I give full credit to Brian Armstrong for jumping on Bitcoin early when nobody believed it was a thing. He stuck with it and persevered through the toughest of times. I also think anecdotally he seems like a nice and likeable guy. But I don’t think he’s making good decisions as CEO. Coinbase is all over the map. The company has a massive and bloated payroll considering how little it actually delivers outside of exchange ops. And it seems to make puzzling acquistions every week. The fact is, no Coinbase product since the original exchange has really taken off. The NFT platform was a huge bomb that reportedly cost half a billion dollars. It bought Echo for hundreds of millions of dollars, which it should have been able to build in a weekend. And then it used it’s own half assed launch platform tech to run the Monad ICO. And this didn’t go very well. Investors are down significantly and not likely to pariticipate in more of these sales. It spent billions on Deribit, yet hasn’t really done well in the derivatives market. It isn’t competitive. There has also been constant data breaches and customer service issues since inception that have reached meme status due to the severity and frequency. In the past few months alone, Coinbase is buying multiple very simple to create point solutions like Liquifi, Spindl, Roam, Iron Fish and Opyn. Nobody can possibly integrate all of this so quickly. Like what do people do at Coinbase? It should actually be able to build these things itself. I’m counting 30 recent acquisitions in total. Which is crazy. I’m not sure we’ve seen any company do this many acquisitions so quickly. Its Base Protocol is being run by a nutcase (also probably a nice guy) that crypto people seem to vehemently despise due to his provacative candoe. Tokenizing every post. It’s insanity and has only financially hurt users that have participated. Today it announced another acquisition. This time of a prediction market. Only days after launching its Kalshi backed prediction market platform. As a tech investor I know that there’s serious costs to all these pivots. Meanwhile the core exchange business (in a market where fees are in terminal decline) is still most of the revenues and it’s busy creating DEX products with lower and even no fees to compete against itself. Puzzling really. Not great for shareholders. And its custody business it invested so heavily in is commoditized and will face margin pressures as well. I don’t see too many bright lights here from the business that still makes up most of its earnings and pays for all this experimentation. Coinbase has just gotten very lucky with the recent bull market and being in the right place at the right time with regulatory benefits of Binance and other exchanges not being able to operate effectively in the US. But if you recall in 2023, when transaction volumes fell, the stock quickly lost 90% of its value. It rebounded not due to operational excellence, but simply a fomo market where it was impossible for it to not make money. Being in the right place at the right time isn’t a sustainable business model however. And while I feel Armstrong is a gifted crypto (and tech) visionary, he really needs to turn the reigns over to somebody more operationally focused. Otherwise I fear that Coinbase is going to just blow up (in a bad way) in the next few years. You simply cannot make this many bad decisions without any real wins and expect to prosper in typical market conditions. Let alone in bad market conditions.

Name & Symbol: Echo Protocol ($ECHO)
Address: 0x06238c1b8e618abedf17669228dc95fb2d2e210b

Now send it back to ATHs https://t.co/9n1eOmeBC4

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

Liquidity (both explicit and implicit) is usually what keeps low leverage fairly safe in normal conditions from one minute to the next. Normally, market makers (provisioners of dynamic liquidity) are playing prisoner's dilemma against each other. If someone puts down liquidity, you should too, or you lose out. 10/10 created the conditions to reverse the game theory by spooking liquidity off the books. When liquidity disappears, it becomes open season for liquidation levels to be hunted. Liquidity became thin, making it far cheaper and profitable to start hunting even deep liquidation levels, starting the cascade. This highlights a problem: we cannot have leverage without liquidity. Liquidity both protects liquidations from being hunted and is what is necessary to conduct them. This is why it should come as unsurprising the disappearance of liquidity directly caused heavy ADL to occur after subsequent movement. Is there a more elegant solution? I... don't think so. I don't agree with TWW's advocation of Drift's pause of liquidations, as I have outlined in other posts/replies. Even if it is only implemented for this specific scenario of liquidity thinning, there are insolvency risks for the entire exchange. In fact, book illiquidity only magnifies these risks. At the end of the day, if there is more collective leverage than the books can handle... the most obvious solution to me is to reduce it. Auto-DeLeverage. If there is something to be improved, it perhaps is how ADL should be handled for cross-margined positions. I have spent hours debating this with users on the HL discord, and I am not convinced there is an obvious solution better than the current common implementation. If the system closes all of your cross positions rather than just the one, then this will likely cause an unnecessary chain reaction of ADL through all coins. The recent POPCAT scenario on HL would've leaked into other pairs, possibly even cascading into impacting other exchanges. The common ADL implementation prevents contagion, if it is just one pair having extreme movements. At the end of the day... this is one of the risks that comes with utilizing cross-margin and is why some traders strongly advocate for sticking to isolated-only trading for perpetuals. It is a risk you can try mitigate if you run a bot (/use someone else's) that closes the other leg if the first is closed for whatever reason. But it doesn't make sense to me to have this logic run at an exchange level. At the end of the day, I think perpetual protocol design is fairly mature today, and there aren't likely to be many innovations which are a net value add without making the product into something completely different. The perpetual protocol is one of the oldest in this space. Many perp exchanges agree on the main features not just because our space is full of copycat coders, but because no one has come up with changes that are widely agreed to be improvements. If someone does, it is likely to be copied by someone else anyways.

Name & Symbol: Popcat ($POPCAT)
Address: 7GCihgDB8fe6KNjn2MYtkzZcRjQy3t9GHdC8uHYmW2hr

Update: HLP has offloaded the entire POPCAT position Total loss seems to be around ~$5M https://t.co/FggLZiUnMe

Name & Symbol: Popcat ($POPCAT)
Address: 7GCihgDB8fe6KNjn2MYtkzZcRjQy3t9GHdC8uHYmW2hr

@apoorveth These are PRO power user wallets. They SPECIFICALLY don't need the AA bells and whistles because simple ass EOAs are good enough for THEIR users. Their users are OGs, whales, degens etc. The real opportunity for UX innovations in AA/CA space are with mass-market focused apps

Name & Symbol: Caila ($CA)
Address: 0x74da4c5f8c254dd4fb39f9804c0924f52a808318

@apoorveth These are PRO power user wallets. They SPECIFICALLY don't need the AA bells and whistles because simple ass EOAs are good enough for THEIR users. Their users are OGs, whales, degens etc. The real opportunity for UX innovations in AA/CA space are with mass-market focused apps

Name & Symbol: ARAI ($AA)
Address: 0x01bf3d77cd08b19bf3f2309972123a2cca0f6936

Coinbase’s Echo acquisition is a bet on a post-CLARITY Act world where there are 100-1000x interesting onchain assets.

Name & Symbol: Echo Protocol ($ECHO)
Address: 0x06238c1b8e618abedf17669228dc95fb2d2e210b

Even plasma, ethena, and ondo couldn’t get their fdv this high during their max pump phases The old dogs had different tricks Or maybe we got smarter, or perps became more accessible, or there’s too many coins to buy

Name & Symbol: Ondo ($ONDO)
Address: 0xfaba6f8e4a5e8ab82f62fe7c39859fa577269be3

Even plasma, ethena, and ondo couldn’t get their fdv this high during their max pump phases The old dogs had different tricks Or maybe we got smarter, or perps became more accessible, or there’s too many coins to buy

Name & Symbol: Plasma ($XPL)
Address: 0x405fbc9004d857903bfd6b3357792d71a50726b0

I am recruiting a team of 11 to go find degen ping

Name & Symbol: Degen ($DEGEN)
Address: 0x4ed4e862860bed51a9570b96d89af5e1b0efefed

We've been investigating aster volumes and recently their volumes have started mirroring binance perp volumes almost exactly Chart on the left is XRPUSDT on aster, you can see the volume ratio vs binance is ~1 Chart on the right is XRP perp volume on hyperliquid, where there's some decorrelation Aster doesn't make it possible to get lower level data such as who is making and filling orders, so until we can get that data to verify if there's washtrading, aster perp volumes will be delisted

Name & Symbol: Aster ($ASTER)
Address: 0x000ae314e2a2172a039b26378814c252734f556a

This is not FUD about $ASTER, genuine question. Can anyone explain to me how ASTER is a perps dex, doing billions in volumes, but BNB chain TPS went from 150 to 200? Hyperliquid processes 20k TPS. Am I missing something or is ASTER just calling a Perps CEX a DEX?

Name & Symbol: Aster ($ASTER)
Address: 0x000ae314e2a2172a039b26378814c252734f556a

If you want to thank me for retiring you with $ASTER Do not send me gifts or even nice words Thank me by coming to have plastic surgery at my clinic in Busan. There is no point in being rich if you are ugly as sin. Pay me to fix your ugly face

Name & Symbol: Aster ($ASTER)
Address: 0x000ae314e2a2172a039b26378814c252734f556a

Pump is trading like an iranian nuclear scientist is getting liquidated at 0.0044552 https://t.co/ZnbZJnqo8c

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