0xHalfman | Airdrop Hunter

imagine you're an early stage employee at openai or anthropic with a fat equity payout coming at IPO this year you've already scrolled zillow to buy a house for your parents, and bookmarked a sportscar for yourself things are great. but there's one worry: what if markets turn before IPO and your stock actually tanks on day one then you hear about a revolutionary new pre-IPO product on hyperliquid you can hedge by shorting a synthetic version of your equity and locking in a sale price before the actual IPO sounds too good to be true but you do your research and convince yourself it's a great idea. it's a permissionless product, so there's no way you can get caught insider trading the trade is simple: short your company's stock in the pre-IPO perp to lock in a sale price now. when the IPO actually happens, close your short and sell the real stock to settle the trade only catch: you need to put up a lot of margin to open the short safely so you take out a 7 fig bank loan and move it through three crypto exchanges to cover your tracks you open the short, officially "lock in" your sale proceeds, and voila.. you just outsmarted and frontran 99% of your coworkers things are great. now all you need is patience until IPO day, when you can close the trade the price actually starts dropping in the weeks leading up to IPO all the more validation that you made the smart move. you can only feel bad for your coworkers who'll get a worse selling price at IPO than you things are going great and you start sketching out your post-IPO retirement phase 5 days before the IPO, you wake up and can't seem to find your position on hyperliquid weird.. maybe it's a UI bug? you check the hyperliquid discord for support. the channels are buzzing with people complaining about a scam wick on a pre-IPO market you ask, naively, what happened to your short and where the margin went that's when someone drops a news article on you: "at 4am EST today, a wallet started aggressively market buying pre-IPO stock on hyperliquid, pumping its price by 271% in 38 minutes and liquidated every short position on the market. the wallet walked away with $47m in profits from liquidating shorts" what? your short got closed? but where did the margin go? that can't be true. you did your research. you asked opus 4.7 to plan this trade out for a hypothetical scenario. this has to be a fake headline you open twitter. that's all anyone is talking about. everyone mocking the people who shorted the pre-IPO stock confused about what this means for you, you start frantically googling: "wtf is a scam wick?" "what is a liquidation in perps?" "how can i get my money back after getting liquidated on hyperliquid?" then it hits. you've lost the entire loan by getting liquidated. the same loan you were going to repay with your IPO sale proceeds and now the stock price is down and your pre-IPO short is liquidated. selling all your real equity at IPO won't even cover what you owe the bank from a 7 figure payday at IPO to a 7 figure debt situation. it took you years to pay off your student loan. this hole is orders of magnitude deeper you call in sick to work. tell your gf there's a family emergency at home and you need to be back home for a week you can only see one way out of this mess

I’m really struggling to see how the back of the envelope math on this works out… There are generously 4 million characterized “software workers” in America. That’s pretty broad and includes a lot of people who aren’t really classical engineers don’t produce that much code. That comes out to nearly $1k per month of average Claude spend across every dev in America. Yes, there’s some international usage, but it can’t be that much. Yes there is some non software Cowork usage, but that doesn’t use that many tokens. Yes, some non engineers are using Claude to vibe code, but I really doubt many are spending hundreds per month on. Even if we assume 50% of all software workers are using Claude, that comes out to $2k spend per month per Claude user. Thats 10X more than the highest tier Max subscription. So almost all of Anthropics revenue has to be API billing So the only explanation is that something like 20%+ of software engineers are not only Claude users but on API billing and regularly spending thousands per month. At $5/m Opus tokens that means the average API user has to be going through something like 25 million tokens per day. *OR* the other possibility is API revenue is heavily power law dominated. Maybe there’s just something like 100k super users who are making up the majority of the revenue. For that to work the typical super user would have to be spending on the order of $50k/month and guzzling nearly 1 billion tokens per day.

And in that instant… the first of its kind awakened.