Brandon Potts
2K posts
@b_potts23
partner @hiframework ||| long tough-minded optimists ||| my views only, not financial advice
This is the story of Hyperliquid, the most profitable startup per employee on earth, told from a guarded office in Singapore. Last year, its team of 11 generated $900 million in profit. It's 3 years old, has never taken a dollar of venture capital, and is beginning to change how century-old markets work. Its founder, Jeffrey Yan (@chameleon_jeff), had never taken a physics class when he picked up a textbook at 16. Two years later, he won gold at the International Physics Olympiad. In 2019, he started trading with $10,000 from a living room in Puerto Rico—working off a television because he didn't own a monitor. Within 3 years, he was running one of the largest anonymous crypto trading firms. Then he shut it down. Yan was rich and free, but he had spent years inside crypto, watching it betray itself. Bitcoin's central premise was decentralization. Yet the biggest exchanges were centralized. Crypto kept reintroducing the dependence on trust it was built to eliminate. He set out to create what should have existed. Hyperliquid is a blockchain with a trading exchange on top, and anyone can build on it. Yan's vision is to house all of finance. In 3 years, it has done over $4 trillion in volume. And in the past few months, it has begun to outgrow crypto. Markets for oil, silver, and the S&P 500 now trade on Hyperliquid around the clock, weekends included, and are growing roughly 40% week on week. When the US and Israel bombed Iran on a Saturday in February, Hyperliquid was the venue traders turned to. Hyperliquid's success has cost Yan his freedom. He works out of a secret office in Singapore and cannot travel without two bodyguards. Even the team's housekeeper doesn't know what they do. In January, @domcooke spent a week at their office. Read his profile on Yan and @HyperliquidX below.
Bitcoin’s founder, Satoshi Nakamoto, has remained hidden for 17 years. A trail of clues — and a year of digging by our reporter, John Carreyrou — led us to a 55-year-old computer scientist in El Salvador named Adam Back. nyti.ms/4bXWC3V
"North Korea is willing to spend $100 million for a $300 million prize. You don't have $100 million to defend yourself" Haseeb on why open source might stop being the default in crypto "The pollyanna-ish kumbaya version of open source we've had over the last 20 years is going away" "Crypto apps are open source but they're maintained by a single company. Only Drift uses the Drift contracts. That's really different from open source like Linux or Axios" "There's such an asymmetry between attackers and defenders that this may end up pushing against open source as the default. Maybe they issue a zero knowledge proof that shows there's no admin key, but they're not going to decompile the code for you"
"MEV — that ability for people to reorder transactions to extract value, something that happens on top of Ethereum and Solana — that's just not suitable for financial markets." @drwconvexity @DRWTrading
JUST IN: Obex, incubator by @hiFramework and backed by a $2.5 billion mandate from the @SkyEcosystem, shared its first 8 project cohort: - @maplefinance - @USDai_Official - @daylightenergy - @Centrifuge - @Securitize - @RiverFND - @TVLCap - @tinmanAI $1 billion will be deployed across these companies and @parkeraedwards explains in an exclusive pod on @_TalkingTokens how Obex plans to grow USDS and be the bridge to access onchain liquidity. Full episode below:
I am excited to announce that @shayonsengupta and @SpencerApplebau have been promoted to General Partner and Co-Heads of Venture at Multicoin Capital. Over the past several years, both have taken on significantly more responsibility across every dimension of our business. They’ve not only continued to identify, source, and lead deals at an increasing rate, but have also increasingly taken on more ownership of the strategy, operations, and long-term direction of Multicoin. Multicoin was founded on the belief that crypto will fundamentally reshape global markets. We recently published our updated thesis for the next decade of crypto. We couldn't be more excited about the future of crypto and opportunity to invest in these theses.
