Topher (@TopherGMI) header
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Los Angeles
Joined July 2019
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Topher retweeted
In crypto, the liquid token market over the last 18-24 months grew increasingly allergic to a three things: 1. token overhang via unlocks 2. token overhang via inefficient emissions 3. siphoning of protocol value away from token holders As a result, we saw a stage of extreme token nihilism followed by a set of projects that identified they need to prove to the market that 1-3 are being solved first. Buybacks solve all three, with a single mechanism. So, in crypto, when a company starts doing buybacks, it is not because they are unable to innovate anymore, but rather, a simple signal to the market that they can now begin to trust the asset issued by the protocol (token). nitter.gq/kidponga/article/20113…
This is fundamentally flawed analysis The most junior analyst on Wall Street knows that when a company starts doing stock buybacks, it's because they can't innovate anymore By this logic, FTT was a good bid Why should I buy a token that can't attract new marginal buyers?
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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, $CAKE, solana:jtojtomepa8beP8AuQc6eXt5FriJwfFMwQx2v2f9mCL, ethereum:0x5a98fcbea516cf06857215779fd812ca3bef1b32 etc and heads towards billions of TVL and 9 figure annual revenue. If you pattern match too hard to "L2 bad" or "HyperEVM sucks", it's from a place of being too 🏳️‍🌈🐻-pilled and/or lazy research.
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No words This industry is stuck in eternal hell until this trash is kicked to the curb In any other situation, these KOLs are rotting in a state penitentiary
JUST IN: FOMO TRADING VOLUME IS DOWN 95% FROM IT’S PEAK 2 MONTHS AGO
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I fear those of us in PR sometimes forget that journalists want to write stories they’re excited about. That’s how it felt when Aerodrome and Velodrome came together as Aero last week, bringing both exchanges onto one platform across seven networks. Some of the reporters and creators covering it were genuinely happy to see the team reach this milestone. That didn’t start with the announcement. Over the past year, the team regularly shared their vision for the industry, their achievements along the way, and commentary on important trends. They became trusted voices, and each of those moments gave journalists a reason to get to know them and their mission. So when the big news came, it wasn’t a cold pitch. It was the next chapter of a story people were already following. Congrats to the @aeroxyz team on a massive leap forward!
Today, Aerodrome and Velodrome merged into @aeroxyz 💥🛫 Consolidating one token into an upgraded DEX model, launching across seven chains. Read the key takeaways below 👇
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$AERO's first week as one DEX shows why the merge happened. Tokenized stock volume last week: → Aero $416M → Uniswap $395M → metric $244M → Raydium $196M Wonder what the first month will bring.
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years ago this would be nothing but a dream, now we take these things for granted
This is the only place in the ENTIRE WORLD where a regular person like you and me can buy a real 1:1 backed AI stock and borrow dollars against it Years ago this would nothing but a dream, now we take these things for granted All on Solana, built on @kamino
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$300B $20B $75B $3.5B $0.6B $31B
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The strongest token of the year @Kinetiq_xyz kinetiq:native Study connecting real pmf + low valuation tge + agrressive buybacks + an elite team @0xOmnia
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The cursed $ETH price action is justified For @BitMNR, pivoting to @HyperliquidX is the only sane option... @fundstrat's legacy is on the line here @SBF_FTX Effective Altruism vs @Chameleon_jeff American Dynamism The rational investor's decision is obvious... Hyperliquid
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ppl need to study smarter
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Everyone who's looking at $AERO price post update thinks it was a failure. Everyone who's looking at global market share, holder revenue, efficiency of emissions, volume share growth on new chains etc thinks it was a success. dromos.kitchen/dashboards/ae… Given that a lot of features aren't even live yet (MEV recapture, Autopilot, emissions migrated and properly directed, aggregators picking it up etc), I think we're sitting at the inflection point of price diverging from fundamentals. And the fundamentals are only going to get better from here as the update goes fully live; we're currently seeing the absolute floor of the new model's performance. Think we're going to look back in a few weeks/months and realize that the market lazily decided that bad PA during a broader slump meant the update was a failure before letting the actual data come in. Adding more $AERO here. If the market is in for a worse slump, it'll probably bleed disproportionately due to increasingly losing this narrative battle, but I think if you're constructive (i.e not a 🏳️‍🌈🐻), it has great R:R here at $0.65-0.70.
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In the age of crypto where most analysts have capitulated on doing real DD, @YanLiberman has been prolific and thorough DDing $GRASS He's walked me through the thesis and rebuttals a dozen different ways. Not fading.
No equity company sits above $GRASS. The token is the asset. @0xdrej on how Grass is structured and why it matters for holders The Grass Foundation is ownerless, faces every customer and owns all the IP. Wynd Labs is a service provider to it, approved by directors with no stake in Wynd, and the Wynd team are token holders themselves Grass also owns its infrastructure, where most web access startups rent it. Every dollar reinvested makes the network better instead of paying vendors more They’ve been shipping products one at a time, so I asked what he’d do with a war chest. His answer was to run every initiative at once “Our mission for Grass is for Grass to become the way in which AI accesses information”
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🆕The highly anticipated Anthropic ($ANT) pre-IPO perpetual from @tradexyz on @HyperliquidX is now live on WSL HYPE <GO>:
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Topher retweeted
was a good week for @Collector_Crypt ngl
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TIL Uniswap's treasury sells 43M worth of tokens per month what kind of work do they need to fund there
This quoted post is unavailable.
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The fact that growing revenue is still viewed as a "narrative" and not "obviously the only thing that matters when making an investment" shows how badly the VCs, Coinbase/Binance, the media, and Bitcoin-only shops corrupted the brains of crypto users, investors, and casual observers. Hard to believe a cohort of investors still own and shill inflationary tokens (like L1s or L2s) that accrue no economic value from the applications built upon the chain, or memecoins, or "currencies" when there are real businesses with good tokenomics available to the masses. The investable universe is small and not hard to research ar.ca/blog/the-four-ways-to-… ar.ca/blog/the-new-crypto-al…
Revenue has been one of the strongest narratives this year. People will buy tokens of projects that actually make money. Top 15 projects by revenue in 2026: @HyperliquidX - $HYPE - $526.7M @pumpfun - $PUMP - $390.5M @Collector_Crypt - $CARDS - $90.4M @edgeX_exchange - $EDGE - $86.8M @aeroxyz - $AERO - $66.8M @aave - $AAVE - $62.0M @papertrade_xyz - $PAPER - $58.4M @Uniswap - $UNI - $57.7M @JupiterExchange - $JUP - $55.8M @chainlink - $LINK - $47.5M @PancakeSwap - $CAKE - $43.1M @MeteoraAG - $MET - $35.8M @Lighter_xyz - $LIT - $34.6M @ether_fi - $ETHFI - $33.4M @ponsdotfamily - $PONS - $28.3M This is one of the easiest crypto narratives to understand. You don’t need to decode a whitepaper to see that people are paying to use a product. The next thing I look at: how much of that revenue flows back to the token. Here’s how the top 15 changed throughout the year ↓
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We 100% support @Blockworks’ comment letter on the SEC’s Regulation Crypto Assets proposal. Transparency is crypto’s #1 problem, and solving it is table stakes if this industry wants a future.
We 100% support @Blockworks’ comment letter on the SEC’s Regulation Crypto Assets proposal. Transparency is crypto’s #1 problem, and solving it is table stakes if this industry wants a future.
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Hypothetically... how does one kick off said process
BREAKING: President Trump reveals his new anti-fraud program set up to reward people who expose fraud with a 1% commission on the money uncovered. "If you turn somebody in and you, let's say report and you find $1 billion, we are giving a commission to that person of 1%."
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
DOJ's published guidance caps individual whistleblower rewards at up to $30,000 per tip, not an uncapped 1% of fraud uncovered, with a total program fund of $25 million. A $1 billion fraud tip would not yield a $10 million payout under the official program rules. newsweek.com/trump-vance-of… foxnews.com/politics/trump…
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