Nick Carpinito

More in today's @0xResearch Newsletter: blockworks-research.beehiiv.com/p/agents-need-…

Reflecting on my time at Blockworks, I’d be remiss not to highlight the phenomenal work of the @blockworksres analyst team. The BWR team went from *zero* to the leading crypto research & data platform in the industry. There are many reasons why - raw talent, org culture, ambition, open mindedness, discipline alpha process, etc etc. I could write 10,000 words on why this team is special. But at the end of the day, success in our industry boils down to one thing: prediction. More specifically, being right about the future when everyone else is wrong. There are few teams that have been as ahead of the curve on so many industry trends. Below I reflect on some specifics. *Alpha* - the team correctly identified that *alpha* is the critical wedge for a crypto research shop. Plenty of research sounds really smart, but historically, it was rare that crypto research was aimed at helping investors generate exceptional returns. Coming from tradfi, for me, this was an obvious gap in our industry. So much of crypto research was just waxing poetic about some improbable future state, or diving far too deep on some questionably relevant technical upgrade. Fun to read, doesn’t help me invest. We recognized this gap & went the other direction: we benchmarked ourselves to the price of bitcoin. Analysts were expected to find underappreciated opportunities & measure their call against the market. We developed a process for identifying alpha opportunities and achieved consistently strong hit rates on both long & short calls as a result, making a name for ourselves in the crowded crypto research space. *Fundamentals* - What sticks out to me from 2024: being laughed at. Constantly. The highest performing tokens have a good narrative, they told us. Nothing else matters, FDV can go as high as narrative & 'memetic value' can take it. We got strange looks at best, & backlash at worst, when we applied traditional valuation measures and competitive frameworks to tokens, proposed shorting popular tokens with ridiculous valuations, and helped popularize REV accounting, which quantified revenue & free cash flow for smart contract platform tokens. We focused on traditional metrics, business strategy & durability of cash flows while the entirety of ct was focused purely on stories. Fast forward 24 months, & it is now *obvious* to the vast majority of crypto market participants & ct that fundamental analysis & a traditional valuation lens were the correct ways to assess token opportunities over the period. So how did we get this right? Why did this happen in 2024 and not 2021? The BWR team correctly understood that, as the marginal buyer of crypto assets flips from degen/retail to institutional/tradfi, market characteristics would start to mirror the values of that new investor class. Fundamental measures like revenue would *obviously* be top of mind, and valuations must make sense. It’s a new market now, and only a handful of people got this write. I like to think Blockworks was one of the voices leading this change. *Shorts* - I’ve been told by a number of people that BWR was the first research shop to write explicit short reports. A simple “This is not the right price for this token” goes a long way, and we did this when most were extremely critical of us for doing so. It was never personal, just objective, as best as we could possibly be. Our hit rates here were high, but most importantly, we weren't dogmatic about our positions. We'd happily go long or short any token at any time. When the facts changed, we changed. At any rate, I like to think we helped people avoid mispriced assets over the past 2+ years. *Solana ecosystem* - The team was super early to SOL & the Solana ecosystem, when it was *extremely* unpopular. They nailed SOL’s rise in Q3/Q4 2023 (before my time at BWR), and nailed follow through. We were super early to identify pumpfun and tg bots as legitimate businesses in crypto, and reasoned about the knock-on effects of their activity on the broader ecosystem. Through 2024, we correctly shifted focus to the then emerging solana ecosystem, which is now, by many measures, the most commercially successful ecosystem in crypto. *Hyperliquid* - the BWR team, led by @GoldDefi and @salveboccaccio, correctly identified hyperliquid as an emerging & likely dominant perps platform, with an airdrop worth farming. Then @shaundadevens took the lead, deepening our coverage & correctly nailing the importance of HIP-3 & RWA markets. There are countless more examples I could point to, but I won’t attempt to cover them all here. What stands out is the consistency and the clarity of the mission: be ahead of the curve, popular industry opinion be damned. I’m grateful to have been part of such a talented group, & I have no doubt they’ll continue leading from that front. you can follow the team here: @blockworksres @0xMether @salveboccaccio @0xcarlosg @marcarjoon @Kunallegendd @shaundadevens @_dshap @defi_kay_ @0xMetaLight @minnus

Most of these critiques are fair. But "subsidized by emissions" is not the gotcha. Early infrastructure networks price below cost to bootstrap supply. The real question is whether the incentive mechanism produces genuine coordination that wouldn't otherwise exist. For distributed GPU capacity, there's early evidence it does. The legitimate concerns are elsewhere. Most subnets generate no real revenue, value accrual to TAO + SN tokens is opaque, and self-reported benchmarks collapse under a second eval. The more useful question is if the subsidy producing durable infrastructure, or just renting activity that disappears when emissions decline?

@JackMandin Anniversary bros

Tomorrow marks my 1-year anniversary at Blockworks. Since joining, I've had the chance to dive deep into onchain lending markets. Excited to share some of my key insights on the economics of this exciting sector next week at DAS NYC. See you there.

This and much more Next week in NYC DIGITAL ASSET SUMMIT hyperliquid

Crypto friends: see you all at @blockworksDAS next week.

PJM capacity prices jumped 9.3x, not because of supply/demand, but because a central planner ran a bad sim. ERCOT has the same AI buildout. No price shock. The culprit is market design and interoperability, not megawatts. Bullish VPPs newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/are-ai-datac…

We’ve launched a new buy button on Blockworks, sponsored by @krakenfx. It gives readers a simple, direct path to Kraken when they’re ready to explore buying crypto. From research to action, with fewer steps.

BWR subs saw it first

Gigabullish for @solanamobile engadget.com/apps/google-en…

DAS tickets are scarcer than Bitcoin these days Last chance to bump elbows with the institutional cabal

More in today's @0xResearch Newsletter: blockworks-research.beehiiv.com/p/doublezeros-…

DoubleZero making bold moves here: - Revenue shifting from block reward fees to shred data access - Revenue now distributed to client teams in addition to validators and fiber contributors - Approaching a supermajority of network stake, likely accelerated by the above

NEW: @BNYglobal to speak at DAS NYC Hear from Robin Vince on how he’s driving digital transformation at one of America’s most storied financial institutions

The CEO of one of the worlds largest banks will be speaking at DAS in two weeks Best institutional conference in crypto, hands down