Prob worth expanding my thoughts a bit more besides ghibli fun🧵

https://twitter.com/EvgenyGaevoy/status/1905000562711748645

1. First some disclosures. Wintermute (and myself by extention) is long $HYPE. Not as much as people seem to think based on our wallet, but still our top10 positions as of today (and really since TGE).
I also think Jeff and the team clearly won the defi perp space as of today. It's a pretty significant achievement and they deserve all the praise (and the accompaning hyperliquid army🙃)
All this to say that I do believe in the future upside and have skin in the game

What Wintermute does thread

It’s been exceptionally “fun” on twitter last few days with some accounts hitting new lows in terms of market structure understanding. I’ve written a few times in the past about what we do and how we prefer to do things, but maybe it’s a good time for a refresher: 1) This is not intended to be an apologetic thread. I’m not looking to win support from people in the trenches. We don’t deal directly with people in the trenches – we certainly trade with them either on defi or cefi venues, but neither they nor us have any choice in the matter – it’s all very much anonymous and permissionless (as it should be). It’s possible that this thread will make some of you trench warriors change your mind about what Wintermute (and lots of other, less public, prop trading firms) do, but my hopes are pretty low. Reality is, so many people are retarded, and prop trading firms make the best margins on, what we charitably call, “uninformed flow”. I should therefore not complain that much. This thread is for anyone who we deal directly with – token protocols, OTC counterparties, centralized and decentralized exchanges, and maybe an occasional regulator🫡🙃

Public service announcement or “how we are not really friends with Near @NEARFoundation and Aurora Labs @auroraisnear going forward”🔽 0. Intro

Keeping things quiet is often a sensible approach to adversarial situations. If you have been following the SBF trial, that’s exactly what Alameda/FTX did when they got “hacked” by people using “very profitable trading strategies” in $MOB and other tokens. However, doing things this way just doesn’t feel right to me in the post 3AC/Terra/FTX/Alameda world.

We believe that Near Foundation (NF) in cooperation with Aurora Labs have failed to honor their public and private commitments in regards to USN redemptions. The resulting loss would have been easy to sweep under the rug. Nevertheless, I made a decision to disclose this in the public interest, because I strongly believe it is my (and Wintemute) role to act in the best interests of the industry beyond the immediate commercial interest at hand. It can happen to somebody else after us (who may have less resources to fight back), and it sets the precedent for companies to be publicly accountable for their bad actions (and for others to disclose bad actions). By not making it public we would effectively contribute to bad practices being tolerated and repeated.

Good morning, in todays double thread:

1. Big and vocal part of CT alts traders being perpetually redacted, docile and simply not serious people
2. Why our curve proposal is a win-win 1.0 If you are reading this, there is a chance you think there are forces far beyond your control. Forces controlling your destiny, your wealth, heck, maybe even chances of you getting a girlfriend. They can make numbers go up or down at a whim!

Great update from Jeremy. Some tldr (as I see it) and some thoughts (as I think them)

all opinions are mine, Wintermute has exposure to USDC and this is ongoing volatile situation that will continue until banks are open on Monday (and potentially beyond)

https://twitter.com/jerallaire/status/1634649346535833601

0) If it looks like I'm talking my book, well sure, we are a trading firm first, but I'll try to make my reasoning as clear as possible and then you can make your own judgement call.

It's totally possible I'm wrong and you are very welcome to point at any (material) errors

very humbling day, guess that "wishful" part of my handle is just fading away with this event

my wrong assumptions were: 1) I know Alameda has been doing a lot of ruthless stuff. We made a killing last year, so they must have been on top of the world, not even sure why people keep working there with so much cash (thought thats why SamT left)

Thoughts on recent sbf discourse 👇🏻 1) I cannot claim I know him super well personally - we had couple of conversations all in all and neither of them has been in a “drink a lot of alcohol in a small group” format. Im old school in that - can’t form an opinion on a hard-to-read person otherwise

A quick update on the Wintermute hack as I would like to share more details on what happened 1. Attack vector
The attack was in relation to our wallet used for DeFi proprietary trading operations, which are completely separate and independent from our CeFi and OTC operations

Short communication on the ongoing Wintermute hack We’ve been hacked for about $160M in our defi operations. Cefi and OTC operations are not affected

On USDC news. Found most headlines very much misleading. My 5 cents: 1) Removing most stablecoin pairs is a good thing - liquidity doesn’t have to be split between multiple stablecoins, making market makers’ job easier and markets overall more liquid

Was waiting for this one to come out. Some thoughts in no particular order:

https://twitter.com/BholaXto/status/1556386665291292673

1) one of the key ideas Kevin advocates as possibility is UNI1, AAVE1 etc, “vampire attack”, and the idea the ethPOW already has “infrastructure”. I still think it doesn’t hold water. Forking protocols has been perfected into almost art over last two years

So, I'm just going to post it here for posterity or whatever. I really like Kevin - he is one of my favourite people in crypto and the first og I've met irl when Wintermute has been tiny and I always appretiated him being humble, down to earth and easy to approach There are a lot of potential risks with ETH merge. The fact that people have been working on it for years, doesnt mean it will work out perfectly (and probably indicates there is a potential for opposite, otherwise we would have been there already)

on aggregators, dex liquidity, and enabling transfer of value in a multichain world🧵 1) We’ve been involved in defi aggregator space for a while. Back in 2020 dex space has been either AMMs (horrible design for market makers) or CLOB (gas fees making it not viable to post bids and offers)

I don’t know who wants to hear this, but looking at prices, graphs, rainbows, previous halvings etc is all, very obviously, astrology for men

Ultimately it all comes down to macro and belief 1) Macro is all about big institutional players that don’t care about Bitcoin mission, whether AAVE is a better tech than COMP, whether SOL is fucking fast or whether it’s going to be Optimism or polygon that will scale Ethereum

gaming communities (and game developers) antipathy towards nft/web3/crypto is very real. My datapoints: 1) searching for "nft" on every single gaming discord channel for web2 games returns very negative comments and/or mocking. No surprises here given "get rich fast" feel from most of copy-paste nft project of last months

axie tryout 1/n 1. there was a bit of hype last few weeks and some listings on binance etc, so I thought it would be interesting to understand the game and economics etc

Wrote a first (out of three) article on crypto ETFs
a thread (1/n)
medium.com/wintermute-tra… 1. First article will cover the tradfi ETFs and the challenges of being a MM in that space. Next one will cover the current landscape in defi. I'll cap the series by how I see this space going forward

0) I had it at the back of my head that I’ve promised the “culture” post, but damn, writers block is very real. Thankfully seeing all the clout @emgurevich got finally moved the needle (plus she helped with the structure “a bit”)🙃 1) We have a very distinct culture at @wintermute_t and it’s so many different things that it’s hard to synthesize, but I think there are three main themes. Took me a while to zoom in on the right words, but I think I got it close enough: