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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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: app.extended.exchange/join/DEFINVESTOR

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

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

GM friends.

Here’s what I’ll cover today:

🔎Wall Street joins the stablecoin wars

📊 Crypto chart of the week

🗞️ The latest DeFi news

🔎Wall Street joins the stablecoin wars

USDT and USDC have dominated the stablecoin market over the past few years.

While hundreds of other stablecoins have been released, unfortunately, no one has managed to break this duopoly yet.

But that may change soon.

This week, an alliance of 140+ TradFi giants announced they are launching their own stablecoin called Open USD.

Visa, Stripe, Mastercard, BlackRock, and BNY are among the biggest financial institutions that teamed up to launch Open USD.

These companies obviously have massive distribution power, which is why Open USD could be a noteworthy competitor in the stablecoin sector.

Stripe, for example, could introduce exclusive Open USD integrations across its products, driving adoption at a massive scale.

Initially, when I read the Open USD announcement, I have to say I was skeptical.

Many of these TradFi companies have a long history of overcharging users with outrageous fees to maximize their profits.

But after looking closely into Open USD, two things caught my attention:

• Partners (protocols integrating Open USD) receive all of the earnings from Open USD’s reserves, less a small management fee to cover Open USD’s operational costs

• Businesses can mint and redeem Open USD at no cost

The profit-sharing model is especially interesting to me.

Why does this matter?

Because for a long time, Tether and Circle have captured almost all of the profits generated by the collateral backing their stablecoins, while barely sharing any of it with their users or the platforms integrating their products.

If Open USD gains meaningful market share, it could pressure Tether and Circle to share some of their profits as well in order to stay competitive.

This would be a huge win for both DeFi protocols and users:

• DeFi protocols - DeFi protocols with large amounts of stablecoin deposits (e.g. Aave) could get a new revenue stream from stablecoin reserves profits instead of watching all of it go to entities like Circle or Tether

• Users - Some DeFi protocols could choose to share this additional yield with their users, which would lead to an increase in DeFi yields

Just to clarify, I'm not rooting for Open USD itself to become the world’s largest stablecoin. Many of the companies behind it have spent years openly attacking crypto.

However, if Open USD succeeds in creating real competition for Tether and Circle, forcing them to adopt profit sharing, all DeFi could benefit, as I mentioned above.

More serious competition in the stablecoin sector will inevitably lead to better stablecoin products and maybe also higher yields for DeFi users.

So it’s a win-win scenario.

Ultimately, though, I'd still like to see a crypto-native issuer, whether it's Sky, Ethena, Theo, Aave’s GHO, or another crypto native protocol, winning the stablecoin wars.

Together with Theo

Theo has launched a new points program

If you’re farming DeFi yields, you probably heard of Theo at least once.

It’s one of the largest tokenless stablecoin protocols, and just a few days ago, its team released a new points program aiming to reward early users.

Here are a few things you should know about it:

• The points program is centered around thUSD, which is Theo’s stablecoin backed by a delta-neutral gold basis trade strategy

• thUSD can be staked for sthUSD, a yield-bearing asset with a base APR of 5.40%

• The strategy offering the highest points boost is depositing thUSD in Theo’s Core+ vault, which offers a 7.2% fixed APY and 4x Theo points in exchange for locking your capital there for 6 months

If you’re willing to take higher risks to maximize your yield, another solid option is Theo’s Boost Vault with 11% fixed APY + 2x Theo points for 6 months.

This vault also comes with a 6-month lock, and it deploys user funds into a leveraged sthUSD strategy on Morpho in order to generate a return. What’s interesting about it is that the APY you get is fixed at 11% regardless of Morpho’s rates.

Overall, there are plenty of options for everyone.

With thUSD, Theo is bringing gold basis trading, one of the most popular TradFi yield strategies, on-chain.

In other news, Theo dropped a big announcement this week:

They announced a $20 million investment in FILQ, Fidelity International’s tokenized USD digital liquidity fund. This is the first time when a crypto-native platform has accessed Fidelity International’s tokenized fund offering.

Check out Theo’s new points program here!

Chart of the week

Maple Finance hit a new ATH in outstanding loans

Crypto meme of the week😂

The latest developments in DeFi

Robinhood Chain, Robinhood’s own Ethereum L2, went live

Aave announced they are working on a new automated buyback mechanism

Pendle cut its token incentives by 71% in the past 6 months

Mantle announced the launch of Openstock on its L2, bringing pre-IPO vaults on-chain. The Mantle H1 2026 Recap report also went live

Lighter’s perps were natively integrated into Robinhood Wallet

Resolv introduced primeUSD - a structured yield product generating yield via leveraged strategies on tokenized US T‑bills

Open USD, a new stablecoin backed by 140+ TradFi businesses, was announced

Ethena partnered with BlackRock to integrate USDe into BlackRock’s Aladdin app

Ethereum Institutional, a non-profit designed to accelerate Ethereum’s institutional adoption, was introduced

Theo launched a new thUSD points program

dYdX rebranded to Arcus and announced its deployment on Robinhood Chain

Uniswap announced its upcoming deployment to MegaETH

TradingView integrated Hyperliquid charts

World, a fully native prediction market platform on Solana, went live

That’s all for this week!

Until next time,

The DeFi Investor

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🔎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.

🔎First real tokenized stocks are here

If you’ve been following the tokenization sector, you know that projects like Ondo Finance and xStocks already launched on-chain stocks a while ago.

However, those historically came with several limitations and are better seen as wrappers rather than on-chain stocks with real ownership.

But a few days ago, Backpack released the first real US stocks and ETFs.

I’ll explain why I found them particularly interesting and what I mean by “real”.

There are several things that make Backpack’s tokenized assets stand out from other tokenized stock products:

• Real ownership under New York law - This matters as it ensures that even if Backpack declares bankruptcy at some point, the holders of its tokenized stocks would retain legal ownership of their shares

• They have the same legal framework as Robinhood and Fidelity

• Cash dividends are offered to their holders

• Brokerage transfers are supported - Backpack is the first tokenization platform that allows you to transfer your on-chain stocks / ETFs to other brokers

This last point is what really caught my attention.

If at a certain moment you decide to transfer your on-chain stocks off-chain, Backpack is the only crypto platform that actually allows you to do that.

You can transfer them in and out to Interactive Brokers, Robinhood, or other brokers and have access to 1:1 redemption into the underlying real share.

In other words, you legally own the stock, not just a synthetic representation of it.

I think stuff like this is really important because I’ve talked with several people about tokenized stocks over the past months, and the concern I heard repeatedly is this:

"Why buy stocks on-chain when I can just buy them through a traditional broker, which is regulated and comes with significantly stronger legal protections?"

The big deal about Backpack’s on-chain stocks is that they offer real ownership and are regulated, unlike most other tokenized stock products.

And the demand for their product is proving to be pretty high.

In just a few days since launch, Backpack has already captured 74% of the tokenized equities volume across spot DEXs:

I believe that tokenization will eventually bring trillions of dollars on-chain.

But for that to happen, investors need confidence that tokenized assets provide the same ownership rights and protections as their traditional counterparts.

That's why I think what Backpack shipped is an important milestone.

Together with Apyx

Apyx’s response to its first major stress test

Over the past few weeks, STRC suffered its largest depeg yet.

As the largest STRC-backed DeFi Protocol, Apyx has also been impacted by this, with apxUSD and apyUSD suffering a depeg.

In response to this, Apyx announced a new framework called Apyx 2.0.

The goal is to increase the protocol transparency and clarify how it handles redemptions during such events.

Here’s what Apyx 2.0 brings new:

• Two distinct metrics (redemption value and total collateral value) will be published on its transparency dashboard going forward

Redemption Value is the price at which minting and redemptions occur.

• An RFQ redemption mechanism - On top of the protocol’s automated redemption mechanism, users will also be able to submit redemption requests through an RFQ process that allows approved counterparties to complete them at better rates

• The overcollateralization buffer will not be used for redemptions. All of it will be allocated to STRC, with the yield generated given to the apyUSD holders

And from now on, the buffer will act as a backstop.

In a catastrophic scenario where the protocol is severely affected, the buffer will be used together with all other collateral and distributed pro rata among users.

Thanks to its buffer, apyUSD should always generate a higher yield than STRC.

Learn more in Apyx’s article on Apyx V2 here.

Chart of the week

Aerodrome is processing 53% of all DEX volume on Base

Crypto meme of the week😂

The latest developments in DeFi

Aster allocated 99% of its trading fees to token buybacks

Plasma launched Plasma One - a DeFi neobank with up to 4% cashback

Pendle started teasing its expansion to Monad

MegaETH launched MOSS - a new DeFi wallet aiming to improve on-chain UX

Variational started paying dividends on stock or ETF longs

Curve Finance launched LlamaLend V2 on Optimism

Re, an on-chain reinsurance platform, launched its token called RE

Lighter launched Atomic Orders, enabling to long and/or short multiple markets in a single transaction

Hylo introduced Leveraged Tokens for ETFs - enabling getting leveraged exposure to ETFs with liquidation protection

NEAR Protocol announced an incentive program for those using its privacy solution

Coinbase announced plans to launch 1:1 backed tokenized stocks

Morpho teamed up with Zama to launch the first confidential USDC yield vault with built-in privacy

Citigroup announced plans to roll out tokenized shares of private companies

That’s all for this week!

Until next time,

The DeFi Investor

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🔎Is AI a real threat to DeFi?

📊 Crypto chart of the week

🗞️ The latest DeFi news

🔎Is AI a real threat to DeFi?

I promise that I am not going to turn this newsletter into an AI-focused one:)

But I do think it’s important to talk about how AI could impact DeFi, because there’s no denying that AI is getting insanely good at finding code vulnerabilities.

On May 28, Anthropic (the company behind Claude) released the Opus 4.8 AI model.

Just one day later, a security researcher hired by Zcash discovered, using Opus 4.8, a 4-year-old critical bug in Zcash that enabled the minting of an infinite number of $ZEC.

It took him less than 24 hours to find it using AI.

You can imagine how damaging this could have been if the vulnerability had been found first by a hacker trying to exploit it.

Now, bugs inevitably happen.

Even Bitcoin had a few major vulnerabilities in its early days that were eventually patched. But this incident highlighted something important:

AI is quickly reaching the point where it can outperform humans at finding vulnerabilities. According to Anthropic, Mythos, its most powerful advanced AI model, found 10,000 software flaws in its first month.

So it’s easy to see why AI is becoming a major security concern for DeFi.

But on the bright side, I think there are also two positive things about AI that I haven’t seen many people mentioning, and I believe are worth covering:

• The public version of Mythos (Fable) that got released a few days ago can’t be used to audit smart contracts by the general public

This is deliberately done by Anthropic to prevent its use in cyberattacks.

Depending on how you see it, this is both good and bad. On one hand, letting anyone use Fable for smart contract audits could help well-intentioned developers find more bugs and patch them. On the other hand, it’s somewhat reassuring that hackers can’t currently use it in order to search for smart contract vulnerabilities.

• Some major crypto projects like Ethereum and Solana have reportedly already gained access to the more powerful non-public version of Mythos, which can be used to perform audits and help identify critical bugs

This is obviously great news. If other big projects like Sky, Aave, and Pendle will also eventually gain access to this version of Mythos to perform audits, they could become significantly more secure than they already are.

And I think this is the bull case for DeFi in the AI era.

If the best AI models for security remain gated and are only accessible to vetted teams, auditors, and white-hat researchers, DeFi could eventually reach a point where it becomes incredibly hard for bad actors to find vulnerabilities that haven’t already been discovered and patched by AI.

Now obviously, this depends on what OpenAI and Anthropic will do next.

My hope is that more vetted DeFi teams and auditors will get early access to the most powerful security-focused AI models going forward, allowing them to find and patch vulnerabilities before hackers can exploit them.

If this happens, good actors will gain a major advantage over hackers.

So to sum it up, I think that the DeFi projects that take security seriously will be fine.

As Stani, the founder of Aave, shared, the quality of AI-powered tools for hardening security has improved drastically. The projects using those are much less likely to be exploited via bugs found using AI.

That said, my advice is to be increasingly more careful with the dApps you use.

Stick to DeFi protocols with multiple audits from top security firms, built by teams that give you a feeling that they truly care about security.

The next few years will be a stress test for DeFi, but I think AI will ultimately make it stronger and more resilient.

Chart of the week

Hyperliquid is expected to make $172M in extra annual revenue due to its collaboration with Circle

Crypto meme of the week😂

The latest developments in DeFi

Morpho raised $175M in funding

Curve Finance introduced Llamalend v2 - a new DeFi lending primitive

NEAR Protocol announced confidential perps powered by Hyperliquid

Starknet released STRK20 - a privacy framework for ERC-20 assets

DeFi Saver integrated Hyperliquid and launched S1 of its rewards campaign. Trade perps or open leveraged DeFi strategies to earn a share of its 50,000 USDC rewards pool

Babylon released native Bitcoin-backed borrowing via Aave V4 on testnet

Ondo released Ondo Perps, enabling to trade RWA perps with TradFi liquidity. It offers 24/7 trading access for equities and commodities

Aave proposed a new risk framework following the rsETH exploit

3Jane, a credit-based undercollateralized lending DeFi app, went live to the public

Helius, Mert’s project, announced plans to build a privacy layer for Solana

Polymarket introduced combinatorial positions, which enable to bundle multiple predictions into one bet

Ethena partnered with Centrifuge to add RWAs as part of USDe’s backing

Nado enabled trading perps with tokenized equities as collateral

SBF applied for a presidential pardon

That’s all for this week!

Until next time,

The DeFi Investor

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🔎My plan for Bitcoin

📊 Crypto chart of the week

🗞️ The latest DeFi news

🔎My plan for Bitcoin

It’s been a pretty rough week for BTC.

The good thing about bear markets, though, is that they bring life-changing opportunities. We’ve seen in both 2018 and 2022 that if you have the balls to buy when everyone else is scared, it can pay off big time.

Earlier this year, I shared my plan and market expectations for 2026.

Now feels like a good time to provide an update, so I wanted to share what I think could happen next for BTC, and explain how I’m positioning myself.

Let’s dive in 👇

The 4-year cycle is still intact

I know the 4-year cycle theory may not make a lot of sense from a fundamental perspective, which is why a lot of people don’t believe in it, but the reality is this:

In 2014, 2018, and 2022, BTC did the exact same thing.

~1 year after it topped in the post-Halving year, it hit its cycle bottom.

And according to the chart below, which shows the BTC ROI over midterm years (2014, 2018, 2022), BTC is now following its usual 4-year trajectory.

That doesn’t necessarily mean it will keep falling as much as it did in previous cycles. Historically, each bear market has been less severe than the previous one.

But based on what happened in the past, I think the most likely scenario is that the cycle bottom will be reached sometime in September or maybe October. I am saying this because Q4 is historically when BTC tends to bottom in the midterm years.

So far, I don’t see anything that indicates that this time will be different.

That said, I think it’s a bad idea to try to time the bottom perfectly.

A lot of people who believed in BTC in 2022 didn’t buy it at $16k because they were waiting for $14k. $14k was never hit again, and they ended up watching BTC go to new all-time highs without any exposure.

I am personally not willing to risk that happening to me, so here’s what I am doing:

My current action plan

For me, anything below $65,000 is a good zone to accumulate BTC.

Even though I think the bottom is not in yet, this week I’ve already started dollar-cost averaging into BTC by buying small amounts daily as long as it stays below $65k.

The truth is that no one knows exactly what the market will do next. So while I’m still keeping most of my stablecoins ready to deploy later as we get closer to Q4, according to my original thesis, I also think buying a bit at current levels makes sense just for the scenario that my thesis is wrong.

Anyway, the lower BTC goes, and the closer it gets to $50k, the more I plan to buy.

I mentioned $50k because, at the moment, I think that if BTC dips below $60k, $50k is the level around which I’d expect it to hit the bottom.

That said, if a major crypto company implodes (like FTX in 2022) or there’s a huge stock market crash that affects all financial markets, it could maybe dip below this level and even reach $40k in a worst-case scenario.

But personally, I’d rather deploy my capital earlier at a slightly higher price than wait for BTC to hit $40k, which may never happen.

My goal is to deploy all my available stablecoins into BTC by the end of November 2026 at the latest, as I think it’s unlikely BTC will continue falling much after that.

I expect to get a great average entry price by doing this.

At some point, I will obviously also be interested in buying some altcoins.

But if you look at how BTC performed relative to most altcoins in the last cycle, I think it makes more sense to focus on BTC for now and only start building significant altcoin exposure once they show clear signs of strength.

The harsh reality is that people who bought BTC at $16k-$20k in 2022 and simply held until new all-time highs outperformed more than 95% of altcoin traders.

I guess the lesson is that less is more.

You don’t need a complicated strategy to outperform.

I hope you found this helpful, and good luck out there!

Better times for crypto will come. You just have to believe.

Chart of the week

Near’s privacy solution is gaining traction fast

Crypto meme of the week😂

The latest developments in DeFi

CFTC legalized perps in the US

Sky and Pendle partnered to launch a fixed-rate sUSDS product

Morpho released the whitepaper for Morpho Midnight - an upcoming protocol for fixed rate, fixed term credit markets

Ethena partnered with Coinbase to launch a new savings product

Tom Lee’s Bitmine announced plans to create a STRC-style product in order to raise money and buy more ETH

Arbitrum Foundation published a proposal asking Arbitrum DAO for ~$43.5M to fund another year of operations

Grayscale launched its Hyperliquid Staking ETF

NEAR Intents surpassed $20B in all-time cross-chain volume

Lighter founder announced they are working on an options product

Exponent V2, a new interest rate trading platform on Solana, went live

EtherFi launched 15% cashback for AI tool bills paid with EtherFi Cash

Zodial, the first portfolio-margin lending protocol in DeFi, went live on Solana

Opensea announced its own perps DEX powered by Hyperliquid

Radiant Capital announced it is shutting down

Cap announced its ICO starting on June 10

That’s all for this week!

Until next time,

The DeFi Investor

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

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🔎An underrated DeFi strategy

📊 Crypto chart of the week

🗞️ The latest DeFi news

🔎An underrated DeFi strategy

The most obvious and fastest way to make (or lose) money in crypto is trading.

But besides investing or trading, there are also many other, less popular strategies that you can use to gradually grow your stablecoin holdings.

I wanted to talk today about one of these strategies I’ve been using to make money with my stablecoins over the past few months. Let’s dive in:

First of all, I’ll provide a bit of context.

Many yield-bearing assets work this way (I will use Ethena as an example):

You can instantly stake a base asset with no yield, such as USDe, for a yield-bearing asset like sUSDe, but if you want to unstake sUSDe, you have to wait up to a few days.

If an sUSDe whale needs instant liquidity fast, it can choose to instantly sell the yield-bearing asset (sUSDe) on a DEX, but at a slightly worse price than it would get by unstaking sUSDe and waiting for the unstake cooldown period.

And whenever that happens, it often creates a peg arbitrage opportunity.

Because the liquidity for most yield-bearing assets, including sUSDe, is not very deep, if a whale sells, the sUSDe DEX price might temporarily drop below its actual NAV exchange rate shown on its website.

NAV exchange rate = the true value of that token (e.g., for USDC it’s $1.00)

What that means is that you could, for instance, do this:

• Notice that sUSDe is trading slightly under its peg on DEXs after a whale sold

• Check Ethena's website and verify that sUSDe is still overcollateralized, and that there’s not a fundamental reason for the depeg

• Swap 30,000 USDC for 22,000 sUSDe on a DEX (for example)

• Unstake that sUSDe on Ethena for USDe

• Wait 24h (the unstaking cooldown period) and then receive $30,045 USDe in return

• Swap that USDe back to 30,041 USDC and walk away with $41 profit in 1 day

This is just an example with made-up numbers to show you how this strategy (I will call it peg arbitrage) effectively works. The returns vary a lot, but personally, at times, I was able to earn 50-100% APY for a few days by doing peg arbitrage.

That said, peg arbitrage isn’t something you can do every day, as big depegs like this happen only once in a while (e.g., after the rsETH hack, there was a decent sUSDe depeg), but when they do, you can make good money by capitalizing on them.

Next, I will show you how to track depegs like this in order to take advantage of them whenever they occur. Before that, here’s an overview of Pareto:

Brought to you by Pareto

It’s time to make on-chain credit more useful

On-chain credit has been growing fast.

But bringing loans onchain is only the first step.

The bigger opportunity is to make these credit positions easy to use across DeFi and unlock greater capital efficiency.

That’s where Pareto comes in.

Pareto provides vault infrastructure for tokenized credit markets, helping turn credit exposure into positions that can be integrated with lending protocols.

It supports deploying credit vaults with the compliance, liquidity, reporting, and uptime guarantees that institutional products require.

One of the most successful products built on Pareto is the FalconX Credit Vault, which is composable by design:

• Users can deposit USDC into it and get AA_FalconXUSDC receipt tokens

• The capital deposited into the vault is then lent by FalconX to trading firms, hedge funds, etc., in order to generate a yield

• Depositors can then use their AA_FalconXUSDC tokens as collateral on Morpho to borrow USDC against them

• The borrowed USDC can then be used to create a loop position with high returns or for any other strategies. Looping can also be automated through Gauntlet.

This setup provides a lot of flexibility:

Instead of simply holding a credit position, users have the option to access borrowing opportunities while maintaining exposure to the yield-generating vault.

Recently, Matteo Pandolfi, CEO and Co-founder of Pareto, and Craig Birchall, Head of Lending at FalconX, were guests of Unchained’s Bits + Bips podcast.

They discussed there what’s behind the $16 trillion repo market and why bringing it onchain is DeFi’s most important missing piece of infrastructure.

You can check out the full podcast here.

Read more about the $16T repo market and why it matters for onchain credit in this article.

🔎An underrated DeFi strategy (part 2)

How do you catch peg arbitrage opportunities?

There are multiple ways, depending on how far you want to take it.

If you know how to code or you’re a vibecoder willing to spend some time on this, you could build a bot to alert you when such an opportunity arises.

But the simplest way is this:

• Find a list of yield-bearing assets (e.g. Stablewatch has a good one here) and check their charts on Coingecko to see which ones have seen depegs on DEXs before

• After you identify several of them, research how their redemption/unstaking mechanism works, and if there’s any way you can arbitrage them (arbitrage in the way I described works only for the yield-bearing assets that have a permissionless redemption/unstaking mechanism - some don’t)

• Go to Dexscreener → Watchlist

• Add to the Watchlist the yield-bearing assets you found that meet your criteria, click $ button to see their native price, and check the watchlist once or twice a day

• When you notice that one of them dropped >0.05%–0.1% in the last 24h, check whether it’s trading below the NAV rate on its website, confirm the drop isn’t due to an exploit/loss of funds, and arbitrage it if the return is worthwhile (be aware that some assets have redemption fees)

sUSDe, reUSD, and PRIME are a few yield-bearing assets I am monitoring.

You can also set alerts to trigger when a specific price is hit using Dexscreener.

With this strategy, just yesterday, I noticed that PRIME, a yield-bearing RWA asset, dropped to $1.037 for a brief period while its NAV exchange rate was $1.0397.

If you had bought it when it depegged, you could have gotten a 0.26% return in just a few days by buying it on a DEX where it was depegged and by beginning the PRIME unstaking process on its website. (in this case, Hastra)

These are not crazy returns like we are used to in crypto. But if you hold stablecoins, this arbitrage is a nice way to make some additional money on the side IMO.

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

What I wanted to show in this post is that while making money in crypto is certainly harder now than it was a few years ago, this market is still very inefficient.

If you hold stablecoins and manage to spot these inefficiencies, you can grow your portfolio even during market crashes.

Chart of the week

Spot HYPE ETFs absorbed 1.04% of HYPE’s circulating supply in their first 10 days

Crypto meme of the week😂

The latest developments in DeFi

Hyperliquid launched outcome markets based on real-world events

Base introduced Base MCP - enabling anyone to connect AI agents to their Base account to trade on-chain

NEAR Protocol released confidential on-chain payments

Aave’s proposal to deploy Aave V4 on Avalanche with up to $15M incentives is live

Sui released gasless stablecoin transfers

Resolv announced its recovery plan and introduced primeUSD - a permissioned leveraged RWA product

Liquid introduced Co-Invest - the first way to trade directly via ChatGPT and Claude, powered by Hyperliquid

Ethereum proposal to enable native private ETH and ERC-20 transfers on mainnet was presented by Facet co-founder Tom Lehman

Polymarket released its perps product in the beta phase

Ondo Finance Founder Nathan Allman passed away

Re, a reinsurance platform, introduced its governance token called RE

Babylon proposed bringing native BTC collateral to Aave V4

Euler Finance launched modular lending on HyperEVM

Solstice’s token and airdrop claiming portal went live

That’s all for this week!

Until next time,

The DeFi Investor

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

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🔎Tokenized Stocks are getting regulatory clarity

📊 Crypto chart of the week

🗞️ The latest DeFi news

🔎Tokenized Stocks finally get regulatory clarity

One of the most bullish regulatory announcements in a while dropped this week.

According to Bloomberg, the SEC is reportedly planning to introduce an “innovation exemption” that would officially allow US users to access tokenized stocks.

I think this could have a major positive impact on DeFi and attract significant capital to the industry in the long run, which is why I wanted to cover it today.

Why legalizing tokenized stocks is a big deal

On-chain stocks already exist. Several platforms, including Ondo Finance and xStocks, offer tokenized equities with deep liquidity.

But there’s one major issue:

They mostly operate in a regulatory grey area and are restricted to non-US residents.

This is one of the reasons why I think they haven’t gained significant traction yet.

For now, holding stocks in a TradFi brokerage account simply makes more sense for most investors. It comes with lower regulatory risk and clearer investor protections.

But the SEC’s proposed innovation exemption could change that.

Once regulatory clarity arrives, the value proposition of tokenized stocks becomes much clearer in my opinion, as tokenization can offer major advantages.

For example, DeFi’s composability enables an unparalleled level of capital efficiency.

In DeFi, you could use your stocks and ETFs to borrow stablecoins against them, provide them as liquidity to generate a yield, trade them 24/7, not only during the stock market operating hours, and do all of this while paying lower fees.

Meanwhile, most of these use cases are still either unavailable, limited, or impractical on traditional brokerage exchanges. TradFi is simply much less capital efficient.

That’s why I think the demand for tokenized stocks and ETFs could be massive once the regulatory uncertainty is removed.

Which DeFi projects could benefit from the SEC’s innovation exemption for on-chain stocks?

I already made a short X post about this, but I think it’s worth diving deeper.

The most obvious beneficiaries would be the issuers of tokenized stocks. Right now, the most popular ones are Ondo Finance and xStocks.

Ondo has 60% market share in the tokenized stocks sector, and xStocks has 28%.

That said, there’s an important caveat. Ondo is currently the only major issuer with a live token, but ONDO is a governance token with limited utility for holders today.

There have been proposals around revenue sharing/buybacks, but there’s no timeline for their implementation. So while Ondo’s TVL could grow significantly if tokenized stocks take off, that growth may not necessarily translate into ONDO token pumping.

Another project that could benefit in the long run is Hyperliquid. Hyperliquid doesn’t offer spot trading for tokenized stocks, but it does offer RWA perps, from which it has generated significant revenue.

The only drawback is that Hyperliquid isn’t officially available to users in the US for now, so it may not immediately capture the upside of the SEC’s innovation exemption.

But the Hyperliquid team is working on making it accessible in the US.

Lastly, I think money markets could also see significant growth in TVL, driven by friendly regulations for tokenized stocks and ETFs.

I believe many people would love the idea of borrowing against their equity portfolios for day-to-day purchases, yield farming, or other investments. Right now, Kamino on Solana is the most popular place for borrowing against tokenized stocks & ETFs.

But I expect that projects like Aave will eventually allow that as well.

Overall, I’m excited about the direction crypto is heading.

We’ve been waiting for regulatory clarity and pro-crypto regulation for years.

Now those are finally coming, and they are going to attract more money into the industry than ever before.

Together with Apyx

The fastest-growing STRC-backed DeFi protocol

One of the fastest-growing new DeFi protocols has been Apyx.

In less than 3 months, it surpassed $476M in TVL.

Apyx is the first stablecoin protocol backed by Digital Asset Treasury (DAT) preferred equity, such as Strategy’s STRC and Strive’s SATA.

As STRC has a very high base yield, Apyx can offer 10.73% APY to the holders of its apyUSD yield-bearing asset.

And in addition to this, APYX Airdrop is also coming:

• 5% of its total token supply will be distributed as part of its Season 1 points program that ends on May 22

• 4% of its total token supply is allocated for Season 2 of its points program, which starts right after Season 1 ends

The exact date when the APYX token launches has not been announced yet.

But what we know is this:

The APYX token will have a staking mechanism, enabling stakers to either earn additional APYX tokens or receive apxUSD dividends from the protocol’s revenue.

APYX will provide a way to bet directly on the STRC narrative for the first time.

As Apyx is the largest STRC-backed protocol, it benefits from STRC’s success, and APYX token holders will get more revenue as the dApp grows.

You can farm Apyx by holding apyUSD, apxUSD, or by using them in DeFi across various protocols like Pendle and Morpho.

Start exploring Apyx today!

Chart of the week

EtherFi Cash is one of the fastest-growing crypto neobanks

Crypto meme of the week😂

The latest developments in DeFi

Variational raised $50M in funding and launched RWA perps

Polymarket launched pre-IPO markets for trading private companies

SkyMoney increased the SKY Staking Rate from 1.31% to 5.71% (fueled by buybacks)

Pendle released the Pendle Trading Alert Bot, enabling users to set alerts for limit order fills, new market launches, and more

Chainlink SVR was integrated into Aave V4, adding a new revenue stream for Aave from liquidation MEV

Lighter announced Lighter RFQ, bringing institutional-grade liquidity for RWA pairs

CME and NYSE are pushing the US to force Hyperliquid to integrate KYC

ProjectX announced an airdrop (likely in stablecoins) for May 22

Bitwise committed to use 10% of the revenue from its Hyperliquid ETF to buy HYPE

SEC is allegedly preparing to allow on-chain tokenized stock trading

Lombard and Kraken are migrating from LayerZero to Chainlink CCIP for their cross-chain infrastructure

Japan officially recognized stablecoins as legal payment methods

Solstice postponed its TGE to May 25

Aave’s proposal to expand to Monad is live

Strategy acquired $2 billion worth of BTC

Thorchain suffered a $10M exploit

That’s all for this week!

Until next time,

The DeFi Investor

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