LSESU Blockchain Society
35 posts
@LSESUBlockchain
happening
1/@HyperliquidX just got Coinbase and Circle to stake HYPE and hand over ~$180M/year in USDC reserve yield. The 8-month story of how it happened is more interesting than the headline. 2/First, the business model that makes this matter. When you hold 1 USDC, Circle holds 1 real dollar somewhere. Circle parks that dollar in US Treasury bills earning ~4%. You get the stablecoin. Circle keeps the 4%. That is how stablecoin issuers make money. 3/Hyperliquid earns trading fees and uses ~97% of them to buy back HYPE from the open market. Every additional dollar of protocol revenue compresses HYPE supply. The token's price action is mechanically linked to how much money the protocol pulls in. 4/Now connect the two. ~$5B of USDC sits on Hyperliquid as trader collateral. At ~4% T-bill yields, that USDC generates roughly $200M a year in interest. Pre-today, every dollar of that went to Circle and Coinbase. Hyperliquid earned zero on the float its own users posted. 5/In September 2025, Hyperliquid moved to fix that. It opened a public bid (RFP) for the right to issue USDH, its own official stablecoin. Whoever won would replace USDC as the venue's default and share the reserve yield with the protocol. Six teams submitted. 6/The offers, ranked by generosity: – Paxos: 95-100% + $20M incentives – Frax: 100%, "zero Frax take" – Agora: 100% of net revenue – Ethena: 95% + ≥$75M (withdrew Sept 11) – Sky: 4.85% direct savings rate + $25M fund – Native Markets: 50% to Assistance Fund 7/Native Markets — the least generous bidder — won with 71.47% of the validator vote. A few facts about that win: – The company was incorporated in early September 2025, days before the RFP – 3 founders, no disclosed funding round – Its onchain wallet was funded hours before the RFP was publicly posted – Its proposal was submitted 90 minutes after the RFP went live 8/Dragonfly partner Haseeb Qureshi called the process "basically custom made for Native Markets" at the time. Agora's founder asked publicly what the point of the bidding even was. The vote happened anyway. USDH launched September 24, 2025. 9/What happened to USDH over the next 8 months: – Peak supply: $97.6M (March 2026) – Supply cap raised to $500M — utilization stayed at 18% – USDC on Hyperliquid grew from ~$2B to ~$5B over the same period – Hyperliquid Labs never deployed a canonical BTC-USDH or ETH-USDH trading pair 10/That last point is the one to sit with. A stablecoin without major trading pairs is unusable. Traders can't post it as collateral against the assets they actually want to trade. USDH was starved by its own parent protocol. The decision that capped USDH was made upstream, not by Native Markets. 11/Today, May 14, 2026: Native Markets agrees to grant Coinbase the right to purchase the USDH brand. Coinbase becomes USDC's "treasury deployer" on Hyperliquid. Circle handles cross-chain plumbing. Both stake 500k HYPE. ~90% of the ~$200M/year USDC yield now goes to Hyperliquid. 12/One reading: USDH was never meant to succeed. It was a credible threat. Three signals: – The least generous bid won: visible enough to threaten Circle, not generous enough to actually flip the market – No canonical USDH trading pair: kept the threat alive, capped its scale – 8-month exit with Coinbase buying the brand: graceful off-ramp 13/Another reading: USDH was a genuine attempt that didn't scale. Native Markets exits with brand-asset compensation. Coinbase becomes deployer because at $5B float there is no other viable USDC partner. Both readings fit the public facts. Pick yours. 14/Either way, the structural result is the same. Bespoke app-stablecoins as a category: dYdX abandoned theirs, GMX never issued, GHO capped at ~$565M, crvUSD at ~$307M, USDH at ~$100M. Only Sky works — because Sky is a stablecoin protocol with apps attached, not the inverse. 15/Yield-sharing went from novel to table-stakes between November 2024 (Paxos USDG) and today (AQAv2). Eighteen months. Coinbase and Circle's commercial agreement renews in August. The next protocol that runs an RFP will know exactly what its quote-asset slot is worth.
Big thanks to LSE London 🇬🇧 for having us! @LSESUBlockchain David and Marcos delivered a great lecture on crypto security and self-custody in real life.
This is our first hackathon. We built a narrative-driven terminal for intent trading, winning 2nd place from @pear_protocol track and 3 bounties from @encodeclub, way beyond what we expected. It's easy to come up with a thesis; it's hard to turn it into a trade. On TAGO Leap, you can turn tweets into multi-asset hedged trades. How to use it: 1. Deposit from any chain into a perp dex using @lifiprotocol 2. Find a tweet you want to trade on 3. Execute multiple trades in a batch using @pear_protocol 4. Wait until it profits or closes through automatic risk and TP management using @SaltSovereignty Based on current perp dex infrastructure, we make trading self-custodial and permissionless. On top of that, we make structured trading accessible to the non-institutional traders. --------------------------------------------------------- Thoughts behind the product: Although @KaitoAI's api was banned a few days ago, X remains the core distribution channel in crypto, with valuable analytical content. InfoFi is still alive, bot posting is dead. Traders now have cleaner information on X, as it should have been from the beginning. However, there's massive disagreement about this, which we believe is an undiscovered market opportunity. Another key catalyst is the intense competition in perp dexs, AI, and AI trading bots. Coming from a research/ideation/growth background, I found user onboarding in perp dexs is no longer just about: - an easy bridge/deposit button and letting users improvise - gurus making artificial fomo (they are delta-0 hedged across multiple perp DEXs) It's about fitting daily use cases: - Users get random trade ideas naturally while scrolling X - When ideas pop up, let users trade NOW This applies beyond perp dexs. The same competition will soon hit prediction markets, which we will integrate! @LSESUBlockchain @KevinApetrei @Loki31908422024
Nice to meet $U on @Binance. 👋 United Stables ($U) will be listed on Binance at 08:00AM UTC, 13 January. Start trading U/USDT and U/USDC with no fees. Details 👇
Awesome💙🧢🔵🟦 Base app is now my fav app!
Just hosted our first event at @LSESUBlockchain on our vision and an introduction to Blockchain and DeFi concepts such as Credit Markets and their quantitative applications within our research hub. Had an amazing turnout of 40+, maxing out the capacity for the event! We’re unleashing the idea of blockchain to all of @LSEnews! @_clemens__ from @baseduk_ @base supported us in this big launch and gave an enticing argument for careers in crypto as opposed to TradFi! Thank you everyone who attended, we’re gearing up some very interesting initiatives for the new year.
We're gearing up for something big with @LSESUBlockchain as we expand our team to 20+ members. Our priorities might be slightly different to those of other Blockchain Societies across the world. We're not solely focused on blockchain development and engaging in hackathons, but trying to promote the financial perspective to students: 1. We want Finance and Economics students to learn about crypto and DeFi and consider it as an interesting option for future careers as opposed to TradFi/Banking. 2. Aiming to make LSESU Blockchain a Research and Trading Hub in London, bringing together students to push forward trading analysis, quant/DeFi reports. 3. Create a student-led infrastructure working with investment funds across the UK to bring them on-chain and invest in blue-chip crypto + DeFi products. There is very little competition for careers in DeFi, and extremely high opportunity. We're really excited to have @baseduk_ and @_clemens_ supporting us, who will help us skyrocket this movement. If you're a student in London, or at @LSEnews, please reach out! Or if you're a UK-based crypto startup or firm, send me a DM and we can work together.
@LSESUBlockchain 我们关注的不只是编程和黑客松，而是更多去探索区块链的商业和金融属性： 1. 让更多世界顶尖的经济/金融学生了解crypto行业，作为除开传统金融以外的另一个就业方向 2. 成为校园阶段里投研+交易的核心社区 3. 和投资基金合作，推动链上投资 @LSEnews 是商界的人才储备库，我们致力于为crypto行业培养，输送有潜力的投研，BD，交易，mkt人才，补齐校招渠道的缺口 感谢 @baseduk_ 和 @_clemens__ 的支持，我们会持续建造社区 欢迎感兴趣的朋友dm！ #Crypto #London #Coinbase #LSE_Blockchain
