kushagra

on perp DEXs today - perp dex UX (how they actually feel) is pretty much the same across the desktop apps. the differentiation happens on time to fill, fees, liquidity, and transparency - FX fees (on notional) are extremely high on Perp DEXs - Deposit are usually only in USDC

@thatdegenvc great article tommy!

Perps are NOT topped. Every healthy, durable market has its seasons, and I believe that it is still early to make bets in this sector. In this article, I explain why the future of perpetuals belongs onchain and where the venture-scalable opportunities lie.

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Current State of Prediction Markets For all of CT that looks at prediction markets as the next new financial narrative— I think there is a need to adjust some expectations. For what it’s worth, prediction markets are insanely cool. It gives end users a way to speculate in ways that were not possible before. - Elections & other world events - Social markets - Sports books In addition, it opens completely different markets to market makers. For instance, market makers that were previously not able to scale operations on sports betting in size (despite the volume on it), are now able to have a P2P marketplace of bets that with which they can calculate their positioning and not be permissioned by bookees or other centralized counterparties. But the reality is— there may not be as much immediate demand as we may think. The entire interface of trading is completely different and there’s a non-negligible learning curve to it. New edges will be developed over time, but this is intellectually hard to build immediately especially given liquidity concerns. It seems right now the community is overindexing on the fact that everyone else is bullish on prediction markets, but I honestly dont see the meaningful traction to back this thesis. For instance, polymarket has done $22B in volume over the past 3 years. This is not something you can easily overlook. But in comparison, this is what uniswap does in a couple of days, or hyperliquid in 2 days (granted this is leveraged volume). On the user side, there’s a large chunk of crypto retail that recently got into polymarkets (which I’m sure a large chunk of it was incentivized by potential airdrop and is actually artificial). But for OG users that initially deposited into the platform, why were a good chunk of them churned? Why are folks that are invested into prediction markets not using them more actively? Are the reasons irrelevant if there is actual demand— or perhaps the demand just simply isn’t there yet? I think while the thesis of prediction markets is sound, it’ll be a while until there is actual meaningful demand. Though, I do believe that there is significant demand in certain niches: mention markets, history buffs, long-tail assets. Polymarket/Kalshi + sportsbetting platforms have already proved this. Users (and market makers) will have to learn a completely new financial primitive. Market resolutions need to be better. Liquidity will have to improve significantly for them to be usable moreso than the next trading platform. I see this being more of a slow burn than a rapid uptick in usage. Though I assume that the money raised from the polymarkets team will contribute significantly in accelerating this momentum, there is still long ways to go here. There is still a huge design space from futarchy to financial derivatives to parlays. If you’re a power user on prediction markets (or are building something on prediction markets) and have a solid opinion on this, I’d love to chat— dm’s are open :)

@jshinny12 @eliqiann Goat

Multicoin just released a paper regarding building around the attention economy. Great read by @eliqiann. multicoin.capital/2025/10/23/bui… My thoughts: Completely agreed that memecoins showed general direction validation in this and that they are a great schelling point to valuing attention. But I also believe that crudely determining a trading medium for pure attention is a little early. It takes away from the actual nuances and fun of what the memecoin market brings to the table: a medium of believing that a certain type of attention will get more than others (which when memecoins were lively-- brought a lot of retail traders). And not to mention, the more formal it becomes it may lose traders in the process. What a lot of marketing outlets have already begun to realize over the past couple of years is that attention span is rapidly diminishing and now the quality of attention matters (connection to other nodes, wealth, loyalty, intelligence, sentiment, etc.). This is because now with crypto, everyone has access to a pretty efficient UI/UX for avenue of payment and capital transfer. This started with radios and television, where attention has become a tool for removing overhead for people to notice the product, grow mindshare in the product, and eventually hopefully that turns into increasing customer spend on the product. Along with the fact that attention breaking out and contaminating others within the same clutter of nodes is much easier (information now travels much faster and social circles are now much more solidified). This is so prevalent to the point where it forms and shapes the business model of large platforms/corporations: starbucks --> real estate, twitch --> amazon, tik tok --> tiktok shop, etc. They are all desperate for growth and this comes in the form of the second order of the general increase in "attention" (first order being specifically useful attention). Attention as a whole-- if we were to denominate as market cap-- has risen, but the truth is that this market is quite top-heavy (and all subjectively valued). I like the idea of attention oracles because it gives a good and fair way to price attention, but there are different types of attention. But certain attention is priced differently to other people. If we go back to the root of why attention itself is so costly is because they're easily monetizable. If the end goal is to somehow monetize this attention here there are a couple of areas that could be interesting: 1. Something that further removes proximity of spending and value generation (replacing the role of attention in this case) 2. Pricing attention fairly given a specific type of people and the brand/platform/corporation/product 3. Something that can provide the local maximum of the matrix between: end consumer's emotional gain and money spent 4. Mechanisms or platforms that can optimize for spreading information more effectively 5. Platforms that can use this attention flywheel and increase the span of the users to solidify themselves as a source of attention (which comes from both just having a unique, great product that cares about the end user as well as being able to keep innovating to satisfy them) Obviously this list, and this entire piece, is just a huge braindump :) s/o @etherary @0xArnav for helping inspire some of the ideas here

@TheiaResearch ct fundamental analysts in shambles

If you receive a $10,000 signing bonus and tell your family you are earning $3.65M in run-rate salary then pls consider becoming a CT fundamental analyst you would be perfect for the role

something i'm hearing more of from startups recently: we should've hired slowly and found the right people

@MattFiebach @robbiepetersen_ @cydeologie Bullish nyc

New York crypto is wild. Walk out of the gym and run into @robbiepetersen_ We stand on street and chat for a bit and run into @etherary and crew. They mention there is a binance event down the block and turns out @cydeologie is hosting. It's a small world. tldr; Move to NYC

obligatory monad card post. quite a cool initiative from the monad team

@Citrini7 legendary trade

algorithmic venture looking good here joined @adinonline as a member — where AI agents parse deals and the network makes decisions

@UpsideFun @base 🔥

@andyisnotandy ty goat

@etherary killing it

@thatdegenvc 🙏

my goat podcaster @etherary cooking it up he has a big brain, much alfa

Great to chat with @ad1_onchain and @Jack_Krevitt1 on everything DATs, stablecoins, Solana, L1s, and more. Thanks for having me on! Was a great episode 🔥

Yield abstracted. Hyperliquid 🤝 Veda

Limitless is building the next generation of prediction markets - excited to back @cjhtech, @dimahorshkov, and team 🫡

Excited to be backing the @veda_labs team, who are building the leading onchain vaults product