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Two trends are quietly playing out in DeFi: (1) Intent-based DEXs are growing market share (2) Private market makers are filling more of this order flow The obvious takeaway is that the utility of AMMs beyond long-tail tokens is becoming increasingly unclear Users simply want

Visa launching their own stablecoin-linked cards in LATAM will do more for global stablecoin adoption than most people intuitively realize One of the missing pieces today is the ability to save in stablecoins while simultaneously spend with merchants in local currencies – all

Decentralization will always be a means to an end (eg censorship resistance, regulatory arb etc), but never the end itself The sooner that we accept this as an industry, the sooner we can principally optimize for what end-users actually want

One of the more underappreciated features of blockchains is programmatic leverage The ability to loop one’s exposure to yielding products is uniquely possible on a single state asset ledger It's possible this is the killer use case that brings the next $100b in RWAs on chain

Underappreciated killer use case for stablecoins: unlocking a geographic arbitrage for fintechs Ramp CEO, "Stablecoin-backed cards will allow Ramp to expand globally and issue cards in local markets we could never serve before" By circumventing local banking integrations using

The 2-3% that merchants pay to issuers is not a function of antiquated infrastructure — it compensates (1) credit risk and (2) card rewards Stablecoins don’t solve the former and the latter is path dependent It’s hard to see a world where stablecoins replace domestic rails The

Perhaps this is saying the quiet part out loud but institutions like Blackrock and Franklin Templeton are principally using blockchains like Ethereum and Solana as a distribution mechanism to increase their AUM and clip more management fees Not only does tokenization not unlock

From first principles, perps are an incredibly elegant financial product: - Make directional bets with leverage - Support for any arbitrary asset as long as a robust oracle exists (including equities, FX, commodities, "social assets" etc) - Self-correcting through funding

Thought experiment: If projects in each respective layer of the trading stack — front-ends, DEXs, token issuers, chains — increased their take rate, who is most likely to lose market share? For example, if today Axiom increased their take rate 50 bps, would they lose market

Circle — a business that earns a net interest margin — is now trading at 146x 2024 earnings The only way to interpret this information is public markets are incredibly bullish on the growth of stablecoins

Once again, it’s more nuanced than this The additional $2.80 that goes to issuing banks for credit card transactions is a function of — (1) credit risk and (2) funding card rewards Intuitively, stablecoins don’t solve this A better comparison is debit card transactions, which

Stablecoins are the next logical evolution of closed-loop payment networks Historically, large merchants like Starbucks and Target built out their own internal payment networks in an attempt to circumvent fees paid to card networks and banks Users upload funds onto their app →

When you take the “who owns the end user?” question to its logical end, it’s not blockchains nor apps, but rather the tokens themselves that own the end user A simple thought experiment proves this: why do you use one blockchain over another? It’s not because of the chain