Here’s what I’ll cover today:

🔍 How I decide where to buy altcoins

📊 Crypto chart of the week

🗞️ The latest DeFi news

🔍 How I decide where to buy altcoins

If we’re talking about BTC, buying at $81,000 instead of $87,000 during a bull market won’t necessarily make a big difference in the long run.

But altcoins are significantly more volatile than BTC.

The timing of your altcoin buys matters, because your profit can be significantly higher if you buy an altcoin at $0.2 instead of $0.27, for example.

In today’s newsletter, I want to share how I decide which price levels to buy altcoins at.

I’ll take the NEAR chart as an example to explain my strategy:

For tokens that have been live for at least 1-2 years, I generally focus on the daily and weekly timeframes when analyzing their charts.

In the chart above, I marked the key price levels (support zones) where NEAR has historically struggled to break above or below with a white line.

Identifying these levels is pretty straightforward. You just need to look for the price levels that have been tested multiple times. I highlighted in yellow the areas where NEAR struggled to break through the $3.526 and $4.562 price levels.

These are the support and resistance levels I would pay the most attention to.

Next, what I usually do is compare BTC’s recent performance with the performance of the token I want to buy. (For this example, the token is NEAR)

CoinGecko has a useful “Compare” feature where you can add multiple tokens.

I added BTC and NEAR and got the 7-day chart below.

As you can see above, NEAR has outperformed BTC over the past 7 days, showing strong relative strength. Relative strength to BTC is exactly what I want to see before buying an altcoin, as it could signal that its local bottom is near.

Given this, if I want to increase my NEAR exposure, my next move would be to set a buy order for NEAR just above its nearest support level.

As shown at the beginning of this issue, that level is $4.562, marked with a white line.

The reason is that if NEAR drops back to $4.562, there’s a decent chance, based on the past price action, that this will be the local bottom, giving me a very good entry price.

And that’s essentially my strategy for buying altcoins.

To sum it up, this is what it involves:

• Mark the key support levels of the token I want to buy on the daily chart

• Check how the token has performed relative to BTC over the past week

• If, and only if, that token has recently held up relatively well compared to BTC, I will place a buy order just a bit above its closest support level

If BTC is down 6% in a week and the altcoin I want to buy is down 10%, I think it’s still fine to place buy orders for it at the next key support level.

But to give another example, if BTC is down 6% and the altcoin I want to buy is down 18%, I usually don’t think it’s a good idea to set buy orders for it yet, as its recent weakness could indicate it still has a lot of room to fall before it bottoms.

That’s how I approach buying altcoins, and this has worked well for me in the past.

With that said, I hope you found this guide helpful!

Hopefully, the market recovers soon, and we’ll be talking only about taking profits rather than buying the dip.

Chart of the week

Aerodrome captured 50%market share in the on-chain FX volume

Crypto meme of the week😂

The latest developments in DeFi

Aerodrome launched Aero, a new multichain DEX

Lighter CEO said they’ll apply for a US derivatives license next month

Solana’s transaction finality dropped from 12.8 seconds to 150 milliseconds

Pendle launched PendleLoop, enabling to long/short any token w/ leverage

Stacks' DEX volume hit a 12-month high, with Bitflow being the leading DEX

Metric, a novel DEX that uses external oracles for asset pricing, went live

Ethereum staking hits a new record high of 35.9% of ETH supply

LayerZero announced plans to launch its own L1 blockchain on Nov. 30

Fluid’s proposal to launch Fluid DEX V2, a new DEX primitive, went live

NEAR Protocol introduced NEAR Business - a confidential multisig treasury for crypto-native teams

Pump fun integrated Hyperliquid-powered perps

Arbitrum announced incentives for projects adopting USDG stablecoin

BlackRock filed for another Bitcoin ETF with downside protection

Hyperliquid Policy Center urged the SEC to regulate airdrops

That’s all for this week!

Until next time,

The DeFi Investor

Subscribe now

Want to sponsor this newsletter?

Please send me a DM on Twitter (X). I have a sponsorship deck that I can send you.

CrunchDAO is a decentralized collective intelligence network of thousands of top engineers competing to solve real-world problems.

Check it out here!

GM friends.

Here’s what I’ll cover today:

🔍 Why did crypto crash?

📊 Crypto chart of the week

🗞️ The latest DeFi news

🔍 Why did crypto crash?

The market has been pretty choppy over the past 1-2 weeks.

I think most of this weakness comes down to the current macro situation, although a few unfortunate events have also happened within crypto.

For example, Ledger, one of the most popular hardware wallet producers, recently discovered that devices sold by certain authorized resellers in Asia contained unauthorized hardware implants.

Some of these resellers are believed to have added the implants themselves.

Those implants then allowed attackers to see the seed phrases of people who bought them and steal their funds. While the exact amount lost is not confirmed, it’s estimated that a whopping ~$90M was stolen.

This incident really sucks because the affected people did everything right in theory:

They bought a hardware wallet to self-custody their assets more safely, yet their wallets were still drained. I guess the only lesson here is to buy hardware wallets only from official websites and avoid third-party resellers.

But this security breach is certainly a big setback for the entire industry.

Moving on to macro, several macro-related developments have also contributed to the recent market weakness in my opinion:

1. US CPI inflation data came in at 3.7%, above expectations - This triggered a correction across all major financial markets, including crypto

Many investors panicked because CPI data coming in above expectations makes it more likely that the Fed will raise interest rates again. Another rate hike would make borrowing more expensive and risk-on assets less attractive.

2. The South Korean stock market experienced a major crash - This matters because a lot of South Koreans have significant exposure to crypto, and this stock market crash could have prompted some of them to sell some of their crypto

3. The Russia-Ukraine energy ceasefire failed to hold - Trump’s announcement of an energy ceasefire initially raised hopes of lower oil prices and lower inflation, which would have been bullish for markets. But within hours, the ceasefire broke, ultimately pushing oil prices higher instead of lower.

None of these events is catastrophic on its own, but together they’ve created a pretty unfavorable environment for risk assets over the past few days.

And I suspect that’s why the market crashed.

The good news is that, according to Polymarket, there’s still a 67% probability that the Fed will leave interest rates unchanged in October (instead of hiking them).

If the Fed doesn’t hike rates, as many investors now expect, this could provide some relief for crypto and financial markets in general. And I think this is the most likely scenario at this moment.

But we still have ~2 weeks to wait for the next FED interest rate decision.

In collaboration with CrunchDAO

World’s largest decentralized AI competition platform

Most forecasting models are developed by siloed teams.

CrunchDAO is taking a different approach:

It turns machine learning into an open competition, bringing thousands of independent researchers together to build models that address real-world problems.

Institutions provide datasets and define the problem, while contributors build models, submit their solutions, and compete for rewards based on the quality of their work.

Here’s how it works:

• CrunchDAO attracted 11,000+ ML engineers and 1,200+ PhDs across more than 100 countries to its platform

• Businesses can leverage CrunchDAO’s extensive network to develop better models by launching a competition on CrunchDAO

• Once a competition is launched, over 12,000 data scientists compete to solve certain problems and prove their expertise

• At the end, the businesses receive the winning models and pay exclusively for the performance delivered

Crunch’s goal is to make AI development more open, efficient, and globally inclusive.

Top institutions like the Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard and ADIA Lab have already used Crunch and achieved great results.

Check out CrunchDAO here!

Chart of the week

Jupiter Lend became the largest money market on Solana

Crypto meme of the week😂

The latest developments in DeFi

Papertrade, a 1000x leverage app built on Hyperliquid, went live

Chainlink launched a solution that enables DeFi apps to accept 1-click deposits from any blockchain

INFINIT announced it will open deposits for APEX MS2, an institutional-grade trading vault, on Oct. 28

Bybit and Mantle introduced mStocks, an upcoming tokenized equities product backed 1:1 by real stock shares

Stacks revealed its plans for the next 3 years, which include launching self-custodial Bitcoin lending and compliant BTC privacy

Derive team proposed expanding Derive into US regulated markets

Solana network became 2x faster

Starknet launched Shadow Accounts for private DeFi interactions

Aave launched incentives for its new tokenized stocks market

Base launched an Earn & Borrow product for stablecoin yield

Pancakeswap proposed cutting CAKE token emissions by 69%

Pyth allocated 100% of its DAO revenue to buybacks

Plasma partnered with Visa to launch multi-currency stablecoin cards

That’s all for this week!

Until next time,

The DeFi Investor

Subscribe now

Want to sponsor this newsletter?

Please send me a DM on Twitter (X). I have a sponsorship deck that I can send you.

Here’s what I’ll cover today:

🔍 The crypto reflexivity trade

📊 Crypto chart of the week

🗞️ The latest DeFi news

🔍 The crypto reflexivity trade

In today’s newsletter, I want to talk about reflexivity, which I think is one of the most useful concepts for better understanding financial markets.

The basic idea is that market prices aren’t driven only by fundamentals.

Investors form expectations about certain assets based not only on reality, but also on their perception of reality and what they expect to happen next.

For example, when BTC shows the first signs of strength after a bear market, more people start paying attention to it and buying it. This attracts even more capital and attention, creating a self-reinforcing loop that eventually drives the price much higher.

BTC’s fundamentals don’t necessarily improve just because its price goes up, but people’s perception of BTC can improve as its price keeps rising.

This seems to be happening now with BTC’s latest major rally from $63k to $83k+, and we saw similar dynamics in previous cycles after the bottom was in.

Basically, as prices go up, significantly more people jump on the trend and start believing that the uptrend will continue.

Ok, so why does all this matter?

Well, I think understanding reflexivity can help you become a better trader.

Almost all crypto assets are reflexive to some degree, but I would argue some are way more reflexive than others, and the latter tend to outperform.

I would broadly categorize crypto assets into 2 groups:

• Assets whose reflexivity is based purely on attention (e.g. BTC) - BTC goes up → more people notice it and buy it → BTC goes up → even more people buy it

As the price rises, a positive feedback loop develops and drives more demand, but the fundamentals of BTC don’t directly improve just because its price is higher.

• Assets with both attention-based reflexivity and economic reflexivity - I would give AAVE or ENA as examples here.

As the market starts going up, altcoins in general, including AAVE or ENA, obviously get more attention, which is ultimately beneficial for their price action.

But on top of that, the fundamentals of certain altcoins also improve.

How?

In Aave’s case, for example, higher crypto prices lead to more TVL as the value of the collateral deposited on Aave rises, which also increases the protocol revenue.

In Ethena’s case, higher crypto prices lead to higher funding rates, which lead to a higher sUSDe yield, more sUSDe demand, and ultimately more revenue for Ethena.

This creates a much stronger reflexive mechanism:

Price goes up → the project gets more attention → the protocol usage and revenue increase → price goes up further

By economic reflexivity, I mean that the same market conditions driving a token higher can also improve the economics of the underlying protocol.

This is important because a token becoming more expensive doesn’t necessarily mean it is becoming more overvalued if the fundamentals are improving at the same time.

This may help explain why tokens like AAVE and ENA have outperformed most altcoins over the past 2 months. They benefited not only from the broader market rally and increased attention, but also from improving protocol metrics.

Some assets like BTC are reflexive primarily because their rising prices attract more demand.

Others are reflexive because higher prices also improve their fundamentals on top of attracting more demand, and I think those are likely to perform best in a bull run.

Now, just to clarify, this doesn’t make BTC a bad investment.

BTC is actually my biggest holding rn, as I see it as the lowest-risk crypto investment.

But if we're talking about altcoins, for me it makes sense to bet mostly on tokens that also benefit from economic reflexivity, as described above, because I think those have much greater potential to outperform the market.

How do you identify these kinds of opportunities?

I covered AAVE and ENA as two examples of highly reflexive assets, but I also want to share my general framework for finding other opportunities like this.

A good way to start is with a market thesis and then work backwards.

If you think BTC will continue going up, then ask yourself which protocols are likely to see the biggest surge in revenue because of it. Or if you think on-chain trading activity will rise, look for projects that would directly benefit from higher volumes.

Off the top of my head, these are a few general crypto categories that I believe could perform very well in a bull run:

• DEXs - higher speculation → more trading volume → more DEX fees and revenue

• Stablecoin protocols - the total stablecoin supply surged to new ATHs and beyond in all previous bull markets, and I don’t think this time is different

• Lending protocols - higher asset prices → higher collateral values → more borrowing as the demand for leverage rises → more revenue

There are other categories as well, but I’d say these are among the most obvious ones.

DeFiLlama has a helpful section called “https://defillama.com/categories” that makes it easy to see the market leaders in each sector.

My suggestion for anyone looking for highly reflexive altcoins is to go through each sector you are bullish on using DeFiLlama and identify the projects you find most compelling from an investment perspective.

Look at their tokenomics, business model, competitors, recent growth, team track record, and, most importantly, think about how their revenue and usage would change if your market thesis plays out.

The whole idea behind economic reflexivity in crypto is simple:

You are not just trying to randomly predict which token goes up. You are looking for protocols where the market pump itself improves their fundamentals, and where those improving fundamentals can then lead to even higher prices.

Used right, I think this can be a very useful framework for identifying outperformers.

Chart of the week

The total crypto revenue shared with token holders hit a new annual high in September 2026

Crypto meme of the week😂

The latest developments in DeFi

EtherFi introduced its own stablecoin powered by Ethena

Lido revealed Lido Lending, its own lending platform

Lighter announced the pre-market listing of the Variational token

Hyperliquid’s $200M annual revenue-sharing deal with Circle went live

Derive v3, an improved on-chain options trading platform, went live

Polymarket CEO said they’re “exploring an on-chain asset tied to Polymarket’s economy”, but without giving a launch timeline

Superform introduced Earn Stocks - DeFi yield strategies for tokenized stocks

Aptos introduced MonoMove - its biggest network scalability upgrade to date

Tenero V2, an upgraded Bitcoin DeFi analytics platform, went live

Ondo Finance launched a platform bringing tokenized pre-IPOs on-chain

Arbitrum is adopting USDG as its ecosystem dollar, with the revenue from USDG reserves flowing back into the Arbitrum ecosystem

Virtuals introduced Virtual App - a personal AI app with access to markets

Blast and Abstract announced they are shutting down

Sanctum burned 25% of its total token supply

Orca and Loopscale merged into a new project called Formation

That’s all for this week!

Until next time,

The DeFi Investor

Subscribe now

Want to sponsor this newsletter?

Please send me a DM on Twitter (X). I have a sponsorship deck that I can send you.

DeFi Dev Corp. is running the MicroStrategy playbook for Solana. Check it out here!

GM friends.

Here’s what I’ll cover today:

🔍My playbook for the revenue meta

📊 Crypto chart of the week

🗞️ The latest DeFi news

🔍 My playbook for the revenue meta

The past few weeks have been very rewarding for bulls.

BTC finally broke above the $83k resistance level, and as long as it doesn’t dip below $82k-$83k on strong volume and stays above these levels on higher timeframes, I don’t see many reasons to be bearish.

But what’s been particularly interesting about this rally is that most of the altcoins that outperformed the market are tied to revenue-generating projects.

I’m talking about tokens like HYPE, LIT, ENA, UNI, which are up massively.

In this issue, I wanted to cover the framework I use to find profitable on-chain businesses and what I look for before investing in their tokens.

Let’s dive in:

First, the primary tool I use in my research is DeFiLlama.

It has a ton of useful features, as many of you might already know, but for this post, there’s one dashboard on DeFiLlama I want to focus on:

Revenue (https://defillama.com/revenue)

As the name implies, it shows the top projects by revenue.

Whenever I want to buy a new altcoin and I am not sure what to buy, I often start my research by sorting the projects on this dashboard by 30-day revenue.

From there, I scroll through the list and search for projects that catch my attention.

I’ll take Aave, the 28th project by 30-day revenue, as an example and show you exactly how I conduct my research and what I am looking at.

The next step is to click it to open the protocol’s dashboard and add 3 metrics to the chart on the right side: TVL, $AAVE price, and revenue.

The first thing that stands out in this chart is that Aave’s TVL, revenue, and token price are all significantly below their October 2025 highs.

Part of that decline happened due to the rsETH exploit in April, which triggered a meaningful TVL outflow from Aave. But the main reason for this TVL decrease in my view is that we’ve been in a bear market since last year.

In a bear market, the TVL of most dApps declines, and Aave has been no exception.

However, with market conditions improving recently, the chart above also shows that Aave TVL, revenue, and token price have begun to recover in the past 2-3 months.

And this is what makes me interested in researching it further.

Before I buy a revenue-generating token, I usually ask myself three questions:

1. Do I expect the protocol’s revenue to continue rising in the foreseeable future? (If its revenue is flat and not in a clear uptrend, its token is less likely to be attractive to other people as an investment, as markets are forward-looking)

2. Do token holders directly benefit from the protocol's success?

3. Does the protocol have any major upcoming catalyst that could drive more demand for its token?

In my opinion, assuming BTC goes higher, Aave will continue to attract new liquidity as it did over the past 2 months, since higher crypto prices will lead to more TVL and revenue, as a large share of user deposits on Aave are BTC-wrapped tokens and ETH.

So I think AAVE can be a reflexive asset that does well during uptrends thanks to this.

Regarding 2., Aave previously had a buyback mechanism, but it was paused following the rsETH exploit. This is not ideal, but the good news is that the Aave founder confirmed they are working on a proposal to restart buybacks.

There’s no timeline for this unfortunately, but I think this future tokenomics upgrade also serves as a catalyst that potentially makes the token more attractive to forward-looking investors, which may explain why $AAVE has performed so well lately.

And the upcoming public launch of the Aave App is another interesting future product catalyst that could bring more attention to the project.

Lastly, there are a few more things I take into consideration before buying a token:

• Are the project and its token popular on X in terms of mindshare? Crypto is an attention economy, which is why I wouldn’t personally invest in a token with no mindshare on CT unless I am convinced that will change soon. If you search for Aave on CT, you’ll see a lot of posts about it from people outside its team, which I think is a very good sign from a mindshare perspective

• Does the project have any serious competitors in its sector that have a good chance of stealing its market share? Morpho has been growing significantly faster than Aave in recent months, so I guess the answer is yes, even though I think both can continue to grow at once. But the issue I have with MORPHO token is that it has no value accrual mechanisms and the protocol generates no revenue, and the Morpho team didn’t indicate plans to change this in the near future, so if I had to choose between AAVE and the MORPHO token as an investment, I’d choose AAVE at this moment

• Is there any hot narrative on CT that Aave directly benefits from? AI, perps DEXs, privacy, and the revenue meta seem to be the most popular narratives on X right now. Aave is in no way related to the first three, but it’s a profitable on-chain business, so it benefits from the last one

To sum it all up:

For me personally, AAVE seems like a good token to hold right now, as it ticks most of the boxes I look for in a revenue-generating token.

In general, I am looking to invest in the tokens of projects with rising revenue metrics, clear product-market fit, an active community on CT, and at least one significant upcoming product/token catalyst.

I have a list of tokens that meet these criteria, and whenever BTC sees a big dip, I buy the tokens showing the most strength if I want more altcoin exposure.

With that said, I hope you found this research framework helpful!

I believe the tokens with decent fundamentals that are not just overhyped memecoins will continue performing well in this new cycle.

In partnership with DeFi Development Corp.

The MicroStrategy of Solana

Strategy turned a public company into a massive Bitcoin accumulation machine.

Now DeFi Development Corp. (DVDF) is doing the same for Solana.

DFDV’s strategy is simple: raise capital, buy SOL, stake it, earn yield, and use that growing treasury to help raise even more capital and accumulate SOL.

Its treasury has grown by roughly 10% in the last six weeks, with DFDV recently hitting a new milestone of 2.5 million SOL in total holdings. As a result, DFDV's stock price directly benefited from SOL’s latest rally.

Recently, DFDV has also added another piece to that flywheel: CHAD

• CHAD is DFDV’s Nasdaq-listed perpetual preferred stock, similar to Strategy’s STRC, but used to accumulate SOL

• CHAD was initially sold at $8.00 per share, and it currently carries a 13% annual dividend rate at a $10 stated value per share, with its trading price also currently floating between $8 and $10

• DFDV will issue new CHAD shares when CHAD is trading at $10+ to raise more capital and use those funds to accumulate more SOL

The idea behind CHAD is to design a lower-volatility perpetual stock instrument with daily dividends and senior exposure to the DFDV common stock.

But of course, this comes with several risks.

CHAD’s dividend rate is variable, the payments are not guaranteed, and its price could experience a serious downtrend during a major SOL price crash, as happened with STRC when BTC crashed.

Still, CHAD gives DFDV another way to finance its goal of buying as much SOL as possible without relying only on common-stock issuance.

Learn more about DFDV and CHAD here!

Chart of the week

ETH price is on track for its best quarter since Q1 2021

Crypto meme of the week😂

The latest developments in DeFi

Aerodrome announced plans to launch its new Aero DEX on Oct. 21

SEC gave projects the green light to conduct token buybacks legally

Chainlink launched CCIP 2.0 interoperability protocol

Aave V4 enabled borrowing against Coinbase’s tokenized stocks

Stacks founder Muneeb became the new CEO of Stacks Labs. STX price surged 30% in the next 24 hours following the news

Lighter announced they’ll soon roll out new products like options and Lighter EVM

Hyperliquid team announced they’re selling $320M of HYPE OTC

Kinetiq announced an “airdrop” that you have to pay to claim it 😅

Jumper’s ICO went live, with the TGE being planned for Q4

Moudinho launched stuckfunds, a free crypto tool that scans your wallets for unclaimed bridge withdrawals

Ethena announced it’s ending the token incentives for USDe. This could mean that its last Season 6 airdrop will happen soon

Open Standard launched its own stablecoin called OUSD

Near Intents was exploited for $3.8 million

Bitwise launched the first US Spot Near ETF

Arcus, the perps DEX built by the team behind dYdX, launched its S1 points program

That’s all for this week!

Until next time,

The DeFi Investor

Subscribe now

Want to sponsor this newsletter?

Please send me a DM on Twitter (X). I have a sponsorship deck that I can send you.

Apyx just launched aptUSD, a yield-bearing stablecoin fully backed by US Treasury Bills. Earn 3.5% APY and Apyx Points with aptUSD!

GM friends.

Here’s what I’ll cover today:

🔎Where does BTC go from here?

📊 Crypto chart of the week

🗞️ The latest DeFi news

🔎Where does BTC go from here?

The past few days have been quite eventful, to say the least.

With that in mind, in this issue I wanted to share a few market thoughts and what I expect to happen next.

Two days ago, the U.S. Senate failed to advance the CLARITY Act, one of the most important pieces of crypto legislation in the U.S.

Then yesterday, the US FED Chair also announced a 25 bps rate hike, which was supposed to be bearish but didn’t negatively impact crypto prices at all, as we have actually seen a small market pump in the past 24 hours.

What’s particularly interesting is the strength that the market is now showing.

Stocks dipped after the Fed decision, we’ve had plenty of bearish crypto news recently, and yet BTC and most altcoins have gone up over the past 24 hours.

BTC also didn’t break below the ~$75,500 support level for a sustained period despite testing it multiple times, which is also notable.

In my opinion, all of these things support the bull thesis that the latest BTC rally from $65k to $82k isn’t just a bull trap and that it might be the beginning of a new bull cycle, with the cycle bottom likely behind us.

These are a few of the main reasons why I shifted my view from a Q4 bottom to the cycle bottom already being in for BTC:

• Massive sudden rallies like BTC’s recent move from $65k to $82k have historically happened only after the bottom was already in. In the last bear market, there were plenty of bull traps, but most were slow grind-ups. BTC only started having explosive rallies once the cycle bottom was in.

• Trump has a strong incentive to avoid actions that could lead to a new market crash over the next 2 months. The midterm elections in the US are on November 3, and Democrats are currently ahead in national polling. So I think Trump will try to avoid escalating global conflicts or making other risky moves that could hurt markets and further weaken Republicans before the election takes place.

• BTC is now trading above its 200-day and 200-week exponential moving averages (EMAs), signaling that the uptrend has resumed. My only concern is that BTC has recently dipped below its 50-week EMA, which I also consider an important indicator, but that also happened plenty of times in 2023.

• The Q4 bottom view has become consensus in the past few months (I first talked about it in Q1 this year), and when all the market participants are waiting to buy at the same time, things often don’t go as planned, and BTC frontruns them.

In addition, BTC’s recent strength also makes me think the $65k → $82k move wasn’t just a fake pump. But there’s an important distinction here: I think the cycle bottom may be in. Whether the local bottom is in or not, I am not sure at all.

As I shared in a recent post on X, September is historically BTC’s worst month in terms of performance, and if you look at what happened before, BTC repeatedly tested its 200-day EMA and/or its 200-week EMA after its cycle bottoms.

Right now BTC’s 200-day EMA is at $73k and its 200-week EMA is at $68.8k, although as time passes, the 200-week EMA will keep rising if BTC doesn’t suddenly crash.

Considering this, I think a scenario where BTC goes to $71k-$72k before resuming the uptrend and hitting new local highs is also possible. But for me, as long as BTC doesn’t drop below its 200-week EMA, the bullish thesis remains intact.

In any case, I am not sitting on the sidelines waiting for $72k. I also think it’s possible we go straight to $82k and beyond from here.

I am already heavily allocated to the market, as I think the risk/reward is already very compelling here, with the downside being limited in my opinion.

BTC is by far my biggest holding, although I plan to increase my altcoin exposure over time. But ideally, I want to see BTC break above $82k on strong volume and make its first higher high before rotating my BTC exposure into altcoins, since I think that would be the perfect final confirmation that a new bull cycle has begun.

And that’s basically my current market view.

My advice to you is to listen to arguments from both bulls and bears and build your own thesis based on what you believe is most likely to happen.

No one has a crystal ball to know exactly what the market will do next, but the goal is to just take trades where the odds are in your favor.

If you ask me, I am personally bullish here.

Brought to you by Apyx

Put your idle stablecoins to work with aptUSD

Stablecoin issuers like Circle and Tether earn billions from their US T-bill reserves.

But USDC and USDT holders don’t really benefit from this, since none of that yield from Treasury Bills is shared with them.

Apyx, the first dividend-backed dollar protocol in crypto, has recently launched a new product called aptUSD to change this.

aptUSD is a new U.S. Treasury-backed yield-bearing token.

Here’s what makes it interesting:

• aptUSD holders get a 3.5% APY from US T-bills just for holding it

• Unlike US T-bills, which have a maturity date, aptUSD can be exited for USDC instantly with zero fees and no cooldown

• aptUSD holders earn boosted points from Apyx (24x Pips) until Oct. 12 on top of the 3.5% US Treasury yield

The token is currently live only on Ethereum, but it will soon expand to Solana too.

I think it’s an interesting product as it offers a direct way to access US T-bills on-chain, which are considered one of the world’s lowest-risk investments.

And the ability to exit it instantly to USDC is certainly a nice feature.

Check out aptUSD here!

Chart of the week

Uniswap v4’s trading volume hit a new ATH

Crypto meme of the week😂

The latest developments in DeFi

Circle launched its own L1 called Arc

SEC allowed trading tokenized stocks on-chain in the US

Aave introduced a new RWA Hub on Avalanche that will allow institutions to borrow against RWAs

Stacks launched a 3-month BTCfi campaign with 3 BTC in total rewards. You can participate by using DeFi apps Zest Protocol & Bitflow

Robinhood announced plans to enable voting rights for its tokenized stocks

Derive’s proposal to launch Derive v3, its biggest exchange upgrade yet, went live

Extended announced it is migrating to Arc blockchain

Morpho launched Direct Lending against the collateral assets of your choice

Kinetiq started burning all the KNTQ tokens it buys back

World, a Solana-native prediction market platform, went live

Zama Confidential Swap Protocol went live, enabling private swaps on Ethereum. On top of that, Zama also launched a new set of confidential Morpho vaults

US Clarity Act failed to pass. All democrats in the US Senate voted against it

Kraken’s parent company announced plans to bring Hyperliquid perps to the US

Balancer is shutting down. A proposal to distribute its treasury to BAL holders is live

That’s all for this week!

Until next time,

The DeFi Investor

Subscribe now

Want to sponsor this newsletter?

Please send me a DM on Twitter (X). I have a sponsorship deck that I can send you.

Here’s what I’ll cover today:

🔎Who benefits from Robinhood L2’s success?

📊 Crypto chart of the week

🗞️ The latest DeFi news

🔎Who benefits from Robinhood L2’s success?

The past few days have been absolutely wild for Robinhood Chain L2.

In the past 24h alone, it generated a whopping $4 million in daily revenue.

Yet as many of you know, most people use Robinhood Chain for trading memecoins. I personally think that memecoins are just a fast way to lose your money, as only 500 of the 429k total memecoin traders on Fomo made more than $1,000, according to a dashboard made by Foxy.

To me, this stat seems insane, and it’s the reason why I have no interest in trading memecoins. That said, there are several ways to capitalize on the Robinhood Chain hype even without gambling on memecoins.

Here are two strategies for that:

1. Look for the DeFi protocols that directly benefit from this trend

An example I can give you is Uniswap.

Its token UNI is up 38% this week, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

Because Uniswap is the main DEX for trading on Robinhood Chain and also launched a token launchpad there, its revenue has absolutely skyrocketed.

If Robinhood Chain continues to gain traction, Uniswap will also benefit, as increased memecoin trading volume will lead to higher revenue for Uniswap.

And this revenue is used for UNI buybacks.

So whenever there’s a memecoin season, for me it makes sense to look for the revenue-generating dApps that benefit the most from it and bet on their tokens.

When Solana memecoins boomed, Pump Fun’s revenue surged and PUMP pumped.

Now that we have a memecoin season on Robinhood Chain, Uniswap seems to be one of the biggest beneficiaries, and UNI is pumping.

At this moment, I think we are getting close to the late stages of the current Robinhood memecoin trend, so I don’t necessarily believe that UNI still has a lot of room to surge from there, but I wanted to share this example as I think it’s useful to adopt this kind of thinking to make money off narrative trading.

2. Provide liquidity to tokenized stock pools

The 2nd way to profit off Robinhood Chain’s current hype is to be a liquidity provider.

Pons, the most popular launchpad on Robinhood Chain, came up with an interesting idea: create liquidity pools that pair a tokenized stock with a memecoin.

These pools gained a lot of traction as retail is bidding memecoins like there’s no tomorrow, and because of that, more advanced users who are providing concentrated liquidity to pools like HOOD (tokenized stock) /USDG (stablecoin) are able to make a ton of money, as a lot of trading volume is going through these pools.

DeFi Ignas, for instance, shared how he was earning 4,000%+ APY a few days ago by providing liquidity to a HOOD/USDG pool on Robinhood Chain.

(HOOD is the tokenized stock of Robinhood)

Why? Because HOOD is also paired with memecoins in other liquidity pools, much of the memecoin trading volume flows through the HOOD/USDG pool as well when people swap USDG for a memecoin paired with HOOD.

You don’t need to LP highly volatile memecoins that might go to zero; you can just LP tokenized stocks and capitalize on this mania.

Now, you may ask, what’s the catch, or what are the downsides of doing this?

That’s a totally fair question, and there are a few things you should be aware of:

• Impermanent loss - When you provide liquidity on a DEX, if one of the assets in that LP pair that you chose moves too much in one direction, then you will incur a high impermanent loss when exiting the position

• These crazy yields will get diluted over time - As more people start providing liquidity to these pools, the yields will inevitably decrease a lot

• Concentrated liquidity provision on Uniswap requires selecting the right liquidity range - If you don’t select the range correctly and the assets you provide liquidity for go out of that range and don’t come back, you will have to adjust the range and incur a potentially high impermanent loss

• Providing liquidity to a tokenized stock/USDG pair means that you actually have to get exposure to that stock - If that stock goes down too much and you end up selling it at a low price, you will incur a loss (although it’s true that major stocks like NVDA or even HOOD are generally less volatile than altcoins)

I wanted to share these things as most people on CT seem to be focusing only on the positive aspects of LPing, but I think it’s important to also know the risks.

You can also use a tool like revert.finance to copytrade the best LPs on Robinhood Chain, but this requires doing a bit of research as well.

And my advice is to never provide liquidity directly to memecoin pools. If you want to try this strategy, do it only for tokenized stock/stablecoin type of pools.

If you wish to dive deeper, I think this tutorial from Stephen is also quite useful:

Providing concentrated liquidity is not necessarily easy, but if you learn how to do it right, it can be very profitable. Especially on Robinhood Chain, where retail traders are spending a lot of money on trading fees to buy memecoins right now.

The way I see it is this: LPing is like selling shovels during a gold rush.

To sum it up, I think it’s worth paying attention to what’s happening on Robinhood Chain.

While I am not a fan of memecoins, I think it’s interesting how memecoins ended up being paired with stocks there, the LP opportunities that this enables, and how memecoin mania is boosting the revenue of legit projects like Uniswap.

Whenever there’s a hot narrative, there are always a few smart ways to make money.

Chart of the week

Robinhood Chain generated 2x more revenue than Hyperliquid in the past 24h

Crypto meme of the week😂

The latest developments in DeFi

Ethena introduced Ethena Pay - its own DeFi neobank built on Avalanche

Hyperliquid is allegedly in talks with Kraken to enter the U.S. market

Variational released Swaps - an on-chain instrument for trading RWA markets with very low execution costs

EtherFi’s proposal to activate ETHFI token buybacks just passed

Solana’s proposal to double SOL disinflation passed

Arbitrum DAO announced that 35% of its July revenue came from Robinhood Chain

3Jane released Levered Callable Capital - a DeFi primitive making it 13x more capital efficient via capital calls

Aave increased its GHO Savings Rate to 4.50% APR

Aster extended its team token allocation’s vesting cliff by 12 months

Outcome, the first prediction market project built on top of Hyperliquid, went live

Hyperliquid Strategies expanded its equity facility from $1B to $2.5B to buy more HYPE

Wyoming adopted Chainlink’s Proof of Reserve for its state-issued stablecoin

Injective appears to have been exploited for $4.9 million

London Stock Exchange announced plans to bring the biggest UK stocks on-chain via a collaboration with xStocks

That’s all for this week!

Until next time,

The DeFi Investor

Subscribe now

Want to sponsor this newsletter?

Please send me a DM on Twitter (X). I have a sponsorship deck that I can send you.

Ripe, a credit market for tokenized stocks, just went live on Robinhood Chain.

Borrow against tokenized stocks with Ripe here!

GM friends.

Here’s what I’ll cover today:

🔎 What’s next for the market?

📊 Crypto chart of the week

🗞️ The latest DeFi news

🔎What’s next for the market?

As you all already know, BTC had an insane rally over the past few days.

While it’s not entirely clear what caused this, I think the main reason for this rally is likely the U.S. Treasury's bond buyback announcement.

As the 30-year US Treasury yield recently hit a new multi-year record, US Treasury announced it will double the size of its long-term US government debt buybacks.

How does this impact crypto?

Well, to buy back long-term US government debt, the US Treasury will have to issue new short-term debt. Doing so lowers bond yields and makes investments in stocks/crypto/metals much more attractive, as people are looking for alternative ways to protect themselves against inflation.

This is why both gold and Bitcoin surged after this announcement.

So it is certainly a big catalyst for crypto.

But what’s particularly interesting about this rally is this:

The 23% weekly jump that BTC just had is its biggest increase since March 2023.

Generally, BTC doesn’t show so much strength until a new bull cycle begins.

So I think there’s an argument to be made that the cycle bottom is in, even though this would mean this bear market ended much faster than the previous ones.

The market needed a catalyst to increase the appetite for scarce, risk-on assets, and the US Treasury’s recent announcement could be that.

That said, there are a few additional things to take into consideration:

• In 2023, BTC tested the 200-day and 200-week EMA (Exponential Moving Average indicator) several times after the beginning of its bull market rally

Right now, the 200-day EMA for BTC is around $72,000, and while I personally wouldn’t bet on it testing this level again, a scenario where it drops to $72,000-$73,000 before continuing the uptrend is possible.

• The stock market has barely moved over the past months - Low volatility for a sustained period is usually a sign that an explosive move is happening (like BTC just had), and if we see a stock market crash in Q4 (which is not uncommon during midterm years), this could also drag the crypto market down

• If we assume the BTC bottom is in, this would have been the shortest bear cycle in BTC’s history, as it lasted only 10 months from the moment it peaked

I am sharing this as I think it’s important to understand both the bullish and bearish arguments rather than just making a crazy unrealistic price prediction.

If you ask me, I lean toward being bullish as long as BTC stays above $72k. I think $72k-$73k is a key level to watch as it’s historically a strong support level.

The 2nd key level to watch is $82k-$83k in my opinion, which BTC didn’t manage to break during its May 2026 rally, as that turned out to be a bull trap.

This is the level that I want to see BTC break with strong volume in order to confirm that we are indeed in a bull market, as breaking $82k would form a higher high. If it surpasses $82k, we will most likely not see $60k again.

With that said, now you should have a good understanding of my market view.

Next, I want to talk about my strategy for the next few months, but before that, here’s an overview of Ripe, which just went live on Robinhood Chain:

Brought to you by Ripe

Your tokenized stocks can back a loan

If you hold tokenized stocks on Robinhood Chain, there isn’t much to do with them yet. Trade them at 2am, sure. But in tradfi, borrowing against equities instead of selling them is routine. And now, it’s possible: with Ripe.

Ripe is a credit market for tokenized stocks, live now on Robinhood Chain.

Here’s what makes it different:

- One loan, not six. Everything you deposit backs a single position. SPCX, NVDA, TSLA, AAPL, GOOGL, GME and WETH sit together, each adding its own borrowing power.
- Chainlink equity feeds price the collateral, sourced from the equity exchanges rather than an onchain pool.
- Built for the weekend. Equity feeds freeze Friday at 4pm ET while the tokens keep trading. Borrowing limits assume that gap up front, and positions reprice in one step at Monday’s open.
- Everything is visible before you commit: rates, borrowing limits, liquidation terms in the app, every position public on the explorer.

Ripe ran for a year on Base, audited and in production, peaking at over $4M TVL and zero protocol losses. It just launched on Robinhood Chain and fresh rewards are live.

If you’d rather supply than borrow, the GREEN/USDG stablecoin pool pays RIPE rewards to liquidity providers, and depth there is what opens borrowing for everyone else.

Borrow against your stock tokens here!

🔎What’s next for the market? (Part 2)

Circling back, I mentioned in June (in this article) that I already started DCAing, and I intend to deploy all my capital into the market until late November.

I fortunately managed to get a decent amount of market exposure at a ~$63-$64k avg. BTC price, although I am not going to lie, I was expecting the downtrend to last at least a few more weeks. So I still felt a bit underexposed when everything pumped, as I also have a good amount of capital that hasn’t been deployed in the market yet.

But living with regrets doesn’t help. So my strategy from now on is this:

• I bought a good amount of BTC at $76k as well, on top of what I already accumulated before this rally

• If BTC goes up only from here and breaks $82-$83k with strong volume forming a higher high, then I think the bull market is confirmed at that point, and I plan to deploy my remaining cash into the market on any small 5-15% dips we see along the way

• If BTC drops to $75,000 and $72,000, I plan to buy some at these levels too, as I think the trend remains bullish as long as BTC stays above $72k

• If BTC drops below $72K and doesn’t quickly reclaim it, I’ll consider this rally a bull trap, and I don’t intend to buy again until it goes into the low $60Ks

The scenario I consider most likely is that BTC will stay above $72k and continue to go up, but what happens remains to be seen.

Yet as you can see, I have a plan for every scenario, as I think this is the only way to avoid impulsive buying/selling and make the right decisions.

If BTC hits a new low this year, I’ll have some money available to buy it.

But if BTC only goes up from here, I’ll also benefit, as I have a decent amount of market exposure and plan to add more.

Obviously, I am also interested in altcoins.

But the reason I talked so much about BTC is that altcoins follow BTC's price action in 95% of cases, so my altcoin strategy depends heavily on my market view on BTC.

Speaking about altcoins, I don’t really have a full list of altcoins that I plan to hold from the beginning to the end of the cycle. But as a general rule, I am interested in buying revenue-generating coins that also have an active community on X, as I think attention is crucial for driving a token price up.

Rather than adopting a buy-and-forget strategy as I do with BTC, I plan to hold most of my altcoin bags only as long as they consistently outperform the market and/or have an upcoming catalyst that I believe will create more hype around them.

Once one of them shows weakness for a few weeks in a row, I’ll simply reallocate my money to another altcoin with strong momentum.

I think this can work pretty well as long as it’s done right.

HYPE, ETHFI, ENA, JUP, SKY, AAVE, and PENDLE are a few of the altcoins on my watchlist, which I plan to use for this type of narrative trading. If there’s any interest, I’ll do a full deep dive into my altcoin watchlist and my strategy as well.

But I hope this post provides a bit of clarity into how I am positioning myself in the market for the next few months and my view on what’s next.

No one can predict the future, but I think it’s possible to adopt a strategy that helps you emerge as a winner regardless of the short-term price action.

Chart of the week

Aave V4 TVL surged to $535 million

Crypto meme of the week😂

The latest developments in DeFi

Aave launched early access to its Aave mobile app on iOS

Lighter released its RFQ trading mechanism to the public

Coinbase released tokenized stocks on Base

Kamino introduced Kamino Fixed Rates - an upcoming fixed-term, fixed-rate lending product scheduled to launch this quarter

Hyperliquid activated AQAV2, its revenue-sharing deal with Circle

Arbitrum DAO is discussing adding two new revenue stream mechanisms: priority gas auctions and a fast feed

X announced plans to add crypto trade buttons soon

Ethereum released the first public testnet for the Glamsterdam upgrade

LayerZero introduced ATLAS - a backend infrastructure for trading

Arcus (formerly dYdX) introduced pTokens - tokenized leveraged positions that auto-rebalance to maintain a target leverage

Cosmos EVM Chains had to halt withdrawals due to a critical bug

infiniFi scheduled its TGE for Q4 2026

Kinetiq announced Elysium - its own L2 built on top of HyperEVM

Ethena started arbitraging funding rates again as part of its yield strategy

Tydro V2 went live, introducing fixed-rate borrowing on Kraken’s Ink chain

That’s all for this week!

Until next time,

The DeFi Investor

Subscribe now

Want to sponsor this newsletter?

Please send me a DM on Twitter (X). I have a sponsorship deck that I can send you.

HashKey Cloud operates a Solana validator that lets you stake your SOL with a commission rate of only 3% on rewards, one of the lowest in the industry.

Check out HashKey Cloud’s Solana validator account on-chain here!

GM friends.

Here’s what I’ll cover today:

🔎What’s next for Hyperliquid?

📊 Crypto chart of the week

🗞️ The latest DeFi news

🔎 What’s next for Hyperliquid?

It’s no exaggeration to say that Hyperliquid has had a huge year.

From its equity perps surpassing its crypto perps markets in volume to HYPE hitting new ATHs earlier this year despite the bear market, it hit several big milestones.

That said, it still has a few major upcoming catalysts on the horizon.

Here are some of the most interesting changes coming to Hyperliquid:

1. AQAv2 activation

On May 14, Hyperliquid announced a new deal with Circle called AQAv2:

In exchange for Hyperliquid adopting USDC as its primary stablecoin asset for trading, Coinbase and Circle have committed to buy and stake HYPE.

Furthermore, 90% of the yield generated by the USDC reserves on Hyperliquid will start being allocated to HYPE token buybacks.

However, AQAv2 yield accrual doesn’t start until Aug. 26, 2026, with the first payment to the Hyperliquid Assistance Fund being made on October 3, 2026.

So there are 2 weeks left till Hyperliquid actually starts making money from AQAv2.

Why is this such a big deal?

Because Hyperliquid has $6b in USDC user deposits at the time of writing.

At a 90% revenue share rate and based on USDC’s current revenue numbers, AQAv2 is expected to increase Hyperliquid’s annual revenue by a whopping ~$162 million.

So it will represent a massive new income stream for the exchange (which will be used for HYPE buybacks), as its current annualized revenue is ~$463 million.

2. HIP-3 fees will become adjustable

As I mentioned before, the trading volume of Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 equity perps markets has recently surpassed the volume of its crypto perps.

However, most HIP-3 equity perps markets have 90% lower trading fees than crypto markets on Hyperliquid, thanks to Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 Growth Mode program.

So while lower fees are certainly good for traders, this also means that Hyperliquid isn't making much money from HIP-3 equity perps yet.

However, this could change soon.

I say this because Jeff, the founder of Hyperliquid, recently announced that, with the next network upgrade, HIP-3 market deployers (like Trade [XYZ]) will be able to increase the trading fees on their HIP-3 markets by up to 30x.

(Currently, the trading fees for markets in Growth Mode are fixed at very low levels)

It would obviously be a bad idea for HIP-3 deployers to suddenly increase the fees across all HIP-3 markets by 30x overnight, as many traders would just leave. But I think that for certain markets, such as pre-IPO perps, trading fees could be increased several times without necessarily reducing the trading volume.

And obviously, the advantage of doing that is that higher trading fees would lead to higher Hyperliquid revenue and more HYPE token buybacks.

So I expect this upgrade to also positively impact Hyperliquid’s revenue.

3. The deployment of HIP-4 markets will be permissionless

To be frank, despite the massive initial hype around the HIP-4 markets, once they launched, they didn’t get much traction.

For those unfamiliar, HIP-4 markets are essentially Hyperliquid’s version of prediction markets, also known as outcome markets.

I think a main reason for their slow growth is that there are only 5 HIP-4 markets available to trade on Hyperliquid right now, while competing platforms like Polymarket have thousands of prediction markets.

But the Hyperliquid team announced that the deployment of new HIP-4 markets will soon become permissionless, which will hopefully lead to a big increase in the total number of markets and give traders more prediction markets to trade.

The upgrade that will enable this is live on testnet, and I expect it to go live on the mainnet within 1-2 months. In fact, there are already projects like Outcome that have announced plans to deploy custom HIP-4 markets once it becomes possible.

If things go well and HIP-4 markets are successful, Hyperliquid will be one step closer to becoming the house of all finance, as its team originally envisioned.

The next few months will certainly be big for Hyperliquid with so many upcoming catalysts, so I thought it was worth covering what’s next for the project.

I’m rooting for it to succeed, as I feel like it’s one of the few big projects whose team has always stayed aligned with its community.

Together with HashKey Cloud

Why you should stake your SOL with HashKey Cloud

Solana ecosystem has been on fire lately.

Both Fomo and Pump Fun, which started as two Solana native dApps, have been getting massive traction, with their revenue skyrocketing.

If you hold SOL for the long term, staking is the easiest way to put it to work.

HashKey Cloud, the staking provider of HashKey Group, operates a Solana validator that lets users stake their SOL while keeping full custody of their assets.

By using it, you can earn approximately 5.7% staking APR on your SOL.

Here are a few things that make HashKey Cloud stand out:

• It offers non-custodial staking, meaning your SOL remains in your control as the staking delegation process is completed directly on-chain

• It incurred zero slashing losses in over 5 years of operation

• HashKey Cloud charges only a 3% commission on the SOL staking rewards, while the avg. commission rate for Solana validators ranges from 5% to 8%

In comparison, P2P and Everstake charge a 6-7% commission rate for their Solana validator service, which is 2x more than HashKey Cloud.

Staking your SOL with HashKey Cloud validator is easy:

1. Open your Solana Wallet (e.g. Phantom)

2. Select your SOL balance, click on “More”, and access “Stake SOL”

3. Click on “Native Staking” and search for HashKey Cloud to stake your SOL with them, and then you’ll need to enter the amount you wish to stake

And that’s it, it only takes a few steps to stake your SOL.

HashKey Cloud charges only a 3% commission fee on staking rewards, which is below the industry average, so by staking with it, you can get a higher staking yield.

If at some point you want to unstake it, the unstaking time is usually only 2-3 days.

Check out HashKey Cloud’s Solana validator account on-chain here!

Chart of the week

Tokenized equities surged in popularity this year

Crypto meme of the week😂

The latest developments in DeFi

EtherFi introduced ETHFI buybacks and stock trading

Hyperliquid is lobbying US regulators for a legal path to expand to the US

Jupiter launched Jupiter Lend v2 on Solana, which is powered by Fluid tech

Pendle launched the Pendle USDC Vault on Morpho with incentives for lenders

Lighter announced its new points program on Robinhood Chain

Vitalik Buterin released an updated Ethereum roadmap prioritizing quantum resistance and privacy

TradeXYZ started buying back $HYPE with 12% of its revenue

xStocks launched tokenized equities on Hyperliquid

Neutrl paused protocol redemptions with no explanation

Base announced it will implement native account abstraction in September

Trezor revealed that its recent customer data was exposed in a data breach

US Senate delayed the Clarity Act vote until September

FX100, a perps DEX with 15 minutes of liquidation protection, went live on testnet

Solstice opened the claiming portal for its Season 2 airdrop

LayerZero announced a new 0.02% fee for bridging OFT tokens via Stargate

That’s all for this week!

Until next time,

The DeFi Investor

Subscribe now

Want to sponsor this newsletter?

Please send me a DM on Twitter (X). I have a sponsorship deck that I can send you.

Ouinex lets you trade crypto, FX, stocks, commodities, and indices all from one place while also giving you airdrop points rewards.

Check it out here.

GM friends.

Here’s what I’ll cover today:

🔎How to keep your crypto safe

📊 Crypto chart of the week

🗞️ The latest DeFi news

🔎How to keep your crypto safe

A few days ago, one of the worst crypto security incidents of all time happened.

Many people who stored their BTC with Coldcard, a hardware wallet popular among the Bitcoin community, woke up to discover their BTC had been stolen.

This was possible because a hacker discovered a bug in Coldcard’s seed generation process that made Coldcard users’ recovery phrases easy to reconstruct.

And because of this bug, over $100M of BTC was stolen.

I feel very sorry for all victims, as they have theoretically done everything right: They bought a hardware wallet to store their BTC safely instead of trusting a CEX, and yet they still ended up losing their funds.

Given what happened, I wanted to share a few general crypto security tips.

I’m not a security expert, but I spent quite some time researching this topic, and there are several things you can do to reduce the risk of losing your funds.

Let’s dive in:

1. Add a passphrase to your hardware wallet

It goes without saying that you should have a hardware wallet.

My recommendation is to choose between Ledger and Trezor, as those are the most popular ones and probably have the biggest security budgets.

Yes, hardware wallets are not perfect as we’ve seen with Coldcard, but they are still way more secure than a hot wallet like Metamask.

Now, speaking about passphrases, the advantage of having one is this:

Even if your recovery phrase gets compromised, as it happened for many victims in the Coldcard incident, as long as you store your funds in a wallet that also has a strong passphrase that is hard to guess, your funds should still be safe.

A passphrase is basically an additional custom password that you can add on top of a 24-word recovery phrase for extra security.

To unlock your wallet, you’ll then need both your recovery phrase and the passphrase.

Both Ledger and Trezor support adding one.

One particularly useful feature on Ledger is the ability to attach a passphrase to a second PIN code, creating an entirely separate set of hidden accounts.

This is helpful for the following scenario:

If you’re ever under physical threat to unlock your Ledger, you could give the attacker the main PIN that unlocks only the accounts that are not protected by the passphrase.

This would give him access only to your wallet’s primary accounts (which are protected only by the recovery phrase, and not by the passphrase), where you could keep a small amount of funds as a decoy.

In this way, the attacker would think he successfully gained access to your funds, while the majority of your coins would stay hidden in the secret accounts protected by the passphrase and second PIN.

That said, if you add a passphrase, make sure you store it carefully. If you lose it, you basically lose access to your wallets even if you still have your recovery phrase.

2. Never give infinite token approvals

Whenever you interact with a dApp, chances are that you’re usually asked for an infinite token approval that could spend all your tokens.

My advice is to never approve an infinite spending amount, and use "Approve token” to edit the token amount and set it only to how much you need to spend now.

The idea behind this is to protect yourself against potential future exploits.

Because if you give an infinite token approval to a dApp that gets exploited one month later, then its hacker may be able to steal the tokens you approved spending.

If you want to revoke your past token approvals, I suggest using revoke.cash.

3. Store your recovery phrase in multiple different locations

Especially if you hold a significant amount of your net worth in crypto, it’s important to eliminate all single points of failure.

My advice is to store your recovery phrase in at least two separate safe locations. (offline, definitely not on your PC)

So if something happens with the first backup, you’ll still have access to your funds.

Additionally, if you’re concerned someone may find your recovery phrase, you could encrypt it or write the words in a custom order that only you know.

But there are pros and cons to this. If you add too much complexity to this process, there’s a risk that you will forget how to get access to your funds. This is something to consider.

One more thing you can do, if you want to go one step further, is to buy, for instance, a 6mm-thick titanium plate from Ledger or Trezor to write your recovery phrase on it.

Unlike paper, this material is waterproof, fireproof, and bulletproof, so it is much more durable.

There are a few more things I want to share.

But before that, here’s an overview of Ouinex, an everything crypto exchange:

Together with Ouinex

The first exchange with a no-CLOB execution model

Many crypto exchanges claim to have low trading costs.

The issue is that while their trading fees might be low, market makers can still use tactics like stop hunting, spoofing, or front-running to execute your orders at unfavorable prices.

Ouinex eliminates this risk through its novel no-CLOB execution model, making trading fairer and more transparent.

On top of that, it has recently launched its Season 1 points program.

Here are a few things you should know about Ouinex:

• On Ouinex, you can trade a wide range of asset classes, including crypto, stocks, indices, commodities, and forex.

• The project has raised $9 million in funding from retail and professional traders.

• The exchange offers advanced trading features such as slippage control, trading alerts, complex order types, and in-app market news.

Ouinex generated $122M in trading volume during the first week of Season 1, with traders earning approximately 1 point for every $22 traded.

That means its points are still easy to earn.

On top of the points program, Ouinex has also launched Trading Arena.

Up to $1 million in rewards will be distributed to traders across multiple trading competitions, which is a substantial prize pool given Ouinex’s current trading volume.

By trading on Ouinex, you can farm two types of rewards at once: airdrop points and stablecoin prizes.

Check out Ouinex here!

4. Be extremely careful with what you install on your device

I know this sounds obvious, but many people still install untrusted apps or cracked games on the same device they use to do crypto transactions.

If this is you, I suggest either getting a separate laptop/PC for crypto if you can afford that, or resetting your Windows and being very selective with what you install.

Theoretically, even if you get malware on your laptop/PC, your funds stored on a hardware wallet are still safe.

However, hackers are extremely ingenious.

They could, for instance, trick you into signing a malicious transaction once they get access to your PC, and manage to steal your funds in the end.

This is why it’s important to keep your laptop/PC safe.

5. Use a multisig wallet for your long-term holdings

Lastly, if you want something even more secure than a recovery phrase and a passphrase, the most secure option is probably to create a multisig with Safe.

(for storing assets on EVM chains)

That said, I would say that a multisig is only for highly advanced users or for those keeping a very large amount of funds on-chain.

The way I’d recommend setting it up is the following:

• Buy a Ledger and a Trezor wallet from their official websites

• Generate separate recovery phrases with each and store them safely

• Go to app.safe.global, connect your wallets, and create a multisig Safe account with a 2/2 threshold where you add your Ledger and Trezor wallet as signers

If you create a multisig and somehow your Ledger or your Trezor recovery phrase gets leaked, your funds will still be safe as long as only one of them gets leaked.

This is the security advantage of having a multisig.

However, a multisig also comes with several disadvantages:

• You’ll need to securely store two recovery phrases (for Trezor and Ledger), instead of just one - if you lose one, you also lose access to your funds

• Every time you need to send a transaction, you will need to sign the transaction from both your Ledger and your Trezor

• Safe is the most popular multisig solution for EVM Chains, and while it is considered safe, using it introduces some extra smart contract risk

So if you ask me, while multisigs may be the safest option overall, for most people a hardware wallet with a passphrase is the best choice in terms of security and convenience in my opinion.

But I wanted to also talk about multisigs to show what the pros and cons are.

This has been a long issue, but I genuinely hope you found it helpful.

I can only imagine how hard it must feel to lose everything due to a hack.

So please take crypto security seriously to prevent this from happening to you.

Chart of the week

Monad TVL is up 96.4% in the past 30 days

Crypto meme of the week😂

The latest developments in DeFi

Uniswap launched Earn - a new lending product powered by Morpho

Solana announced a network upgrade that will make it 2x faster

Pump Fun is expected to integrate Hyperliquid perps via builder codes soon

DeFi Saver released Token Saver - a tool that checks the smart wallets linked to your account to find unclaimed airdrops or leftover token balances, and helps you claim them

Extended launched 100+ RWA markets powered by an RFQ mechanism

Sui Co-founder left Sui to join Anthropic

Kamino released Kamino Institutional Yield - a product that brings institutional credit markets on-chain

Term Labs launched Term V2 - a fixed-rate lending product with an orderbook model

Ethereum devs proposed significantly reducing ETH staking rewards

Hyperliquid enabled the permissionless creation of HIP-4 markets on testnet

BitGo is migrating WBTC from LayerZero to Chainlink’s CCIP cross-chain solution

Western Union launched a stablecoin card on Solana

Ondo airdropped $100 to Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 traders who also have an Ondo Perps account

Circle scheduled the launch of its L1 blockchain called Arc for Sept. 16

That’s all for this week!

Until next time,

The DeFi Investor

Subscribe now

Want to sponsor this newsletter?

Please send me a DM on Twitter (X). I have a sponsorship deck that I can send you.

Quai Network, the world’s fastest Proof-of-Work Network, launched its all-in-one DeFi platform called Quainance.

Check it out here!

GM friends.

Here’s what I’ll cover today:

🔎3 new DeFi tools you should try out

📊 Crypto chart of the week

🗞️ The latest DeFi news

🔎3 new DeFi tools you should try out

Recently, I’ve come across a lot of DeFi tools that I consider quite useful.

Since they are all free, I thought it would be interesting to write a newsletter covering these tools and how I use them.

Let’s dive in 👇

1. Pharos Watch

Pharos is a platform where you’ll find any information you need regarding stablecoins.

This includes:

• Recent depegs

• General stablecoin news

• Upcoming stablecoin launches

• A breakdown of each stablecoin's backing and how it works

• Mint authority (This section shows if an asset uses multisigs, timelocks, and other security measures and is helpful to assess how seriously its team takes security)

• A safety score based on the redemption mechanism, volume, DEX liquidity, durability of that stablecoin, and more

And so much more. If you want to research a certain stablecoin product and better understand its risk profile, I think Pharos is a good place to start.

Besides that, Pharos also has a very cool Telegram Alert Bot.

You can use it to get depeg alerts for free on Telegram whenever a stablecoin depegs or there are some unusual on-chain movements related to it.

I find this very helpful because I want to be alerted when one of the stablecoins I hold starts to depeg so I can exit my position quickly if needed.

2. Yieldz

Yieldz is a platform built specifically for yield farming.

It has three main pages:

• Dashboard - Here you can see your positions across money markets such as Aave and Morpho, as well as what collaterals you are exposed to

• Deposit - This one shows the top lending opportunities across Aave, Lista, and Morpho while also displaying their historical performances

• Leverage - This page looks similar to the Deposit page in terms of user interface, but it shows leveraged yield opportunities instead, filtered by APY

The Leverage tab is the one I use the most.

Using it, it is very easy to spot the best looping opportunities across almost all major money markets as Yieldz automatically calculates the yield you’d get for looping a certain asset at maximum leverage.

For each looping opportunity, it also shows how its borrowing and supply rate evolved over time in the form of a chart, which is helpful for assessing its performance.

You'll also find other details on the Yieldz UI, such as how much liquidity is available in a certain market, its utilization rate, liquidation LTV, and so on.

This makes it relatively easy to decide what loop may be worth opening.

Moving on, there’s one more tool I want to cover.

But before that, here’s an overview of Quai, which just launched its DeFi platform:

Together with Quai Network

DeFi just went live on Quai Network

Quai, the world’s fastest Proof-of-Work blockchain, has recently launched Quainance.

Quainance is an all-in-one DeFi platform where you can bridge, swap, and earn yield by providing liquidity from one place.

This makes Quai one of the very few L1s powered by Proof of Work to add support for DeFi.

Here are a few things you should know about Quainance and Quai:

• You can bridge USDT to Quai in just a few clicks via the Quainance website

• Once you bridge it there, you can use that capital to swap into QUAI/WQI, Quai’s native assets, and provide liquidity to earn a yield

• Quai is a highly scalable blockchain with an architecture built to support up to 50,000+ transactions per second without fees spiking

What’s particularly interesting about Quai is its Proof-of-Entropy-Minima consensus mechanism, which can be seen as an upgrade of Bitcoin’s Proof-of-Work.

Quai’s Proof-of-Entropy-Minima aims to offer the best of both worlds:

It combines a high transaction throughput with the security guarantees of Proof-of-Work, making it well suited for DeFi applications.

Thanks to it, Quai can offer a good DeFi UX while staying decentralized and secure.

To bootstrap user activity, Quai is currently offering triple-digit yields to early users providing liquidity to its pools on Quainance.

Explore Quai’s Quainance DeFi platform here!

🔎3 new DeFi tools you should try out (part 2)

3. Monarch

If you use Morpho for DeFi lending, you may like this one.

Monarch Lend has been live for a while, but I only recently discovered it.

It’s essentially a lending platform built on top of Morpho’s smart contracts with advanced features for DeFi power users.

For instance, what you can do on Monarch that isn’t possible via the Morpho UI is to lend directly against a set of collaterals that you choose yourself.

Why does this matter?

Because in this way you get full control over your lending positions and no longer have to rely on a vault curator who may (or may not) do a good job managing risk.

Another advantage is that, by letting you lend directly against a collateral you choose, Monarch often provides higher yields than you can get via Morpho UI.

To give you an actual example, at the time of writing, you can lend USDT against stcUSD collateral on Morpho via Monarch and earn 15.74%.

If I then go to the Morpho user interface, there’s no Morpho vault providing such a high APY, as no vault provides direct exposure solely to stcUSD.

And that’s why I think using Monarch as a Morpho lender makes sense.

That said, the trade-off is that you're fully responsible for managing your own risk.

While using Monarch can definitely offer some advantages as I shared above, it also requires doing proper research on the markets you choose to lend to make sure you understand what risks you are exposed to.

Anyone can list a market on Morpho as the platform is permissionless.

Monarch turns users into their own curators, and there are a few things I recommend you check before lending to a market via it if you intend to use it:

• What oracle the market uses

• How liquidations are performed (based on the NAV price or DEX rate?)

• What collateral it exposes you to and how risky that collateral is (if it’s a yield-bearing asset, look into how it generates yield)

• Whether any well-known curators deposited capital into that market (which can be helpful to determine if other curators trust that market)

Those are the main things I pay attention to.

With that said, I hope you found this list of tools helpful!

I will continue to cover lesser-known DeFi tools that I find useful as I discover them.

Chart of the week

Robinhood Chain surpassed Base in daily active users

Crypto meme of the week😂

The latest developments in DeFi

Morpho released Morpho Midnight - a money market for fixed-rate loans

Hyperliquid announced plans to support the permissionless creation of HIP-4 outcome markets

Aave Labs’s proposal to launch Aave App went live

Aerodrome scheduled the launch of Aero, a new multichain DEX, for September

eCash.com announced an upcoming ECX token airdrop in August for every wallet address holding BTC

Ondo released Ondo Points - a points program for trading activity on Ondo Perps

Ethereum’s validator exit queue fell to zero (no one tries to unstake ETH anymore)

MegaETH has shut down its MegaMafia incubator

Telegram announced plans to launch a new crypto wallet with zero tx fees

Hylo launched xBTC - a liquidation-free token offering 3x BTC exposure

Yearn’s proposal to launch a risk tranching system for its vaults went live

Ethena went live on Monad L1

Ostium announced plans to reopen trading today

That’s all for this week!

Until next time,

The DeFi Investor

Subscribe now

Want to sponsor this newsletter?

Please send me a DM on Twitter (X). I have a sponsorship deck that I can send you.

Here’s what I’ll cover today:

🔎The Clarity Act: How it could impact crypto

📊 Crypto chart of the week

🗞️ The latest DeFi news

🔎 The Clarity Act: How it could impact crypto

The US Senate has 25 days left to pass the Clarity Act, the most important piece of crypto legislation in US history, before senators leave for the summer recess.

With this deadline rapidly approaching, I thought now would be a good time to discuss what the Clarity Act could change and why it’s such a big deal.

Because if it passes, it could have a massive positive impact on crypto.

As the name suggests, the Clarity Act can finally bring some much-needed clarity by establishing the first comprehensive US regulatory framework for crypto.

Much of the crypto industry still operates in a legal gray area.

And while I am not a fan of overregulation, the reality is that without clear rules, launching crypto products in the US has become a legal minefield.

Among the biggest changes that the Clarity Act proposes are the following:

1. Establish who regulates what

The Clarity Act establishes that sufficiently decentralized assets should be regulated by the CFTC as digital commodities, while the more centralized ones should be regulated by the SEC as crypto securities.

This matters a lot because the two regulators follow very different rulebooks.

For years, many crypto startups avoided launching in the US, unsure whether their tokens would be treated as securities or commodities and fearing potential lawsuits from the SEC amid regulatory uncertainty.

What the Clarity Act does is give projects a clear path to compliance and clarify how they can operate in the US legally.

This is also expected to make token launches in the US much easier.

2. Introduce investor protection requirements for CEXs

The goal of the protection requirements is to prevent another FTX-like event.

This includes asset segregation (CEXs must segregate customer funds from their operational capital), anti-insider trading measures, and more.

Personally, I mostly use DEXs nowadays and prefer to keep my funds in a self-custody wallet. But for normies entering the space via CEXs, I think this is a great change.

3. Truly decentralized DeFi receives explicit protections

This is the most interesting part to me.

In 2024, for example, the SEC accused Uniswap of running an unregistered securities exchange, and Uniswap spent tens of millions of dollars in legal fees to defend itself.

The Clarity Act could prevent this from happening again by distinguishing between centralized intermediaries and truly decentralized protocols. If a protocol doesn’t custody user funds, it may not be regulated like a broker or a centralized company.

This is a big deal because it introduces protections for DeFi software developers and could encourage more people to start building DeFi products in the US.

It also incentivizes existing projects to become truly decentralized if they want to benefit from a more favorable regulatory framework.

So it’s a win-win from any point of view.

What are the odds that the Clarity Act passes?

According to Polymarket, there’s a 41% chance it will get signed into law.

Realistically, there are only 25 days left to pass it, because as I mentioned at the beginning, the US Senate will go into summer recess on Aug. 10.

If it doesn’t pass by then, it could theoretically also pass later in September, but the chances of this happening are low, as Congress has a packed agenda after recess and the upcoming US midterm elections will become the main focus.

So the next 21 days will likely be decisive for the US Clarity Act.

Regulatory uncertainty has arguably been one of crypto’s biggest obstacles. If the Clarity Act passes, that could finally begin to change.

It will likely not trigger an immediate massive market rally or a new bull run.

But in the long run, clear regulations could attract a lot of new capital to the industry, accelerate institutional adoption, and trigger a new wave of innovation.

Together with Ondo Finance

The most rewarding place to trade equity perps

Just recently, Ondo has released Ondo Perps - the first perpetuals exchange purpose-built for tokenized equities, indices, and commodities.

It offers up to 20x leverage and access to dozens of equity markets.

As institutional market makers use it to deliver tight spreads, Ondo Perps is able to offer very deep liquidity, even for large positions.

What’s also interesting is that it has some very attractive incentives:

• $3 million in total rewards - Every week, over $100,000 in USDC incentives from this pool are distributed to active traders

• Ondo Points - While there aren’t many details about Ondo’s points program yet, the Ondo team confirmed that points are already accruing for trading activity

By trading equity perps on Ondo Perps, you can farm two types of rewards at once.

Another thing that grabbed my attention is that you can use tokenized stocks as collateral. (currently available only for Pre-alpha users)

So if you are, for example, bullish on AAPL and bearish on TSLA, you could buy AAPL tokenized stocks and use them as collateral to short TSLA.

This gives traders a new level of capital efficiency that’s hard to get elsewhere.

Check out Ondo Perps here!

Chart of the week

Tokenized stocks trading volume skyrocketed in June

Crypto meme of the week😂

The latest developments in DeFi

Aave V4 went live on Avalanche with an incentive program

Pendle launched automated PT looping

Ondo released 24/7 trading for tokenized stocks on Solana

Lighter burned $36M worth of LIT tokens

Curve Finance released Llamalend v2 on Ethereum

Cap was caught giving most of its airdrop to its own founder

Quai launched Quainance - an all-in-one DeFi platform on Quai

Hyperliquid Policy Center team met with the SEC to address crypto regulation

Plasma One, an on-chain neobank, went live on Android

Chainlink CCIP was adopted by Aave as the cross-chain infrastructure solution for its upcoming mobile app

Jito released JTX - a new DEX for trading crypto and equities on Solana

EthSystems launched privacy tools for institutions that want to use Ethereum

Polymarket applied for a US License to offer margin trading

Arbitrum announced that 10% of Robinhood Chain’s fees go to its own treasury

Ostium was unfortunately exploited for over $23 million

That’s all for this week!

Until next time,

The DeFi Investor

Subscribe now

Want to sponsor this newsletter?

Please send me a DM on Twitter (X). I have a sponsorship deck that I can send you.

Hyperliquid is well known for the biggest airdrop of all time, but many other perps DEXs like Lighter and dYdX also airdropped massive amounts of money.

For me, the biggest airdrop I ever got came from Lighter last year.

And as the valuations of perps DEXs have recently started rising again in pre-markets, I believe it still makes a lot of sense to farm their airdrops in 2026.

In this issue, I cover:

• How to arbitrage funding rates to farm perps airdrops

• My strategy to identify arbitrage opportunities

• A free tool I am using to easily monitor my arbitrage positions

• How I picked which perps DEXs to farm

• A few risk management tips

I also talked about funding rate arbitrage last year, but my strategy changed a lot since then, and I started using new tools, so I decided to share an update.

Let’s dive in 👇

Funding rate arbitrage: How and why I use this strategy

First of all, if you are unfamiliar with funding rate arbitrage, here’s an intro:

When you open a long or short position on a perps DEX, you either pay or receive a small payment called funding rate at fixed intervals (every 1 to 8 hours).

Every major perps DEX uses a funding rate mechanism.

When there are more shorts than longs, the people with long positions receive the funding rate payment. When there are more longs than shorts, the opposite happens.

Positive funding rates mean short positions get paid, while negative funding rates mean long positions get paid.

And these funding rates differ from exchange to exchange.

This creates an arbitrage opportunity: on one exchange, you might be paid to long BTC, while on another exchange, you might be paid to short it.

In these cases, you can open a delta-neutral BTC position between these exchanges and earn a nice yield from the positive funding rate spread. And that’s how funding rate arbitrage works.

With this strategy, I’ve been earning an average APR of 14% on my perps portfolio with a ~2x cross-margin account leverage over the past few months.

That said, the most valuable thing I get from funding rate arbitrage is perps airdrop points, as I am arbitraging funding rates only between perps DEXs.

I believe the points of certain perps DEXs like Variational could be worth a lot of money at TGE, which is the main reason why I arbitrage funding rates.

The best part about this strategy is that you can get a lot of points while being delta-neutral and not having to bet that prices will go in a certain direction.

How I identify funding rate arbitrage opportunities

The tool I’ve been using for this lately is bendbasis.com. I’ll show you how to use it.

There are many funding rate analytics platforms, but I’ve been using Bendbasis because it offers a lot of cool features you can’t find elsewhere.

An example is Bendbasis’s “Funding Arbitrage” dashboard, which you can access for free at bendbasis.com/arbitrage.

Once you get to this page, there are a few things I suggest doing:

• At “Exchanges”, select only the perps DEXs you intend to farm (for example, I selected Hyperliquid, Variational, and Extended)

• At “Filters” → “Min Open Interest”, select a minimum open interest between $150k-$700k depending on the size of your portfolio

• Then click on “APR” to see the top arbitrage opportunities by APR

After you do this, Bendbasis will show the top funding rate arbitrage opportunities by 15-day APR, rather than by live APR, as most other tools do.

This matters because, ideally, you want to find arbitrage opportunities with a stable, positive funding rate spread so you don’t have to constantly rotate your positions.

This dashboard also features a “Stability” indicator on the right side of the page. The greener the indicator, the more reliable the spread has been over time.

An example of a good funding arbitrage opportunity at the time of writing is a delta-neutral ATOM position between Hyperliquid and Variational.

(long ATOM on Hyperliquid while shorting it on Variational)

To see how this position performed in the past 30 days, you can click on it on Bendbasis directly from the Funding Arbitrage page.

This will open a historical ATOM funding rate chart like the one above.

As this chart shows, over the past 30 days, the funding rate spread for this delta-neutral ATOM position has always been positive, with Variational’s funding rates for the short position (the red line) consistently above the green line representing Hyperliquid’s funding rates for the long position, which is exactly what you want to see.

A funding rate spread is positive when you earn more from funding rates than you’re paying. On the chart above, that’s the case when the red line is above the green line.

In conclusion, longing ATOM on Hyperliquid while shorting ATOM on Variational is a great funding rate arbitrage opportunity at the time of writing.

ATOM funding rates may change by the time this issue goes live, but I hope this example explains well how to find arbitrage opportunities on your own.

Next, I want to show you the easiest way, in my view, to monitor the performance of your arbitrage positions after you open them.

Note: If you're finding this guide useful and decide to farm any of the perps DEXs I mentioned, I'd appreciate it if you used my invite links below.

Variational: omni.variational.io/?ref=OMNIMLU9GFM2

Extended: https://app.extended.exchange/join/DEFII

Hyperliquid: app.hyperliquid.xyz/join/DEFINVESTOR

Some of these links provide points boosts or trading fee discounts as well.

None of these perps DEXs compensated me for being included here. These are only the projects I’m personally farming via funding rate arbitrage with my own capital.

How I track the performance of my arbitrage positions

The thing is, funding rate spreads like this don’t last forever.

In the example for the delta-neutral ATOM position, the funding rate spread has been stable over time, but there’s always a chance it will disappear overnight.

When the positive spread is gone for several hours in a row, it's usually time to close the trade and rotate your capital to a better opportunity.

This is why it’s important to actively monitor your positions.

To do this, I use another Bendbasis feature called “Portfolio”.

You can find it here: https://bendbasis.com/portfolio.

Basically, it works like this: You have a Positions tab where you can click on “+ Add Position” in order to import your positions there manually.

For example, if you opened the delta-neutral ATOM position I mentioned earlier, you can add its details manually there.

Once you do that, Bendbasis will start tracking your position.

It will automatically calculate your fees, slippage, funding rates, and APR. And on top of that, for each position, Bendbasis Portfolio will show “Funding Live”, which is essentially the funding rate spread between the two exchanges.

Whenever the “Funding Live” APR flips negative for several hours in a row, it might be a good idea to close that position and move on to the next arbitrage trade.

I simulated a new funding rate arbitrage portfolio on Bendbasis below so you can see what the interface looks like:

As you can observe, once you add multiple positions, Bendbasis Portfolio also shows your total portfolio performance over time, which I personally find very helpful.

And you can see your profit and APR for each position there.

I highly recommend using this feature because otherwise, if you don’t track your P&L, you might think your arbitrage strategy is profitable when it’s not.

Personally, I check the Portfolio tab on Bendbasis 3-4 times a day to see how my arbitrage positions are currently performing and if there’s anything I need to do.

It’s much easier to use this feature than to keep multiple browser tabs open to check funding rates across different DEXs separately.

How I picked which perps DEXs to farm

At the time of writing, there are 193 perps DEXs listed on DeFiLlama.

Now, you can imagine that with so many different platforms building the same thing, using most of them is a waste of time, since many will inevitably fail.

That's why I'm extremely selective about which ones I farm.

Here are a few of the things I am looking for in a tokenless perps DEX:

1. Unique selling proposition (USP) - Hyperliquid was among the first perps DEXs to bring a CEX-like trading performance on-chain. Meanwhile, Lighter was the first perps DEX to introduce zero fees.

I believe that having something that makes them unique and the fact that Hyperliquid and Lighter didn’t just copy their competitors played a major role in their success.

So when thinking about whether a certain perps DEX is worth farming, ask yourself whether it has a feature that makes it stand out or if it’s just a copycat.

2. The team committed to doing a big airdrop or heavily rewarding early users

One interesting secondary effect of the Hyperliquid airdrop is that it led many newer perps DEX teams to allocate a larger percentage of their token supply to their airdrop in hopes of building a strong community.

For example, Lighter did a 25% token supply airdrop. And Extended promised to airdrop an even bigger allocation of 30% of its token supply at TGE.

Farming the perps DEXs that are transparent about their intentions to heavily reward their community generally has a higher chance of paying off.

3. There’s a strong community supporting the project

This is probably the most important factor because, for an airdrop to be successful, there needs to be strong demand for its token at launch to reach a high FDV.

Both Hyperliquid and Lighter have very active communities on CT. I believe this played a big role in the success of their TGEs, as crypto is an attention economy.

If no one talks about the perps DEX you are using, this might be a sign that you are early, but the most likely scenario is that you are farming the wrong project.

Now that you have a general idea of what I am looking for, let’s also talk about the actual perps DEXs that I am farming.

These are the three tokenless projects I am currently focused on farming:

• Variational - It’s arguably the tokenless perps DEX with the most mindshare on CT rn + its team stated several times that they like how Hyperliquid did its airdrop + it stands out as the largest perps DEX with an RFQ architecture + it raised $50M from VCs

• Extended - It’s the first perps DEX (to my knowledge) that enabled users to trade perps with yield-bearing vault shares as collateral + eToro directly invested in it and teased a future potential integration with Extended + the Extended team confirmed a 30% token supply airdrop at TGE

  In terms of UX, Extended also offers a great trading experience in my opinion, as it has deep liquidity and several features you can’t find elsewhere.

• Trade[XYZ] - Trade[XYZ] is the most popular tokenless perps DEX product powered by Hyperliquid. I thought a lot about whether Trade[XYZ] is worth farming, since it doesn’t have a points program and there’s no confirmation it will have a token, so it doesn’t meet the second criterion I mentioned above.

  But I ultimately decided to include it in my farming strategy because it gives me exposure to two potential airdrops: Hyperliquid Season 2 and Trade[XYZ]. Neither is confirmed, but I think that if any of these airdrops happen, they will be massive given how much CT mindshare both Hyperliquid and Trade [XYZ] have.

Even if Trade[XYZ] doesn’t do an airdrop, I won’t really regret using it because there are many great funding rate arbitrage opportunities between Hyperliquid (Trade[XYZ] is an interface of Hyperliquid), Variational, and Extended.

That said, I have high expectations for Variational and Extended airdrops.

A few final tips

Before wrapping up, I want to share a few arbitrage tips based on my own experience that might increase your profitability (and help you better manage your risk):

• Don’t arbitrage memecoins or other highly volatile tokens that are easy to manipulate - This is important to reduce the probability of getting liquidated

• Set take-profit / stop loss orders to avoid getting liquidated - Let’s say I short $TRUMP on Variational as part of a delta-neutral position and my liquidation price is $4. Then I will set a stop-loss at $3.8 (slightly below $4) on Variational and a take-profit order at $3.8 on the exchange where I have the long hedge. In this way, I significantly reduce the liquidation risk during extreme volatility

• Don’t do funding rate arbitrage on a market where the slippage/spread for a market order exceeds 0.12%. The reason is that slippage is already the highest cost you incur when opening a delta-neutral position. If it’s too large, then it will take a lot of time till the funding rate spread PNL offsets your slippage loss

• Check your funding rate arbitrage positions (I do it via Bendbasis Portfolio to avoid visiting several DEX websites separately) at least 2-3 times a day to ensure you aren’t close to being liquidated, and the funding rate spread APY is still positive

• If you use cross-margin mode, don’t use an account leverage above 2x-2.5x on the perps DEXs you are farming - Obviously, you could get a higher return with a higher leverage, but a high leverage also increases liquidation risk. I'd rather earn a bit less and stay safe

That’s all for today.

I know this was a longer issue than usual, but I hope you found it useful.

Personally, I believe 2026 will be a great year in terms of returns for perps airdrop farmers, just like 2025 was with the Lighter airdrop.

If you enjoyed reading this, subscribe for more content like this.

Until next time,

The DeFi Investor

Subscribe now

Theo, one of the most popular tokenless stablecoin protocols, has launched its largest points campaign to date. Check it out here.

Read more

Here’s what I’ll cover today:

🔎First real tokenized stocks are here

📊 Crypto chart of the week

🗞️ The latest DeFi news

Today’s email is brought to you by Apyx - A dividend-backed stablecoin protocol

Check out the Apyx 2.0 announcement here.

Read more

Here’s what I’ll cover today:

🔎Is AI a real threat to DeFi?

📊 Crypto chart of the week

🗞️ The latest DeFi news

Read more

Here’s what I’ll cover today:

🔎My plan for Bitcoin

📊 Crypto chart of the week

🗞️ The latest DeFi news

Read more

Pareto is a private credit marketplace. Check it out here!

Read more

Apyx is the first dividend-backed stablecoin protocol. Check it out here!

Read more

Altura is a multi-strategy yield protocol. Explore its yield opportunities here!

Read more

Theo launched a first-of-its-kind yield-bearing stablecoin powered by gold. Learn more about it here!

Read more