Here is the 13 tweet report breakdown, simplified with charts & data: 👇🧵
DeFi was the golden child of 2020, acting as the first true narrative of the last market cycle.
Its initiation into the crypto mainstream has now endearingly gone down in history as “DeFi Summer.”
While DeFi has come far, obstacles remain:
1. DeFi products with traction are speculation-based 2. Onboarding new users is very difficult 3. Retaining users is even harder 4. Crypto UX is not good
The challenging end goal is self-sovereignty & a transparent, borderless system
We explore 7 themes in DeFi that make us excited for 2023:
Transparency provided by public ledger blockchains makes DeFi protocols auditable in real-time, curtailing risks that led to the downfall of FTX.
Perhaps market makers will now see how DEXs are the path forward for price discovery and trading in crypto.
2. DeFi Blue Chips
DeFi blue chips still dominate their respective sectors.
As the sole form of collateral & recipient of platform fees, @synthetix_io holds the most straightforward value accrual and utility of any major DeFi token.
There’s been a lack of convenient, capital-efficient access to leverage in DeFi so far.
@GearboxProtocol allows for composable, capital-efficient leverage through its credit accounts with v2 streamlining liquidations and gas costs.
4. Undercollateralized Money Markets
Undercollateralized Money Markets serve the speculation use case by funding market makers and hedge funds with efficient leverage.
Default risks along with counterparty and concentration risk are always important to consider.
6. UX Aggregators
We can create UX aggregators that act as a unified front end for all of DeFi.
With different aggregation layers, dApps become "liquidity infrastructure" with their main goal being to house liquidity and enable efficient execution for user activity.
7. veTokens
Projects are implementing veTokenomics as a levered liquidity-mining program without concrete objectives.
All roads lead to a laissez-faire approach with value to be extracted while inching towards equilibrium.
Along with themes for the future, there were multiple surprises in 2022 including:
🔹Saturation of structured products
🔹Lack of on-chain derivatives adoption (besides @dYdX 💪)
🔹Lack of DeFi options traction ⬇️
Overall, there’s a lot to be excited about.
DeFi stands on the precipice of some of the greatest opportunities (and challenges) the financial industry has seen.
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?