Onchain | Prev Research @MessariCrypto | Trading attention | NFA
New York, NY
Joined January 2012
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we are in the early innings of stock tokens
programmable stock tokens are the next step
Baba retweeted
Strap in and consider this my official update on the kinetiq:native thesis, specifically regarding @Enter_Elysium.
Best way to do this is to refute some arguments I've seen:
1. "L2's are parasitic"
It's very lazy to compare Elysium to other L2s from the past. Robinhood Chain has generated a little over $50m in fees, of which $5m went to Arbitrum, and a whopping...$70k went to $ETH blob fees.
HyperEVM hyperliquid:native fees are burnt, whereas sequencer fees on Elysium go to kinetiq:native buys and builders (more on this later), but HyperEVM fees only account less than 1% of Hyperliquid total revenue. Papertrade is actually much more directly parasitic to hyperliquid:native; HyperEVM fees are peanuts even if Elysium vamped them entirely.
An under appreciated dynamic that a lot of people don't know is that HyperEVM USDC applies to AQAv2 hyperliquid:native revenue too, and USDC on Elysium will as well. Assuming the HyperEVM burns around $25k of hyperliquid:native a day, every additional $1b USDC that Elysium onboards in TVL would burn 4x that same amount due to AQAv2.
For reference, Solana has ~$7.5bn USDC and Base has $5b. Robinhood chain is predominantly USDG, which they monetize on, and ETH obviously gets nothing from. Imagine if Base contributed to $175m (3.5% of $5b) of value accrual to $ETH via their USDC TVL...maybe my $5k/7k $ETH calls would actually hit then 🙃
Beyond this, the entire selling point of Elysium is that it sits adjacent to HyperCore. propAMM's are functionally impossible on HyperEVM now due to the 1s block time (amongst other reasons). Additionally, on the HyperEVM, you can only read Hypercore price, not order book depth.
As a result, Solana does 25-50x the spot trading volume that Hypercore/HyperEVM handle. If Elysium can eat even a moderate chunk of on chain spot volume from Solana, especially in tokenized RWAs, the implications for corresponding hedging flows to Hyperliquid are enormous.
Elysium explicity enables net new flow and TVL to Hyperliquid, both of which are very accretive to hyperliquid:native itself. I would not be surprised if Elysium directly contributes an additional low 9 figure ARR for hyperliquid:native in 2027.
2. "L2's are bad investments and down only tokens"
As stated above, $ARB made about $5m so far from Robinhood Chain. Of that amount, a whopping...zero dollars made it to tokenholders. No buybacks, no burns, nothing.
50% of Elysium sequencer fees are directed at kinetiq:native buybacks. Even if you assume that Elysium only generates half the current sequencer fees of the current ghost town that is the HyperEVM, that'd still more than double their current revenue.
Currently, kinetiq:native buybacks as a % of market cap are about 1.5%, compared to 4-5% for hyperliquid:native. If Elysium generates only half of the sequencer fees of the current HyperEVM ($5m/yr), they'd be retiring token off the market at the same rate that hyperliquid:native does relative to market cap.
If Elysium can do closer to 50-75% of Base annualized sequencer fees ($30m), they'd be doing kinetiq:native buybacks at double the rate of hyperliquid:native as a % of market cap.
This is completely negating a likely increase in kHYPE TVL and other revenue streams (which there are numerous), like from launchpads like @AscendLaunch.
Ascend actually deserves their own section because they've commited to doing 30% of gross revenue as kinetiq:native buy/burns (50% to buys, 60% of that to burn). $PONS has generated $200m revenue in the last 2 months, but is currently only annualizing about $125m revenue, so we'll use a very conservative ~10% of the more conservative number. That'd add another $4m of kinetiq:native buybacks, which brings buyback yield/mcap well into the double digit %, over double hyperliquid:native.
3. "Why would there be activity on Elysium if there wasn't on the HyperEVM?"
Probably because the HyperEVM operates at the speed of smoke signals and has 0 support from Hyperliquid.
You have @Uniswap, @fomo, @Pumpfun etc all announcing integrations and deployments on Elysium day 1 after ignoring the HyperEVM all this time. @0xOmnia and the @Kinetiq_xyz team is putting on a master class in distribution, and you're seeing it play out this week.
Jeff and company are focusing on building the best perps platform in the world, and that's great, but this hands off approach has come at the expense of any support or curation of an on chain ecosystem.
That's left a massive gap that other chains have filled, but Elysium can bring all that activity back into the "house of all finance". Having a team that's fully dedicated to making this a reality will look nothing like the lack of attention the HyperEVM received.
4. "It'll be a flash in the pan memecoin chain and die out just like RHC activity has"
This is more speculative and it's hard to say. Elysium could have an epic and unsustainable PvElysium memecoin season by inheriting some of the wealth effect from both hyperliquid:native and kinetiq:native. Obviously this would absolutely moon kinetiq:native from sequencer fees/Ascend revenue, but that's shortlived.
Lively trenches aren't mutually exclusive with a real and innovative DeFi ecosystem though. As I mentioned before, Elysium will be uniquely able to plug in with, leverage, and read Hyperliquid orderbooks and liquidity. DeFi applications that couldn't be built anywhere else are made possible here.
A performant general purpose blockchain adjacent to HyperCore is the natural home to propAMM and HFT arbitrage against HIP3, which incentivizes deeply liquid spot RWA markets, which enables much higher LTV lending, which enables unique structured products and DeFi primitives to be built.
I do imagine that the trenches are built before more serious innovation comes about, but an important note here is that builders are getting 25% of sequencer fees as well. What builder wouldn't want to deploy on a new ecosystem, adjacent to the most successful app in crypto history, with a built in rev share agreement with the chain itself? Based on my conversations with Ascend and Montra, lots of serious teams want to build, not just memecoin deployers.
TLDR: It's not that complicated guys. kinetiq:native is a $120m mcap token that has a very clear path to buyback % yields multiples higher than hyperliquid:native, with an unprecedented ecosystem flywheel. It's both beta to hyperliquid:native and enhances the hyperliquid:native bull case. It might be the most asymmetric bet in crypto right now, and it's not conditional on some long shot thesis, just that there will be a large on chain ecosystem for the most important app in crypto.
Maybe it's a flop and a sell the news event on launch...or maybe it's all the best parts of Base/Hood sequencer fees combined with the revenue streams of $PUMP, $CAKE, solana:jtojtomepa8beP8AuQc6eXt5FriJwfFMwQx2v2f9mCL, ethereum:0x5a98fcbea516cf06857215779fd812ca3bef1b32 etc and heads towards billions of TVL and 9 figure annual revenue.
If you pattern match too hard to "L2 bad" or "HyperEVM sucks", it's from a place of being too 🏳️🌈🐻-pilled and/or lazy research.
Baba retweeted
I so desperately want to end the psyop that buybacks don't work:
1. Mechanically speaking, buybacks make the price go up
2. Crypto is not TradFi, there is a different social contract
> The Mechanical Value of Buybacks
First there's a large number of studies that confirm basic intuitions:
* Market Underreaction to Open Market Share Repurchases NBER (1995) - Buybacks create long term value, especially for underpriced stocks
* The Nature and Persistence of Buyback Anomalies (2009) - Reaffirms buybacks create persistent abnormal positive returns. They have an especially positive effect smoothing over price dips when the market overreacts to bad new
* Actual Share Repurchases, Price Efficiency, and the Information Content of Stock Prices (2017) - Reaffirms the findings of the 2009 paper. Buybacks improve pricing efficiency, liquidity, and are especially positive during market declines
* Pavilion Global Markets Buybacks Drive S&P 500 Returns (2023) - Buybacks can drive up to 43% of the returns in a single stock
tldr: buybacks make the number go up. obviously they work better when your stock is at a lower p/e because of under appreciation or market downturns unrelated to the core business, but nonetheless they are positive on the stock
THIS SHOULD BE REALLY OBVIOUS, you don't even need to read any of the papers above to understand the basic intuitions of why they work:
* Price is a function of supply and demand. When buybacks take supply off the market, price goes up all else held equal
* When shares get taken off the market, the shares you hold represent a larger share of the business meaning you benefit from EPS growth even if revenue isn't growing (let alone if it is)
* Businesses providing constant single sided buys on their own shares has a smoothing effect on liquidity making deeps shallower and setting higher price floors in the long run (more shares are repurchased on a fixed buying program when price is lower)
Some specific examples:
* about 51% of Apple's EPS growth is credited to their legendary buyback program retiring so many outstanding shares
* Autozone has bought back like 90% of their shares - the stock has had double the annualized returns of the SP for the last 2 decades
* Home Depot is similar to Autozone
What crypto people get uncomfortable is that buybacks take a long time to compound. This is totally fine in the stock market where there's many businesses you can forecast out in to the future for a decade+. In crypto I understand this rightfully makes people nervous
One prime example of this would be PONS. It kinda doesn't matter how much %of supply was bought back by PONS if their business never recovers. The entire trade/business may end up being too much a flash-in-the-pan for the long term effect of buybacks to have compounded
But we're now seeing a few crypto businesses start to cross the chasm into multi-cycle success stories. We can & should expect the businesses to implement long durable buyback programs that will compound excess positive returns for the years to come
> The importance of buybacks in crypto
I don't know if any of you noticed this, but you have no legal protections as token holders. It's also not even on any government roadmap to fix this
Regulators are just now getting around to setting some guidelines for crypto projects to not get sued - but even then, none of those guidelines relate to you. You do not have voting rights. You do not have legal recourse. In fact most times you don't even own equity in the underlying businesses which actually collect the revenues
IF token holders had legal rights. IF I could sue Compound or Aave for what they've done to token holders, I'd be far more sympathetic to the argument that teams should wait for buybacks. At the end of the day, I know I'd be able to pursue legal recourse & pressure with like minded token holders to force them to return capital when the time is right
Unfortunately, you have none of these abilities. You have nothing but the promises of the team. IN FACT, a team that likely ran a points program or other to WIN YOUR BUSINESS by trading some of their equity. I'd argue they have a moral responsibility to you to show they're aligned in the long term with you even in the lack of regulatory requirements
Baba retweeted
Industries aren't measured by headlines. They're measured by what people buy, where they go, and what they download.
Today @Kalshi announced its sector KPI indices, settled on Prisms from Carbon Arc as an official data provider.
Explore Carbon Arc’s Prisms here or sign up for Carbon Arc's platform today. 30 days free with 𝗣𝗥𝗜𝗦𝗠𝟯𝟬: carbonarc.ai/prisms
Read the announcement: news.kalshi.com/p/announcing…
#Kalshi #PredictionMarkets #data
Baba retweeted
People on here always want to hear a singular decisive unchanging view (and a bullish one of course) but that is not really how trading goes. People can do that and hit the jackpot and become heroes but that is more akin to gambling than thoughtful trading. Being a good trader means mapping out different configurations of the future and staying open minded and observing how newsflow and price action coalesce to validate one of those scenarios. Playing the odds and managing risk. I have been fortunate and protecting the money I already have is more important to me than getting a moonshot 20x.
In that vein, you shouldn't follow me for clear trading calls that can be copy traded, and if anything I want to fully move away from that. I change my tactical views all the time and it's not feasible to update you all on their evolution. I also feel a genuine sense of responsibility towards others and don't like to leave people hanging. I am here out of my enjoyment of writing and desire to exchange views with sharp people, and I don't have a need to optimize for clout that can someday be used to shill my own coin or whatever, because I will never do that.
So instead it's more constructive for me to share insights about the big picture, because those will remain more stable, and maybe something isn't directly tradeable at the moment, but can help give color to the way the next 6-12 months unfolds. My big thesis around "There's Not Enough Money in The World" (see pinned post) was a good example of this, it wasn't a directly tradeable call at the time, but it predicted one of the most important macro dynamics for the year.
It is genuinely a complex time because AI is changing everything. There are a lot of different cross currents. We've had the AI capex boom but the rate of change is slowing down, and now we are starting to explore the limits of financing capability as money is becoming tighter everywhere. There is reflexivity here, because as financing for AI capex tightens, sentiment around AI worsens, which further tightens financing, and so on, and so forth.
We have the fact that AI is starting to unweave the fabric of the world as we know it, and will structurally increase uncertainty. Usually uncertainty is kryptonite for risk appetite, and increasing uncertainty is bad for asset prices, and decreasing uncertainty is good for asset prices.
We also will have a lot of unemployment from AI. It's becoming more likely we see the initial wave of this next year, but the early stages can be bullish, because it won't be enough to meaningfully impact passive flows, but it will weaken economic data enough to potentially nudge the Fed into pivoting to be more dovish. This is combined with the fact that the 3 most hawkish members of the Fed, Logan, Hammack, and Kashkari, are all regional Fed Presidents that will roll off into 2027. So I'm hopeful that early 2027 will lead to better conditions.
As the snowballs keeps rolling down the hill, and AI layoffs become significant, this will surely be bearish, since it will impact passive 401k flows which are a key underpinning for the market, it will reduce consumer spending, and lead to asset sales as unemployed people will need to fund living expenses. We are in an environment where asset prices (market caps) are very high relative to flows because they have generally been unidirectional. This has been a super bullish dynamic on the way up, but it cuts both ways.
Timing all of these very factors is difficult, they are things that I keep in the back of my mind as I trade around shorter term catalysts and newsflow day to day.
It's easier for me to say that conditions in equities will be challenging through the end of the year because I know the following:
1. Anthropic IPO will suck a ton of money out of equities directly, at least $40-50bn, and mostly out of AI stocks specifically. To me this is unavoidable. It doesn't mean I would short into the IPO but it is a major headwind.
2. Fed will likely pause in Oct and hike in Dec, but in any case, there will be no pivot before year end. Liquidity will remain tight.
3. Retail money has shown many signs of being tired, and spread too thin. The price action around the recent Nasdaq ATH reminded me of late October 2025, and this pattern recognition flipped me from bullish to cautious. I wish I had posted about it publicly then (people in my group chats know) but I was still locked out of my X account at the time.
4. Hedge funds have gotten rekt in October (yesterday was one of the worst days for them ever, across classic L/S, quant, and market neutral pods) and they will be reluctant to re-risk into year end, especially classic L/S funds are more likely to book their years and play defence given their incentives (annual returns are the main basis for relative evaluation and bonuses). Pods will also be more conservative because many teams will be closer to their drawdown limits (usually capital cut at -5% and fired at -10%).
5. As bills issuance has been so high in terms of mix, this puts pressure on repo/plumbing. A simple illustration of this dynamic is the following: if you spent a ton of money but had to fully pay off your credit card frequently, you would need to maintain more balance in your checking account to manage the float. This was manageable for most of the year due to the Fed's RMPs but Warsh recently ended it. Repo/plumbing tightens in Dec because banks like to close up their books early ahead of year end. When liquidity in this channel is abundant, the year end factor is irrelevant, it only matters when things are tight, which they likely will be. This happened last year.
The main scenario where this is wrong is if we get a decisive resolution to Iran + Anthropic IPO is delayed.
All of that said, there will be at least one good tradeable bounce within the next few weeks, this is inevitable. And I hope that on the other side of this, we get resolution on this factors hanging over the market, and we can have strong markets again. The market cannot be roaring all the time. The last few years has really been more of an aberration when you compare it against larger slices of history.
Baba retweeted
The death of Juice vs. Sauce and rise of Aura is the largest contributor to cultural rot.
Crypto, for instance, believes all Aura is equal. That couldnt be further from the truth
Kimchis and the like only have juice, which is temporary. Sauce is forever.
Study gucci mane
ripmart will bring this onchain
you are not bullish enough on $cards
Whatnot just dropped its 2027 trends report and the numbers are ABSURD:
• 4 Pokémon cards sell every SECOND
• 100M+ sports cards sold in 2026 so far
• $8B+ in live sales last year, on pace to DOUBLE this year
• 650,000 new buyers EVERY WEEK. 👀
Full breakdown 👇
If your cards aren't moving, the buyers didn't disappear. They went live.
THE SPORTS CARD STUFF
→ Jordan only narrowly beat Wemby in NBA card searches this year
→ The number of people searching for Cooper Flagg: +440%
→ Haaland searches jumped ~17x ahead of the World Cup
→ Yamal is now next to Messi among the most-searched names for jerseys
The legends aren't going anywhere. But the next generation of collectors is chasing the next generation of stars.
THE SLEEPER: WOMEN'S SOCCER
→ Women's soccer searches up ~70% in 2026
→ Trinity Rodman leads search interest??
→ The number of people searching for Alexia Putellas roughly TRIPLED
→ Women's World Cup hits in 2027
The 2026 World Cup brought tens of thousands of first-time soccer card buyers. Whatnot expects the women's game to do the same. Early is cheap.
POKÉMON ISN'T SLOWING DOWN
→ Orders and buyers both more than doubled year over year
→ September = all-time monthly high, 10M+ cards
→ The 30th anniversary brought in hundreds of thousands of FIRST-TIME buyers
→ Pikachu, Charizard, Eevee, Gengar, Mewtwo lead searches
More and more, buyers collect the characters and artwork they love, not just whatever is worth the most.
COLLECTORS DON'T STOP AT CARDS ANYMORE
→ Soccer jersey searches up nearly 230% month over month during the World Cup
→ Vintage jersey searches up nearly 70% in a month
Fans collect around a PLAYER: cards, jerseys, autos, memorabilia. If you only sell cards, you're leaving money on the table.
LIVE IS THE NEW NORMAL
→ 47% of Gen Z and 44% of millennials shop live MORE than a year ago
→ 35% of live shoppers say they find products there before anywhere else 👈
THE TAKEAWAY
The hobby might seem like it's shrinking on some of the traditional sites. It's just moving.
New buyers. New stars. New categories. Live.
Adapt or watch it happen without you.
Source: Whatnot 2027 Consumer Trends Report (Whatnot platform data plus a Censuswide survey)
blog.teamwhatnot.com/uniteds…
turns out they didn’t disable the mint function for gold
Last month, we demonstrated high-rate alchemy: turning mercury into real, stable gold, beating CERN’s record by a factor of 10.
Last week, we enriched isotopes in the world’s most powerful plasma centrifuge, beating the Soviet record that stood for 40 years.
Now, we’re building a fusion reactor in San Francisco to achieve record power density.
Baba retweeted
I don’t think people should be comparing ev of different games when discussing tcg/gacha because... they are different games. And different players! Sure they introduced it to crypto first but thats just the right cohort of testers. A bunch of rich degens who will spin the wheel and find all your bugs before you hand it over to the normies.
The direct benefit of gacha has nothing to do with whether or not they’re better than memecoins. They are better than the current experience tcg collectors deal with every day for grail-chasing. Normies are not running ev calcs on which game they should play to escape the underclass. Most of them don’t even know they’re in the underclass. They just chuck some of their salary into pokemon or a sports betting app every week and gamble. The concept of trading is lost on them.
Currently, normies need to rip packs, beg for a rare, hope to god it gets a good grade, then they STILL might not sell it because they think pokemon is up forever. This is a ~6 month process.
Versus what gacha offers where you instantly get a graded card. That's a huge value to the actual consumer who's fighting for their life against scalpers.
Plus, they’re the best looking slot machine to a new generation of degenerates. The results make sense to them, and they already play the physical game of collecting expecting to lose way more than they win, so 'losing less' is very attractive and it stops at that notion, ill say again no one is running calcs. It does not require the mental friction and retardation necessary to go from normie to memecoin trader. It's very simple
These arent even all the reasons but this is getting long as so ill stop here. But all the infighting on ct about this versus that is nonsensical. Gacha is the new shiny thing to a cohort much larger than ct. i see people ripping packs from vending machines in airports... these apps are gonna hit them like crack hit chicago
Baba retweeted
The bet with gacha is that its a design pattern that will proliferate across all consumer goods categories, and the company that runs this playbook beyond TCGs will be a 10bn+ outcome as the next big ecommerce winner since Shopify
this is bullish papertrade
we just launched something pretty interesting under jupiter labs.
introducing YOLO. 500x to 1000x leverage.
yes, 1000x.
we’ve been experimenting with a different approach to high leverage trading, and YOLO is our first attempt at it.
the idea is pretty simple. what if we could let people trade with extremely high leverage, without actually having to execute these massive leveraged positions in the market?
so we took inspiration from the JLP model and built YOLO, where positions are simulated against real market prices, but the profits and losses are real.
this allows us to offer leverage that goes far beyond what we currently have on jupiter perps, using a completely different approach.
of course, this also comes with some tradeoffs.
since profits are paid out from the pool, if there isn’t enough liquidity to pay out a winning position, the payout can be queued instead of being paid immediately.
it’s a different model from traditional perps, with its own risks and limitations, but i think it’s an interesting experiment worth exploring.
one thing i’ve always liked about building onchain is how much room there is to experiment with new financial products and trading experiences.
and that’s also why we’re launching YOLO under jupiter labs. to give ideas like this a place to be tested, without necessarily having to fit into our existing products.
i’m quite excited to see how people use YOLO and what we can learn from it.
it’s still early, and there are probably many things we can improve along the way.
but that’s the fun part of building and experimenting.
give it a try, understand the risks, and let us know what you think.
jup.ag/yolo
let’s go!
elite analysis of $cards
people usually throw around insane bull targets that are never reached but this time it’s actually different
citrini will ignite the nft bull
Art, as a representation of the last thing humans can be better at than machines, will become more valuable than ever before.
Neil Gaiman’s advice to graduating students seems more apt than when he gave the speech originally:
“Life is sometimes hard. Things go wrong, in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all the other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do.
Make good art.
I’m serious. Husband runs off with a politician? Make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by mutated boa constrictor? Make good art. IRS on your trail? Make good art. Cat exploded? Make good art. Somebody on the Internet thinks what you do is stupid or evil or it’s all been done before? Make good art. Probably things will work out somehow, and eventually time will take the sting away, but that doesn’t matter. Do what only you do best. Make good art.
Make it on the good days too.
And Fifthly, while you are at it, make your art. Do the stuff that only you can do.
[…]
The old rules are crumbling and nobody knows what the new rules are.
So make up your own rules.
Someone asked me recently how to do something she thought was going to be difficult, in this case recording an audio book, and I suggested she pretend that she was someone who could do it. Not pretend to do it, but pretend she was someone who could. She put up a notice to this effect on the studio wall, and she said it helped.
So be wise, because the world needs more wisdom, and if you cannot be wise, pretend to be someone who is wise, and then just behave like they would.
And now go, and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here.
Make good art.”
If you’re complaining about AI’s impact on art, it just means you were probably not making only the stuff you can do. And, yes, that will continue to be worth less and less.
they are prepping for a massive onboarding event
ripmart soon
IDK what @Collector_Crypt did on the backend, but holy shit is the site fast and smooth now. Well done 🙏