquid gaining marketshare due to competence alone

House of all finance indeed; very easy to bid with open profit sharing structure too

https://x.com/hyperliquidx/status/2054895699498619143
Native Markets (small hyperliquid native team) won the bid over giants like paxos, ethena, circle, tether scaled up USDH to 100M tvl and now sunsetting.
Obviously I can’t know what happened, but I imagine Circle just saw that they would be eventually pushed out so Hyperliquid got a much better negotiation position and were able to dictate the terms for their partnership. I’d imagine it wasn’t a goal all along but worked out well for most involved in the end.
I find this case fascinating because while USDH is sunsetting, Native Markets team undoubtedly won.

The most successful MEV bot jaredfromsubway.eth was exploited in extremely sophisticated attack for $15M. Claude estimates lifetime $60-80M PnL so not the end of the world for the team behind it, they will be vary of these new attack vectors now for sure.

Dark Forest comparison is very apt:
"It’s no secret that the Ethereum blockchain is a highly adversarial environment. If a smart contract can be exploited for profit, it eventually will be. The frequency of new hacks indicates that some very smart people spend a lot of time examining contracts for vulnerabilities.
But this unforgiving environment pales in comparison to the mempool (the set of pending, unconfirmed transactions). If the chain itself is a battleground, the mempool is something worse: a dark forest."

I’m up 150%