Threading on the Edge

i thought to address a few common misconceptions

i think the more interesting way to look at @alignedlayer is not just another piece of Ethereum infrastructure, but packaging the entire stack needed to build financial applications on Ethereum.

for instance, today, a fintech that wants to build onchain might need separate providers for wallets, rollup infrastructure, interoperability, proving, and ZK verification.

@alignedlayer is trying to compress that into one stack including:

user → WaaS → dedicated rollup → interoperability → ZK proving/aggregation → Ethereum settlement

WaaS abstracts away seed phrases and gas.

RaaS gives applications dedicated execution.

Interoperability connects that environment back to Ethereum liquidity.

LambdaVM and proof aggregation handle the ZK side, while Ethereum remains the underlying settlement and security layer.

the thesis is basically that institutions shouldn’t need to become crypto infrastructure companies just to build on Ethereum.

if Aligned can make that stack feel like integrating a normal fintech backend, Ethereum becomes much easier to use as financial infrastructure rather than something users have to interact with directly.

that’s the part of the $ALIGN thesis I find most interesting.

NFA, DYOR

https://x.com/arndxt_xo/status/2092155521658982877

$AERO remains the clearest proxy to bet on the growth of the @base ecosystem.

- 30 day DEX volume is currently $11.74B, with weekly volume up +85%
- Aerodrome's Slipstream has built a real foothold in euro-stablecoin FX, processing close to $10B in 30-day volume.
- Every dollar of protocol fee revenue routes to veAERO holders.
- $AERO's valuation is not stretched given the flow (9.3x P/S and 6.7x P/F)
- @coinbase just added 50x perps to the Base App via Hyperliquid and launched a $1M accelerator for trading/payments/agent apps.

Base is turning into a trading hub, and Aerodrome owns the spot side of the volume.

None of this is priced in.

https://x.com/Flowslikeosmo/status/2091895310234862021

How much does it cost to onramp €1,000 into Bitcoin on top MiCA-compliant CEXs ↓

https://x.com/stacy_muur/status/2091889025108103227

After $ZEC, why $NEAR you ask?

In a future where machines will handle most of the transactions at massive scale the real scarce thing will no longer be blockspace or even privacy but a durable and contestable sense of identity that can last for decades while keys evolve and permissions stretch across many different domains.

Execution layers will just become cheap commodities while the real coordination value will go to whatever protocol actually owns the identity primitive that every other chain ends up having to inherit because their own account models were never built for long lived machine actors.

Once agents turn into the main economic participants @NEARProtocol’s early decision to design accounts that way becomes the quiet advantage that reduces every other chain to a simple execution backend and leaves $NEAR itself as the authority and reputation layer they cannot easily replace.

https://x.com/yashascore/status/2091895408029241528

Crypto Watchlist for the week ahead:

https://x.com/TheDeFinvestor/status/2091871099344581107

As ETH/BTC continues to outperform the market will continue to bid the tokens that act as betas.

Here's a list + beta over the past 180 days:

https://x.com/Flowslikeosmo/status/2091526624898629739

Ngl this pump caught me a bit off guard.

I’ve got ~35% of my capital deployed into the market, and while I started DCAing a lot in August, I thought we still had at least 3–4 weeks before a major rally.

My plan going forward is to keep buying any major dips, especially around key support zones.

I bought some when BTC hit $76k today, and the next key buy zone I am watching is $72k-$73k.

There’s no guarantee BTC gets there, but the 200-day EMA is around $72K, and $72k has historically been a strong support level.

After the 2022 bottom, when BTC resumed the uptrend, it retested the 200-day EMA many times on its way up.

That said, I’m also still open to the possibility of one last major dip in Q4. The Q4 bottom happened in all three previous bear markets.

But ultimately, I think the best strategy is one that prepares you for all scenarios.

If the bottom is indeed in, make sure you have some exposure to enjoy the rally instead of watching from the sidelines. Take advantage of any dips we see on the way up, as there will surely be many.

For the scenario where this is just a bull trap, keep some dry powder so you can take advantage of any major discounts.

This is the way I see it.

Everyone on CT is acting as if they are leveraged long to the tits, but I think a lot of people are in the same situation where they feel a bit underexposed.

If you’re unsure what to do next, I hope this post helps you make a decision:)

https://x.com/TheDeFinvestor/status/2091500733153612114

$PUMP +60% and the bull case is pretty simple.

i’ve been fairly critical of Pump before, especially around unlocks, competition and how robust the volume moat actually is. but none of that really kills the trade.

$PUMP is cheap relative to $HYPE on revenue multiples, the business has real PMF, revenue has been unusually consistent, and current revenue is still growing despite market-share compression.

that last point matters. @Pumpfun’s launchpad share fell hard at one point, but absolute fees still increased because the total launchpad market expanded even faster. losing share in a rapidly growing market is not automatically bearish if the underlying revenue base keeps growing.

then you have the buyback. 50% of revenue continues flowing into $PUMP purchases through April 2027. at current revenue levels, that creates a meaningful daily bid and offsets a large part of the ongoing team and investor unlock pressure.

while i don’t really see $PUMP as a long-term cash-flow hodl, i see it as a leveraged bet on memecoin attention.

more attention → more volume → more Pump revenue → larger buybacks → more token demand.

however, the bear case is still very real: competition is increasing, unlocks continue, Pump is spending aggressively to defend volume, and the buyback commitment has a known expiry date.

but the bull case doesn’t require Pump to dominate forever.

it only requires memecoin activity to stay elevated, Pump to maintain enough market share to keep generating meaningful revenue, and the market to eventually assign a higher multiple to those cash flows.

that’s why i’m cautious on the business, but tactically bullish on the token.

the one metric i’d watch most closely is Pump’s share of total launchpad fees. if that stabilizes while the overall market keeps growing, the bull case gets much stronger.

not advice

https://x.com/arndxt_xo/status/2091004100121133241

URGENT: Update your@Rabby_io wallet extensions! 1) Go to extensions page (top right corner) 2) Activate dev mode 3) Click "update" Done! Stay safe!

https://x.com/AmirOrmu/status/2090908003444699294

At some point, the market will realize how wrong they were about $ETHFI

Cards, cash, transactions, and active new cards are all near ATHs.

Valuing Apple as if it were IBM.

https://x.com/flowslikeosmo/status/2089714075530055962?s=46&t=hr2fbvcHJGpvp_SbDstdzg

You may not like it, but he has a point.

Solana has generated more App Revenue in the last 24 hours than Ethereum, BSC, Base, Hyperliquid, and Polygon COMBINED.

Decentralization doesn't matter until the moment it does.

https://x.com/stacy_muur/status/2089661337060454560?s=46&t=hr2fbvcHJGpvp_SbDstdzg

so i was looking at the source code of kaito pulse and found some interesting things:

- it fingerprints your device. it hashes how your gpu renders an invisible image, your gpu model, and how your hardware handles a test tone. that combo is unique to your laptop and it doesn't change

- it goes up with your twitter id attached, so every x account you use on that laptop points back to the same machine

- they can see what you see and replay your whole session. every post your feed served you including the ones you scrolled straight past, how many milliseconds you spent on each, every click, follow and unfollow, and a ping every 30 seconds with idle detection so they know exactly when you were on and for how long. not just your timeline either, it covers your search results and your bookmarks

- it reads your claude and chatgpt subscriptions, which plan you pay for and what percent of your rate limit you've burned (not your conversations though)

- on chatgpt it opens your settings page and clicks through to Usage by itself

- on binance it clicks the Positions tab for you, then re-sends your logged in requests to read wallet balances, futures positions, pnl, and deposit and withdrawal history

- the zktls is a fork of a project called primus

the 12 domains it runs on:

- markets: binance, okx, bybit, hyperliquid, lighter, polymarket, tradexyz, variational
- ai: chatgpt, claude
- social: X (all the telemetry is here)
- kaito (only site allowed to talk to the extension)

https://x.com/0x_ultra/status/2089807103636722039?s=46&t=hr2fbvcHJGpvp_SbDstdzg

The heavy crypto card activity continues.

New week with $250M in top-ups. I believe we won't have any more weeks with less than $200M.

Here are the current top 10 cards by weekly top-up volume:

https://x.com/defi_warhol/status/2089996042528084099?s=46&t=hr2fbvcHJGpvp_SbDstdzg

These viral screenshots of 800x gains are the new marketing meta.

Notice how everyone is posting the exact same story qt the same time. It is not a trade, it is an advertisement designed to provide exit liquidity for the team.

Paper wealth on a low cap token is not real money until you cash it out.

https://x.com/lovingcb1/status/2089963232035577869?s=46&t=hr2fbvcHJGpvp_SbDstdzg

The new leaders of the fundamental, revenue-producing onchain business era of the next cycle:

https://x.com/andyyy/status/2089675173410607237?s=46&t=hr2fbvcHJGpvp_SbDstdzg

I think we are close to the $BTC bottom.

CT is still full of bearish takes, but if you look at what happened in the last three market cycles, BTC historically bottoms within the next 3 months.

If you think crypto is here to stay, this isn’t a bad time to DCA.

https://x.com/thedefinvestor/status/2089674730479444125?s=46&t=hr2fbvcHJGpvp_SbDstdzg

On DeFi's Next Untapped Opportunity:

RWA has quietly become one of the fastest-growing sectors across crypto, expanding 21.9x since 2024 to roughly $38B in distributed assets.

We've come a long way & the conversation surrounding it has fundamentally shifted over the past 2 years:

https://x.com/0xcheeezzyyyy/status/2089699141161226367?s=46&t=hr2fbvcHJGpvp_SbDstdzg

what I take from this is that cost of living is increasingly detached from lived quality.

the most expensive cities are often expensive because everyone wants access to them. The best-value cities stay good only until enough people discover them.

and that makes these rankings more about where geographic arbitrage still exists and how long more before it disappears.

- the biggest global cities increasingly charge an access premium. you’re paying for jobs, networks, culture and status and not necessarily a proportionally better day-to-day life.

- Porto, Valencia and Prague are the more interesting places. they’ve stayed near the top for years, but all are getting more expensive. good value attracts migration, and migration eventually destroys some of that value.

- the Sun Belt trade may be following the same pattern. people move for cheaper housing and better lifestyles, prices rise, and the original arbitrage starts closing.

- cheap is also a misleading label. some cities are cheap only if you arrive with foreign income. for locals earning local wages, the experience can be completely different.

- London, New York, LA and San Francisco offer the WORST value on earth

https://x.com/arndxt_xo/status/2089756865983066455

I was talking to a friend recently who trades with six figs. He mostly trades on CEXs, has basically never traded perp DEXs, and has zero interest in perp DEX airdrops.

At the same time, among the CEXes he uses is BingX, even though they don’t have a token.

I got curious why he trades there. In theory, perp DEXes could adopt the same model of opportunities that BingX offers users, so people wouldn't have to care about some future token in the first place, let alone an airdrop.

Over the last six months, he gave me three examples of trades he made on BingX that together made him more than $150k.

The oil case in March, when the US and Israel went to war with Iran.

BingX has isolated margin with 100x leverage. The war started while the markets were closed, so you could open a long with $1,000 margin and a short with $1,000 margin. That’s $2,000 locked up for a $200k position.

When the markets reopened, with all the volatility, the maximum you could lose was $1,000 on one side because of isolated margin, while making a lot more on the other. Oil went up to $120 while it had been around $90 over the weekend, so the long made about $26k with only a $1k loss on the short.

This worked several times during those weeks because of the ongoing escalation and the markets closing over the weekends. My friend made more than $100k on this.

In April, some tokenized stocks on Binance, like TSLA and NVIDIA, suddenly rose 15-20% because of a bug, even though the actual stocks didn't move at all. The price on BingX also went up, while prices on perp DEXes didn’t change. So you could short basically any size on BingX, wait for the bug to be fixed and the price to come back down, and make money on the short. My friend made $40k on this.

Then there was a 20% spread on
$ARIA
between BingX and Bybit. You could short on BingX, go long on Bybit, wait for the prices to converge and make money on the spread. My friend made $12k on this.

So in the first case, it was an isolated-margin dual-position strategy. The second was probably closer to bug exploitation, although that's more of an exchange problem than a user problem. The third was classic arbitrage.

Can perp DEXes offer something like this? Unlikely. Oracles, 24/7 markets and lower liquidity make these kinds of opportunities much harder to reproduce.

Just out of curiosity, I asked him afterwards: why aren't you interested in perp DEX airdrops? There are cases like Lighter and Hyperliquid, and it seems like a more reliable way to make money than what you just described, especially since an exchange can block your account and freeze your funds.

He answered:

"What's the point if, out of a bunch of scam stories, you can only name a couple of good cases? The rest of these perp DEXs just screwed their users. I'm interested in making money here and now, including the risk of losing money because of an account block, like you said. Why would I farm some points just to maybe get rewards for them in a year or two? And it's not even clear whether those rewards are guaranteed or whether they'll be worth my time. What, do I have nothing better to do? I value my time, and I'm not going to waste it on this shit."

Do you agree with him?
https://x.com/muarmemuar/status/2089269512918978752