Wilson Withiam

I’m excited to announce that I’ve joined @SyncracyCapital as Head of Research! I’ll be working alongside fellow Messari alum @RyanWatkins_ and @HighCoinviction to execute our thesis and make concentrated investments in the secular winners of the cryptoeconomy.

Hyperliquid's third party ecosystem is now generating ~$100M in run-rate annual revenue. This is a significant milestone for Hyperliquid and speaks to the compounding impact of all the talent and capital pouring into its builder codes and HIP-3 ecosystem.

@awettermann All roads lead to HYPE

@WilsonWithiam x.com/awettermann/st…

Only a few crypto native innovations (stablecoins, prediction markets, and digital SoV) have broken through crypto’s self-referential economy and demonstrated clear proof of widespread utility and adoption. Perps are shaping up to be the next transformative breakthrough. Yet the size of the opportunity, why onchain exchanges have structural advantages over incumbents, and how optimizing for perps and order book exchanges may be the correct foundation for building a full-scale financial platform remain largely underexplored. @RyanWatkins_ and @defi_monk leave no stone unturned in what is our highest conviction thesis in recent memory. It’s the culmination of countless conversations about the optimal design and sequencing for a financial superapp, trading as the foundational use case for crypto’s app layer (alongside payments), and the cryptoeconomy as fundamentally a retail phenomenon. The best is yet to come. The great perpification is just beginning.

Perps eating global financial markets is the highest conviction thesis I’ve had in my 4 years since starting Syncracy. If we’re right, the sector could produce $350B+ in value over the next 5 years, with the winning chain becoming one of the largest platforms in global finance. As shared in our OG Hyperliquid thesis released over a year ago, we believe $HYPE is the fastest horse in this race. While many skeptics view platforms like Hyperliquid as products of regulatory arbitrage, over time we believe they will come to be understood as a fundamental transformation of the global trading stack. What was once a fragmented world of brokers, exchanges, clearinghouses, among other intermediaries, is giving way to integrated trading systems that are continuously margined, atomically settled, globally accessible, and permissionless to build on. The case isn’t just theoretical as early signs of disruption are already visible in the data. In the early months of perps’ “real world asset” expansion they’re already impacting global financial markets — most recently functioning as a price discovery engine on weekends for oil during the Iran conflict. We believe this is only the beginning and that perps will absorb an increasing share of leveraged directional trading that today lives in retail options, CFDs, and fixed-tenor futures. Even low single-digit penetration of these markets could produce dramatic outcomes for the sector. In parallel, it remains under-appreciated how quickly DEXs like Hyperliquid have emerged as leaders in equity and commodity perps. Should DEXs continue scaling these markets, it will accelerate their share gains from the likes of Binance and Coinbase while also positioning them to challenge legacy derivatives venues such as CME, who will struggle to compete due to regulatory and architectural incompatibilities. Finally, as decentralized venues lead the growth of perps, we believe they will also expand into adjacent categories. Perps are the hardest product to nail on blockchains and once a blockchain can successfully host perps it naturally starts to aggregate other crypto use cases as a byproduct. We are already seeing early evidence of this with Hyperliquid’s expansion into spot trading and stablecoins, and soon prediction markets and options. It’s in this sense that perpetual DEXs are also Trojan horses for the financial platform of the future. —— Enjoyed writing this one with @defi_monk who was the first sell-side analyst to cover Hyperliquid in summer 2024 and among the leading thinkers on the sector. Hope you all enjoy what is a very detailed and data-driven piece that was a long time in the making.

Sentiment gullies and narrative gaps aren’t new in crypto. But what’s different now is how tangible adoption has become. When you consider that crypto-led use cases like stablecoins, tokenization, perps, and prediction markets are leading financial innovation, it’s hard to see these growth trends not continuing or accelerating from here. A great and perhaps necessary dose of optimism in Ryan’s essay.

The cryptoeconomy is in the biggest transition period I’ve seen in my 8 years since joining the industry. The chaos and confusion of it all is causing many people to burnout right before the golden age begins. Read if you want a first principles take on where we go from here.

@riabhutoria @stripe LFG! Congrats

Life update! I’ve joined @stripe to accelerate the adoption of stablecoins 🤠 We’re just beginning to unlock the benefits of stablecoins for users, and I'm so excited for the next chapter. I went all in on crypto seven years ago because I believed it would make global payments faster, cheaper, and more accessible. Over time, the clearest path forward has become stablecoins. But to reach their full potential, stablecoins need better infrastructure, tools that are easy to integrate and the right guardrails for users across the risk spectrum. That’s exactly what Stripe is building with Bridge (@Stablecoin), @privy_io and @tempo: foundational infrastructure built from first principles, with the same craft and rigor Stripe is known for. I’ve always admired Stripe’s ability to deliver exceptional products that solve user needs, and in my short time here, I can attest the obsession is real. If you're interested in learning about our growing suite of stablecoin products, I'd love to connect. Stripe is also actively hiring, so check out our open roles and reach out!

Excited to publish my Crypto Trends Report for 2025! It frames crypto’s growth as a story of 3 compounding s-curves: asset creation, asset accumulation, and asset utilization The report applies this lens across five key thematic areas – macro, stablecoins, centralized exchanges, onchain activity, and frontier markets – to predict where the industry may be headed

It's easy to get lost in the sea of projects that have failed to live up to expectations or were outright frauds and overlook the undeniable progress the industry has made. When you zoom out, it's clear that crypto has more protocols with PMF and the chance to compound growth than ever before. And with wall street suits and the executive members of the US government finally noticing and respecting the industry, crypto is in the strongest position it's ever been on the road to adoption.

The rough outlines of what happened today: - Trump in the AM starts re-escalating tariff concerns after 5 months of acting normal and allowing the market to get comfortable w the TACO thesis. This is a pretty big deal - Most people still assume it’s a nothing burger despite an initial selloff - Trump invalidates that sentiment in the afternoon right before market close by doubling down on Tariffs with China - Equities freak out, crypto freaks out, stock market closes and MMs on HL and other CEXs start pulling their crypto quotes, widening spreads dramatically to avoid having exposure on before an illiquid weekend during a freakout - People panic sell into thin books causing price to gap down - People get mass liquidated causing price to gap down even more - Some market makers may have gotten blown up here too, unsure of the details yet - At this point spreads are wide asf everywhere and every exchange is quoting different prices, everything is a fucking mess and no one is brave enough to come in and correct anything because people are just trying to get out - OTHERS market cap wicks down almost 50% at one point on coinmarketcap, no liq thresholds are safe and we see prices we thought were unimaginable in the near term -$20B+ in liquidations, afaik thats a record - It now seems like prices are slowly normalizing and books are finally filling in - Also looks like the HL whale who is an insider trader hit again by shorting last night, his/her ability to time key Trump announcements has been uncanny Just an insane day overall and feels like we’ll get more details as the hours go by. Just thought I’d freestyle explain what I thought happened since people are so confused. IMO these types of days are typically indicative of the final nail in the coffin or represent a massive buying opportunity. I lean towards the latter for now. Bullish. Best wishes for anyone out there impacted negatively. Theres more to life than prices.

Time and again I see people overthink L1 valuations. The only difference between $1400 ETH and $5000 ETH was Bitmine. In April Ethereum was a dying platform. Today it’s the stablecoin chain and the next “Bitcoin-like” opportunity for institutions. Price leads narratives so they say. The point here isn’t about whether any of this is justified. The point is that the absence of agreed upon valuation methodologies creates a void that only narratives and relative frameworks can fill. Is the ETH bull case that it becomes a take rate on global GDP? What about it becoming “programmable Bitcoin” which intrinsically can’t be valued? How about both? The truth is no one knows. So what happens when the market instead anchors to relative value and narratives? Well BTC is $2 trillion. So who’s to say ETH shouldn’t be 50% of that? It offers a superset of Bitcoin’s functionality right? ETH is $500B. Why shouldn’t SOL be 100% or more of that? It’s the superior product with greater traction across almost every economic metric. These exercises are goofy. But again we can theorize all we want, or navigate the environment in front of us. We’ll figure out the answers to these questions in time. Fundamentals are the ultimate anchor at the limit. But until then, don’t overthink it. There’s an enormous competitive advantage for assets that have penetrated mainstream consciousness and persisted over time. It’s a game of flows and narratives until the party stops.

Digital Asset Treasuries hold $105B in assets and control big chunks of the BTC, ETH, and SOL supplies. Few have stopped to think through what this means long-term. A thesis on how DATs can move beyond speculation and become lasting economic engines for the cryptoeconomy. 1/

One of the biggest revelations from the USDH governance process is just how many blue chip projects and institutions plan to build on Hyperliquid regardless of the outcome. USDH ticker wars were just a catalyst for all them to reveal and accelerate their plans. Hyperliquid.

This graphic from @alvinhsia perfectly captures the design space for perps markets. With Hyperliquid evolving into an Exchange as a Service platform through HIP-3, the expansion of new markets moving onchain should only accelerate. All developers need is "a market, an oracle, and a dream." x.com/alvinhsia/stat…

The rate of innovation on Hyperliquid is accelerating among apps launching new perps markets. Perps offer a faster path to bringing new asset classes onchain than tokenized spot, with the potential to unlock entirely new markets. @ventuals' push to support trading for startups before they IPO is the latest example. Beyond equities, expect experiments with everything from social trends to market dominance (like BTC.D) to other esoteric markets. It wouldn’t be surprising if most of these experiments land on Hyperliquid. It’s the only onchain perps DEX that rivals centralized incumbents in performance and liquidity, and with HIP‑3 opening market creation to third‑party exchanges, the cost of bootstrapping and iterating new markets is collapsing. The timing couldn’t be better. With Wall Street enamored with tokenization and the cryptoeconomy starved for higher quality assets, there’s an emerging race to bring equities and other markets onchain. These races tend to favor the path of least resistance. The best bets in crypto are often the platforms that unlock the next wave of financial experimentation. And right now, Hyperliquid is a playground for one of the largest near-term opportunities in the industry. Hyperliquid.