Something that is arguably more important than any other aspect of liquid token investing. Time and time again it is clear that there are misaligned incentives, which in my opinion is the greatest failure in most tokenomics structures. Too often we see (simplistically) “Good protocol -> bad token” which ultimately makes attractive technology essentially un-investible

Name & Symbol: TokenFi ($TOKEN)
Address: 0x4507cef57c46789ef8d1a19ea45f4216bae2b528

Today, we are 109 days since the last ATH, that’s the tweet 😁 📊 During the previous major corrections, we spent 236 days between March 2024 and November, then 154 days between December 2024 and May 2025. 💥 Yet the current correction feels far more painful. Realized losses have been significant, capitulation has been intense, and short-term holders are under heavy pressure, not to mention record liquidations. 👉 Still, this correction could easily extend for several more months without becoming anything out of the ordinary. This cycle has been unusual in terms of the alignment between a new ATH after the bear market and the halving. Most likely, we are seeing a market shift triggered by the arrival of ETFs, now being reinforced by increasingly strong institutional involvement.

Name & Symbol: Aethir Token ($ATH)
Address: 0xbe0ed4138121ecfc5c0e56b40517da27e6c5226b

no crypto startup should feel pressured to do buybacks. in normal tech this would be insane. high growth startups should be reinvesting capital and preserving runway, not blowing it in the open market to placate a couple loud reply guys the popularity of buybacks - and in some sense, the expectation by the market that every revenue positive protocol will do them - is unequivocally bad for the crypto startup ecosystem. founders should be focused on their users, product, and team - not managing a perpetual twap buybacks are a symptom of a more fundamental malaise we find ourselves in as an industry. most tokens are worthless. the average app token is just a memecoin wearing a suit. it has “utility” but no ownership of anything meaningful token holders have finally grown wise to these schemes and now as a result demand buybacks. why be forced to trust the team to steward a protocol’s capital when they can just immediately return it to investors via buybacks? the shorter the lag between revenue in and buybacks out, the better this approach is fine for later stage teams. buybacks make sense for protocols like pump & hyperliquid that print money and may have no other productive place to park all that cash. but for your run of the mill crypto startup, buybacks are at best a distraction and at worse a waste of precious resources the pendulum is finally starting to swing away from buybacks, as evidenced by helium’s decision to pause part of their buyback programme. metadao will only accelerate this shift teams that launch ownership coins on metadao feel no pressure to do buybacks bc investors have actual ownership. this means ownership coin founders don’t need to virtue signal to their holders; instead they can focus on the important stuff - product, users, team buybacks are a pre futarchy phenomenon

Name & Symbol: Pump.fun ($PUMP)
Address: pumpCmXqMfrsAkQ5r49WcJnRayYRqmXz6ae8H7H9Dfn

@VitalikButerin @colludingnode You need composition. And if careful, you can depend on trust for coercion resistance, but not anonymity. This kind of real-world protocol design is hard. Easier to push commodity ZK, or FHE, or TEEs. Indeed, people miss that building private protocols on top of zk is hard.

Name & Symbol: Mind Network ($FHE)
Address: 0xd55c9fb62e176a8eb6968f32958fefdd0962727e

hear me out, the anti-solana solana app not a trading terminal but an investment app - no shitters, only curated majors, stocks, gold, and RWAs - forex - DCAs and MEV protected private buys - intelligent data on revenues, earnings, margins - 1 txn deposit bridge from any chain

Name & Symbol: Allo ($RWA)
Address: 0x9c8b5ca345247396bdfac0395638ca9045c6586e

Yes boomers had better home affordability (although had to suffer through real stagflation in the 70s and double digit interest rates in the 80s while losing more than half their net worth in their early 60s during the GFC), but would the kids today trade places with boomers if they couldn't YOLO call options on shvtcos like OPEN that are up almost 300% YTD? https://t.co/7XyQTYwc6I

Name & Symbol: OpenLedger ($OPEN)
Address: 0xa227cc36938f0c9e09ce0e64dfab226cad739447

spent last night deep in the a16z state of crypto 2025 report... and wow, privacy is quietly becoming the next trillion-dollar narrative > google searches for “crypto privacy” and “financial privacy” are up 10x since january > total flows through railgun passed $200M > zcash’s private pool hit 4M+ coins also found out aleo is building a private stablecoin while governments roll out digital IDs and push programmable money aleo’s out here building the rails for actual financial autonomy & pushing modern day finance the future is two types of people: > those who use privacy tech > and those who wish they had p.s. been exploring aleo for a while now, glad they reached out to spread the word

Name & Symbol: Aleo ($ALEO)
Address: 0x6cfffa5bfd4277a04d83307feedfe2d18d944dd2

Kyle is the #1 VC investor but on this thesis -- "FHE is best for Privacy" -- you're wrong: Two problems with FHE: you need the *nodes of the chain* to do the heavy lifting of computing the FHE. Because FHE gives privacy, but not *integrity*. If you need integrity, you either need to trust the FHE operator (centralized setting, not blockchain), or *add ZK* to the mix, because ZK does prove integrity. Second problem is the silicon and scale needed are pretty large, especially at scale (1000TPS). And you'd need to nodes to run it, hurting decentralization and scale. ZK allows to offload massive computation to one, non-trusted, computer, and still process those transactions and put them onchain, no trust assumptions. I love Zama, and love FHE. As co-inventor of a lot of the ZK tech deployed today (Zcash and StarkWare co-founder) I have immense respect for teams taking moon-math and making it a reality, like Zama. But FHE ain't the silver-bullet you describe.

Name & Symbol: Mind Network ($FHE)
Address: 0xd55c9fb62e176a8eb6968f32958fefdd0962727e

In 2025, someone arguing you need FHE operating on global shared state to do good private DeFi is probably selling you something. https://t.co/oy239CxATx https://t.co/sujqZjbMuC

Name & Symbol: Mind Network ($FHE)
Address: 0xd55c9fb62e176a8eb6968f32958fefdd0962727e

I’m going to say one more thing about this announcement that has triggered widely divergent reactions. The negative responses are mostly from ETH people, possibly because Pump is on Solana. The shade I’ve seen from ETH people toward Solana recently reminds me of how Bitcoiners used to look down on Ethereum starting from all the way back in 2014. It even reminds me of how in 2015, I would hear TradFi/Wall Street people (and normies generally) calling Bitcoin “criminal money.” It reminds me of how any incumbent anywhere looks down on upstarts. This is human nature. I myself am like this. So here’s my “it’s 11pm and I want to get out a few lines on Pump” take: - yes, a lot of people have lost money on Pump (but maybe it’s good if publications like ours that have been around for almost a decade go on there?) - but also, Pump is the most successful crypto company of this last cycle — if this platform ends up being big, we won’t regret getting on there early and building an audience there - Pump is experimenting wth better ways to compensate creators since everyone agrees that Web2 has been atrocious in paying creators. EXPERIMENTATION IS GOOD. (If you’re into crypto but not into innovation, then let me suggest you may not be in the right industry.) - we’re doing more live-streaming and Pump is a live-streaming platform so it’s a good fit - we have done I think all the other crypto media platforms: Pods, Fountain, Zora, Drakula … BECAUSE WE ARE A CRYPTO MEDIA COMPANY. - do I know everything about how this will go? I do not. In fact, I do not know how well this night’s sleep I’m about to embark on will go. I do not know how well flossing my teeth will go! I literally for the first time in my life last night appear to have hurt my gum from flossing! I’m way too old to be messing up an activity that I’ve been doing for way longer than most of you have been alive! So in short, to end this tweet, I’ll just say: Hyperliquid 🤪

Name & Symbol: Pump.fun ($PUMP)
Address: pumpCmXqMfrsAkQ5r49WcJnRayYRqmXz6ae8H7H9Dfn

7 day token performance - WLD is up so much I had to breakout the log scale - ETH lags L1s while TIA leads - FLUID lagging DEXs - ZORA lagging launchpads - AAVE, SYRUP, WELL outlier laggards in lending https://t.co/uyFPDMHO5x

Name & Symbol: Zora ($ZORA)
Address: 0x1111111111166b7fe7bd91427724b487980afc69

Since the USDH charade is boring me out of my mind, here are some different ideas or things that are going on in the market: 1) ICM Done Right? AVAX With @inversion_cap announcing their raise last week, this brings a bit of spotlight (other than the just announced DAT) to Avalanche. Essentially Inversion's target is to acquire real businesses and put them on blockchain rails (when deemed appropriate). So while this is a throwback to the 2017 era, it's also probably the best attempt at bringing real web2 businesses onchain, not just having failed developers launch a memecoin on Believe. 2) More Privacy? ZEC This token has generally been an apocalypse bringer on the same levels of ETC, ICP etc. However, since XMR was a bit frisky this year, it's worth to pay attention. Even though I didn't dig in too much, it seems that shielded pool adoption is growing, chart looks a bit meh post Dec 2024 peak, and there is some sort of possibility to spend privately through Payy (although I dislike Payy due to their disgusting doxxing marketing attempt). Also even if ZEC was to acquire same lindiness of XMR, that doesn't necessarily spell good news, given that few tokens has been historically stable as XMR given its actual usage as cash. (credits to @ssaintleger for the image) 3) HNT Buybacks: Deflationary or Not? Already posted about this this morning, anyway the bottom line is: - HNT went through an halving on August 1st, with now emissions equal to 7.5m tokens a year - HNT switched to 100% revenue sharing model (buybacks) There's a bit of confusion on the actual numbers (1.2m a month or 2.3m a month in revenue) that I didn't verify yet, however, that makes the difference between deflationary or still inflationary (but less). Token (local?) bottomed at 2.30$ ish, then peaked up now a bit down again in that area. 4) Suspended Governance: SCR So, Scroll was the 3rd major protocol this year to announce suspension of governance operations, following a major shake up in their team. SCR has been pretty much down only since inception, however they did find some grounding with @EtherFi's card. @makinafi's involvement is also quite interesting. I think chains struggling with competition should go way heavier on yield products, which are the ultimate crypto product at the end. This doesn't mean you've to offer a shitton of incentives in any case, but you can work bringing opportunities there, tokenize them and make them accessible to everybody and composable (s/o to @ggmxbt and @shiftprotocol_ - disclaimer: i'm an investor). Now, this is kind of the moment where centralization improves thing a bit (due to efficiency etc) or where they just throw the towel in. 5) Starknet: Ekubo, Extended, Paradex Already talked about this so not gonna go for too long, however, this is a similar (but better) situation, as Starknet afaik is way better off financially and has also products that are getting some traction. They're betting big on BTCFi too (not a fan), but aside from that: - @EkuboProtocol as poster child is in the 10-15 top dexs by volume behind much bigger names (although actually it's decelerating a lot) - @extendedapp doing cross margin with the vault and tokenizing the vault shares - @tradeparadex doing quite good volumes (August was ATH in volumes) and Shizopunks recovering a bit back to 1 ETH (with ETH being worth quite some more compared to the last time they were there). I'm not a fan of their "PURR"-type of plans with double NFTs but w/e. 6) AI, ROBOTICS: TAO, VIRTUAL? Idk still wrapping out my mind around this, until something really good comes I don't think there are great ways to express a trade on either narrative. One idea could be to just trade majors, such as TAO and VIRTUAL but i'm also skeptical of that. I think I already went through all the robotics tickers, and there is nothing really impressive, even though a couple tokens are obviously gonna benefit from it (if it actually becomes a narrative).

Name & Symbol: Virtuals Protocol ($VIRTUAL)
Address: 0x0b3e328455c4059eeb9e3f84b5543f74e24e7e1b

It’s crazy seeing so many people comp Tempo/Arc to the corpo chain announcements from past cycles, concluding these must fail as a result Seems incredibly obvious this is a totally different level of commitment, talent, & resources behind them + totally different market backdrop

Name & Symbol: AI Rig Complex ($arc)
Address: 61V8vBaqAGMpgDQi4JcAwo1dmBGHsyhzodcPqnEVpump

The moat bridges have today is slowly ceasing to exist GMP is commoditized Token issuance won't matter intent based swaps dominating orderbooks

Name & Symbol: TokenFi ($TOKEN)
Address: 0x4507cef57c46789ef8d1a19ea45f4216bae2b528

u: stressing about buying close to ATHs me: stressing about buying close to ATLs we r not the same

Name & Symbol: Aethir Token ($ATH)
Address: 0xbe0ed4138121ecfc5c0e56b40517da27e6c5226b

@jessepollak @zachxbt @js_horne @crystaltaixyz @zora onboarding people is a worthwhile effort and zora is a great team with a cool product the above are true it is also true that it's lame to denigrate other ecosystems behind closed doors for being "bad" while doing the same thing

Name & Symbol: Zora ($ZORA)
Address: 0x1111111111166b7fe7bd91427724b487980afc69

each successive onchain speculation meta got stupider/more mass mkt >defi yield ponzi farming >nft mint reveal/listing snipe >token of the month crash game expect the next one to be even stupider

Name & Symbol: TokenFi ($TOKEN)
Address: 0x4507cef57c46789ef8d1a19ea45f4216bae2b528

@jonrotbard Same infra works for everything, memecoins are just an addition bc chain can support consumer, base is largely memecoins too (zora) No major institution on solana is just false "the place where everything settles" is literally meaningless gibberish

Name & Symbol: Zora ($ZORA)
Address: 0x1111111111166b7fe7bd91427724b487980afc69

Fun fact: @Arc is led by three second time founders @0xrachelita @Sanket_Jain_ and me We are going to bring this builder-first and founder-friendly ethos to everything we do with @arc!

Name & Symbol: AI Rig Complex ($arc)
Address: 61V8vBaqAGMpgDQi4JcAwo1dmBGHsyhzodcPqnEVpump

🚨Dream Job: Want to come help us build @arc, @circle's purpose-built L1? 🙋We're hiring a Director of BD: candidates should be De-Fi native, high-agency, and high-motor. Come join the founding team of @arc and build the future of finance

Name & Symbol: AI Rig Complex ($arc)
Address: 61V8vBaqAGMpgDQi4JcAwo1dmBGHsyhzodcPqnEVpump

Circle’s @arc is uniquely designed at its core to finally bring capital markets onchain at scale with native privacy features. May just be the perfect match for a privacy-first zkCLOB…

Name & Symbol: AI Rig Complex ($arc)
Address: 61V8vBaqAGMpgDQi4JcAwo1dmBGHsyhzodcPqnEVpump

One of China’s largest banks is launching a tokenized money market fund on @plumenetwork and you’re bearish? slowly but surely - Plume will be a Top 10 blockchain by end of 2025 👀

Name & Symbol: Plume ($PLUME)
Address: 0x4c1746a800d224393fe2470c70a35717ed4ea5f1

There’s a 2,500-year-old story about how to avoid getting one-shotted by AI (tie yourself to the mast or wear earplugs), yet tech bros are still getting rekt left, right, and center. Wordcel W once again https://t.co/h3mbkB2nUW

Name & Symbol: Rekt ($REKT)
Address: 0x20482b0b4d9d8f60d3ab432b92f4c4b901a0d10c

So bearish on all the founders and other stakeholders who think in terms of "this should belong to equity." Every founder who allows that conflict of interest is essentially fine with having incentives that will destroy their project for some short-term opportunity. The moment you go for SAFE + TW and your project has a TGE, you end up with two different cap tables. @JeffBezos would call this mistake a one-way door—a decision you can’t reverse. Be aggressive with two-way doors, but don’t be naive with one-way doors. The only way to manage this is to accept that if you are in crypto and launching a token (you don’t have to), that’s your value accrual mechanism. You will be able to tell your early investors who received a warrant that everything is owned by the token, but you will not be able to say this the other way around to the public market in the future. This doesn’t mean you can’t use revenue for growth, or that you must immediately buy back and burn it. If you burn, it’s no longer an asset on your balance sheet. And if you’re a startup, it often doesn’t make sense to use the little cash flow you have to buy back tokens instead of growing. For all the founders who are trying to get cash flows from the real world and just use the token for growth—but then tell me afterwards that the cash flow is equity-owned—take a look at @chainlink Also take a look at what @Morpho and @ethena_labs are doing. All those chads will win way bigger

Name & Symbol: Morpho Token ($MORPHO)
Address: 0x58d97b57bb95320f9a05dc918aef65434969c2b2

any chain narrative that is based on stablecoin / rwa dominance is forced and is bound to come tumbling down if you build a 10x better product the stables will move (the security of the underlying chain is mostly irrelevant here)

Name & Symbol: Allo ($RWA)
Address: 0x9c8b5ca345247396bdfac0395638ca9045c6586e

New ATH on weekly data posted at 11GB (modulo eclipse + cli) https://t.co/VvybUHGT01

Name & Symbol: Aethir Token ($ATH)
Address: 0xbe0ed4138121ecfc5c0e56b40517da27e6c5226b