Josh Rogers

Full write-up, with the data and charts: startupblacksmith.com/blog/w…

MegaETH hit $246M TVL while paying users with points. Six months later it's $12M. Not slow, not unlucky, just built in the wrong order. Hyperliquid did it the right way round. Full breakdown 👇 startupblacksmith.com/blog/w…

Stablecoin supply just dropped $14.2B in 30 days, the biggest fall since June 2022 per Glassnode. Liquidity is leaving. If your GTM only works when money's flooding in, now's when you find out.

If your chain launched with 50 apps and the TVL is already leaving, check what you paid for. MegaETH opened in February as the first real-time blockchain. 50+ apps on day one. $40M TVL. Then a points programme paid users to use those apps. TVL doubled to $246M in two weeks. Three and a half weeks later the team ended it early. By November the whole chain held $12M, 95% off the peak. ETH barely moved, so it wasn't the market. It had the budget, the engineering and a real technical edge. The problem was ORDER. Almost none of the 54 apps needed the speed. A swap on a fast chain is still a swap. The points paid people to turn up and nothing gave them a reason to stay. I see the same pattern on every new chain: → Apps that would run anywhere, so they do → Points that rent users for a season → TVL that walks the week the emissions stop Hyperliquid did it in the order that works. Be different enough that users change what they do. Win the few hundred who make a market. Then pay for growth. It now holds $2.4B, and ICE has taken a stake in a market built on it. The full case, including how 100 addresses did 81% of Hyperliquid's volume and the four questions to ask before you launch a chain, is in the reply 👇

In a red week your volume and TVL fall with everyone else's. If your key metric falls every time BTC does, you are measuring the market. The one worth reporting moves when you and your users do something.

The markets are horrible. ETFs flows are deep red, $643M last Friday alone. If you're out pitching your round and selling that line as the reason growth slowed, expect investor commits to be deathly quiet. Macro is easy to blame. The market fell for everyone. Your churn is yours.

Robotics startups raised USD 9.9 billion in Q3. Last week's biggest rounds went to AI chips, robotics and a prediction market. Crypto is not the current theme investors are is chasing this quarter. Your round depends on your own numbers. In tough markets, user growth is harder to sell. Retention tells and revenue are what I'd lead with. Your product works so well your users stay and are willing to pay to do so.

Great to be joining the Umbra team to discuss Umbra V2; privacy that truly works without the trade-offs.

On-chain privacy without the trade-offs. Privacy you can use, and want to use every day, and for every thing. That is what @umbraprivacy is building with V2, and I am delighted and proud to have joined as an advisor to help build it. A few weeks ago the entire team flew in to work with me in a comprehensive strategic workshop. A full week, in person, every part of their new build on the table. The brief we set was simple to say and hard to do: make sure Umbra V2 actually solves privacy, not just adds another product to the pile. On-chain privacy has always forced a trade-off. Every tool asks people too much: technical skill, high costs, long waits, or a question mark over where they stand with the law. Every product in the category asks users to accept at least one of those. So we drew a hard line: no evolution of the existing playbook, no inherited trade-offs. Privacy only matters at scale when it becomes a habit, part of everyday life. And it cannot be just a transactional system. It has to be a safe haven, a place where people keep everything they own and never worry whether there’s any risk to it staying that way. Getting there took a full revision of the company, end to end. Product definition, strategy, architecture, growth, roadmap, all of it run through best-in-class methodologies, with a team that never once flinched at the hard questions, or the hard work. What came out is why I am writing this. Umbra V2 is a standout, and not just in privacy: a user experience simple enough to be part of everyday use, resting on private architecture that concedes nothing underneath. What Umbra has is unique, and it is positioned to shake up far more than the privacy sector. What the team achieved in that week was amazing. What they are achieving now is more incredible as they build out crypto’s new money system. I'm excited to continue working with them as the future of privacy comes to life. Thirty years of building startups teaches you to recognise a special team when you're in the room with one. I just spent a week in that room.