Mercek

I made an exit strategy so you don't have too! So my main take away from the last bull run is you go into the bull market not knowing what is going on and you will assume you will figure out the top and sell perfectly. This does not happen even and you will get burnt. I did and i'm sure that many of you will have had similar experiences. There are so many ways to exit the market, here is just one idea I had that makes sense to me. Please change this as you see fit to taylor your portfolio. Step 1, Making a duplicate portfolio tracker: On coingecko/ coinmarketcap make a new portfolio. This will be important for this strategy. Once you start selling (this point will be discussed), you will not mark the sales on this duplicate portfolio. Only on your main one. This is so we can accurately track the % we should be selling. Step 2, when to start selling: This is not an exact science, however for the purpose of this I have chosen one month after the previous break of ATH. Feel free to change this however the rest of the data below will use this. Step 3: Estimating the length of the bull run: Below I will show the length of the last 3 bull runs from the point where they break the ATH. 2013, the break of ATH to top is 272 days. This was a very volatile bull markets however we don't expect this due to the size the market has grown too. 2017, the shortest of the three at 230 days. 2021, the longest bull run lasting 348 days. So here we have 3 bull markets to work with. Obviously we have to assume that something will change majorly for the next rally, however we use what we have to give ourselves the best chances. Average of the 3 = (348 + 230 + 272) / 3 = 283 days. Minus one month which we wait before we start to sell will equal 262. That is what we will be working with. Step 4, the strategy: First of all I will be working on the assumption that you are trying to sell 100% of the portfolio. 100% / 262 = 0.38%. This is what percent needs to be sold per day to achieve 100% sold using our time estimate. Now, you should not sell everyday 0.38%. Once you wait the month after the previous ATH breaks, you start counting percent, each day accumulating. E.G. day 1 = 0.38, day 2 = 0.76 etc. You let this build until a green green day which you sell. Could be worth waiting for the largest moves (+10-20%). Once you sell this amount, the count resets to 0. So why did we create the second portfolio? Because if you are selling the ratio in your portfolio would change. For example, if you hold 1 BTC and sell 50%, then the next day you sell 50% again, you would have 0.25 BTC. Not sold 100%. However, if you keep one portfolio not touching it when you sell, you can put in say what is 5% in dollars and the next day 5% again, and you would have sold 10%. Otherwise the maths will get extremely complicated. Once you get toward the end, you might have to sell on some red days. Don't be afraid! This is very important if you want to take full profits, so in the last say 100 days be less picky about you sell days. We always speak about DCAing in so use this strategy if you would like to DCA out :). NFA and Always DYOR!

The speed at which RWAs moved from “interesting experiment” to actual financial infrastructure is honestly kind of crazy. A couple years ago most people still treated tokenized assets like a niche side narrative inside crypto. Now some of the biggest financial players in the world are actively building around it. And the sector itself is already sitting around record levels onchain. What’s even more interesting is that RWAs are starting to generate meaningful revenue now, not just TVL and speculation. That’s usually where sectors start becoming much more serious. Some of the projects standing out to me lately: → @maplefinance $MPL quietly built one of the strongest onchain private credit businesses in the space → @chainlink $LINK RWAs probably don’t scale properly without reliable oracle, NAV, proof-of-reserve and messaging infrastructure underneath → @OndoFinance $ONDO one of the clearest examples of institutional treasury demand moving onchain → @centrifuge $CFG kept building through multiple cycles around real-world credit and structured assets while attention rotated elsewhere → @KeetaNetwork $KTA interesting settlement + payment infrastructure angle for moving tokenized value efficiently → @plumenetwork $PLUME focused heavily on making RWAs actually usable inside DeFi instead of just tokenizing assets for headlines → @MANTRA_Chain $MANTRA positioning itself around compliant tokenization infrastructure and regulated issuance rails And honestly, I still think the market underestimates how early this entire sector is relative to global finance itself. The bigger opportunity may not even be “which asset gets tokenized.” It may be which protocols become the infrastructure layer underneath trillions of dollars later.

There are two ways to read the position of @BitMNR on $ETH. First: a leveraged bet on ETH price. Second: a single entity controlling 13.1% of all staked Ethereum through its own validator network. Market is pricing the first but the second is what's actually happening 👇 1️⃣ The numbers → 5,278,462 $ETH held // 4.37% of 120.7M total supply → 4,712,917 ETH already staked via MAVAN // 89% of holdings → $10.3B in staked ETH generating $319M in annualized staking revenue → 2.86% annualized yield — projected to reach $352M at full stake → $857M in average daily $BMNR stock trading volume → Backers: ARK/Cathie Wood, Founders Fund, Pantera, Kraken, DCG, Galaxy Digital The accumulation pace slowed 74% this week showing how Bitmine is moving from buying to staking. -------------- 2️⃣ Structurally different from Strategy @MicroStrategy holds approximately 4% of Bitcoin's circulating supply. Such a position has zero protocol implications because Bitcoin is proof-of-work. Holding $BTC does not give you block production rights, validator influence, or governance weight. It's a passive bet on scarcity. Ethereum is proof-of-stake. So, holding and staking ETH gives you: → Validator selection rights: your ETH determines which validators enter the set → Block proposal probability: proportional to stake → Attestation weight: your validators vote on chain state every epoch → Finality influence: a single entity controlling sufficient stake can delay finality The 33% threshold is the benchmark that matters here. Per Ethereum's own documentation, an entity controlling over 33% of staked ETH gains the ability to prevent the chain from finalizing... without needing to attack any smart contract. Bitmine is not approaching 33% of total ETH supply. But the more relevant figure is its share of total staked ETH. → Total ETH currently staked: approximately 35.86 million. → Bitmine's staked position: 4.71 million, accounting for 13.1% of all staked ETH concentrated in a single entity @LidoFinance has deliberately managed its market share below 33% for years specifically because of this threshold. The Ethereum Foundation has publicly flagged the governance risk of concentrated staking. -------------- 3️⃣ The MAVAN angle Instead of outsourcing its staking, Bitmine It runs its own validator infrastructure: MAVAN, the Made in America Validator Network. This is the detail that separates Bitmine's ETH position from any passive treasury holding. Running your own validators means: → Direct block proposal rights, not delegated through a third party → MEV extraction: validators capture maximal extractable value from transaction ordering → Full attestation weight without intermediary fee drag → Zero counterparty risk on staking rewards At 4.71 million staked ETH through its own validator network, Bitmine is one of Ethereum's largest active infrastructure participants. And its economics and influence scale with every additional ETH staked. -------------- 4️⃣ The institutional angle The comparison to Strategy is useful but incomplete. Strategy holds Bitcoin as a macro bet. Bitmine holds ETH as an operating position were stakes rewards are a revenue line. $319 million in annualized staking revenue. $352 million projected at full stake. For context: that's more annual revenue than most mid-tier DeFi protocols generate in fees. The institutional backing is a bet on Ethereum's role as settlement infra for tokenized assets and agentic AI systems, both of which require ETH for gas, security, and finality. @fundstrat (Tom Lee) thesis is explicit: the two primary ETH catalysts are Wall Street tokenization and agentic AI. → Both are already happening → Both require the Ethereum network to function -------------- 5️⃣ What 5% actually means Bitmine is 87% of the way to its 5% target. At 5% of total supply (approximately 6B ETH) the staked proportion of that position would approach 14-15% of all staked ETH, assuming the current staking ratio holds. Such an high concentration, in a proof-of-stake system, means Bitmine's validators are statistically present in a meaningful fraction of every epoch's committee assignments. ⚠️This is not an argument that Bitmine is acting maliciously. But an observation that the MicroStrategy playbook, when applied to a proof-of-stake asset, creates structural implications that nobody applied it to Bitcoin ever had to think about. The market is pricing Bitmine as a leveraged ETH bet. The more accurate frame is that it's becoming Ethereum's largest single infrastructure operator. Strategy never had any of that. Neither did any Bitcoin treasury company.

Feels like DEX competition is slowly shifting away from just “who has the most volume” again. Been looking deeper into protocols experimenting with fee-sharing and retention mechanics lately. One interesting setup is @ZSWAP_DEX, live across Solana, BNB Chain and Base. Instead of routing fees upward into some vague treasury narrative, they’re pushing trading fee rewards back through $ZRW incentives. The ZygoGames layer is also interesting from a retention perspective. Weekly contests, casino-style mechanics, more reasons for users to stay active between trading cycles instead of disappearing after volume dries up. Curious what people here are actually using most these days for swaps, especially cross-chain. Feels like the market is slowly starting to care about sustainable user retention models again instead of pure volume optics. NFA.

> Learn more: checkpoint.exchange

Points have been the most illiquid asset in DeFi for years. You earn them, you wait, you hope the TGE conversion is fair. → @CheckpointEX launched on testnet as the first protocol that actually gives them a market before any token exists. One dashboard across 70+ projects and chains, buy and sell secured by onchain escrow, full visibility over what you’ve built. → Started as an internal tool to track Pendle points, now it’s a full trading layer for offchain contributions. The grind finally has a price. DYOR as always.

Feels like privacy is slowly becoming one of those sectors people ignored for too long. For the last couple years the market treated privacy coins like they were relics from an older crypto cycle. Too much regulatory pressure. Too many delistings. Too much stigma around the narrative. But the funny thing is… most of these projects never actually stopped building. And now the environment around them is changing again. Because once you start moving: → RWAs onchain → institutional settlement → AI agents → tokenized finance → onchain identity privacy stops being some niche cypherpunk idea and starts becoming actual infrastructure. Not necessarily “hide everything from everyone” privacy either. More like: who gets access to the data what stays public what stays confidential how institutions transact without exposing every position onchain how AI systems handle sensitive information how financial activity scales without turning everything into a public database That’s where the narrative starts getting a lot bigger than just “privacy coin.” Some projects i’ve been watching again lately: → @Zcash $ZEC probably still the cleanest institutional privacy exposure in crypto honestly → @monero $XMR still one of the strongest examples of real product-market fit in the entire sector → @CantonNetwork $CC less retail privacy coin, more confidential institutional infra for RWAs and finance → @AskVenice $VVV the AI + privacy overlap here is starting to get more attention lately → @MidnightNtwrk $NIGHT compliant confidential smart contracts feels like a narrative institutions may eventually care a lot about → @zano_project $ZANO smaller cap but one of the more modern privacy-focused ecosystems structurally → @horizenglobal $ZEN quietly kept building zk and appchain infrastructure while the market ignored the sector The interesting part is that privacy survived despite the market actively trying to kill the narrative for years. Usually sectors disappear after that. This one didn’t.

@CheckpointEX @arbitrum FINALLY!

Your points finally have a market on @arbitrum Check, track and trade points across any integrated project and chain.

Been looking at @Dropee_app's numbers this week and something clicked. $2.5M revenue from 7 apps, 13M users: all before anyone outside their own team could build on the platform. Dropee Create changes that. Describe an app, AI ships it into Telegram in minutes, Dropee's own monetization playbook applied automatically. Lovable and Bolt cleared over $500M last year building for the open web with fragmented distribution. $TON has 900M+ users and no AI no-code layer yet: the whitespace Dropee Create walks into first. What makes the $DROPEE angle interesting is also the compounding loop: more creators shipping means more training data, smarter AI, better conversion on every app that follows. Treasury buybacks explicitly in the litepaper mean revenue has a direct path back into the token. → TGE May 27 → Presale live via @ChainGPT_Pad DYOR as always!

@LilMoonLambo lmao the timing on this one

Bankless and Mark Cuban both sold their ETH and Bitcoin this week The incoming bull run might be the greatest ever

$634 million. 45 days between April & May 2026. That number gets treated as a security failure. In reality, the failure lies on cross-chain infrastructure built in 2022/2023 when the bear market incentivized speed over security. The exploits aren’t getting more sophisticated… it’s the infra being exploited that got large enough to be worth targeting at scale 👇🏻 1️⃣ Exploits recap Two exploits. Eighteen days apart. Both linked to the same actor. → April 1: Drift Protocol // $285M → Solana-based perp DEX → Attack method: six-month social engineering campaign by North Korea’s Lazarus Group (TraderTraitor unit). Attackers compromised an admin key, whitelisted a worthless token as collateral, and drained $285M in USDC, SOL, and ETH in 12 minutes. → April 18: Kelp DAO // $292M → Liquid restaking protocol → Attack method: LayerZero DVN infrastructure compromise Attackers poisoned two RPC nodes used by LayerZero’s verifier network, DDoS’d the clean backup nodes, and forced the DVN onto the compromised ones. Because Kelp used a 1-of-1 DVN configuration a single forged cross-chain message released 116,500 rsETH. Done in 46 minutes. → May 15: THORChain // $10.8M → Multi-chain liquidity protocol. → Attack method: cross-chain coordination layer vulnerability. Trading halted globally for 12 hours. Combined April losses: $634 million. Combined 2026 losses through mid-April: over $750 million. ───────────────────── 2️⃣ The infrastructure timeline Kelp DAO launched in December 2023, operating on LayerZero infrastructure since January 2024. Drift Protocol was built and expanded through 2022-2023 during Solana’s bear market rebuild phase. THORChain’s multi-chain architecture was constructed through 2022-2023 as the protocol expanded beyond Bitcoin-ETH swaps. The pattern is precise: protocols that lost the most capital in April 2026 were built during the the 2022-2023 bear market when: → Security audit costs were high relative to TVL at the time → Speed to market mattered more than audit depth in a competitive landscape → The attack surface was small enough that sophisticated state-sponsored exploitation wasn’t economically rational → Cross-chain architecture was still experimental, with default configurations that prioritized functionality over redundancy Private key compromises accounted for 88% of stolen funds in Q1 2025, and the trend has continued into 2026. Smart contract audits protect against code bugs but not against a state-backed team with six months of patience and operational security expertise. ───────────────────── 3️⃣ The key architecture failure Cross-chain bridges have evolved architecturally since 2022, when Ronin, Wormhole, and Nomad collectively lost more than $1 billion to multisig compromises and validator exploits. LayerZero V2 replaced multisig committees with Decentralized Verifier Networks: offchain observers that cryptographically attest to cross-chain events before destination contracts release funds. → The problem: the new architecture was only as strong as its configuration. LayerZero’s reference setup shipped with single-source verification defaults across every major chain: Ethereum, BSC, Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism.  Kelp used the default. Because Kelp was using a single 1-of-1 DVN setup with no redundancy, the fake message was accepted, allowing the bridge to unlock the token. Operational security failures have been responsible for close to 50% of all losses in DeFi and CeFi since 2016, and the pace in 2026 is accelerating. The audit model audits code. The 2026 exploits are not code exploits. ───────────────────── 4️⃣ The Lazarus pattern → February 2025: Bybit: $1.46 billion. Largest single crypto hack in history. → April 1, 2026: Drift: $285 million. → April 18, 2026: Kelp DAO: $292 million The protocol was used to launder a significant portion of the $1.5 billion Bybit hack proceeds in February 2025, and again to move funds from the $300 million KelpDAO hack in April 2026. Same actor. Escalating capability. Consistent laundering infrastructure. Lazarus Group is a persistent, well-resourced operation that treats DeFi protocols as a revenue stream for the North Korean state. The escalation from $1.46 billion to $285-292 million is a diversification across multiple targets simultaneously. Across those two April attacks combined, Lazarus Group drained more than $575 million from DeFi in under three weeks. The question the industry is not asking clearly enough: if the same state actor is responsible for a significant fraction of DeFi’s largest exploits across 14 months, and if that actor is improving its operational capability with each attack, what does the threat model actually look like in 2027? ───────────────────── 5️⃣ What survived protocols have in common The Kelp DAO exploit triggered a ripple effect: dozens of DeFi protocols froze their LayerZero OFT bridges, including Ethena, EtherFi, Tron DAO, and Curve Finance. Total DeFi TVL dropped 7% in 24 hours from $99.5 billion to $86.3 billion. The protocols that didn’t pause, didn’t freeze, and didn’t lose capital in April share one structural characteristic: minimal cross-chain state dependencies. → Aave’s core V3 lending contracts held → Morpho’s isolated market architecture contained contagion at the position level rather than the protocol level → Uniswap had zero exploits None of those protocols rely on cross-chain message verification to function. Their security models don’t include a configuration layer that sits outside the audited code. The thesis the data supports is uncomfortable: DeFi’s security problem in 2026 is that the cross-chain infrastructure layer has become the dominant attack surface, and the audit industry is still auditing the wrong thing. The bear market built the attack surface. The bull market funded it. The next 18 months will determine whether the industry fixes the infrastructure layer before the next Lazarus campaign

The cross-chain liquidity problem has been solved on paper a dozen times. @EuclidProtocol is one of the few teams that already delivered in that direction: → 155K passport holders → 18M testnet transactions → Private mainnet live → $3.5M raised from KuCoin, Gate & 0G Labs Mission 16 puts that infrastructure to the test across five chains simultaneously: Base, Polygon, Monad, BNB Chain, Arbitrum, 50K Astra and the Constellation Runner stamp on completion, both sitting on your stack before public mainnet and TGE get here. Minting closed, so secondary is the entry now. Worth getting familiar with the protocol while the mission structure still rewards you for it!

Is @byreal_io quietly becoming one of the more interesting places for USD1 / WLFI liquidity right now? The setup is actually interesting from a risk management angle. The competition rewards volume on any trade paired with USD1 or WLFI. A framing that imply you’re not forced into high-volatility plays to compete. You can run a relatively conservative rotation strategy and still rack up meaningful volume. How I’d approach it: → USD1-USDC is the conservative anchor: 34.21% APR, deepest liquidity, pure stablecoin exposure. → SOL-USD1 and WLFI-USDC run higher APR (271% and 304%) but carry directional risk. pick your lane based on how much volatility you want in the mix. → Trading into and out of USD1 positions keeps you liquid, keeps your volume climbing, and gives you a natural hedge when the market gets choppy. The agent execution angle is also worth paying attention to and it's fully described below in their announcement. If you want an extra 10% volume boost, RealClaw gives you that on top. Still in invite-only beta… access codes below if you want in. Worth checking out the LP incentives too. USD1-USDC, SOL-USD1, WLFI-USDC pools are live with $WLFI rewards on top of trading fees. ⚠️ Not financial advice. Manage your own risk.

@variational_io @dragonfly_xyz starting to feel way more bullish on variational after this tbh

We’ve raised $50M led by @dragonfly_xyz to go all in on RWAs and bring TradFi liquidity on-chain. Today, we're launching Phase 1 of our RWA rollout to stress-test our infrastructure before bringing 100+ TradFi markets on-chain this summer.

BTC May expiry max pain is around $75K right now, but honestly the level I’m watching more is $78K. Because once May expiry is out of the way, attention probably shifts straight into the June quarterly positioning. And right now the quarterly max pain area sits closer to $78K. So even if BTC manages to hold above $75K into May close, I don’t think the market fully escapes pressure unless $78K gets reclaimed too. That’s the level where the structure starts looking healthier again imo. Below that, price still feels stuck in the weaker side of the quarterly range. Max pain obviously doesn’t magically predict direction, but it’s still useful for understanding where positioning gets crowded and where price may keep getting pulled during expiry windows.

There's been some noise around @Dtec_AINetwork lately. Fundraising figures for Dtec vary wildly across sources. under $100K in one place, $3.89M in another, total valuation is around $12.46M. Hard to know what’s real just from timelines and screenshots alone. So, instead of speculating i'm going straight to the source. They're hosting an X Spaces AMA Thursday May 21 at 16:00 UTC. CIO will answer live on OBD updates, DePIN, vehicle data monetization, and roadmap. All public, live and on record. Top 5 questions win $20 USDT each. 🔗 If you have questions about how the project actually works, now's the time to ask them directly: x.com/i/spaces/1oKMv…