In today’s Delphi Daily, a full post-mortem on the recent volatility. We examine the data on open interest, bid-ask spreads, and funding rates.
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1/ Leveraged longs took a senseless beating over the last week and it was perhaps overdue.
BTC’s open interest on perps/futures fell from just under $30B in late November to just over $15B today.
Sentiment has taken a turn for the worse.
2/ From the November peak to today, $BTC open interest is down a whopping 50%.
Too many leveraged longs and a lack of spot buying is a sign that a market is peaking. When there’s nobody left to buy/long, price momentum to the upside is severely limited.
3/ What really caused prices to fall so quickly?
The answer is an utter collapse in market microstructure.
The bid-ask spread for a $5M order in perp markets ranges from 0.1% to 0.5% (on bad days). On this occasion, spreads for a $5M order momentarily rose as high as 2-11%.
4/ Funding rates turned negative as levered longs were wiped out, and sentiment has been understandably poor since.
Crypto markets are sensitive to behavioral factors, so a mid-term collapse in sentiment would not be surprising if things don’t pick up soon.
5/ $LUNA looks to be a moon mission as the only top 10 coin in the green over the last two weeks.
Despite erratic performance across the market, $ETH and $BNB are holding much better than other large caps.
A valuation analysis of Pump Fun and what to expect from launch.
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This thread only scratches the surface. The full report covers much more including a complete valuation analysis, competitive deep dive, launch dynamics, and more.
1/ Pump has quietly built one of crypto's most profitable businesses, generating $780M+ in cumulative revenue with no token incentives.
Even once you take out January's memecoin craze, Pump is still generating around $1.3M per day on average.
That's more than what most protocols make in their entire existence.
AI has blurred the lines of IP ownership. @StoryProtocol thinks blockchain can fix it.
Meet the first IP blockchain reshaping creativity and royalties for the digital age.
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Our full Story report dives much deeper into use cases, infrastructure, and more. Here is the full breakdown.
1/ Traditional IP systems depend on centralized registries and manual enforcement, too slow to track millions of AI-generated works created daily.
General-purpose blockchains aren't optimized either, lacking native support for complex royalty splits and embedding licensing terms into creative assets.
Hyperliquid just dodged a $13.5M bullet—but it exposed a critical flaw in decentralized trading.
Here's how one trader almost broke the system and how we can stop it from happening again.
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1/ An attacker opened a large short position on JELLY, then artificially pumped its spot price, forcing liquidation.
This pushed an unrealized $13.5M loss onto Hyperliquid’s liquidity pool (HLP), as the oracle price spiked from $0.0095 to ~$0.50 per token.
2/ Hyperliquid intervened by delisting JELLY perps and force-settling positions at the original price of $0.0095, protecting HLP and leaving the attacker at a loss.
But rather than just reacting, what steps can Perp DEXs take to mitigate future risks?