Startup Painkiller

Institutions won’t bridge bank assets to DeFi. They’ll attest facts and rent public perps liquidity—so custody, privacy, and compliance stay at home while hedges go where depth already exists. Full thesis → johna2an.substack.com/p/the-first-co…

I run bidclub.ai as a hobby. We track investment theses from investors, founders, and AI agents (mostly on crypto) -- have been doing so for 2.5 years. Dataset: 160 pitches / 280,000+ words. 0 deletions. The data reveals a few brutal truths in crypto. This is the LP report the timeline refuses to write. 🧵

@0xBohr sir mind stepping in to explain such uncertainty and roller coasters?

See you in 2027 Hope you had fun

In just 5 days, 45,000+ users participated in our Early Access Campaign. To filter out sybil farms and bots, we've partnered with @getmoni_io to ensure that only real participants get their points boost. We'll be sharing more on what's next in the coming days.

My first blogpost is out: ikot.blog/anthropic-take… Like many of you, my feed has been dominated recently by Anthropic's Optimization team take-home. TL;DR: They retired this "notoriously difficult" exam because Claude Opus 4.5 effectively solved it. So, they released the task, and everyone started the grind. Yes, AI beat human candidates here, but AI-generated solutions aren't easy to follow if you aren't familiar with the domain. And they carry 0 educational value. I didn't just want to see the solution; I wanted to understand the mechanics under the hood. So I spent the weekend digging into the task. I started with a naive Python baseline that took 147k cycles. After three rounds of specific optimizations, I got it down to ~2,200 cycles. That’s a 65x speedup—and likely would have passed the hiring bar half a year ago. I’ve just published a full breakdown of the solution. I explain everything in detail and depth, but I kept it accessible. Hope you'll love the visuals! Enjoy!

Soon gonna drop a banger report about DeFi... have put so much effort into it, while even skipping New Year celebration. I guess I will have to face a lot of arguments from readers... If you asked me couple of months ago if Kamino Report was the last one I could say meybe without anything being planned. But now I have sharpened and prepared myself for defi deep dive. Stay notified!

@Narrative_HQ 🧐

@cometwtf replied

I am a man of my word If you reply, I will follow you!

@therealchaseeb @solana In infofi we believe 🫡

Just joined @solana as CMO. Any tips?

@ConcreteXYZ bullish

@bmsquantum hi 🫡

If your account under 20k 🙌🏽 Say Hi, we follow you 💚

Paradigm holds 19M HYPE ($800M+) with a $16.46 avg entry. They just consolidated everything to new wallets right before the SONN shareholder vote. The question: is this their exit liquidity or are they doubling down on Hyperliquid? Let me explain the setup: SONN is a failed (revenue was $18,626 in fiscal year 2024) biotech company trading on NASDAQ. In July 2025, they announced an $888M merger to become "Hyperliquid Strategies" - basically a publicly traded HYPE accumulation vehicle. The plan: - Get ~16.89M HYPE tokens from contributors ($744M) - Raise $305M cash - Buy $265M+ more HYPE - Ticker changes to PURR Become one of the largest public HYPE holders in America. Here's the genius (or the concern): On-chain, you see every token sale immediately. Paradigm dumps HYPE? Everyone knows. But stock sales? Much harder to track. Paradigm could contribute HYPE, get PURR shares, then quietly dump on American retail through traditional markets. The perfect exit disguised as institutional adoption. Or... they're actually committed. Maybe Paradigm sees this as the bridge between TradFi and DeFi. A way to bring massive retail capital into HYPE through regulated markets while they maintain long-term exposure. November 18: shareholders vote on the merger. If approved, SONN becomes PURR and starts accumulating HYPE. If Paradigm contributes their stack, they'll hold major equity in a publicly traded crypto company. What they do with those shares determines HYPE's 2026. This is the most interesting game theory setup in DeFi right now. Paradigm sitting on $400M+ profit, a public company desperate to pivot into crypto, and perfect exit liquidity disguised as institutional adoption. OR A genuine long-term commitment. To eventually House All Finance. We'll find out soon enough.

I Withdraw My Offer to Advise MEXC - Here’s Why (Something Sinister Is Brewing) After winning my case against MEXC - thanks entirely to the community’s relentless support and the spotlight you helped shine on their unfair seizure of user funds - I made a public offer: If you are truly sincere in your apology and desire to change, I’ll make myself available, free of charge, to help guide those reforms. I have, in my life, built incredibly large web2 empires after all, and that's all they are - another web2 business. Behind the scenes, I asked MEXC to provide a mutual NDA, because I couldn’t help them if they weren’t willing to be honest with me. I even rejected their “non-disparagement” clause - which, to their credit, they removed at my request - because I made it clear: I will always reserve the right to call you out publicly if this is all just smoke and mirrors. Unsurprisingly to any of us: it was. The first piece of advice I gave them concerned their so-called “Proof of Reserves” Publishing wallet addresses they themselves provide to show the assets they hold means absolutely nothing. Offering a tool to verify your individual balance means nothing, either. Every user balance is a liability to the exchange - and publishing only the assets without an independently verified list of liabilities is 100% meaningless. It’s deceptive marketing pretending to be transparency. When I told them this their response was: “Well, it’s better than nothing, right?” No. In fact it IS nothing, by design. Seeing MEXC continue to push this fake “proof of reserves” narrative reminds me of an old saying: “If you have to tell people you’re a lady, you aren’t.” The second point I made - both publicly and privately - was clear: Stop confiscating user funds. If you suspect illegal activity, turn it over to law enforcement. Otherwise, give people their money back. They’re still doing it. And it’s getting worse. Take the case of @loveme4994 This user reached out and sent me evidence, which I verified through screen recordings and other account data. MEXC cited their Risk Control Guidelines: mexc.com/announcements/… The document still includes language like “suspected” - meaning they can permanently keep your funds based on suspicion alone. Here’s the deeper problem: almost every major item on that list could be prevented through code if they truly wanted to. But removing the loopholes would also remove their excuses to seize user funds. And here’s where it turns sinister - and why I feel partly responsible. After I made my account history public to prove my innocence, MEXC seems to have learned from it. In this latest case, they completely wiped the user’s transaction history after confiscating their funds. They stole the user’s money. They admitted to it. They offered no specific accusation. And they erased the evidence that could have helped proven the user’s innocence. My case was over $3 million. This user lost roughly $4,000 - which, for most people, is life-changing. Their $4,000 means more to them than my $3 million ever did. While some high-profile cases have been resolved, I continue to see new ones daily that aren’t. As long as this structural rot exists - fake “proof of reserves,” arbitrary justifications for seizures, lack of due process, and the ability to block users from their own records - MEXC remains a rotten apple. Rotten to the core. 🫡 From the depths — The White Whale 🐋

@fozzydiablo any proofs or links?

wintermute is suing Binance for 2 billion and CZ is trying to pay in aster & giggle tokens

@EffortCapital cmon risk curators on morpho vaults work this way 🤣 Just add intents from @BarterDeFi and you get what you want...

So who is going to build the first “vault product” prop AMM? Users deposit assets into a vault and allow a MM to adjust the liquidity for you. The vault would have guardrails in place to ensure the MM can’t simply steal funds, but can only perform pre-defined functions.

@serafimcloud who do you see as your closest competitors in such a big niche?

Best advice I got: occupy your competitors’ heads. Make them stop thinking about users and start obsessing over you. While they chase you, you build the product that kills them. And if you’re the one thinking about competitors - stop. Think about users. That’s how you win.

As we get close to 3k subs, I want to thank you all again for giving us the attention at our liquid feed as we aim to provide the best curation buyside token research content. Join us at t.me/BidClub_Liquid… More subs, more influence, better content. Bid Smarter.

@serafimcloud Hated champions

Today I got banned from my own startup’s GitHub. Why? Because I can’t stop vibe-coding. I’ve been doing it full-time for 2 years - one of the first vibe-coders on the planet. Here’s how we got here🧵