看多 Hyperliquid 的逻辑|Ryan Watkins
- Watkins 的核心筛选标准是“全球资本配置者”测试:如果没有加密资产配置任务,面对 Micron、SanDisk、SK Hynix 等 AI 股票作为替代选择,“你真的会买加密资产吗?” 进入这一年时,Bitcoin 和 Hyperliquid 是最明确的答案;除此之外,所有有意思的标的都很“棘手”,要么有解锁压力,要么需要创投式投资周期。这也是为什么“健康市场”意味着机会存在,但“不一定是水涨船高、所有船都能浮起来”。
- Syncracy 在 HYPE 上线当天就买入——那时大多数人甚至不知道保险基金正在回购代币——因为它当时年收入约2亿美元,没有离谱的解锁压力,而收入更高的只有 Solana、Ethereum,以及可能还有 BNB。 随后,这一逻辑在 2025 年第1季度演变成“全能交易所”判断:以“统一保证金交易任何资产”——加密货币、股票、大宗商品、预测市场和期权上的永续合约——为目标,Hyperliquid 可能是争夺“整个金融市场总入口”的3-5家企业之一。
- Hyperliquid 之所以逃出 BitMEX、dYdX、Synthetix、GMX 等永续合约 DEX 的坟场,是因为产品用起来像“在用 Binance”,团队看起来像一群狠角色,而社区驱动的市场拓展方式更是 Watkins 从未见过的。 今年1月,一位生态创始人的话让他真正顿悟:“我已经不在乎 DeFi 了……我们已经拿下链上永续合约70%-75%的市场份额。真正的大目标是 Binance、Bybit 和 Coinbase。” Watkins 不会用其他永续平台做对冲,因为推动 HYPE 的传统金融永续合约业务并没有在其他平台跑起来——“看起来是同一个逻辑,但其实不是”。
- 这笔交易并不拥挤,因为资金一直在离开这个资产类别,而不是流入。 许多基金根本没有 HYPE 仓位;D1 在 13F 文件中披露持有 PURR,成了基金经理互相抄作业的案例,Citrini 还将其标记为6月的重要交易主题;Hyperliquid 财库公司、ETF,以及让 Jeff 这支匿名团队拥有清晰面孔的 Colossus 人物报道——证明“这不会成为下一个 FTX”——都可能让养老金、捐赠基金和全球散户获得参与渠道。
- 他没有目标价,只有在“失去信念时”才会卖出;世代级企业在上市交易的整个时期,看起来都曾以30-50倍盈利估值交易。 人们低估了收入从1亿美元增长到10亿美元、再到100亿美元的复合速度;“算一算这些项目如果在这些区块链的所有资产交易量中拿到20%,会是什么样子”——人们忘记做的,是“敢于想象”。
- 下一个 Hyperliquid 可能“落后6-12个月”:一是代币化资产的现货交易,监管清晰度可能成为拐点;二是链上借贷,如果被动稳定币收益受到有条件的传递限制,交易所用户可能被导入 DeFi——“一场涌入链上的流动性季风”。 他欣赏 Morpho,但没有持仓,原因是解锁和价值捕获问题仍然“棘手”;他给这些项目的解决方案是加速所有归属安排,来一次“一次性大爆雷”,找到市场出清价——Solana 当年令人担忧的2021年供应悬崖,后来却先于一次200倍上涨。
- 在6月8日录制时(SOL 67美元、ETH 1,700美元),Yanowitz 表示,ETH 2000亿美元估值下他不会买入,但会买入400亿美元估值的 SOL;L1 估值是现金流加上不可知效用溢价的拼图——当 ETH 在2025年末达到4000亿-5000亿美元时,Watkins 说“你当时花更少的钱就可以买到 OpenAI”——两人最终都认为增长才是答案:“增长能解决一切。”
- 他跳过了 NEAR、Venice 和 Zcash:“隐私是一项功能”——人们想要的是私密的美元交易和薪资,而不是“一个随机的工作量证明资产的隐私”;而显示性偏好表明,几乎没人真的把隐私当成优先事项,因为 DuckDuckGo 只占搜索市场约1%。 Yanowitz 认为 DuckDuckGo 和 Signal 各自约有1亿用户,且都已在这一规模附近停滞。Watkins 认为人们唯一明显忘记的一点是:“加密货币会成为一件大事”——那些宣称“一切都结束了”的帖子就是从未成真。
1. 全球资本配置者测试:几乎没有加密资产能过关
- Watkins 在进入这一年时感到认知失调:一方面看多行业,另一方面自2021年高点以来又“对所有这些资产……以及我们看到的所有行为感到如此犬儒”。他的化解方式,是戴上全球资本配置者的帽子,在没有加密资产配置任务的前提下,拿 Micron、SanDisk、SK Hynix 等 AI 股票作比较:“你真的会买加密资产吗?也许只有1-2个。”
- 一个代币要过这道门槛,必须有“真实基本面加速和颠覆的故事”;而大多数有意思的加密资产都很“棘手”——有代币解锁,需要5-10年的创投式投资周期,也没有“急于做多”的理由。即便如此,他仍看多永续合约、预测市场、稳定币、数字黄金和里程碑式立法,希望其中包括 CLARITY Act;他还表示,一些企业机构已经开始落地稳定币。
2. 自2022年以来,加密失去计算范式桂冠,Hyperliquid 或许是唯一破圈者
- 2022年的市场心态是:只靠叙事,“我们最终会回来……会有山寨季,涨10倍、20倍”;但如今“已经比较清楚,加密区块链不是下一个大型计算范式,或者按最宽厚的说法,它至少要与 AI 共享这一称号”。与一项已经实现产品市场契合度的前沿技术相比,加密领域的实验“看起来像小孩子过家家,或者有点业余水平”——这正是他认为行业难以长大到2021-22年估值水平的原因。
- 即便 Solana 也很难说创出新高:2021年高点为260美元,Trump 在1月发行 memecoin 时曾短暂达到300美元。“过去4年里,Hyperliquid 可能是唯一真正破圈的东西。”
- Yanowitz 自己的转折点,是 Patrick O'Shaughnessy 媒体品牌关于 Jeff 的 Colossus 人物报道:“原来,机构也在乎这件事。这是第一次破圈。”
3. 价格由信念强度而非催化剂决定,而现在 beta 暂时失灵
- 今年盲目配置排名前三的资产并没有奏效:BTC 跌幅超过30%,SOL 跌幅超过50%,ETH 也差不多——“选资产是有回报的”。谈到 Saylor 和战争新闻时,他问:“这些事件真的重要吗?还是说,真正重要的是人们在这里缺乏如此多的信念,所以这些事情才会显得重要?”如果 Bitcoin 处于3万美元,“没人会在乎 Saylor 在做什么……大家只会不计代价地买入”。
- 四年周期是“巫术”。Watkins 和 Yanowitz 认为,技术分析在毫无价值的资产上更有效,因为情绪和共同交易行为占主导;Fibonacci 水平之所以能反弹,部分原因也是有太多人在交易这些水平。Yanowitz 希望通过讨论 Blockworks 关于投资者关系的书来推动一个变化:项目越多地以企业的方式披露,“Fibonacci 数字就越不重要”。
- Watkins 的结构性判断是分化:优质资产与次优资产脱钩,“这件事只会慢慢发生”。
4. 只有4类产品处于牛市,但几乎没有代币可以表达这一观点
- 大多数加密资产都处于熊市(BTC 大约从去年10月开始,许多山寨币则从2021年开始——一场“安乐死过山车”),而整体风险资产却大幅上涨。但“如果你身处预测市场、永续合约、稳定币等领域,那就是牛市”——这些领域拥有“真实的复合增长和长期增长”,不论 Bitcoin 价格如何。
- Watkins 表示,2025年下半年表现较好的标的,除 HYPE 等异类之外,主要都有 DAT 公司加持——凡是能说服华尔街出资买入相关资产的东西,包括主流资产、Ethena 和 IP。Yanowitz 补充称,私募市场主题也表现良好:Polymarket、Kalshi、IPO 后的 Circle、Tether,以及 Hyperliquid 等永续合约平台。
- 代币市场没有直接的表达方式:在 HIP-4 上线前,市场没有公开工具可以押注预测市场;而与稳定币最接近的直接代币敞口是 Ethena 和 MakerDAO——“连它们”也因各自不同的原因跑输市场。
5. 投资流程:只要质量,信念只能来自长期相处
- 仓位大小和入场时点靠直觉,但仓位背后是多年的研究——Watkins 和 Wilson 从 Solana 2020年主网上线及代币发行时就开始跟踪,直到2023年才建立仓位。在 AI 时代,任何人都能立刻复述一套逻辑(“收入回流用于回购,从 Binance 手里夺取市场份额”);“真正拉开差距的,其实只是信念……而信念只能来自长期陪伴一个想法,直到你真正、非常彻底地理解它”。Memecoin 和短线交易让人们养成了过于短视的思维。
- Watkins 认为,市场上真正适合学习加密资产的地方很少,LLM 生成的报告也可能包含互相矛盾的数据。Yanowitz 举例说,Blockworks、DeFiLlama、Dune 和 Artemis 可以给出4个不同的收入数字,彼此相差约30%;尽管数据来自区块链,“收入到底意味着什么,仍然需要做会计工作”。
- 基本面的重要性“比过去高得多,100%”。他的检验标准是:风险偏好回归时,任何资产都能反弹,但“真正重要的是,你是否在不断抬高低点;唯一能做到这一点的,是基本面能够复合增长的资产”——其他资产只会不断降低高点,再降低低点,最终被市场抛弃。
6. Hyperliquid 的入场:首日买入,当时没人知道回购正在发生
- Watkins 在空投当天之前从未在 Hyperliquid 上交易过,但“这东西一上线,我们就准备买入”:衍生品是加密行业3大收入类别之一,另外两个是稳定币和可能算在内的智能合约平台——Ethereum 在2021年年化费用收入一度接近100亿美元,Solana 在2025年初达到25亿-30亿美元;与此同时,dYdX 面临 HYPE 没有的那种代币解锁压力。HYPE 上线时年收入约2亿美元,而回购当时仍基本不为人知——“这保险基金到底是谁?……原来是团队在回购代币。这太疯狂了。”
- Watkins 回忆,入场时按代币产生的收入衡量,排在 HYPE 前面的只有 Solana、Ethereum,以及可能还有 BNB——“它们的估值都是 HYPE 的数倍。这很简单。”随后研究形成了2025年第1季度的“全能交易所”逻辑:“统一保证金交易任何资产”——先是用1美元、最终可能用一个投资组合,作为加密货币、股票、大宗商品、预测市场头寸和期权永续合约的保证金。全世界也许只有3-5家企业在争夺这个金融超级应用的位置,而 Hyperliquid 的无许可区块链路径最为独特。
7. 中心化争议是路径依赖的权衡,历史上的失败案例尚未给出答案
- 面对“4个验证者和跨链桥风险”的质疑,Watkins 重申了自己在2022-23年关于 Solana 与 Ethereum 的论证:先接受数据中心验证者,之后再逐步实现终端用户验证,因为“最重要的是,我们确实打造了一个杀手级产品,而且用户愿意选择它”。Hyperliquid 的验证者数量已经从4个增至8个、10个、20个,再到约27个;核心用户“现在根本不在乎这些”,但随着规模扩大,去中心化仍是协议必须回答的问题。
- 针对 Yanowitz 所说的 BitMEX、dYdX、Synthetix 和 GMX 一个个消失的“坟场”问题,Watkins 给出的答案是:上手体验和延迟更像“在使用 Binance”,而不是 DEX;他通过与创始人和团队交流,判断了他们的动机和能力;其市场拓展方式也很新——基础设施中心化,但扩张由社区驱动,“拥有 Ethereum 或 Solana 的优势……可以调动整个蜂群,推出新市场或新前端”。
8. “我们要挑战 Binance”的顿悟,然后不设目标价,只给想象力以空间
- 从3美元涨到35美元,再在2025年4月关税低点回落至9美元的过程中,没有哪个单一时刻让这笔交易变成核心仓位——“我们只是一直和这个想法相处”;唯一例外是今年1月与一位大型生态创始人的谈话:“我已经不在乎 DeFi 了……我们正在赢下 DeFi。我们已经拿到链上永续合约70%-75%的市场份额。真正的大目标是 Binance、Bybit 和 Coinbase。”应该跟踪它相对中心化交易所的份额,而不是相对 DeFi 的份额——“这其实是一门真正的生意……我准备让它继续跑。”
- 他没有目标价,卖出触发条件是“失去信念”,只会在边缘做些减仓。他批评新的收入估值风潮:人们“拿出计算器做 DCF”,却忽视了世代级企业“在上市交易的整个时期看起来都很贵”,当时估值是30-50倍盈利,因为人类无法给收入以极快速度从1亿美元增长到10亿美元、再到100亿美元合理定价。
- 结论是:“算一算这些项目如果在这些区块链上所有资产的交易量中占到20%,会是什么样子……你会得到一些相当疯狂的数字。”人们忘记做的,是“敢于想象”——“这是早期技术……否则你应该去做别的事。”
9. 生态、可比公司、竞争对手,以及 Yanowitz 对交易拥挤的反驳
- Syncracy 没有持有 Hyperliquid 生态中的任何资产:“历史上,押注链最终就是比挑应用表现好得多”;Watkins 担心轮动时失去 HYPE 敞口。他说自己可能想持有的唯一项目是 TradeXYZ,但目前并没有持仓。该团队在股票、大宗商品和其他市场的 HIP-3 部署中占据超过90%的份额,使部署者成为“巨大蜂巢中的单元”——一个由 Hyperliquid 组成的蜂群组织。
- 可比对象包括 Coinbase、Binance、CME、Robinhood 和各类新型券商;若看最终形态,则还包括 Ethereum 和 Solana,因为“整个金融市场的总入口”、Ethereum 的框架,以及 Solana 的“互联网资本”,本质上都是同一件事。Yanowitz 表示,很难在不考虑竞争的情况下看多这些资产中的任何一个:“这个家伙会不会来抢我的生意?”
- Watkins 不会通过持有 Lighter 等其他永续合约平台来对冲:HYPE 真正令人兴奋的地方,先是白银和黄金永续合约,接着是2-3月的原油,然后是 AI 股票和 IPO 前股票——“这些东西在其他交易所也跑起来了吗?答案是否定的……看起来是同一个逻辑,但其实不是。”
- Yanowitz 认为值得反驳的是:有 Solana 创伤后遗症的基金在没有真正信念的情况下买入 HYPE,那它难道不是已经拥挤了吗?Watkins 的回答是,既然“大量资金一直在离开这个资产类别”,任何标的都很难变得拥挤;许多基金根本没有持有 HYPE;D1 在13F中披露持有 PURR,成了基金经理互相抄作业的案例,Citrini 将其发帖称为6月的重要交易主题;围绕 Hyperliquid 的策略财库公司、ETF,以及让匿名团队拥有清晰面孔的 Colossus 报道——“这不会成为下一个 FTX”——都可能扩大养老金、捐赠基金和全球散户的参与范围。
10. 下一批机会:借贷的流动性季风、Morpho 的解锁问题、ETH 与 SOL,以及他不愿碰的隐私交易
- 他认为有“10-15件事情”值得关注,其中很多“处在起点 A,落后 Hyperliquid 6-12个月”:代币化资产的现货交易,监管清晰度可能成为拐点;以及借贷。一个被低估的二阶效应是,如果被动稳定币收益不再能够传递给用户,交易所和券商可能会把用户导向主动策略和 DeFi 集成:“一场涌入链上的流动性季风”,但这只能解决供给端,不能解决贷款需求。
- 尽管欣赏 Morpho 的工作,他仍没有持仓——解锁和价值捕获问题就是那根“头发”,而最近只有没有这些“头发”的资产才能跑起来。他给这类项目的建议是:加速归属安排,来一次“一次性大爆雷”,不要再“拖延市场找到出清价”——而且最终甚至可能不会爆雷。Yanowitz 提到,Solana 在2020年末曾有令人恐惧的供应悬崖,随后在2021年上涨了他所描述的约200倍;Watkins 认同,投资者卖出的往往是自己认为估值过高且毫无价值的东西,不一定是优质资产。
- 在6月8日录制时(SOL 67美元、ETH 1,700美元),Yanowitz 表示,2000亿美元估值的 ETH 他不会买,但会买入400亿美元估值的 SOL;Watkins 也重复了这一比较,但没有单独表明个人仓位。L1 是“最具争议的资产”之一,估值由类似股票的现金流加上不可知的效用溢价拼成;Watkins 表示,若 ETH 在2025年末达到4000亿-5000亿美元,“你当时花更少的钱就可以买到 OpenAI”。两人最终都把答案归结为增长:Yanowitz 说“增长能解决一切”,Watkins 则表示,投资者需要一个出价买入这些资产并“投资增长”的理由。
- Watkins 跳过了 NEAR、Venice 和 Zcash:NEAR 给人的感觉是不断把自己贴到每个热门叙事上,价格走势则是一张经典的过山车图。对于 Zcash,他认为“隐私是一项功能”——人们想要私密的美元交易、薪资和支付,而不是“一个除了自身生态外毫无用途的随机工作量证明资产”。2016年之后的显示性偏好表明,DuckDuckGo 只占全球搜索约1%,几乎没人表现得像把隐私当成优先事项;Yanowitz 认为 DuckDuckGo 和 Signal 各自约有1亿用户,且都已在这一规模附近停滞。Zcash 的上涨主要由衍生品杠杆和 FOMO 驱动,而非深度信念——“这不是说它永远不可能回来”,但 Watkins 自始至终都“非常、非常怀疑”。
完整逐字稿
Very excited about this one. We've got Ryan Watkins, co-founder of Syncracy, on the pod. Long-short, I think mostly long, actually. Long-biased, I think, is what the professionals would call it: a liquid fund in crypto. So Ryan, welcome in.
Yeah, thanks for having me on.
Long-biased hedge fund—is that right?
Long-biased hedge fund.
Okay. Only crypto assets.
Only crypto.
All right. I want to talk about a bunch of stuff. The biggest trade that I've seen you guys be public about is Hyperliquid. When I think about people who have put on the Hyperliquid trade in size and done quite well, you guys are top of mind for that.
But before getting into the Hyperliquid trade, we could talk about this market environment in general. I think you're one of the only people I've seen on Twitter who is positive and saying that we're entering a healthy market environment right now. Maybe you could just expand on what that means to you.
Yeah, I think when I say healthy, I mean that there are opportunities available, but it's not necessarily a rising tide that lifts all boats. I remember heading into this year, one of the biggest forms of cognitive dissonance that I had was that I'm bullish, but at the same time, I'm so cynical about all these assets in the asset class and all the behavior that we've seen over the past year, 2 years, and even the past 4 years since the 2021 peak.
When you zoom out, one helpful lens that I think we've developed—and I think it's also helpful just to invest personally in many different asset classes to help you get to this conclusion—is to actually have the global capital allocator hat on. If you don't have a mandate to invest in crypto, what within crypto would you actually buy?
I think heading into this year, the answer was almost nothing. You could buy AI equities. You can go into private credit. There are so many different things you can do.
A global capital allocator who could buy anything in the world—would you actually buy anything in crypto? Maybe there's 1 or 2 things.
There were a handful. There were a handful, and it was just being brutally honest with ourselves about the actual state of the industry, or the state of the token market.
When we put on that hat, we're like, all right, there are only so many things. Hyperliquid was 1 of them, as you mentioned before. And what is that reason? If the bar is that I can invest in, let's just say, AI equities because that's the hottest thing that everyone wants to talk about, then you need to actually offer something in token markets that's interesting to the person who can just go invest in Micron, for example, or SanDisk or SK Hynix.
For that, you need a story of real fundamental acceleration and disruption. There are just not many things that do that.
There are so many things in crypto that are interesting to us, but they're hairy. They have token unlocks, or maybe they're interesting if you're a venture capitalist thinking 5 or 10 years out, but what is essentially the urgency to get long? I think that was one of the biggest challenges that I saw in the market, while at the same time being so bullish on a handful of products that we built, like perpetual swaps, prediction markets, stablecoins, and digital gold.
This year, we're going to get landmark legislation—hopefully the CLARITY Act. At that point, heading into 6 months after its genesis, we're starting to see the stablecoin stuff be implemented at a lot of these enterprise institutions. But again, there weren't that many ways to play these themes, save for just a handful.
Yeah, yeah.
So you guys launched Syncracy 4—I think. I'm trying to remember—4 years ago.
Yeah, 2022.
What has changed from the seat of a crypto fund? What do you think has changed from then to now?
I remember in 2022, obviously, it was not a great year for the asset class. For us, we were sitting in cash for quite a bit of time. One of the things that I think has changed the most is that, even though we were in a bear market, the common psyche that everyone shared was that eventually we'd be back.
We'd be back, and it would be just like it was every other time. We went up in 2021 and 2017; it's going to be altseason, and we're going to make 10x, 20x. That was the mentality.
What was also true is that when the market came back, you didn't really need things to actually be real. You just invested in narratives, and it worked. I get the reason why. In 2017, we were going from a point in time where the altcoin market didn't really exist before 2017, and all of a sudden you had the ICO boom. It was like, wow, look at all these ideas. It's not just Bitcoin. We have a million things. We're going to decentralize Uber and all this other stuff.
Then in 2021, we went from, okay, these are not just ideas; these are actual working experiments. These are real things. There was also real growth to show for it. In hindsight, it was super speculative—a lot of liquidity mining and all these incentive games, like Axie Infinity and all that stuff—but there was growth.
Because there was growth, you had to question yourself: Is this a big megatrend that I'm going to miss? Is this actually the next big computing platform? At the time, it seemed like it was the only game in town claiming to be that. It was like you had blockchain, and then maybe virtual reality or augmented reality. Meta ended up betting on both with the name change and all that.
When you think about where we are today, since 2022, it's clear that crypto blockchain is not the next big computing paradigm, or at least it's sharing that title with AI, in the most generous take of it.
You can't just go from experiments or ideas to experiments anymore. You actually need to have real working products, because when you have another frontier technology that has product-market fit, is scaling, and is actually delivering value to society at large, it makes the stuff we're doing here look like child's play, or a little bit of amateur hour.
I think that's one of the reasons why this industry has struggled to grow into the valuations that were set in 2021 and 2022, and why only so few things have seemingly crossed the chasm.
Yeah, you can argue that the 2 different assets that have done well this cycle, like Solana, didn't really even make new highs since 2021. It peaked at $260 in 2021, and for a brief moment in January, when Trump launched his memecoin, it got to $300, but it just hasn't really broken out.
You can argue that Hyperliquid might have been the only thing that has broken out over the past 4 years. I don't know if you know Patrick O'Shaughnessy or the Invest Like the Best podcast, but he has a media brand called Colossus. They had a piece on Jeff and Hyperliquid.
That piece was a real turning point for me with Hyperliquid, because I was like, oh, the institutions care about this too. This is the first breakout. Actually, that Colossus piece was the thing in my head that kind of broke out.
We'll talk about Hyperliquid a bit, but going back to this theory and theme of the industry and where it stands today, we used to be able to just buy beta, right? It was just like, the industry is going to go up, let's get long. The industry is going to go down, let's maybe get to cash.
Do you think we've moved from buying beta to underwriting businesses? Is that the biggest shift that's happened?
Yes. It's always going to be a moment-in-time thing. We could be in a different world in 3 years where you can just ride beta and there's an abundance of opportunities. It could be like AI right now, where you just throw darts at the board and anyone can do it.
But right now, it's a market where it pays to be an asset picker. You can't just blindly allocate. Even if you were to blindly allocate to the top 3—BTC, SOL—coming into this year, BTC is down over 30% on the year, SOL is down over 50%, and ETH is probably similar. It just hasn't worked.
I think it's because of what I said. Oftentimes, I listen to podcasts or I'll go on a podcast, and you get asked to talk about the latest thing happening in the market. If it were this week, you'd be talking about Saylor, you'd be talking about the war, and you'd be asking what the impact on Bitcoin is—does it go up or down?
Sometimes I just stop myself and ask: Do these events actually matter, or is it the fact that people lack so much conviction here that these things matter? When people lack conviction, they always come up with a million reasons why they would sell.
For example, if Bitcoin were at $30K right now, and it had fallen enough that people were just interested in bidding at that level...
I think you can ask most people, “Hey, Bitcoin is $30K—what are you doing?” They’d be buying hand over fist. No one would care about what Saylor is doing.
He’d come out with some news on Monday, and it just wouldn’t matter. People would just be buying hand over fist because it’s at a level where they finally have that conviction.
1. Do Four Year Cycles Exist?
And who knows, maybe $60K is that level where people have that conviction. But again, I think the problem is that people just don’t have a reason to bid so many of these assets right now, and they’re looking for that reason.
Yeah. Before going too deep into the specific assets, this is almost an obnoxious question at this point, but this idea of a 4-year cycle: are we in a bull market or a bear market? Are we either at the very end of a bear market or at the very beginning of a bull market? Do you have thoughts on how you would answer this?
Yeah. I mean, I think we’re clearly in a bear market for most assets in crypto. For Bitcoin, you can argue that it started in October or September of last year. I think for a lot of altcoins, you can argue it started in 2021. Things have been down only. It’s been a euthanasia roller coaster, but we’re not in a bear market across risk assets at all. It’s been a mega bull market for all these other assets.
I mean, crypto was doing well until 10/10.
We were—until 10/10.
Until 10/10.
Well, kind of. Maybe not.
Yeah.
I think we were correlated and we were going up, but we were still getting smoked, even outside of the majors.
The majors were doing well. The majors were correlated with the broader risk-on market.
Agreed. But then I think one thing I always think about in that second half of 2025 is: what actually did well? Sure, you had outliers like HYPE, but the things that did well were mainly the things that had DATs. Whatever people could convince other people on Wall Street to give them money to buy these assets, those assets did well. So obviously, it was the majors; it was things like Ethena. I remember IP had a DAT, and anything with a DAT did well. The stuff that didn’t have DATs didn’t do well at all.
2. Running A Crypto Fund In 2026
Yeah. I mean, the only other thing I’d say is that the private markets did quite well. The themes of last year were probably stablecoins, perps, and prediction markets. If you were in Polymarket or Kalshi—you know, Kalshi isn’t really crypto—you did quite well. If you were in Circle and hit the IPO, you did quite well. If you were in Tether, you did quite well. And if you were in perps, probably Hyperliquid, you did quite well as well.
Yeah. So what I would say is that there are these 4 product categories that are doing well, and they’re doing well irrespective of what the price of Bitcoin is. This almost ties back to the original question of bull market or bear market. It’s a bull market if you’re in prediction markets.
It’s a bull market if you’re in perps. It’s a bull market if you’re in stablecoins, but if you’re not in those categories, then it’s just not. And I think many of these categories that I talked about actually do have—
Real compounding and secular growth. Every single year, you can almost expect that the numbers will be higher.
And that’s what you want to see for a real secular theme. The challenge with token markets is: is there a way to play prediction markets in public markets right now? There isn’t. I mean, I think Hyperliquid might be the only one right now, but before they launch HIP-4, there’s no—you couldn’t buy Polymarket, and you can’t buy Kalshi. That’s it.
Same thing with stablecoins. There are maybe many adjacent ways you can play it. Stablecoins touch all the different parts of the on-chain economy. As more stablecoins come onto the blockchain, you can develop a thesis on how lending protocols might benefit, or trading protocols, whatever it might be. But there’s not really a direct way to play it, in the same way that owning Circle or Tether is direct exposure to it, or owning Stripe equity is direct exposure to it. The closest thing you can probably get to is just Ethena and MakerDAO, which are the only issuers of stablecoins that actually have tokens that you can buy.
Yeah, but even those did—
Even those as well, for different reasons.
Yeah. So, 4-year cycle: bear markets would be 2014, 2018, 2022, and 2026. If you just follow the 4-year cycle, we’re actually tracking kind of perfectly where we should be. Do you have a thought on whether the market starts—will the 4-year cycle basically hold? Which would say that, if you think back to early 2023, SOL was trading at $8 or $10 and started to move. I remember SOL did a 5x to $50 before anyone on the timeline was talking about it.
Right. Will we—and I think you guys had a good size in that trade, too—is that what we’re going to see? Do you think it’s possible?
Yeah, it’s possible. I mean, it’s also possible that this lasts shorter or lasts longer.
Yeah.
I’m really not sure. It’s one of those big questions where, in theory, the 4-year cycle is silly. It’s this voodoo magic that we do in crypto: trend lines on charts.
Like resistance is a silly thing.
I agree. At least from my personal experience, it seems like technical analysis doesn’t work as well on real businesses, but it works much better on worthless assets because it’s all sentiment.
Yeah.
Right. So I can see why, for crypto—super-immature participants, worthless assets—you just trade—
Like Fibonacci numbers should not be a thing, but the 61.8 line—
There’s always a bounce.
Because so many people trade the Fibonacci numbers, there’s going to be a bounce.
Yeah, but then in an equity—
Yeah, you know what? If Nvidia comes out and says earnings are up by 1,000%, your lines—
On maybe crypto stops trading. Maybe. I mean, this is talking our book here, but we’re kind of pushing this investor-relations thing. Maybe the more people are actually talking about their businesses, the less Fibonacci numbers matter.
3. peaq Ad
Yeah. And I think that would be ideal. To be honest, it’s a waste of time if we’re all talking about sentiment and technical analysis. Also, if you believe in this industry, then eventually we will get to the point where there are real businesses that we’d want to own.
Yeah. And I think there will be easy ways to get the data that you need to understand these businesses.
All right. Hopefully it’s standardized.
And then there will probably be, over time, a decoupling—
Yeah.
—of the assets.
Yeah.
And I think we’re already in the early stages of that as well. I’ve always had this thesis that we would end up decoupling, but it’s going to happen slowly. It’s just going to happen slowly. Bitcoin and all other assets, or are you saying the quality assets from the subpar assets?
I think quality assets from subpar assets. But just in general, maybe the better word is dispersion, because I don’t want to single out Bitcoin as the thing to decouple from. I don’t think that’s really the point.
4. How To Find A Trade
Blockworks gets some crap because we call Bitcoin a special snowflake. So, if I asked you, do you have a framework for how you put on a trade, how you do your research, how you size it, what other investors you talk to, or what filters you use? Do you have an answer there, or is it more of a gut feel?
I think it’ll be a combination of gut feel—gut feel is more about sizing and timing—but we also do very deep research for any of the positions that we build. If we’re going to build a big position in a name, then for sure we’ve done extensive research in many cases. For example, whether it be Solana, or when we built a position in 2023, at least myself and Wilson, who’s on our team and leads research, had been following Solana for as long as it had been a thing.
We’ve been following it since mainnet came out and the token launched in 2020. We followed it throughout the entire cycle. So you can argue that we had been researching this thing for years before we even built the position in the fund. I think it’s important because we only want to invest in quality. We only want to invest in quality, and I think you have to actually use your brain.
Yeah. If you want to do that, I think it’s also an important point because I find that over the past year and a half, really since 2023, people have been conditioned through memecoins and perpetuating short-term thinking.
Yeah. And when you think very short term, I think building that conviction—long-term conviction, long-term fundamental conviction—just doesn’t really matter as much.
And then what I also say is that, in the age of AI, in the age of abundant information and hyperspeed information, people can learn the thesis for these assets very quickly. I think at this point—I remember even earlier this year—it would almost feel like a waste of time for me to go on a podcast and talk about Hyperliquid because everyone knew the thesis. Everyone knew the points. They had the same talking points: “90% of revenue goes back to buybacks,” “It’s stealing market share from Binance,” and all these different things.
What actually made the difference is the conviction.
Mhm.
And I think conviction only comes from sitting with an idea until you really, really understand it.
Do you think there’s something about being a research analyst that leads to being able to get strong conviction or being a good investor in crypto? Your team is made up of a lot of ex-Messari people. You’re a Messari research analyst, and Monk and Wilson, right? All ex-Messari guys.
Yeah.
Do you think there’s something about being a research analyst that leads to strong conviction or being a good investor in crypto? What do you think?
I think the conviction, for sure, because there aren’t really good places to go learn about these assets. Hopefully this changes with things like Blockworks Transparency, Trim, Brick, and all that stuff, but there really aren’t good places to learn about these assets. Even if you ask your LLM, “Hey, I want you to put together a report on Hyperliquid or Morpho, or whatever your favorite asset is,” it can probably give you good high-level details, but oftentimes I find there are data inconsistencies. The data is just not presented well, and there also aren’t established frameworks for even understanding these assets.
Yeah. Yeah. It’s crazy. If you look at the revenue of a protocol on Blockworks, DeFiLlama, Dune, and Artemis, you’re going to get 4 different numbers, which is insane.
Which is insane. You’re going to get different numbers by something like 30%. It’s like, wait, isn’t this stuff supposed to be transparent? You’re reading it from the blockchain. How does this even make sense? Because then there’s almost accounting work to be done to say, “They’re clearly…” I’m not going to name names, but there are folks who are clearly miscounting what revenue is—almost the definition of what revenue is.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, maybe speaking of revenue, how much do you think fundamentals actually matter here?
I think they matter a lot more than they did in the past. 100%. Again, when the average investor has an abundance of alternatives to get exposure to frontier tech and asymmetric upside, you really need to have something that’s real and tangible.
One way to test this is to look at what happens whenever things go up. Even over the past 3 months, before the past week when Bitcoin sold off, there were a lot of things that started to go up. You had some random crypto AI projects and some DeFi stuff. Anything can go up when people feel some level of risk appetite, but what matters is whether you’re making higher lows over time. The only things that do that are the ones that have compounding fundamentals.
Yeah.
That’s almost the better test of what’s actually a quality asset to own and what you’d want to own long term. Otherwise, it’s just a rotation. I can think of so many assets where, every single time there are people bidding, they start bidding this thing, and it’s like, “Oh, wow. This is actually the way to play AI now. This is the way to play quantum now.” It’ll go up 100%, and then what happens is it makes lower highs and then lower lows, and people abandon it. It happens all the time.
Yeah. Yeah.
It happens all the time.
Yeah. You need deep conviction. I even see this with my portfolio right now in stocks.
Yeah.
Right. I basically blindly followed Santiago into Micron and SanDisk.
Good trade.
Yeah, I did well there. I’ve got no conviction. I’m like, “Oh, memory. Buy these things.” They go up 200%, and I’m like, “Oh, genius.” So, shout-out Santiago. Thank you.
Then they go down 20%, and I’m like, “Oh, God. I’ve got to get out of this thing,” as opposed to something like Robinhood. I’m not selling Robinhood for 10 years. Eli Lilly—I’m not selling Eli Lilly for 10 years.
So, maybe speaking of conviction, you guys got conviction around Hyperliquid. Can you—I don't know what you're allowed to share, what you're not allowed to share, but what are the assets? You said there's only a couple assets that a global capital allocator could actually buy. What are the assets that you guys own right now, and maybe what percentage of your book is Hyperliquid?
Yeah. So I can't share the details on the number of assets we own and weightings, but I think with that framework, it's really tough outside of Bitcoin and Hyperliquid.
Yeah. And you're really—you either can put on certain positions, but you have to limit your sizing, or you might just have to forego doing that at all. And it could just be a point-in-time thing. What I always tell people is, listen—
In some ways, this sounds hyper-cynical, like there's nothing you want to own except for a small number of things. And then maybe the optimistic part is that the small number of things are working. They're really working. I'm not one to use analogies, but maybe this is like ChatGPT of crypto. That would be sick. That's exactly what I think this industry needs.
Now if we think about this over time and we're not being impatient anymore, we're thinking 6 months out, 12 months out, 24 months out, there will be more Hyperliquids—not necessarily the same exact opportunity. This could be a once-in-a-cycle thing—
But yeah, there's going to be more assets that actually break beyond this crypto merry-go-round, and they're going to be in these categories we talk about, like prediction markets and stablecoins. I think lending is one we're quite excited about. I do think at a certain point we'll get something real in crypto AI, but you have to be patient. At least for me, every 6 to 12 months, there are usually 1 to 2 new assets that come out and they're like, "Wow, you know what? This is real. I think this is worth a shot."
5. The Hyperliquid Thesis
Yeah. Yeah. Want to talk hype?
Sure.
You guys did the work. I don’t know when you put the trade on, but I do remember Monk came out with a post. I think it was called “The Great Purpification.” This was maybe early March.
Yeah.
I’ve been reading a lot of Flood’s stuff, and we’ve got this guy on our team, Shondaranda Devons, who puts out great stuff. I remember Monk’s post. I read that and thought, “I think they might be onto something here.” Tell me your Hyperliquid thesis, and then we can drill down from there.
Yeah. We’ve owned this since day 1.
Were you trading on it before, or did you just get the airdrop? Did you just see the excitement?
No. We don’t trade perps as a fund. To be honest, I personally had never traded on Hyperliquid until the day when we actually bridged.
Until the airdrop.
Until the airdrop.
And then you saw the excitement around the airdrop.
So, I’d been tracking Hyperliquid, but I just wasn’t using it.
Yeah.
I think Monk on our team was using it, and that’s a different story, but that was before he joined us. I actually did not use Hyperliquid until the first day. What we did know was that the second this thing launched, we were going to buy.
Interesting.
Yeah.
How come?
To be honest, back then the thesis was simpler than it is today. There were only so many opportunities. If you zoom out, the 3 biggest categories by revenue in this industry have always been exchanges—specifically perpetual swaps—stablecoins, and, arguably, smart contract platforms.
Ethereum back in 2021 peaked at maybe $10 billion in run-rate annual fees. It was huge. Even Solana earlier in 2025 was maybe doing $2.5 billion to $3 billion in annual fees. These are big businesses.
We were like, “Okay, look, I’ve always wanted to own a derivatives exchange at Syncracy, and there haven’t really been good options.”
I mean, for a long time, the only options were GMX.
Mhm.
And there was dYdX. I remember when this one came out, I thought, “You know what? This actually makes sense. It doesn’t have the crazy token unlocks that, say, dYdX did, and it did a ton of revenue.” I remember that, at the time we bought it, it was doing $200 million a year in revenue.
On the first day, no one even knew that they were buying back the token. It was kind of this secret thing, and you could track it on-chain. I was like, “Who the hell is this insurance fund?” Then I thought, “Oh, wow. This might be the team buying back the token. This is crazy.”
I looked across the landscape and thought, “How many projects even have tokens that you can own that are generating that much in revenue and passing it back to token holders?” At the time, there were only 3 that were higher: Solana, Ethereum, and I think maybe 1 more, which I’m forgetting—maybe BNB.
I was like, “Oh, wow. These are all worth multiples of what HYPE is.” It was just that simple. As we continued to do our research, it became much bigger than that. That’s when we started developing this everything-exchange thesis, and we ended up putting that one out in Q1 2025. That was the first type of thesis we put out.
I think the thesis has more or less been the same since then, and it’s just started to become more clear: unified margin to trade any asset. That is a Hyperliquid thesis. You can put $1 in, and that dollar can be a stablecoin, or in the future it could be a portfolio of assets, and you can use it as margin to trade anything.
It could be perpetual swaps on crypto, equities, and commodities. It could be prediction-market positions. It could be options. I think there are only so many businesses, even outside of crypto, that are competing for this everything-exchange or financial-super-app opportunity. I think Hyperliquid is 1 of maybe 3 to 5 that are doing this, and it has the most unique approach to doing it, being built on a permissionless blockchain.
Yeah.
It is, to me, the realization of this thesis we’ve had with blockchain for the longest time: that you’re going to have a single substrate where all the finance takes place. That is an amazing thing. I think so many people tripped themselves up early on over the centralization of it.
I remember even I was thinking, “Wait, hold up. They told me it’s 4 validators. There’s this bridge risk.” What I started to think about was this concept of path dependence. This is actually what I thought about with the Solana thesis at first as well, because back in 2022 and 2023, there was a lot of pushback from the Ethereum community that Solana was just beefing up the validator requirements, and that’s how it got all this increased throughput.
The argument was, “We can’t build this global financial system. There need to be end users running the validators.” I remember doing our work and thinking, “You know what? I don’t think that’s true. I think what makes sense is this compromise in the interim: fine, let’s just have the validators in data centers, and we can work toward getting end-user verification in the long run.”
The good part is that now we can actually have usable applications, which is most important. I almost think the same thing happens with Hyperliquid as well. Maybe the end state isn’t just having 4 validators collocated in Tokyo, but this is going to change over time. It has changed over time. We’ve gone from 4 to 8 to 10 to 20 to whatever—we’re around 27 right now—and we’re going to keep growing that validator set.
What’s most important is that we actually built a product that is killer and that people choose. The Ethereum people may be right, or the Solana people may be right, that the end state is to have a globally distributed validator set. That’s what you need as a foundation for a global substrate for all finance and commerce.
But how do we get there? Do you start on the extreme end, like Ethereum, where you have all these individuals running nodes and you can’t have a working system for 10 years? Or is it Hyperliquid, where you have an actually working product that scales and you slowly decentralize it over time as it’s needed?
I think the core users of Hyperliquid just don’t care about that right now. They didn’t care at first, and I think this is something that matters as it scales more. It’s a question Hyperliquid will have to answer over the coming years.
But you have time to do that. Why did you think that Hyperliquid would become this massive thing? I know a lot of people who missed the trade and said, “Look, BitMEX came and went, dYdX came and went, Synthetix came and went, and GMX came and went.” The graveyard of perpetual exchanges is getting pretty big.
I remember all the Blockworks analysts in 2022 were all in on GMX. Then the next guys were all in on the next thing, and it’s just the graveyard, right? It’s littered with perp DEXs. So why was Hyperliquid going to make it and not become one of those guys?
Yeah, that’s a good question. At first, I actually wasn’t sure. It was more so, “Okay, this is just a great trade.” As we did our work, there were a couple of things that stood out.
One was simply the experience of trading on it and onboarding onto it. That was unique. I remember using a product like GMX or a product like dYdX, and it didn’t compare in terms of the latency of doing a swap or even the process of getting your assets. I was like, “Oh, this is like a centralized exchange.”
Oh, this feels like using Binance. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That was 1 thing, which I think is always important: to actually use the product. Someone could write it out for you, but when you actually use it and feel it for yourself, it’s a big aha moment. I thought, “Oh, yeah, this is a big deal.”
The other thing was the founder and the team. It’s helpful to have conversations with people in the ecosystem and with the team themselves to build conviction. For me, I always need to talk to the founders and get a sense of who these people are, what their motivations are, and whether they’re killers or not.
The other thing was that the go-to-market strategy was unique. While the infrastructure itself was relatively centralized, the approach to scaling the ecosystem was community-driven. You get the benefits of Ethereum or Solana, where it’s permissionless for anyone to use, permissionless for anyone to build, and deeply composable. You get to tap into the swarm to launch new markets or new frontends. That was something we just hadn’t seen before.
Mhm. When did you start to put on this—you know, it sounds like it started as a trade, and then it quickly turned into your big, maybe the investment of the cycle for the fund? What changed there?
It sounds like when you initially found it, you said, “Look, there’s Solana, there’s Ethereum, there’s BNB. They’re all at the top of the charts, and then there’s HYPE. Maybe there’s some arbitrage to be done here.” Not arbitrage, but there’s a big gap between the valuations of these things.
Now, I just know what I read publicly—we’re not talking about Hyperliquid all the time in DMs—but it seems like you guys have a pretty big Hyperliquid position. It seems like it’s gone from a trade to a large investment, whatever you could define as the difference there.
How did that happen? It’s really a question about sizing, getting conviction, and how you move from one stage to the next. I was listening to Andrew Kang talk about his robotics thesis. I don’t know if you’ve gone down this rabbit hole of Kang and his whole robotics thing.
Yeah.
He said, “Look, we put $1 million into Figure, then this happened. I put $5 million in, then this happened, and then I put $20 million in.” Was there something that happened for you with Hyperliquid?
Yeah. We bought a lot on the first day. I think what really changed is, like I said, we just sat with the idea.
This was basically December through January and February, during the period when it ran up from $3 to $35 and then back down to $9 at the tariff lows in April 2025. During that time, there weren’t really that many new things I was spending time on in crypto.
There was the AI-agent stuff, which was hilarious. That was fun.
Yeah.
But it wasn’t real. So the only thing that was real that I was focusing on was really Hyperliquid. We spent a lot of time.
I'm saying this while researching. We're putting together this thesis that we end up sharing publicly, and I think it's just through that process that we were able to build that conviction. There wasn't really any single aha moment.
Yeah.
It's just that, as we started to understand—as the thesis became more lucid to us—I think it got to the point where I was like, “All right, you know what? I think we're going to let this one ride.”
Yeah. So, I remember it launched. I weirdly really specifically remember this day. It was Thanksgiving of 2024, and that was at—I’m trying to remember the exact price—$3 or $4. Now I'm looking at $64.
Yeah.
Right. So, if you got it at $3 and it's at $60, you're up 20x. What? I don't know what you guys got it at, but have you sold? Are you just riding it? How do you think about trimming positions?
Well, I guess before I answer that, I actually do remember there was maybe 1 aha moment that I had. This was in January. I was having a conversation with another founder in the Hyperliquid ecosystem. He runs 1 of the largest projects.
I think what reframed it for me was that, for a long time, this is the case with any DeFi protocol, the mentality when you're investing in it is, “I'm investing in this project because I think it can dominate DeFi.” I think this thing has 10% market share, and I think it could reach 60% market share of on-chain lending, on-chain trading, on-chain meme coin trading, whatever.
It was actually this conversation where this person was like, “I think people need to think bigger. We're taking on Binance.” Binance is a massive business, a multibillion-dollar business, and this business line for them is worth tens of billions of dollars. I don't care about DeFi anymore. We're winning DeFi. We already have, at that point, 70% to 75% market share of on-chain perpetuals.
The big target is Binance, Bybit, and Coinbase. That's where we're going after. What you want to track is the market share versus these exchanges. That's when I think the thesis started to become more clear: What actually matters in competing with these centralized exchanges?
Then it's some of the things I talked about—things that would help Hyperliquid in the long run. Once I got to that point of view, I was like, “Oh, wow. You know what? This is actually a real business.”
Yeah.
I'm just going to let this thing ride.
Let it ride.
I'm going to let it ride.
Yeah. Do you have price targets? I'm not an investor, so how does this work?
No. No price targets.
No price targets. You're just letting it ride.
Yeah.
Is there something that would get you to sell?
I think whenever I lack conviction.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Okay. Another thing that ties back to the original question of trimming is that—
We have trimmed around the edges here and there, but what's interesting about Hyperliquid and this new revenue meta, as people call it, is that for the first time, many people are pulling out their calculators to do a DCF on something. It's like, dude, what are you even talking about?
The thing about Hyperliquid is that there have been so many generational businesses throughout history, and the entire time they were in public markets, they looked expensive. They're trading at 30x, 40x, 50x earnings—or in private markets, too. Businesses always look expensive, right? They always look expensive.
I think what we fail to appreciate as human beings is the exponential curve of how earnings or revenue can go from $100 million to $1 billion to $10 billion. This can happen very, very fast. It's really hard to actually price that in. It's really hard to understand that.
I think that's the same thing that I'm understanding with Hyperliquid. Once again, if we actually believe that this technology we've built called blockchains over the past almost 1.5 decades is going to produce any value for society, there are going to be really big businesses built.
Right now, as pessimistic as we may sound about the state of crypto, we're still at day 1 of this stuff taking over the financial system. Do the math, if you want to use a calculator, on what some of these projects look like when you have 20% of all trading volume across all assets on these blockchains.
I'm not saying it's going to happen in a year, but it could happen in 10 years, for sure.
Yeah. Do the math on that, and you're going to get to some pretty insane numbers on this stuff.
I think that's actually the thing that people have forgotten to do: dream.
Dream.
But dream.
Yeah.
At the end of the day, this is early-stage tech. You have to be willing to dream if you're going to be here. Otherwise, you should go do something else.
I agree. I forget—I’m going to totally botch your tweet—but you basically said, “If you're logging into Twitter every day and just bear-posting, what are you even doing here?”
Yeah, yeah. It's not a good way to live life.
Yeah, I tend to agree. Do you also buy things around the Hyperliquid ecosystem? I just met with a founder building 1 of the big lend-borrow protocols in the Hyperliquid ecosystem. They've got a token. Are you buying that token too, or are you just long Hyperliquid?
Yeah, we haven't bought anything in the Hyperliquid ecosystem to date.
Yeah, because historically, the chains just end up performing so much better.
Or, I should say, the ecosystem performs better than trying to pick the app. There is some element where it's like—even think about this now with some of the other L1s—let's say you're bullish on Solana. Does it even make sense to go and bet on anything in the ecosystem if you're unsure about Solana? Probably not.
I think the risk-reward is probably already really good. But if you believe in Solana, just go buy SOL.
Yeah.
The other thing, which I think is more important, is that it's been hard to find quality exposure, and I have been worried about losing HYPE as I rotate into those, if I were to do that.
Even think about it this way: Let's say you can actually own anything in the Hyperliquid ecosystem, whether it's private or public. What would I want to own? I probably just want to own TradeXYZ. I wouldn't want to own some of the—
Do you own TradeXYZ?
No.
Do you guys do venture investments?
We've done a couple, but that is not really the bread and butter of the fund.
Yeah. Can you explain TradeXYZ?
I think the way to think about them right now is that they're the largest market deployer on Hyperliquid. At this point, they have well over 90% market share of HIP-3 deployments—equities, commodities, whatever else it might be.
The thesis is really that simple. If you almost thought about Hyperliquid as this decentralized organization, you have the core team that handles the Hyperliquid chain, and they're in charge of the core functionality. But all the new market creation and management of those markets is now handled by third-party teams.
You have teams like Trade XYZ doing all the TradFi stuff. They probably have a new team that will do prediction-market stuff, and they're almost like units in a giant hive-like swarm organization, which is Hyperliquid.
Yeah. Obviously, I feel like Shogun is basically an extension of Jeff and the team at this point.
Yeah. I think they're integral to the Hyperliquid thesis.
Yeah, I agree. What do you think the comp is for Hyperliquid? Is it CME Group? Is it Binance and Coinbase? Is it Solana or Ethereum?
It's a combination of many of those things. I think what makes the most sense right now is probably the crypto exchanges, like Coinbase and Binance. Granted, those are more diversified businesses than Hyperliquid, but I think Hyperliquid is starting to diversify more as well.
For a long time, it was just crypto trading. Now it's TradFi stuff, and now they get the stablecoin revenue from USDC. Then they have the prediction-market stuff that will come out. It is slowly diversifying over time.
I also think CME, Robinhood, and some of the neobrokerages are decent comps. I honestly do think Ethereum and Solana are decent comps as well.
Yeah. I don't think Ethereum and Hyperliquid are remotely the same product today.
Yeah, for a number of reasons. But if the endgame is—Hyperliquid calls it “the house of all finance,” Ethereum calls it something like, and Solana calls it internet capital—it’s all the same thing.
Like we're all saying, we're going to do all finance on blockchains, and they're all going toward the same thing. So I think it's hard to actually be long any of these things and not think about them competitively.
Yeah, I saw this with—if you take out the blockchains—you saw this with CeFi. Remember, in 2018, 2019, and 2020, you had people who launched as custodians and people who launched as lenders and borrowers, like BlockFi and Celsius, which, RIP, but back then was fine. You had the exchanges and the prime brokerage platforms, and eventually you realized they were all building the same business.
They just started with different products. One started with custody, one started with an exchange, and one started with lending and borrowing, but they were all building the same thing.
Do you also buy Lighter or any of the other perps platforms as a hedge in case you're wrong?
No, we don't hedge our Hyperliquid exposure in that way.
Do you use leverage with Hyperliquid?
No. So, listen, I've entertained some of the other perp exchanges, like I think many people have, and there's just none that stand out. I think there are redeeming qualities in many of them, but I remember throughout this year, there were so many people trying to convince me to own some of them.
They would say, “Well, if Hyperliquid does well, then these should do well, too. This is a big secular theme, and it's going to be more than 1 winner.” There are all these different reasons you can think of, and I'm like, “Okay, cool.”
I buy the fact that Hyperliquid is not going to own 100% of the market. Even if they own 80% or 70%, there's still a large percentage available for 1 or 2 other players. I understand where you're coming from. The problem is that the reason people are excited about Hyperliquid right now is because, in the early parts of the year, there were the silver and gold perps, then oil in February and March, and more recently AI equities.
Pre-IPO stocks.
And pre-IPO stocks, right? At this point, the perps category has equities, commodities, and pre-IPO stuff.
Is that stuff taking off on any of these other exchanges?
The answer is no. It's just not the same thesis. It looks like the same thesis, but it's not. I think that's 1 of the reasons why those platforms haven't really done as well and haven't been dragged up along with Hyperliquid. But I'm open-minded that someone else can do it.
At the same time, the Hyperliquid piece is evolving, too.
Yeah.
So, 1 thing I always harp on with people is going back to the comparison between Hyperliquid and Solana or Ethereum. Jeff has been telling you for a long time exactly what he thinks Hyperliquid is. It's not the greatest perp exchange. It's not even an everything exchange. It's the house of all finance.
Yeah. And to be honest, I'm going to take him at his word because he's just been executing on it, and he's proving that this is actually the end goal. If that is the end goal, then if you're an Ethereum holder or a Solana holder, you have to be looking over your shoulder, like, “Is this guy going to come after me?”
6. Is The Hyperliquid Trade Overcrowded?
Yeah, let me take the other side of this argument, which is almost more of a market-dynamics thing. If you look back at 2023, 2024, and 2025, so many crypto investors missed the Solana trade.
Yeah.
What I saw, and what I've seen over the last year or 2 with Hyperliquid, is that people are so scared of having to go to their LPs and tell them, “Yes, we knew Anatoly and Raj. Yes, we were looking at Solana. No, we didn't put on a trade. No, we didn't capture the 20x.”
So now, when Hyperliquid comes out and has really taken over most people's feeds, you buy it because you have PTSD from the Solana trade.
Yeah.
That's what I've seen.
Yeah.
And so even these funds that don't have the conviction that you have are in the trade.
Is the trade too crowded?
I'd say no. I think it's hard for anything in crypto to be really crowded right now because there's not a lot of capital coming into the asset class. In fact, there's been a lot of capital leaving the asset class. So if your point of view is that there's going to be more capital coming in over the coming years, which is at least my view, then even ideas that have a lot of fund ownership can probably do well.
Yeah. So that's 1.
The other thing is, even if every fund owned it—which isn't true, because I talk to many funds that don't own it—and every fund owned it in size, which also isn't true, you still have the rest of the world that doesn't have exposure. That's where I think things like the Hyperliquid strategy treasury companies and the Hyperliquid ETFs are really important.
Yeah.
So, for example, in the latest 13F, D1 Capital—this legendary TradFi discretionary fund—disclosed that they own some PURR. What ends up happening is that people copy-trade each other. They're like, “Wait, what is this PURR thing you own?”
They're all boys, and they talk, just like all the fund managers do.
What is it, Daniel Sundheim or something? He's a top-10 manager right now.
Yeah. These people all know each other, and they end up talking, too.
Exactly. Just like in crypto, we all talk to each other.
And Citrini, I don't know if you saw, mentioned it today and just posted today, saying, “This is 1 of our big ideas for June.”
Exactly, exactly. So I do think there's a lot more. Again, this actually ties back to the original thing in the conversation about the global capital allocator.
Well, they're like, “Okay, I've been hearing about this crypto thing since Trump got elected. Is this supposed to be this big thing? I've sat out of it, and that was probably a good decision. There's been nothing to own. But now there's actually a real disruptor here.”
I haven't seen that before. That's really interesting. I think the Colossus article was important, too, because everyone on the Hyperliquid team is anonymous, other than Jeff. It's probably important for these people to have someone they can look at and say, “Okay, I know who's running this. This isn't going to be another FTX.”
Yeah.
I think that's a large pool of capital that is still available to buy this. That's just the discretionary hedge funds. If we're talking about more institutional investors—pensions, endowments, and global retail—there are still way more people that could buy this.
That's not the basis of the thesis; it's not just that we're going to have a bunch more people buy this. But I'm not worried that there's a lack of capital available to push this thing higher.
7. Opportunities In Crypto, Token Unlocks & The L1 Trade
Yeah, yeah. Well, I guess at the beginning, you said there are only a couple of assets that big capital allocators who can invest in anything—a generalist fund, you could call them—can buy. You said Hyperliquid and Bitcoin. Is there anything else that you think is interesting right now? You don't have to say what the fund owns. I'd be curious if you're able to say it, but if you had to pick 2 or 3 assets that you think are interesting, what would they be?
Listen, there are probably another 10 to 15 things that I find interesting. The difference is that, let's just say Hyperliquid is at point B along its adoption curve. Many of these are at point A, which is 6 to 12 months behind where Hyperliquid is.
If you think that perpetual swaps is a category that inflected within the past year, the categories for me are spot trading for tokenized assets and lending. I think the inflection point for spot trading will be clarity. That could take time to actually materialize into exploding volumes, but that's 1 area where I'm definitely paying attention.
The other category is lending. Obviously, I'm a big fan of the work that Morpho has done, and I think that's another way of playing the merging of traditional finance and blockchain.
What's the thesis for on-chain lending and borrowing in general for you right now?
Yeah. So, listen, 1 underestimated second-order effect of the CLARITY Act is that if you can't pass stablecoin yield back to end users anymore, at least passively, then I think that creates an incentive for all these exchanges and brokerage platforms to funnel these users into more active strategies.
That could be the exchange itself taking the stablecoins and lending them out to whoever they lend them out to. But it could also mean integrations with different DeFi protocols, and that's something I'm really excited about. This could be a monsoon of liquidity that comes on-chain.
Now it only solves one half of the equation, which is the supply side, not the demand side of who wants loans. But that is something that I'm really looking forward to after CLARITY.
Yeah. Yeah, I agree. We had an episode with John Zettler, who's at Kraken. He runs a lot of their vault products and their Earn product, and then Sun, who's the founder of Veda. It was a really good episode back in, I think, January, talking about how big vaults are going to be. So if you're looking for a bull case for Veda, Morpho, Spark, or even Aave, that's probably the thesis.
Exactly. Definitely a sector to look out for. This is again one of those things where I think it's easy to be bullish long term, but in the interim you just have to deal with the Mitosis hack overhang.
Yeah. We'll have that for a year or two, but it's going to harden the protocols.
Exactly.
Do you guys own Morpho?
We do not.
What? So if you like something, why not buy it? What would get you to change your mind and put on a position in Morpho?
Yeah. So this is not specifically Morpho, but again, if we're going to be in this, it's been a challenging environment to navigate crypto for the past 6 months or even the past year. What has actually worked well? It's only the things that don't have any hair on them. If there's just a little bit of hair—
Yeah.
—like it's not growing fast enough, or there are token unlocks, or maybe this founder is not great, or—
The hair on—
A million things. Well, for Morpho specifically, I think it's just the token unlocks and then the questions around value accrual.
Yeah. Yeah. So if you were sitting in Paul's shoes, how would you fix that—
Around the unlocks?
If you're Paul, you say, “Look, I'll buy your token if you can fix this and this.” Or are you saying he can't fix it because it's about the unlocks?
I just think all these projects should just—
You just have to get through the—
Get rid of the vest. We don't need it. I just don't think we need the vest.
Or you would say, just accelerate all your vests.
Accelerate it.
And just have one big nuke—
—and just eat it.
Yeah.
Just find the clearing price. We're just delaying the market finding a clearing price for all these assets.
Yeah.
And it also doesn't make sense for these projects either. Why do you want this overhang?
And I think Morpho is in a better position than almost everyone with this. The unlocks don't even last that long, and obviously it's one of the highest-quality projects in the category. But I can think of so many other decent assets that have unlocks for years into the future.
Yeah. Yeah.
And it's really, really tough.
So if you were them, you would just clear all the unlocks.
Clear all the unlocks.
Nuke the price and just—
Well, I don't know if the price would nuke.
You don't think the price would nuke if you—
It's an open question. I don't know if all those people who are investors would actually sell. It's possible they don't.
Interesting.
Maybe it happens. They're like, “You know what? This was a big overhang. It's cleared. This actually makes it—”
Let it unlock. Just unlock every single person and—
Unlock every single person. I think Solana did a good job at this back in—was it 2021? I remember at the end of 2020 there was this huge cliff. A lot of supply was set to inflate by a crazy amount, and everyone, especially Ethereum people, had all these charts showing, “Oh, Solana's going to nuke because all these tokens are coming online.”
Well, we all know what happened from January 1, 2021, to the end of the year. This thing went up like 200x. It was nuts.
It's actually nuts.
And the people who got unlocks didn't sell, because if this is something you like, at the end of the day it's just about whether this is a quality project and something the investors want to own.
Yeah.
Like—
That's all that matters. People sell things they think are overvalued and worthless.
So if your project has a ton of unlocks—
And you know it's overvalued. It's worth $1 billion, $2 billion, $3 billion, $4 billion, or $5 billion, and the people lack conviction in it, they're going to sell.
Yeah.
They're going to sell. It shouldn't be at that valuation in the first place.
Yeah. ETH at a $200 billion market cap or Solana at a $40 billion market cap—are you a buyer of either of those?
ETH is trading at a $200 billion market cap today, and SOL is at a $40 billion market cap today. SOL is at $67, and ETH is at $1,700 when we're recording this, which is June 8.
Yeah. I'm not a buyer of ETH. I am a buyer of SOL as well.
Buyer of SOL, not a buyer of ETH.
Yeah.
Okay.
Now, so then—yeah, go ahead.
Yeah. So the L1s are the most divisive assets when it comes to valuation.
Yeah. I mean, because you could be the guy to be like, “All right, these are businesses. You value them on revenue.” And if that was your mentality for the past decade, you'd have been dead wrong on Ethereum every single step of the way, and also Solana, right? I keep coming back to, well, how do you actually value these things in the first place?
It probably is a mosaic of different frameworks. I definitely think there is this equity-like component where you do value the cash flows—they are there—but then you do have to factor in this almost utility-like premium, because these assets are used within their respective economies. That is how blockchains work. Blockchains cannot function if these assets do not exist. They play a critical role in the ecosystem. Now, how much is that worth? Maybe that utility premium should actually be worth almost nothing. Maybe it should be worth a lot. Maybe this is actually money down the road or a store of value; it should be worth an enormous amount. No one has any idea. Sometimes, for me, I'm less worried about the valuation.
Yeah.
I'm also obviously aware of it, and I'm more so thinking about—because again, ETH at $400 billion or $500 billion when it was, like, at the end of 2025, I have no way of actually justifying that in my head. I was like, unless you think this thing is going to be the next digital gold, this doesn't make any sense. You could have bought OpenAI for less than that at a time, right?
Now, what I do think is true, though, is that—
8. Zcash & Privacy
You want to find an actual reason to bid these things. You want to invest in growth.
Mm-hmm.
This has always been my recurring thing with Ethereum over the past year and a half: if I had any dose of optimism at any point, it's all about growth. It's all about growth. Growth will solve everything. There's a lot of—I mean, not to make an analogy to a business again, because we don't know if these are businesses or whatever, but I just think of something like Tesla. For the longest time, people were like, “Oh, this thing's so overvalued. It's burning money,” right? And what solves it? Growth solves it.
Yeah, growth solves everything. I tend to agree. Oftentimes in businesses—and a lot of companies are going through this right now—you can either trim your way out of a problem, or you can grow your way out of a problem. Oftentimes, the first thing that people go to is, “Let's lay people off, let's cut costs.” You do need to often do that, but you'll be far better if you can just grow sales, right? Just grow your revenue, and a lot of your problems take care of themselves, right?
The other hot trades right now are NEAR, VVV, Venice, and Zcash. I mean, obviously, Zcash just got a bit of a debacle, but I still think it's probably a pretty hot trade. Are you guys in any of those?
No. No, we skipped all those. I think VVV is interesting. The problem I've always had with NEAR is that I actually have never thought it was interesting. It just kind of feels like it's one of those assets that is always trying to attach itself to whatever the hot narrative is, with a classic roller-coaster chart.
Yeah.
Zcash—I've actually gone back and forth on this one for a long time, because I remember at Messari this was always one of the assets that everyone there owned. This was going back to 2019, when I first joined Messari, so I'm very aware of the thesis. There are a couple of things that always made me skeptical. One is I've always thought that privacy is a feature, and what people actually want to do is protect their assets. They want privacy for the assets they use.
They want privacy for dollar transactions. When I'm going to buy a cup of coffee, send money to a friend, pay for a subscription, or pay for a house—
When someone's doing payroll, they want privacy for transactions in dollars. What they don't want is privacy for a random proof-of-work asset that has no use outside of its own ecosystem, which is literally just sending it back and forth. It doesn't make any sense to me.
So then it's like, all right, well, maybe what people want to do is have a private store of value, right? They just want something where they put their wealth in this asset and it sits there, and no one knows about it. It's protected from governments and whoever else you think is going to take your money. Okay, well, what is actually the market for that opportunity? I don't think it's that big.
And I think about after the 2016 election, when there were so many people concerned about data privacy with Facebook and Google. They were saying, “Oh my God, my data is being sold to these companies, and they're using it to manipulate me into voting for different candidates.” What changed after that? Literally nothing. No one uses DuckDuckGo. No one uses alternatives to Twitter or Facebook. They just use the same things, right? In fact, I think DuckDuckGo has maybe 1% market share of all global search. It's really, really small. So revealed preference is that no one actually cares about privacy.
I actually have a way to quantify this. I think there are 100 million users in the world that care about privacy, right? Look at the number of users of DuckDuckGo—the number of users that Signal has is exactly the same.
Interesting.
It's 100 million users for both, and they've been tapped out at around 100 million for a little while. So I actually think Venice has probably 3 million users. I think if I'm Erik and I'm doing the fundraise or whatever, there's probably a 33x growth story to be told here.
Yeah, yeah.
Or Zcash, or whatever privacy thing you're pitching.
So, interesting, I think privacy is important as a societal value, and I think we need to have private options. I do think privacy will be important in the finance that we have on blockchains, but again, the privacy that's most important is not the extreme cypherpunk version, which is like, “Put all your money in Zcash and go walk away.” It's like, “Yeah, just make sure that when I get paid from my employer, no one can see what my salary is.”
Yeah, yeah, totally.
That just seems reasonable to me. And then, another thing that I thought about with the Zcash thing is: What is the psychology of the many people who were buying it on these prior 2 run-ups? A lot of it was just derivatives leverage. A lot of it was people buying because they had some sense of FOMO: “Oh my God, this thing can go to 5% of Bitcoin's market cap or 10% of Bitcoin's market cap.”
The number of people who actually had that deep fundamental conviction was a very small fraction of the community. So I'm not saying this thing can never come back. Maybe that kind of loud minority will continue to convert people over time, but I've just been very, very skeptical this entire time.
Yeah. Ryan, man, this is great. Anything that we haven't talked about that we should?
No, I think we covered a lot.
Anything that feels obvious to you that you think other people are missing?
That crypto is going to be a big thing. I mean, I think that's maybe the only obvious thing that people lose sight of every single time we go down. It's the classic, classic story of crypto, where anytime we go down, people start writing these long threads and long tweets about why it's all over, and it just never happens.
Yeah. Cool. Ryan, appreciate it.
Yeah, appreciate the time.