Octav Founder Shares His DeFi Playbook: Options, Uniswap LPs, and Tokenized Stocks

We know that a lot of rich people, like Elon Musk, borrow against their assets, like their Tesla stock. We were never able to do that as retail investors. Now, with tokenized stock, you can. If you want to borrow against your NVIDIA, you can put up one NVIDIA share and borrow against it. That’s game-changing; it’s much more capital efficient.

If you combine that kind of stock tokenization and capital efficiency with traditional market tools like trading and options coming into DeFi, you get the best of both worlds. TradFi is saying, “Okay, we have the tooling, and now we have the infrastructure. The infrastructure is on-chain, so let’s move on-chain.” That’s why we’ve seen a lot of tokenized stock come on-chain: it opens up even more efficiency for them.

Nothing said on The Edge Podcast is a recommendation to buy or sell tokens or securities. This content is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing shared here is financial advice.

Welcome to The Edge Podcast. I'm DeFi Dad here with Nomatic. Today's show features Mathieu Baril, co-founder and CEO of Octav Labs. Mathieu, thank you for joining us. How are you doing?

Super great. Thanks for having me, guys.

Mathieu and I worked together years ago at Zapper. I’ve known him even longer than that because he’s been an investor and a builder in this space for well over 10 years. We’ll have to talk more about your Bitcoin origin, too. Funny enough, he has this legendary story going back to the 2017 cycle. He’s actually in this photo, which we’ll flash on screen, from The New York Times. The headline said, “Everyone Is Getting Hilariously Rich and You’re Not.” I think you were at a crypto conference.

Years later, you’re still here building, and I think that’s why we wanted to have you on the show. You’ve always been a power user. We used to bond over all the early DeFi apps we got into, and to this day, you’re still a power user, along with being an early angel investor. Can you tell us more about your origin story and how you got into crypto in the first place?

1. From Bitcoin Mining To Octav

A long time ago, in 2013, I was at university in Canada and found Bitcoin through some random stuff. I started mining in my room at university and realized it was going to be game-changing. I’m a robotics engineer in biotech, so I was going to university for that, but I slowly became really involved in the BitcoinTalk forum, which was the big Bitcoin forum back then.

Then I started buying mining gear from China, and it was super expensive. I was a student, so I thought, “Oh, let’s buy in bulk,” and bought 50 machines at the same time to resell in Canada. I became a reseller of Bitcoin ASIC machines. Since my background is in robotics engineering, I was able to test the machines, push them to a certain level, and play with them.

That’s how I started, and then I officially became a miner. My co-founder, Luc—the same co-founder I have at Octav—and I met because he was buying the gear I was importing from China. Then we started our own mining facility in northern Quebec. Quebec is cold during the winter, and the electricity is cheap. We were students having fun mining, so we just started mining a lot.

I went to California to work in biotech for a company we sold to Johnson & Johnson. After that, I found DeFi and the DeFi summer, along with all the 2017 ICO activity. It’s always been a passion for me because we mined from 2013 to 2022, mostly Bitcoin and then Ethereum. At one point, we had about 500 or 600 GPUs mining Ethereum.

Having Ethereum and being able to use it in DeFi was more capital efficient. We thought, “Oh, we can actually use our Ethereum to do more stuff.” We got into the Lens stuff early, which became Aave, and we were early in Lyra. We’ll talk about that later. All this DeFi stuff was exciting for us, so we did a lot of it.

Then COVID hit in 2021. I came back from California, and I had no job, was deep in crypto, had some assets in my hands that I could do something with, and was stuck inside. That was the perfect match for me to go deep into DeFi. I started being everywhere and investing in everything: Compound, Uniswap, all of that.

I was pretty active on Zapper’s Discord channel, so I started talking with the team and saying, “Guys, you’re missing this. You’re missing that. I need this protocol.” I started becoming a real power user. That’s how I met you, DeFi Dad, at Zapper, and I joined the team as a strategy lead to figure out where we could go and where DeFi was headed.

It didn’t go the way we expected, so I decided to leave and build my own platform, Octav. I left Zapper in 2022 and started Octav. To me, Zapper was going in a direction without a clear vision; it was nebulous where we were going. I needed something to track my assets. I had some assets and a hedge fund in the Cayman Islands, and I needed to track them, understand where the money was, and see whether I was making a profit.

That’s why Octav was created. The most important thing is that it was created for tax purposes. Canada has a really complex fiscal system, and taxes are really complex. I needed to understand how to declare all the taxes on my degen activity. When you start with some money and make $5, you don’t care. But when that $5 becomes $10,000, you think, “Oh, now I need to declare that. I need to pay tax on this.”

Over time—it’s been almost five years now—Octav has become more of a digital platform for asset managers. We work with hedge funds and family offices. For example, ConsenSys is a client. We build what they need, including the data layer they need. That’s how I got into crypto: quite early, just by pure luck, and then going deeper and deeper over time.

Mathieu, something you said when we were chatting about this podcast was that Octav lets you see things or trends that are happening ahead of time. Can you walk us through what you mean by that? How do you take something you see early on in Octav and know it’s interesting? How does that lead to a strategy built on top of the insight you got from Octav?

2. How Octav Spots Early Protocols

We have a lot of clients around the world deployed on every chain and everywhere. Oftentimes, one of our clients will come to us—maybe an investor or an angel—and say, “Hey, I have this new protocol. I need to track it because I have some token vesting,” or whatever. They’ll come to us and ask us to track the protocol.

We’re pretty early because the people asking are usually investors or angels who are really early to a protocol. We start looking at the protocol and meet the team, so we can talk with them. We look at the contracts, and my team is able to create smart contracts and read what’s happening and how secure it is. Then we talk with the team, read the contracts, and integrate everything into Octav.

When we integrate something into Octav, my role as the DeFi guru is to test it. I test every protocol. It reminds me of when there was something called DegenScore. I had a pretty high DegenScore because I was testing everything. Some people ask, “Matt, you’re still super deep in DeFi.” I have to be—not just because I like it, although I do, but because I need to test things for Octav and understand the flow, what’s happening, where the money is going, and whether it’s locked.

Part of my job is to deploy capital in DeFi. We deploy a little bit of money, not a lot; we can play with $100 and things like that. Then we understand the entire flow. We talk with the team, look at the smart contracts, and integrate the protocol into Octav so our investors can track it.

By doing this, we’re also doing due diligence. If the contract isn’t deployed on InterScan, we can’t see it, and that’s a red flag. If the team is completely anonymous and isn’t talking to us, that’s another red flag. That gives us an idea of whether we should deploy more or not, even if we integrate the protocol into Octav. We’ll integrate it into Octav for sure because someone asked us to, but whether we deploy our capital in it depends on the due diligence we’ve done.

Mathieu, are there any recent applications or protocols you’ve reviewed that felt new to DeFi or really unique? One of the reasons I reached out to you more recently was that I asked, “Hey, are you paying close attention to Derive?” I think you said something like, “Yes, I’ve been holding since Lyra, and we are market making on Derive.” This is not uncommon.

You tend to be using and trying everything. But is there anything else that’s really stuck out to you lately where you’re like, “Whoa, that is a really cool, net-new primitive in DeFi?”

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3. Traditional Markets Move On Chain

I think what’s changed a lot lately is the tokenization of stocks. That’s changed a lot in the mindset of every investor, or everyone in DeFi, right? Borrowing against your AAVE—you believe in Aave. It’s a good protocol, it’s big, but the FDV often overvalues a lot of protocols, so it’s really hard to say that makes sense. If I take NVIDIA or the S&P 500 and use it to borrow against, that’s way safer, if I can say that.

What was exciting about Derive is that it’s an options platform. Like I said, I’ve been in it since Lyra, a long time ago. Options are one of the biggest derivatives in the world. There’s a lot of money in options, but DeFi never had them, which was kind of crazy. It was complex to do because it’s hard to have market makers and liquidity. It’s not like an AMM: the invention of Uniswap was awesome, but you can’t do that for options because they change with strike, time, and everything.

When Derive was able to have enough market makers to do that, that was the opening of options. We’ve seen an options season right now, which is kind of interesting. Derive is really big. I love to play beta, and I’ve been in Derive since forever, but now that the season is happening, I’m looking at who else is doing options—not necessarily because they’re better than Derive, but they’ll probably benefit from the hype or the power of Derive.

We’re looking at Paradex a lot. We’ve built something we’ll talk about later called Tactical, which simplifies options for retail. We built it with Derive because we know the team and have been working with them for a long time. We were quickly looking for the next venue to do options, and Paradex was there, so we started deploying on Paradex. Now Tactical also has Paradex. Fun fact: my LP strategy that I often use—we’re one of the LP providers for the Paradex token, mostly because there’s an opportunity there. We’ll talk later about the LP strategy.

The Tread guys—T-R-E-A-D—David is a super-genius guy coming from a high-frequency company. He really understands market making, so he created Tread to market-make on a bunch of things. He can market-make on Hyperliquid, on all the perps, and on centralized exchanges. It’s not DeFi crypto retail; it’s really professional TradFi market making. But it shows that we’re starting to build real tools that traditional markets have used forever, but that don’t exist in DeFi. Therefore, we don’t have the same capital efficiency in DeFi.

On the other hand, we know that a lot of rich people, like Elon Musk and others, borrow against their assets, like their Tesla stock. We were never able to do that as retail people. Now, with tokenized stocks, you can do that. If you want to borrow against your NVIDIA, you can put up one NVIDIA and borrow against it. That’s game-changing, so it’s way more capital-efficient.

If you take that kind of tokenization of stocks and capital efficiency, plus having real traditional-market tooling like Tread or options coming into DeFi, and you merge that, you get the best of both worlds. Now you have the tools TradFi can use, but you can also use them at small sizes and compound everything, as DeFi composability gives you the ability to do. That’s opening up a lot of capital efficiency, and that’s why TradFi is saying, “Okay, we have the tooling, but now we have the infrastructure, and the infrastructure is on-chain, so let’s move on-chain.”

Mm-hmm.

That’s why we’ve seen a lot of tokenized stocks coming on-chain, because they open up even more efficiency for them. I think that’s where I’m looking these days. Just to go back to your question: DeFi, Tread, Paradex, all the options world. We have an options-season group with Molly—if people know Molly from back in the day from Edgic. We have a group of options people talking about options and all the platforms. Tactical is part of this, where we simplify options for retail.

That’s where I’m more interested. More than a new primitive or a new DeFi idea, I prefer to see what from the traditional market can come to the DeFi world and bring more capital efficiency and more stability. We’re pretty deep into a lot of tokenized stocks. I was holding USDC because it’s stable and I’m sure I’m not going to get screwed. I took all that USDC and split it between the S&P 500, USDG, and Robinhood because I trust the S&P 500 enough to do that. Now I’m earning a lot more yield than purely lending at 3% or 4%. There’s a lot of opportunity that can open up that way, and the best chain that’s opened that up right now is Robinhood. We’ll see what happens with the other chains.

I want to stay on this Robinhood stuff a bit. One thing I’ve known in DeFi is that there are always rewards for being curious and early to something. You were telling us a bit about what you were doing on Robinhood Chain before we went live, and it was fascinating. I know a lot of people were doing these LPs, but why don’t you recount your strategy with the early Robinhood Chain launch? It was really interesting, what you were doing with Uniswap pools.

Thanks to Octav, we’re always looking at what the next chain is, which one we need to integrate, and what’s coming. When we saw Robinhood, we joined the Robinhood builder group and started looking at how we could integrate quickly. When it launched, we were looking at where the tokenized stocks were, since that was Robinhood’s focus. I think Rialto is the platform where a lot of liquidity is happening, and the one that’s mostly backed by Robinhood. That was great, but quickly I thought, “I love Uniswap LPs. That’s where I make a lot of my money. Is there any stock on Uniswap right now?”

It had just launched. I think it was the first week, or even the first day, probably. We moved a lot of our capital into Uniswap and provided liquidity to NVIDIA, Tesla, and the S&P 500—all the tokens where we could see some volume. We could see the volume from Rialto, but nothing on Uniswap, so we opened pools on Uniswap at 3%, 4%, and 5% because we were the first ones. If you want to pass through my pool, you’ll pay the fee, and that’s it.

We knew it wouldn’t last 4 or 6 months; we knew it would be 1 or 2 weeks. With the capital we moved there, I think we moved close to $300K. It wasn’t crazy, not millions, but about $200K. We probably did about $75K or $80K in 2 weeks. It was kind of insane because everything was passing through us.

The beauty of AMMs and MEV bots is that people trading on Rialto want to balance what’s happening on the Uniswap pool too. They’re always arbitraging everything between the two. Even if you’re not the most capital-efficient, if the price is moving there, they’ll arbitrage here on your pool, and they’ll pay your 3%, 4% fee.

We were really early. We put capital there, capitalized on it quickly, and then removed everything. When we created the pool at 3%, some people came and said, “Why 3%? If I put in 1%, I’ll be more capital-efficient than their pool, and therefore everyone will trade through my pool.” Over time, we saw our return on investment going down really quickly, which was expected. So we removed all of that from Uniswap and thought, “Okay, what’s next?”

I believe strongly that Aerodrome is pretty powerful on Base. The fact that its token is linked to where you vote to give liquidity incentives makes it more aligned with token holders actually owning the token. So we asked, “What’s happening on Robinhood? Is there a V3 on Robinhood?” We looked around and saw UP, but they were really focused on meme coins. I’ve never loved meme coins. I understand the value and the hype, but I think more people get burned over time than make money. It’s mostly the same people making money and the same people getting burned on meme coins. So I thought, “Okay, not UP,” because they’re focusing on stock brokers and all this meme stuff that I don’t understand.

We looked around and found a small one called Allendale, and we deployed capital there. Again, because of the Octav mindset, we didn’t just deploy capital. We went and met with the team, looked at the contract, and tried to assess everything to see if it seemed okay. It’s really small; I think it has about $1 million in TVL right now. The team is anonymous, so those are all red flags. We put capital there, but we’re ready to get out if something happens.

That’s what we’re doing right now. I’ve seen a new project coming soon as a DEX on Robinhood, too. A lot of new stuff is happening on Robinhood, mostly because tokenized stocks are happening there right now. I know Base and other chains are trying to build in tokenized stocks, but what impresses me most about Robinhood is that they’ve captured a lot of it. The biggest thing that blew my mind is that they don’t use USDC; they use USDG, which no other chain was pushing. If you go on Arbitrum or any other L2, it’s always USDC. Robinhood launched with USDG, and when they launched, I thought, “That’s going to be their nail in the coffin. They won’t be successful because of USDG.” But the opposite happened: everyone bridged to Robinhood to get access, which pumped USDG’s TVL relative to USDC.

That was great because I’m not a big fan of USDC or USDT. I’m a big fan of decentralized stablecoins, but they’re really hard. USDG isn’t decentralized, but it creates more competition and gives you different stablecoins to use and hedge your risk with. Now you don’t need to hold only USDC. You can hold USDC, USDT, and USDG, so you can hedge your risk a little. That’s where we are with Robinhood right now. We’re still looking. I think we’re in Robinhood’s Builder Hub, and we see a lot of people trying to build more traditional DeFi platforms on Robinhood, which is really interesting to see.

We’ve seen the volume go ballistic and then go back to normal. That’s to be expected, but I think Robinhood will be interesting in the future because of the TradFi mindset. I think that’s the idea.

You mentioned hedging. I think we were talking earlier about you providing liquidity to, maybe it was, SPY-USDG and then shorting SPY to hedge. Can you talk about how that strategy works in practice? Where were you shorting SPY, and what goes into that strategy as an on-chain investor?

The easiest way to think about it is impermanent loss. When you put ETH and USDC in a pool, for example, if ETH goes down, you get impermanent loss. You want the yield from market making, so you want the yield from ETH-USDG, for example, but you also want to protect yourself. If ETH goes down quickly, in an AMM you’ll end up with all ETH and zero USDC, so you’re effectively buying ETH as it goes down. I’m using ETH just as an example, but I’ll get back to SPY.

Back then, you could short ETH on Hyperliquid or another platform to hedge your position. For the exact calculation, ask Claude Code, Codex, or ChatGPT. If you put 50/50 in a pool, you won’t short only 50%, because over time, if ETH goes down, you’ll have more and more ETH, so you have to increase your short hedge.

I prefer options. They have a fixed cost. If you buy a put option and the price goes down over time, you know the option costs you, say, $100. If your Uniswap V3 LP generates more than $100, everything above that is pure profit, because you’ve taken on the risk of your ETH-USDG position and removed that risk with your option. Your profit needs to at least cover the cost of the option.

You can short with perps, but funding rates change over time, so it’s a bit different. Sometimes you’ll make money shorting ETH, so you can actually get paid to hedge your position. That can be good, but you need to watch your liquidation price and all of that. With an option, there’s no liquidation. You just buy it, and at the end it either covers the cost of what you lost there, or you pay the premium and forget about it. That’s the beauty of options.

When tokenized stocks started, and still today, it was really hard to hedge them because there weren’t options on-chain for stocks. There still aren’t many. I think Paradex is starting to launch some options for tokenized stocks, which is great. We’ll be able to do our full strategy on-chain. What we were doing was using our own traditional stockbroker to buy options in the traditional market to hedge our tokenized-stock Robinhood LP.

You just need to make sure the fees you earn from your LP cover the premium you pay for the option. When we started on Robinhood, it was so good that we could pay for the option without any problem. It’s also a bit less risky to put SPY-USDG in a pool because SPY hopefully won’t lose 25% over time. It varies a lot less than something like Ethereum, where you can have a flash crash. So it’s a lot less risky that way.

The idea is that you provide liquidity, which generates yield, and then you either buy an option or short the asset. Make sure you calculate the numbers correctly, because when you’re fully exposed to one token, you have a lot more of it than you did at the beginning. You need to short that amount or buy an option to cover it. That’s the idea. It does reduce some of your profit: if your option costs $100 and you make $150, you’re only making $50. But you’re hedging the risk of actually losing money on the market-making position.

You can also automate it. The more money you’re losing, the more you increase your short over time. A lot of people automate that. In traditional markets, it’s pretty obvious: it’s a market maker managing their inventory and hedging it. If you look up market-maker inventory and hedging, you’ll find a lot of information. It’s classic, but the beauty is that with smart contracts, you can automate the whole system. That’s why it’s powerful.

4. Capital Rotation Across Chains

Given how active you are on Robinhood Chain, are you still as active on Base? Has Robinhood Chain eaten into your interest in Base? Have you basically reallocated your strategies from Base over to Robinhood?

Yeah. We’ve moved 100% of our stuff to Robinhood for now. It’s a question of positioning yourself where the volume and the action are. Base took some time. Classic Coinbase. We were laughing in a private chat earlier that it takes them a while to copy someone else. Now they’ve launched their tokenized stocks, and there are airdrops, so maybe it’s going to happen. There may be arbitrage between the same tokenized stocks on Robinhood and Base. I think we’ll slowly go back to Base or other chains.

Robinhood has been the catch-all chain for the last six or seven weeks. It’s pretty new, so we’ll see what’s next. But yeah, right now we’ve moved a lot to Robinhood.

Yeah.

So, what about Hyperliquid? And I’m curious whether you’re interested in Elysium. I don’t know if you’ve read up much on Elysium yet, but it’s a new Hyperliquid-based ecosystem being launched by the Kinetiq team. I’m curious whether you’re still interested in or doing anything with Hyperliquid, or whether you’re interested in Elysium.

Yeah, I’m going to look like I copy CoolCrypto because we talk a lot and do a lot of similar stuff. But we’re pretty early in Kinetiq. We bought a big bag of Kinetiq when it started. I’ve known Amna, one of the founders of Kinetiq, for a long time. I think it was through a Degen Squad dinner 2 or 3 years ago, something like that. I know the guy; I’ve met him.

I think HyperEVM wasn’t as successful as the team expected. Elysium will be more geared toward DeFi and trading, and tokenized stocks and things like that. I think it’s going to be really interesting. We were pretty early in HYPE. There are a lot of Canadians on the HYPE team. Shout-out to all of them; I love them.

We were really early in trading on Hyperliquid, and we still use it to short and hedge. It’s still super powerful. We use Derive and Hyperliquid a lot as a hedge or just as trading platforms. I think Elysium might be an L2, but I don’t know, because they’re going to settle on HyperEVM, which also uses HyperCore, so it’s kind of two layers down.

There was some drama recently because of the airdrop, and people were going crazy about it. I think I posted on Twitter about that. I think what they did was actually a really good thing, mostly because right now airdrops are a full-time job for a bunch of people. Instead of rewarding early contributors, they’ve become a full-time job of trying to extract money, which doesn’t align with a company’s goal of having power users grow its product. So I think they did a good thing by selling the airdrop.

I think Elysium is great, and it’ll be interesting to see if they can position themselves similarly to Robinhood and what they bring back. Their advantage is that they’re not starting from scratch. They’re starting with the name and the hype. Hyperliquid is kind of a kingmaker now; everyone knows it’s the king right now.

I’ve seen that PaperTrade was using the HyperEVM chain this weekend to sell all their stuff. You can see that you can put a lot of bandwidth and a lot of transactions on HyperEVM. If Elysium has a similar approach and settles on HyperEVM, it’ll be interesting.

It’s always great to have a new chain. It’s great for investors because you can get all the arbitrage and everything. Until things settle, you can make a lot of money and grab a lot of stuff by providing liquidity, adding to new protocols, and testing them. That’s really interesting.

For the long-term vision, I don’t think it makes sense to have 25 L2 chains. Ethereum mainnet has reduced its gas prices a lot, so it makes more sense to trade on mainnet. We’ve seen that with a lot of hedge funds and family offices. They’re not as comfortable trading on an L2 as they are on mainnet. It’s mostly the Lindy effect: mainnet has been around for a long time, contracts have been around for a long time, and there’s a lot of capital there. Hedge funds and family offices are like, “Yeah, we’ll deploy capital on mainnet, but don’t ask me to go on an L2.”

Building an L2 means you need to build that Lindy effect, and that takes time. I’m bullish on Elysium. Kinetiq makes sense, the team behind it is solid, and they have the kingmaker hype behind them. They’re going to help them. Are they going to displace mainnet? No. But it’s going to be interesting to see what happens with Elysium.

I have more questions for you about how investors can navigate whatever market structure we’re in. We’re in some chop right now. It looks like we had a nice uptrend over the last few months. Maybe this is consolidation before we resume that uptrend, but let’s pretend things remain somewhat uncertain for the next few months. That means there’s an opportunity to position yourself to get long for the next 12 months.

It’s a game of what you’re betting on: which tokens can potentially outperform, whether Bitcoin is up, flat, or down? Which tokens will actually outperform Bitcoin, if you treat it as your store of value? You’ve been around long enough to know that not every new token is going to succeed. You know how many of these tokens are going to fail and how much of it is vaporware.

At the same time, you’re one of the investors I know who has never stopped believing in something. That’s why you remained long with Derive and Lyra all these years. I know you were early to Bitcoin and ETH. I think you were also early to Hyperliquid, and it sounds like you’re early to Kinetiq.

I’m trying to balance placing bets with conviction, putting size into them in your portfolio, and staying long those bets, while also having the discipline to take profits eventually. Can you give us a framework for how you’re thinking about getting long the right tokens for the next 12 months? How do you resist selling out of some of these tokens early? And when do you start to see FDVs that are big enough to say, “This doesn’t make sense anymore”?

Personally, I look at Hyperliquid and think, “I don’t want to short Hyperliquid,” but it’s been harder for me to be as excited about putting more money into HYPE at, let’s say, $90 billion, versus something like Derive. I’ll use Derive as an example, since that’s one I’ve put size into recently.

5. Taking Profits And Finding Winners

You’re asking for the alpha. The idea, to me, the way I play this is normally—

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Well, we have access to a lot of new projects really early, and we have access to the teams. That gives us an edge that’s non-replicable. It’s also why some VCs have an edge: they do deep due diligence on the team before investing, so they can double down afterward.

The best way for me to sell a token is by providing liquidity. Let’s say you’re bullish on Derive. You get a lot of Derive and hope for it to 2x. But if it doubles, the human mind will probably say, “Well, it can double again. I still believe in it; it’s going to keep growing,” right?

What I prefer to do is provide liquidity on Uniswap V3 or V4, with a really wide range. Not full range, because it’s not capital-efficient. Normally people might do +100% and -50%; I’ll do +200% and -66%. It’s almost the same kind of size.

For example, with Derive and ETH, I’ll collect Derive and ETH over time, then I can sell my Derive and get fees. That’s how I take profit. I always keep my main position, but I sell the fees as a way to take profit. If Derive goes 2x or 3x and I’m fully out of Derive, at least it’s positive that I’m out, right? I’m not going to be like, “Oh, shit, I just lost all my money because I was fully holding the bag.”

There’s a risk that if it goes down the other way, you’re holding the bag. But the best way for me to take profit is to provide liquidity across a really wide range, collect the fees, and sell them as profit.

So I always have my position there. The second way I do this is, let’s say, for example, Lyra, which became Derive: I had a pretty good bag there. When it pumped a lot recently, I was like, “All right, I want to have the same exposure, but I don’t want to have the same risk of going down to 50% and losing everything.” So what I did is sell some of the spot Derive and open a 3x long on Lighter. It’s a good thing Lighter just announced their Derive perpetual.

For example, if you have 100,000 Derive tokens, you can sell 66% of it, put 33% of it there, and leverage it 3x. You have the same exposure to Derive, but it’s a lot more capital-efficient. You don’t need the full 100,000 tokens to get your 3x. If you’re confident this bag will go up, you just need to manage your liquidation price, and you’re good. Then the 66% you have back in USDC, you can use to go and get the next long-term idea or whatever.

I did that, for example: I sold a little bit of spot Derive and took the profit from my 3x position to buy DIME, which is the Paradex token. I think that’s a better bet. So now I have the same exposure to Derive, but even better, because I have 2 projects: the same exposure to Derive and more exposure to Paradex. If Paradex goes up and Derive goes up, that’s a better bet, and I’m doubling up across 2 different things. I also hedge my risk, right? If one of them dies, I’m not fully exposed to that one.

I think providing Uniswap liquidity and using leverage to have the same exposure with less capital is how I play to get exposure. It’s hard to take profit. A lot of times, people don’t take profit. They’re like, “No, I think it can still 3x.” To go back to your question about FDV, when we’re close to a billion-dollar FDV, I start thinking, “Okay, I need to make sure I’m really convinced in that project.” Oftentimes, we don’t realize that we look at the FDV and think, “Oh, 25 billion,” and stuff like that.

But look around your desk and find any company in the stock market, and look at its capitalization. They’re going to be at $50 million or $100 million, not $50 billion. They’re real companies with real revenue, and their P/E is a lot lower than in crypto. We don’t have P/E—price-to-earnings—in crypto, but if we did, all the numbers would be completely insane. When we get close to a $1 billion FDV, I start to ask, “Does this make sense?” Some tokenomics are different, like dilution with ve(3,3), which just prints more and more tokens. But for a pure play where all the tokens are on the market and everything is there, sometimes I think, “Okay, at $1 billion, we need to reevaluate this and ask, ‘Should I keep doubling down or not?’”

The biggest mistake a lot of investors make is closing their winners and doubling down on their losers. You should do the opposite. You should be like, “Okay, I lost $1K. Just kill it and move forward,” and you should double down on your winner. But that’s really hard to do, because you think, “Well, I’m already winning. Why would I buy at a higher price?” As we were talking about earlier, you said, “I got into Derive at that price, even though it was higher than before.” That’s a good mindset, because this project makes sense and generates revenue. It has everyone’s attention right now, and it created a market for options that didn’t exist in crypto. Now it exists, so I think there’s still some room for Derive. You can play with leverage and options to manage your exposure, but I think that’s the right play.

Sticking to this talk of your liquid investments, Derive is one I’ve been really comfortable talking about, because we’ve done interviews on the podcast. As a result of those interviews and my due diligence, I decided to get long. I think I’m more willing to talk about tokens when I’ve longed them more recently. For example, I got long Derive at about $0.40, so I’m not talking about something I’m already 3x or 4x on, where I’m telling people, “If you had a time machine, you could get into the same position I’m in.”

From a portfolio-construction standpoint, you’ve been in the space for a long time. I’m imagining you’re still long Bitcoin and some other tokens. I don’t know if you’re long ETH, but what percentage of your portfolio is the store-of-value long holding, something like Bitcoin? And correct me if Bitcoin isn’t a store of value for you anymore.

I’ll correct you.

Then I’m more interested in what your largest liquid holding is after that store-of-value sleeve in your portfolio.

Yeah. Even though I’m the Bitcoin sweater guy, I actually don’t own a lot of Bitcoin. The reason I don’t hold that much Bitcoin is mostly that I think its upside isn’t as good as the upside of other liquid assets. Second, I think what gives a company value is its product and revenue, and what gives a token value is its community. I think the Bitcoin community has become really toxic and doesn’t really want to evolve over time. To me, that kind of kills the idea that Bitcoin can grow by a really crazy amount.

Now, don’t get me wrong: the reason Bitcoin doesn’t change is that they want it to stay as the gold standard. It’s fixed; it isn’t going to change. This is what it is. But we’ve seen quantum stuff happening recently, and a lot of people are asking questions about it: Is Bitcoin ready for this? Is the community now leading Bitcoin ready to work on it to make it quantum-resistant? Do we need that? I don’t know, but that’s the idea.

I started pretty early in Bitcoin, and I remember Jesse, the CEO of Kraken. He was in Bitcoin, and I’m sure he’s still in Bitcoin, but he did leave and create Kraken, where there was Ethereum and other stuff. A lot of people evolve over time. I mean, Vitalik was the creator of Bitcoin Magazine, and now he created Ethereum, right? I think it’s important to see who’s building it.

So I don’t have Bitcoin. I think I have 1 as a memory that I keep, just like, “Hey, I need to have one. I’m the Bitcoin sweater guy,” but that’s it. I’m more exposed through Ethereum, because I see it as the internet, but I don’t see Ethereum being worth $30K in 10 years. To me, Ethereum is the internet, and the internet itself isn’t worth something; it’s what’s built on it that’s worth a lot of money.

If you talk to a lot of Foundation people, I spoke some time ago with Tim Beiko, and they don’t necessarily want the price of ETH to go crazy high, for multiple reasons. Economically, it’s great for the bag holder, but for gas and everything, it doesn’t make sense. I do believe Ethereum will grow to $5K, $7K, or $10K over time, but I think it’s going to take some time. So I see Ethereum more as my store of value over time than Bitcoin.

My most liquid holdings right now are Derive, Tread[?], and Kinetiq. Those are the 3 I’m most exposed to in my portfolio. My most exposed positions probably change every year, I’ll say. But, again, I’m using leverage and options and taking profit from the LP so I can at least get some profit out of these positions.

Mathieu, what about stuff you might not hold already? Are there any tokens out there that have your interest, that you’re thinking about making a position in? What does that list look like, if there is one right now—your shopping list, essentially?

Earlier, before we started the podcast, we talked a little bit about Venice, the VVV token, and how we didn’t jump on the bandwagon. I think it’s interesting to look at AI tokens. I’m going to put a big red warning on that, because AI tokens are the hype right now and a lot of people are trying to sell you anything. I think it’s going to be interesting to see what happens. I may get into VVV if it makes sense over time.

We have our own DGX Spark, so we have our own inference. We don’t need to buy private inference, which is why I was less interested. But I think the AI play is going to be interesting. VVV is one of them. There’s Fold, which was pretty interesting, Interfold. That was something I was starting to look at a little bit.

Again, we just took a position in Paradex, so that’s a new one. I’m going to be looking at some of the options tokens, mostly because the options market is still really small.

Even if Derive is going up a lot, the market is still really small, so I expect 4 or 5 other projects will probably take a little bit of the pie. That’s what we’re looking for right now. When Elysium launches, for sure I’ll be looking at which projects are most interesting on that chain, but that’s about it right now.

Yeah.

We mostly find gems when we integrate a project into Octav and think, “Okay, now I understand it. I can do it.” Before that, it’s really hard for me to know which list I want to look at, unless I’ve already done a little due diligence on it.

Could you share anything about your thesis on Paradex? I feel like we’ve covered so much about Derive on the podcast lately. I think it would be really interesting just to get—

Yeah. Anything you can share on your thesis, or the elevator pitch on why Paradex is undervalued?

It’s a beta play on Derive. It’s the same thing—the same way as Hyperliquid and Lighter. When Hyperliquid was launching like crazy and everything was on it, I bought some Lighter when it launched as a beta play. It’s the second one, and the team is legit. They can grab a little bit of the pie for themselves.

The same thing is happening with Derive. If you look, there’s a website called Derivative Monkey, I think. I can find it and send it to you guys, but it shows the volume and everything across all the platforms for options. Derive takes 90% of all on-chain options, I’d say. The next one is Paradex, and I think there was Hypercall, which was built by Synapse, a bridge before. It’s a team that keeps building, so it could be something. It’s a token I’m looking at right now.

To me, Paradex is the one that’s already been able to grab part of the pie from Derive, and they’re pretty proactive. I’ve met with the team, and we’ve interviewed them on Tactical. They’ve already launched options on stocks, which is something Derive doesn’t have. They’re really active and pushing hard, so I think it’s a good play. Like I said, it’s a beta play, which means it’s my second play. I have Derive, and I have Paradex as my second play. I’ll probably have 3 or 4 other options there, but that’s why I think it makes sense.

They’re really competitive on the fee market if you look at options. In Tactical, if you connect your account—we’re still working to make it better—and deposit money in Derive and Paradex, when you quote an option, we’ll show you both venues and what they charge you as a premium. Often, Paradex is better than Derive. If they can quote you, they’re going to be better, which means their premium is better. Are they incentivizing this? Maybe. Are they paying this just to get the flow? Maybe. But right now, they have a better premium than Derive for a lot of options. That’s interesting, because now there’s a competition on premiums happening as there are more players in the field. That’s why I think Paradex makes sense.

6. Tactical And Octav AI

I want to give you more time to explain what Tactical is, but first I want to go back to something you said earlier that I’ve been thinking about and think is really important. You talk about meeting the team first. That’s one of your first due diligence steps. Maybe some people listening don’t have the ability to meet the team, but I know how important that is, too. There’s a comforting aspect to talking to the founder, seeing the vision, seeing where they’re going next, and hearing what the next steps are that maybe they’re not revealing to everyone.

One thing we try to do on this show is talk to founders and give listeners a chance to think, “Hey, do I like this person? Is this person mission-driven? Do I think they’re going to do what they say they’re going to do?” That seems to be a complete rarity. DeFi Dad and I approach these conversations as our own due diligence. That’s why we have a lot of these meetings, and we put them on as a podcast. I think you can look at podcasts as due diligence sometimes. You’re vetting the founder who’s talking. People can be super slippery, deceitful, and deceptive. You can never get 100% accuracy from that, but people can be really good actors.

I want to throw that out there, but I also want to get to Tactical because I actually don’t know what it is, and you’ve mentioned it a couple of times on this pod. I want to give you a little airtime to explain what this other thing is. Would you call it a side project from Octav that you’re building, or is this part of Octav? Okay, yeah. What is Tactical?

Yeah, it’s part of Octav. We’re a data provider and provide data to a bunch of people, but we also trade and have our own capital. We were doing a lot of options, but a lot of my guys at Octav were having trouble understanding them. Options are a mind-bender, honestly. There’s a put, a strike, a call. Am I buying a put or selling a put? There’s a lot to it, so you can lose the plot. That’s why a lot of people don’t trade options. It’s also why it’s the biggest market: when you understand it, you can do a lot of things with options, but it’s complex.

Buying or selling a put, or buying or selling a call, is just the beginning. If I’m talking about butterflies, iron condors, or spreads, there are so many strategies you can use, but it’s really complex. When we were trading options with Derive and I was positioning myself, I’d say, “Okay, guys, let’s do a Uniswap V3 LP on Robinhood, and I’m going to hedge it on Derive.” The guys would ask me, “What are you doing? What is this?” I’d say, “Okay, I’m going to try to explain it to you.”

Over time, I realized that if I was explaining this to 2 of my developers, who are really deep in DeFi but not in options, there were clearly a lot of people who didn’t understand how to do it. I remembered that Hyperliquid had a builder code system, and thought maybe Derive had one too. So we asked them, “Hey, do you have a builder code?” They said, “Yeah, we have that.” I thought, “Oh, great. Let’s do that,” because it makes sense to help people understand options. That’s why we built Tactical.

The idea behind Tactical is—I don’t want to compare it to this, but just to give you an idea—it’s kind of FOMO for options. Instead of buying memecoins, you can copy-trade anyone who’s trading options. I’m good friends with Cool Crypto now. We talk sometimes, and he uses Octav as a data provider. We help him build some of his dashboard. When Cool Crypto says, “Hey, I’ve built this option. I’m bullish on ETH at $5,000 to $7,000,” we’ve seen DCF God, who’s also an investor in Octav, copy Cool Crypto.

So I thought, “Okay, how can I copy this guy if I want to do the same thing he’s doing, but I don’t understand options?” That’s where Tactical makes sense. You can go on Tactical, follow Cool Crypto, connect your Telegram account to it, and say, “When Cool Crypto does something, tell me. I’m going to go copy him.” You can click on Telegram, and it opens Tactical. You can say, “I want to copy the same thing at a different size.” Then you copy the same option. The idea is a social app for options, but the goal is mostly to explain how options work and which strategies you can use.

It’s still really small, and we’re still working on the flow because it’s complex: it’s not all on one chain. Derive has its own chain, and Paradex has its own chain. Something I didn’t mention about Paradex is that it’s a Starknet appchain, which is really great for quantum-resistant stuff. They’re really thinking about that. So Tactical needs to work across 2 chains, and you need money on both chains before we can copy trades for you. It’s not super simple.

We’re working on a setup where maybe you deposit into our account, and we fund 2 accounts for you, which makes things simpler for the user. It’s a more retail-facing application. That’s the idea behind Tactical: social copy-trading and understanding simple options.

The real answer is that one of my developers did it in one weekend as a vibe-code project. I told him, “Quickly do this,” and then I said, “You know what? We can actually make a real product out of this and really grow around it. Let’s do this and see how it goes.” So we have Bullycoin [?], Derive, and Paradex. If people use the platform, we can generate some revenue from it. On the business side, it makes sense for us to put some energy into this.

I believe options are super powerful when you understand them. When I joined crypto DeFi, it was to unbank the bankless and help people who actually need help with finance. Options are super powerful, but not a lot of people understand them. So how can we bring options to everyone? We need to explain them, a little bit like the podcast. Like you guys said, when you do a podcast, you’re explaining stuff to bring more people to the market. That’s the idea.

By the way, Tactical’s dashboard is so helpful for understanding what positions other traders are taking. That doesn’t mean you’re going to make a profit, or that if you take the same trade, it’s all going to work out for you. But Mathieu, do you want to screen-share CoolCrypto’s account for a second? It’s really cool to see. If folks are listening to the podcast, they can watch it on YouTube or Spotify. If you’re comfortable sharing it, I’d love to give a quick overview.

Yeah, this is CoolCrypto on Tactical. If you trade on Derive and buy a put or a call, it’s simple: it just goes up, and they show you on the right when you buy it. Even if you do a multi-leg strategy, you’ll see it on the bottom right. But when you go back, it’s really hard to see which positions they’ve taken and how the strategies fit together.

With V3, they’ve created Prime, Altcoin, and Midcap, so now you also have different accounts, which makes it a bit more complex to understand. What we created with Tactical is a way to easily see what positions they have, what they’re carrying, their preferred asset—the one they trade the most—and the user’s daily profit, including whether they’re up or down overall. As you can see, CoolCrypto is technically 20% more up than down, which means he’s a little bit bullish, but he still has some downside.

The reason is that sometimes you’ll sell a put or a call option to pay for another option you want to buy. You can sell one option to buy another because you know the one you’re selling will never happen, so you have the money to buy the other one. That’s one strategy we use. If you go down here, you can see all the strategies. These are multi-leg strategies.

For example, he bought $286,000 of upside, which means he’s saying it’s going to go up, but he sold $250,000 at 90% up, which means that after 90, it’s going down. That’s how the strategy is created. Looking at this, his view is that in 10 days, Bitcoin will be between $96,000 and a maximum of $103,000. That’s how he created the position.

It’s easier to see this when you have a visual. There are a lot of strategies. I don’t know—this is “up only,” so you can go really down, but then you can buy more up. This is a cap: you buy a call option, but you sell a call option on top of it, so you’re capping your gain, but it costs you less. That’s the idea. You can see all of CoolCrypto’s positions.

We’ve also built a leaderboard where you can see who made the most money in the last 24 hours. These are all randomly generated, so I don’t know who QuietLinks is, but you can see who we have there. There are 3 followers, which means 3 people are following him. He’s been pretty good so far, to be honest. You can see what he has, and he’s about 70% more bullish.

It’s easier to understand what he’s doing. For example, POM, ZEC—oh, see, he was actually bearish on ZEC. Now he’s going to take profit out of this. It’s easier to see what’s happening with the user over time. If you want to copy someone and you’re logged in, you can copy them here, or add more details. This is a 3-leg position he sold.

It’s really just to simplify this. Then you can go into expert mode, which gives you some strategies. We don’t have all of them, but we have some. If you think it’s going to go really up but you want to protect your downside, or if you think it’s going to go up but want to cap it so it costs less while protecting your downside, there are a lot of strategies.

This one is for if it’s going up, this one if it’s going down, and this one if you want to stay put or be super active. This is an iron condor. If it stays between 2 prices, you’re going to make money, but if it goes to the other side, you’re going to lose it. There are a lot of strategies here. That’s expert mode. It’s pretty simple.

You can also talk with an AI. You can say, “This is my address. This is the amount I want to put in, and what’s my view?” For example: “I think Ethereum will be more than $4,000 by March. Help me choose.” It’s going to choose the right option for you, and you can use it. We have AI trading. All the AI stuff we have at Octav and Tactical runs on GLM-5.3 on our own system, so it’s not feeding anyone else. We’re trying to be as private as possible.

We have multiple DGX Spark systems, and it passes through our system and gives you information from GLM-5.3. That’s the idea. I think in the activity section we have Trader of the Day, someone who made a lot of money with an option; Rekt of the Day, someone who lost money; and Degen of the Day.

Degen of the Day is often people taking zero-day options, which means the option expires today, so it’s super volatile. The option is going to be really volatile. The delta will be crazy. Because of that, it’s kind of the degen play. You can see all the plays. You can have a thesis, which means you take a position and say why you’re taking it, so other people can read it and think, “Okay, who’s that guy? Why did he take a high position and say that?” If he’s losing money right now, you can look at his thesis and why he opened it, and so on.

That’s the idea for Tactical. There’s a lot of love to be put into this. It’s been 2 weeks, I think. I’m happy to help you guys if you have any feedback. The goal, like I said earlier, is really to make options easier, so we’re going to add wording, explanations, and everything to the platform.

So cool. And in full transparency, I hadn’t even been through all the different features you just walked through.

Let me show you something, because this is something we built that no one knows about. You know you can track any address on Octav? If you put in the address—I don’t know if I have CoolCrypto. If you put CoolCrypto’s address here, you can track everything on it. If it’s a pro address, you can pay, like, $1.99, whatever. We have an AI now, and you can ask it questions. You can say, “Hey, tell me what you know about CoolCrypto,” and it’s going to tell you everything about his positions.

I do that every day. I run my AI on CoolCrypto to understand what he did and why he took his positions. It tells me, “He closed this at this price, with this gain. Now he’s, like, 25% edge or not,” and so on. One thing we realized, sadly, is there’s a shit ton of powerful stuff on Octav. You just need to explore it, look around, and see how it works.

We have an AI connected to it. Again, this is GLM-5.3, and it will read any address you have in your address book to give you information. If you search for CoolCrypto and ask, “Hey, what do you know about this address? Tell me about his hedge position, his position,” you’ll see all the Derive and Hyperliquid positions.

Maybe he has a 5x long on Hyperliquid and then a short, like if you buy a put on Derive, so he’s hedging his Hyperliquid position. You’ll be able to see that because we track both. If he has a Lighter long and a Hyperliquid short because he’s taking the funding on Hyperliquid, and it’s a delta-neutral position, you can see it with Octav AI. You see the idea? It’s really powerful.

If you don’t want to use our frontend, be my guest. You can buy some API credit and connect any Claude Code. We have a CLI, a skill, and an MCP, and you can use any AI you have. If you want to use Venice private AI and connect it to our data, you can ask, “Hey, take the address of CoolCrypto. Tell me what you know about this address, what it’s doing, which positions it’s taking, and what changed over time.”

We take a snapshot every day of a lot of addresses, and you can do it yourself, too, if you want. It costs $30 per year, and we’ll take a snapshot of one address every day at midnight UTC. After that, you can ask your AI, “Hey, what did that guy do in the last week?” It can tell you, “He sold this, bought this, moved this position. He’s hedged on this.” You understand much more deeply what’s happening, and the only reason it works well is because of Octav data.

If you don’t have the Octav data, you have to ask your AI to go to Etherscan or another platform to get the information. We have all of that, and our AI is already knowledgeable about how the platform works and how the data is provided to it.

The thing that really stands out to me with Octav is the AI integration. That was what was missing for us with Zapper. I know a lot of work has gone into it. You’re clearly automating things and making the platform more intelligent. As a user, we used to comb through the platform for insights, and now you have GLM integrated to automate that. To me, that’s a huge unlock.

Could you remind us what the difference is between the free version and the premium version? Do users have access to AI with either version, or does that come with the premium version?

You can use AI for free right now. We’re launching it, and it’s our own inference, using our GLM. We’re testing everything and want to understand what people are using and whether it makes sense, so we’ve made it free for now.

Octav works on a license-based SaaS model. You can buy a Lite version for $150 per year for 1 address. It gives you all the premium features, including a snapshot of your wallet every day. December is a busy month for us because of year-end taxes: you need a snapshot on December 31. Instead of waiting until it’s too late, you can buy the Lite version and get the snapshots and all the premium widgets. We work with widgets, so you can build your own board the way you want.

If you want more, you can go Pro. Lite gives you snapshots and widget information that you can use to understand your reports. You can export a report of your value. Pro gives you transaction-level access, so you can see all the transactions coming in and going out. Then you can ask the AI, “When did I buy this token?” It can tell you the day you bought it.

AI is free, but with Lite it can look at your historical snapshots. With Pro, it can also look at your transactions. We know the front end is a means to an end, and a lot of our clients—most of our sophisticated clients, actually—don’t use our front end. They use our API. We have an MCP and a skill, and everything can be done with AI. You can connect to the Octav API and get the data, including historical data.

I’ll give you an alpha for The Edge: if you don’t use our front end, you can pay $30 in API credits to have a daily snapshot instead of paying $150. If you only want a snapshot, it’s $30 per year per address, and that’s what we sell the most because people need that snapshot. With it, you can trade whatever you want and ask your AI, “What did I do correctly or not? What should I have sold earlier or bought earlier?” You can see that over time with your snapshots.

With the AI integration, one thing I’d use it for is taxes. I’ve struggled with this for years. It’s always been a mess trying to figure out what taxes I owe for the calendar year. As much as I try throughout the year to have a decent sense of what I might owe, this seems like something that could help me get more intelligent.

And again, I wouldn’t have to sit there and export everything myself. I could start making use of the integrated AI. Are you seeing people do that? In other words, do you see Octav users using this for tax estimations throughout the calendar year?

Hire an accountant, because data alone won’t work. You need an accountant. But yes, you can get the data. A lot of companies, including tax companies, use our data. Fun fact: we provide DeFi data to Cryptio, one of the biggest tax platforms. We provide the data behind a lot of DeFi positions and transactions.

So yes, it was built to provide data for taxes. It’s not meant to give you your 1099, but to give you the data to understand what’s happening. With Pro, you have access to transactions, so you can get a really good understanding of how much you have to pay over the year with our data.

For most investors, they can have an accountant and pay all the money in the world, but most accountants can’t keep up with real-time data like this. I’d just want to be a little more informed—give me a ballpark estimate. Here’s my filing status, and here’s roughly the tax bracket I’m in in the U.S. Try to help me out. At least then I might be able to get ahead of things and start planning.

I think this is a great place for us to start wrapping up. First, I want to remind our listeners to follow Matthew's account @mbaril010; that's his personal handle. Go check out Octav for yourself at octav.fi, and follow OctavFi on Twitter. Also check out Tacticals at T-A-C-T-I-C-A-L-L-S.xyz; the handle on Twitter is tacticalsxyz. We'll put all of that in the show notes so you can easily find them. Mathieu, it’s so great to see you. Congrats on all the progress you’ve made on these platforms. It’s really cool to catch up. This was meant to be an interview for us to get your takes as an investor, but clearly your takes as an investor are informed by your experience as a builder and a user. It’s so great to catch up, and we’d love to have you back in the future. I want to give you the final word before we go.

Thanks for having me. We’ve known each other for a long time, DeFi Dad, so I’m pretty happy to be on the podcast. You can invite me anytime. I’ll also go back to what Nomatic said earlier: you guys do the podcast, so you can meet founders. Another place you can meet founders is at conferences. That’s the best place to go and meet them. That’s where it’s happening, and it’s worth it. See you soon at the next conference, probably in Cannes or somewhere like that. See you around.

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