Topher (@TopherGMI) header
Topher (@TopherGMI) profile picture
Los Angeles
Joined July 2019
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Topher retweeted
233K AERO Bought and Burned 🔥 A second buyback and burn of AERO has been executed this week. The Momentum Fund is designed with a rules-based approach, scaling deployment based on market conditions and concentrating resources when it matters most.
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Listen, I know we're all panicking about the hack, but there are a ton of other important things happening in crypto right now too $AERO just posted its first week on 7 chains: 1. DEX volume: #2 in the world 2. Tokenized stocks: #1 exchange 3. New chains: revenue tripled 4. Supply: first burn done 5. Price: down 23% (hack pushed the whole market down) Four of five are going the right way. Naturally, the fifth is the one everyone cares about Alex Cutler @wagmiAlexander, CEO of Dromos Labs, the team behind @aeroxyz, has been posting the numbers all week Biggest update first: Aero is now the #2 DEX in the world by 24-hour volume. $826M on Thursday, second only to Uniswap ($2.2B) and just ahead of PancakeSwap ($812M) By chain, it's #1 on Base, Optimism and Ink Ethereum. Saturday night, Alex had Aero at 2.6% of Ethereum volume. By Wednesday morning he was posting it as the #3 venue on mainnet: $59M in 24 hours, a 6.1% share, behind only Uniswap and Fluid Uniswap still does 70% of it. I hold $UNI too, but what AERO is doing is important too Stocks. When Alex came on @MilkRoadDaily in August, the first four stock tokens had been live on Aerodrome for a week. His words: "in one week, we carved out about 25% of the total market" Since the Aero launch, the team says it's the #1 exchange for tokenized equities, across every stock and every chain. This matters. A lot. It will matter more as more assets are tokenized. New chains. In that same Saturday post, Alex said Aero had flipped 50% of the volume on Arc and taken 11.6% of Robinhood Chain and 3.1% of Arbitrum. "This was supposed to just be the migration week" The revenue is small so far, but here's what I've seen. Robinhood Chain is at $92K lifetime, up from $29K last weekend. Ethereum mainnet is at $81K, up from $25K Base is at $511.6M, so these are still small. They also more than tripled in about five days Supply. On Wednesday the Momentum Fund ran the first buyback of the Aero era and burned 174K AERO. That's about $120K worth, and Alex's take was "Just the start." Clearly, since they just started. 48.5% of all AERO is staked, locked for 3.9 years on average, and 100% of exchange revenue goes to those stakers Price. AERO is down ~23% on the week. If you hold it on @coinbase, AERO and VELO sends and receives pause Nov 2-4 for the migration One week in, it's #2 on Robinhood Chain and Arbitrum. Which one do you think it takes over first? I'm monitoring this situation. Closely. Full disclosure: I own $AERO in my Milk Road PRO portfolio, where it's up 46.9%. $UNI (+44.9%) and $SKY (+38.9%) are in there with it Try Milk Road PRO for $1 for 7 days, link in the replies
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Topher retweeted
This seals it imo... Hyperliquid has crossed the rubicon If you think about it, all of crypto should trade as beta to hyperliquid:native instead of bitcoin:native at this point
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Topher retweeted
no confirmations in this post, but if you take this at face value, TradeXYZ raised capital in HYPE no more questions re: alignment
Of the 3.75M HYPE sold OTC last month, 3.125M HYPE was staked on one wallet with the Hyperliquid Strategies x Unit validator. The remaining 625K HYPE was sent to another wallet on HyperEVM, where it stayed inactive for almost three weeks before sending 1 HYPE to a new wallet yesterday. hyperevmscan.io/tx/0x390596b… That new wallet was funded the same day, through a few hops, by a wallet with multiple links to wallets used by TradeXYZ to buy tickers on Hyperliquid. The 625K HYPE has now been transferred to the new wallet, moved from HyperEVM to Hypercore. hypurrscan.io/address/0x5a4c… Not 100% sure what this means or why the HYPE was split, but my main theory is that ICE was indeed the buyer of the 3.75M HYPE, which remains unconfirmed, and that the 625K HYPE may have been transferred to TradeXYZ as part of ICE’s investment. The onchain link strongly suggests that the 625K HYPE belongs to TradeXYZ.
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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, $CAKE, solana:jtojtomepa8beP8AuQc6eXt5FriJwfFMwQx2v2f9mCL, ethereum:0x5a98fcbea516cf06857215779fd812ca3bef1b32 etc and heads towards billions of TVL and 9 figure annual revenue. If you pattern match too hard to "L2 bad" or "HyperEVM sucks", it's from a place of being too 🏳️‍🌈🐻-pilled and/or lazy research.
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I fear those of us in PR sometimes forget that journalists want to write stories they’re excited about. That’s how it felt when Aerodrome and Velodrome came together as Aero last week, bringing both exchanges onto one platform across seven networks. Some of the reporters and creators covering it were genuinely happy to see the team reach this milestone. That didn’t start with the announcement. Over the past year, the team regularly shared their vision for the industry, their achievements along the way, and commentary on important trends. They became trusted voices, and each of those moments gave journalists a reason to get to know them and their mission. So when the big news came, it wasn’t a cold pitch. It was the next chapter of a story people were already following. Congrats to the @aeroxyz team on a massive leap forward!
Today, Aerodrome and Velodrome merged into @aeroxyz 💥🛫 Consolidating one token into an upgraded DEX model, launching across seven chains. Read the key takeaways below 👇
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$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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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 $0.65-0.70.
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🆕The highly anticipated Anthropic ($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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MAYBE I WAS WRONG ABOUT BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY I wrote about how I always used to make fun of the guys who said things like "Bitcoin is speculative, but the underlying blockchain technology is interesting." And now I think maybe they kinda had a point.
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I think all of the buy the rumor sell the news $AERO traders have already exited ahead of tomorrow's launch. Looks like the traders that actually realize what is about to happen are now front-running the fundamentals
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$AERO is the only altcoin on my watchlist that looks decent right now...
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Aero is launching next week, here are six of the analytics I will be looking at to see how large of an impact this upgrade makes to AERO and sAERO allocators.
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1/ Hyperliquid generated $716M in revenue over the last 12 months and is growing rapidly. One protocol runs the largest liquid-staking token on the chain, runs a perp/spot exchange on top of it, and plans to launch Hyperliquid's first L2. A thread on $KNTQ 🧵
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