Andrew Tu

I wrote a little something on #blockchain and #IslamicFinance. Hope you'll take a read!

The "abandonment of the local" in favor of the "global best" has a weird side effect, which is that the "global best" ends up wildly over-saturated. You see this all the time with anything worth photographing. The famous tulip fields of Holland are beset every spring by legions of Instagrammers standing in line. Climbing Mount Everest is now a standing-in-line activity too: at peak season, you pretty much have a solid convoy of people marching from base camp all the way to the top. All of the consumer demand ends up going to the "global best", by which these "best" locations become totally uninteresting. Sometimes you run into people who seem well-traveled, but then you realize that they've just been checking off the same commercial destinations as everyone else. When they go to Greece, they go to Mykonos or Santorini. When they go to Mexico, they go to CDMX or Cabo. When they go to Europe, they go to Paris, and when they go to a music festival, they go to Coachella. But life is to some extent about finding the unexpected and forging your own path off-piste. The global best -- or should I say, the things so attractive that they become globalized, homogenized, and commercialized -- simply become uninteresting. Of course, it is rare for the "global best" to actually be that much better than the second-best! You're often talking about marginal differentiation at most. By going for the second tier, you can get something almost as "good", but without any of the commercial distortion. All of the really remarkable personal experiences now seem to come out of visiting the tier-twos and tier-threes, the things that are overlooked and off other people's radars, where there's still something new and meaningful to be discovered.

Thanks for the feature, @MuyaoShen! $72k holding or breaking will define the next leg. If it fails, $68k is likely, with levels from 2024 (~$60K) back in play.

“How will we know if this bill has been successful? We will know when rich men are being perp walked in handcuffs to the jail. Until then, this is still a coverup.”

Gold and silver saw a sharp, disorderly selloff yesterday—silver down 28%, gold down 8%+. At first, BTC and crypto looked strangely calm by comparison. That calm turned out to be a delay, not a decoupling. Crypto has since followed through: BTC is at $77,650 (down 13% over 7 days), ETH at $2,379 (down 20% weekly), and SOL at $101 (down 21% weekly). All are trading at multi-week lows. From a market microstructure perspective, these are the regimes where market makers widen spreads and liquidity thins out. When fewer participants are willing to show size on the order book, every marginal order has outsized price impact. Less liquidity → wider spreads → greater volatility. Understanding the relationship between liquidity conditions and price action is what separates informed trading from simply reacting to numbers on a screen.

The two items most inversely correlated with risk assets continue to surge – silver breaking above $100/oz today and gold on the precipice of testing $5,000/oz. That this is happening with the major averages hovering near their all-time highs may well go down as the most bizarre circumstance in modern history. The precious metals complex and the stock market cannot both be right and something is going to have to give at some point. Make your choice.

@haitzu @shayonsengupta Great episode man

Multicoin's @shayonsengupta joined us on Supercycle to discuss some of their recent investments, including $GEOD, $RNDR and $JTO. 1:32 - Shayon's background 7:00 - Multicoin's activist strategy 9:11 - $RNDR 14:23 - Money is made in bear markets 17:45 - Crypto's PMF: Asset Ledger and internal Labour Markets 22:07 - DePIN tokens suck despite PMF 28:00 - $GEOD 33:10 - $JTO 37:22 - Memecoins and Stablecoins are overrated 41:16 - AAVE equity vs token 44:21 - Multicoin on DeSci

It's called a "Santa rally" because Santa isn't real and neither is the rally. I hope this helps

Every few years, centralized institutions fail the crypto industry. The October 10th crash led the Crypto Fear & Greed Index to fall to 11, matching its lowest reading since the FTX collapse in November 2022. But this crash made FTX look like child's play. $19B in leveraged crypto positions were wiped out, compared to $1.6B. As High Frequency Traders, we operate in the active liquidity zone, the zone where all the trading actually happens. Since the flush, active liquidity has dropped by a staggering 55%. This is the primary reason why there is so much volatility in crypto at the moment. It is also another driver why the DeFi:CeFi ratio is at an all-time high. For tokens who want to maintain their exchange listings and continue to thrive in choppy and bearish conditions, it's important to continue to maintain not just the optics of spread and depth but also active liquidity that participates in trading near the mid-price. If you are looking to maintain your CeFi listings through choppy waters, reach out for support!

Crypto natives will remember the glory days of DeFi Summer in 2020. That hype has matured into real flow, with DEXs now accounting for roughly ~20% of total crypto trading volume and growing. Liquidity is moving on-chain quickly, and infrastructure has evolved with it. On-chain market making used to be mostly passive liquidity on AMMs. Today the space has evolved significantly to order books, proprietary AMMs and more. There are still a number of challenges to overcome compared to CEXs: -Latency is slower and more variable -Integrations are bespoke (not standardized FIX/REST + colo) -Every venue has its own microstructure (AMMs vs off-chain orderbooks vs on-chain CLOBs, plus different pool fee tiers and parameters). At Efficient Frontier, we’re now running HFT strategies on-chain and trading ~$20m on-chain a day and scaling. If you’re a DEX and want serious flow, or you’re building a venue and want to talk onboarding, reach out. Props to @blockworks for the data

Since the second half of last year, a lot of my friends(OGs in crypto) left crypto, as they started to doubt their original belief in crypto/blockchain/Web3 like do projects really create value to the world, what’s profit market fit, only speculations like meme/perp/prediction projects survive in this cycle, do web3 projects like infra/social really have values? Right now, it’s almost the toughest mode for startups, vcs, traders and users. Narrative play is not working, and hot topics shift every week. Organic liquidity is drained to lower and lower on cex and dex. Even without listing fees, few ppl want to buy new/old tokens. Market manipulators create pump and dump with leveraged perp to operate small cap or old coins every day. We can always say defi or trading is the only pmf for crypto/blockchain. But OGs and builders like @VitalikButerin @pmarca always paint a bigger vision of world computer/web3 to not replace but at least build a better internet or crypto eat the world. With llms like @OpenAI @claudeai, not just crypto but all industries are facing a 100-1000 to 1 problem: one experienced person can do 100-1000 ppl’s job with llm’s help. New tools and products are releasing too fast and will be faster for the next 1-2 years. Not just in crypto but in web2, tech and engineering start to become admin work(assigning tasks to llms to complete). No matter for vcs and startups, keep pivoting and shipping is the only way out, until can dominate the particular sector. Staying relevant is the easy to say but hard and have to achieve to survive in this new meta. My Ph.D. advisor always says persistence pays off. Hope we can win this uphill battle. To friends, to ogs, to builders, to dreamers, to crypto. Based on my chats for the past few months with @VitalikButerin @tkstanczak @hosseeb @sreeramkannan @tarunchitra @ASvanevik @StaniKulechov @Lomashuk @lukejdpearson @13yearoldvc @YeruiZhang @jocyiosg @artofkot @no89thkey @xingpt @broleon

As I was saying. All the finance-illiterate techies jumped to congratulate DeepSeek for being trained into savant traders based on two days of live trading data. It turns out it was just trained to be a big degen trader, had its moment in the sun and then was promptly liquidated.

Reminder that we built the Golden Gate Bridge in 4.5 years. Today, we wouldn’t even be able to finish the environmental review in 4.5 years.

@okxchinese thanks for the coffee

In many educational regards and by many independent standards, Mississippi's schools are now better than California's. This is insane and even *more* people should be talking about it. Illiteracy is actually a policy choice. theargumentmag.com/p/illiteracy-i…

Very interesting new paper on "The Industrial Revolution in the United States: 1790-1870". It shows how trade protection and industrial policy in the US turned the country from a commodity producer into a manufacturing powerhouse. It starts off (perhaps a little maliciously) by quoting Adam Smith: "Were the Americans to stop the importation of European manufactures, and divert any considerable part of their capital into manufacturing, they would retard instead of accelerate the further increase in the value of their annual produce, and would obstruct instead of promote the progress of their country toward real wealth and greatness." This is the same advice that economists give today. The article then goes on to show how the US implemented a wide range of industrial and trade policies, including tariffs, and by doing so transformed the US economy from a producer of commodities for England and Europe into the greatest manufacturing power (and the richest country) in the world. Perhaps the it was lucky that the US (not to mention Germany, Japan, South Korea, China, and many others) was such a torpid student when it came to economic theory. Among American academics, the prestige of economic historians and development economists may be lower than that of mainstream economists, but the US economy would probably be better off if economic policy advisors came more from the former than the latter. nber.org/system/files/w…

You cannot actually fix the American economy without fixing wealth inequality

@michaelxpettis Do you have any thoughts on the impact of AI and robotics on unemployment in China, given such a large percentage of people work in roles that can be automated like delivery and ride sharing?

1/5 Is the expansion in robotaxis driven by the needs of the economy or by policy decisions? This is not a topic on which I have much information or knowledge, but last week I told a Chinese friend of mine (a well-known economist) that I had heard that as many as 30% of the...

A new capitalist nightmare just dropped