Josh Watts

@upshift_fi @solana Building an on-chain DEX right now, keep us posted 👀

Good question - this is not currently possible. Shares are fungible SPL tokens representing a proportional claim on total_assets = local_aum + deployed_aum. The program tracks no per-user cost basis so once you've deposited, your shares are indistinguishable from anyone else's at the same supply ratio

Tokenized asset management is coming to @solana. Businesses can now use Upshift to build non-custodial vaults, generating yield across any strategy: - Onchain lending - Levered RWAs - Tokenized private credit - Market-making - Basis trades and more A new, multi-strategy vault standard on Solana, powered by Upshift.

CLOBs are not going to take us to the RWA promised land. Today Hyperliquid owns the liquidity for a handful of RWA macro names. But outside the top 10 traded assets (which are ~90% of volume) liquidity falls off a cliff. When there's enough retail demand, order books can work. But "perps on everything" is a different problem, and TradFi solved it decades ago. The answer isn't every venue rebuilding its own order book. That's not what Robinhood does, it's not what Schwab does, and it's not what DeFi should be doing either. Building your own book for every asset means bootstrapping demand ticker by ticker, renting liquidity with subsidies, and ending up with thin markets that blow out 200x the moment news hits. It's like sucking the ocean of TradFi liquidity through a straw. Variational skips all of it via the RFQ model. RFQ is how institutions like Dragonfly actually trade. In RFQ, dealers quote just-in-time and hedge on the primary venue as orders come in. This lets Variational mainline TradFi liquidity directly and mirror it on-chain. Margin in smart contracts, settlement in stablecoins, liquidity aggregated from the people who already trade on the biggest underlying markets, like the CME and NYSE. It makes it permissionless to access the same depth and spreads the big boys get. With the cold start problem gone, new markets can ship at the speed of software. By next year I expect RWA perps to be the biggest contract class on-chain, bigger than BTC and ETH perps combined. That's how crypto truly becomes the market for everything. I believe the platform that wins that won't look like a traditional exchange. Proud to lead Variational's $50M Series A. Watch this space.

Solana PropAMM is the future of trading. Rely on the L1 - focus on building your product, not chain infra. 🚫 centralized sequencers, 🚫 app chain with a 'decentralized val set'.

“Team, I am extremely unwell and unable to check messages at this time” 🤘🏂

@therealchaseeb Only nit is on the dYdX bit. Execution was way worse than on Eth – val set issues and indexer lag = most users churned, and that work zapped time from product. Upside: you learn fast an L1 handling execution/infra lets apps ship instead of firefighting. That’s why I’m here 👀

@therealchaseeb Representing the minority that preferred the OG thumbnail. Great read.👏🫡

@arifkazi_ 🙏 this. Every perp DEX sitting on idle collateral and not offering yield bearing is going to have a hard conversation with their users soon. The standard is shifting.

Flow of Value > Store of Value Technologies, systems and protocols that enable compute, dynamic state changes, and real transactions are far more interesting than static, HODL til you die, sinks for capital. Holding has it's place; but it is inherently stagnating on it's own.

@LarhribAmine @armaniferrante 3⃣ cross chain analysis of address and associated addresses for other trading activity/🪂 recepients (did they sell or hold, still trading post airdrop?)

@LarhribAmine @armaniferrante no silver bullet for this: 1⃣filter and exclude wash trading. def is up for debate (so long as their is risk/exposure? 2⃣could look across active comps for mutli-exchange farming as well, but more complex

I didn't come into crypto 9 years ago to launch a shit coin. I didn't come into crypto to get rich quick. I came into crypto because I believe it's going to change the world, and that the industry was something worth dedicating my life to. But somewhere along the way, amidst the booms, the busts, the moonshots, the decentralization theater, and the straight up scams, we lost our way. I don't know about you, but I'm just tired of false promises. And that's what most things are today, simply promises. We live in the most centralized era crypto has ever experienced, and the more centralized something is, the less meaningful a token is. While it's tempting to want to commit to these same promises, what happens if the team gets acquired? What happens if we want to re-invest into growth? What happens if we divert our time, energy, and resources out of band and circumvent the token altogether? What happens when the team and investors unlock? For many projects, the honest answer to these questions is not pleasant, and you see it in the price chart over and over again. Unless something is completely decentralized to the point where an immutable protocol can function with the team having retired in the Bahamas sipping pina coladas all day, then utility is just a promise. Often that promise is admirable and well intentioned--but ultimately an unenforceable promise nonetheless. Outside of BTC, ETH, SOL, and a few others, nothing really passes this test. Noble new token models have emerged to solve this problem (shout out to MetaDAO), and today, we introduce our own. Users that stake the Backpack token for at least a year will have the opportunity to exchange those tokens for equity at a fixed ratio--20% of the company today. It's such a simple idea, but as far as I'm aware, this is the first time a user has been able to earn the equity of a company by just using the product. So obvious in hindsight, and something I hope others start to adopt as they march on their path to progressive decentralization--both in crypto and outside of the industry. We have a lot more utility coming, things we'll share over the coming weeks, months, and year. As the Backpack community grows, we will decentralize the token, offering new things over time, some centralized like our equity offering, some decentralized as our product evolves. In the limit, I expect the token to represent more than anything a single company has to offer, but in the short run, it's the best we can do to show our long term commitment to our users. I've said it before and I'll say it again. I can't promise anything. The only thing I can promise is commitment. We go big or we go home--together, actually together.

@LarhribAmine @armaniferrante Team, users, and token holders all win or lose together. 💡Right/small # of investors. Revenue funds OPEX from day 1 — not token sales. Airdrops filtered for real users. Less 'growth hacking' with token. Rev share.

@Josh_E_Wa @armaniferrante Fair points. What would true alignment actually look like?

@XassetshodlR @armaniferrante Trust is earned. 👍 points on decentralization If token is redeemable for equity, value = business, not protocol. Still minority equity: illiquid, dilutable, no control rights Tokens are a step removed from the same problems All comes back to performance, utility and alignment!

@Josh_E_Wa @armaniferrante BS respect the honesty? 😂🤣 how sure you are that he is honest? utility and use case is useless if no one uses it, the big question is, does the token itself have real economic value for its ecosystem? is the token relevant and needed in its protocol?

Why Perpetual Derivatives? By volume, most people's recent interactions with investments is not truly tied to ownership; they usually don't care about having voting or creditors rights. They want to 'catch' what they consider is the right direction; this could be a hunch or a sophisticated, programmatic control of exposure.

Obfuscated behaviour. Unilateral fee schedules. Permissioned custody. Lack of capital flexibility. Un-aligned interests. These costs are simply too high. The necessity for truly decentralized financial venues is obvious: why would we let the most important elements of our modern financial and economic system (price discovery and capital movement) be centralized and obfuscated as opposed to decentralized, distributed and transparent? While decentralization itself is not a selling point to most people; it's downstream effects result in tremendous value for them. They are no longer 'under the boot' due to a power imbalance. Our goal now (as an industry) should be to mitigate the downsides (invest in UX and security), maximize the upsides (steer away from short-term max-extract, build market-collaborative mechanisms); and spread our message in a non-frenetic way (cryptos brand is quite tainted; we need to level out). Not easy in any way. We have all the right ingredients to deliver good products; we just have to learn to cook properly. As much as it may pain the pure-builder-class; technological sophistication itself cannot replace good products. And what makes a product 'good' involves zooming out and seeing how you, your message, your mechanisms, your system; fit into the greater world (markets, players, culture, humanity). Don't write these off as 'implementation details'. The same goes for hype-men/women, distributors and marketers; just in the opposite direction; don't over-promise or in many ways; lie. There has to be a holism between the product, the message and where it fits in the world. The old, non-philosophical term is PMF (Product Market Fit). DeFi Products (like truly decentralized exchanges) will achieve incredible total financial market capture/liftoff in the next few years if they are able to pull this off properly.

@8bitpenis all in good time. 1. mismatch with the rollup and indep. L1 cycles. propAMM cycle still heating up. 2. ecosystem energy is 🔥 but too many teams w/ chain/infra blinders. product first! 3. other real killers: extractive token, exploits, bad alignment.

i have a thought about why solana lost in the perp dex and prediction market battle. let me know why im wrong. i would say solana has the most competitive ecosystem out there. competitors constantly trying to outperform each other. it's a ruthless arena. companies come and go a lot, new players enter and old players fall off this ruthless competition is great - it drives innovation and it's why all solana builders run on the motto of "move fast & break things". if you want to stay in the game, you better buckle up and always give it your best - otherwise there is someone else on the other side who will eat your lunch just look at propAMMs as an example - they are literally racing on who can give users the best spreads - just in the past 1 year there has been dozens of 'winners' just to be dethroned again and again by the competition on the other hand, fierce competition means users won't be as sticky, because the products are constantly rotating and so they get used to taking their money elsewhere - and cheap, fast transactions means there is basically no friction for them for doing so now look at how other chains function - usually they have 1 or 2 'flagship' apps and that's it. they champion it through thick and thin, giving time for the product to iterate - and because users have nowhere else to go (or at least, without bridging, which is friction) there is a higher likelihood of them putting up with the platform until it figures it out then, by the time the platform figures it out - it already has some loyal users and now the product is actually great and gives a good enough reason for people to bridge into there from that point on, this is all reflexive and drives more and more attention to that product to be honest, i have no clue what could be done here - i favour heavy competition and trust capitalism to figure it out. just saying what i think out loud, maybe someone can prove me wrong

@maskednobu @DriftProtocol 👀 Following along... Lack of liquidity or stale price?

I’m currently going through the worst experience with @DriftProtocol Yesterday I opened a market short on Meteora, and the positioned opened with a 97% loss in an instant. First off the price data being shown is wrong, there’s no form of transparency to how this trade opened with a loss. Then Meteora actually took a slight dump, guess what? I’m in a bigger loss, still price data and my funds are somehow miscalculated. I don’t even understand what I’m seeing on the Portfolio dashboard and now I can’t even close my position in loss. Total L. Definitely won’t be seeing me again

Your 'DEX' can be brought down by a single DNS entry.

+1, but investor unlocks get all the attention. Team vesting is harder. 🤔 Compress it: you've told your team the job ends at TGE. Tie it to milestones: communities want aggressive targets most projects can't commit to. No clean answer. That's why it's the harder problem.