Alpen Capital

If you show revenue, people will ask how much and it will never be enough.

A Difficult Personal Decision I’ve made the personal decision to step away from trading on HyperLiquid. And I want to stress that word - personal (and difficult). I’m not asking anyone to follow me. I’m simply acting in alignment with where my values have moved. Most of you have watched my thinking evolve over time. That’s what we’re supposed to do as human beings: evolve, refine, shed old frameworks, and build better ones. And look - I know you’re not supposed to develop an emotional attachment to a protocol, but HyperLiquid was different for me. Jeff built something the market desperately needed. He dragged structural fairness into the spotlight and paved the way for a better conversation. He and the HL team deserve their chapter in crypto’s history books. I personally hope they continue to write new ones. But if you’ve followed me for any length of time, you also know I’m an idealist - maybe to a fault - and I can’t turn off the portion of my brain that not only can see things as they currently are but continues to believe in what they should be. 10/10 ripped the mask off the industry for the new folks. Or for those who’ve been around long enough, it simply reminded us how fragile and easily manipulated this ecosystem still is. The fact that one centralized exchange can trigger a global liquidation cascade and force temporary price dislocations across every protocol? That’s not a “black swan.” That’s a design flaw. Here’s a short recap: Binance relied on its own oracle - which depegged a stablecoin. That started a smaller, but manageable, liquidation chain. The real chaos began when their API mysteriously went offline. Market makers, who operate largely delta-neutral, suddenly couldn’t hedge on their primary venue. With hedging impossible, they pulled quotes across CEXs and DEXs. With no liquidity present, price falls off a cliff. And across the industry? Victory laps. “Zero bad debt!” “Liquidations processed flawlessly!” Great. The protocol didn’t die. But users did. Protecting the protocol IS important - obviously. But it is not the same thing as protecting traders. If we want broader adoption, if we want legitimacy, if we want crypto to grow without getting handcuffed by regulators, we have to start building real consumer protection into our systems. TradFi has circuit breakers, obligations for MMs, structural guardrails. Crypto has...hope. And an instruction manual that says, “Good luck out there!” So why am I leaving HyperLiquid? Because I choose to back teams who are actively trying to solve these design flaws, not merely observe them. I’ve spoken with Jeff and another member of the Core 11. They don’t appear to see this as part of the roadmap right now. That’s their choice and I respect it. And to be clear - nobody has a perfect fix. There is no silver bullet. What matters to me is who’s walking toward solutions rather than ignoring the problem. We lost people on 10/10. Real lives were ended. Real families were destroyed. Over...a design flaw allowing one entity to control the world? Crypto doesn’t get to just sweep that under the rug. So the question becomes: Who’s actually building protections that might prevent the next Binance-induced disaster? On Solana, I’ve only found one. Drift’s liquidation protection isn’t magic. It’s not flawless. But it exists - and more importantly, it worked. It checks: “Is the oracle price diverging by more than 50% from the 5-minute TWAP?” If yes it simply puts a temporary halt on liquidations. That single line of logic saved a lot of people. Scam wicks get filtered. The insurance fund catches the edge cases. It’s not some grand philosophical overhaul - it’s simply a meaningful step toward sanity. I’m not as brilliant as Jeff. I don’t pretend to know the best way to solve this at scale. But I am a customer - and customers vote with their dollars. The industry keeps repeating, “Protecting the protocol is protecting the trader.” But that’s not the full picture. A car isn’t complete without a driver. Both are equally important to the beautiful symbiosis that exists. This is a heartbreaking post to write. This isn’t a Drift advertisement. It feels more like a gut-wrenching breakup with a first love - not because the love disappeared, but because you finally recognize that you’re growing in different directions. HL will always be a part of my story. It’ll stay on my shortlist whenever people ask where to trade. But it’s time for me to move forward - toward my values, toward my ideals - and to say to Jeff and the team, with real appreciation: we’ll always have Paris. 🫡 From the depths — The White Whale 🐋

Today we’re announcing our $7.6 million seed round led by Paradigm.