Rough notes on interesting crypto stuff (mostly for the uninitiated since it’s pretty high-level), in no particular order.
A Digital Asset Treasury (DAT) company is a publicly traded company that holds a lot of crypto, effectively acting as an on-chain crypto treasury. Buying stock in DATs offers investors indirect exposure to the digital asset market.
MicroStrategy is one of these DATs — one of the largest corporate holders of Bitcoin (638,460 BTC as of mid-Sept 2025). Owning MSTR stock offers investors highly leveraged Bitcoin exposure through traditional brokerage accounts. Before spot Bitcoin ETFs launched in January 2024, the company was basically “Wall Street’s bitcoin proxy.”
But the company didn’t start off as a DAT; it initially sold business intelligence software. During the dot-com boom, co-founder Michael Saylor was a paper billionaire after MicroStrategy went public. This was short-lived though; in 2000, the SEC went after the company for accounting fraud (which ended in a settlement) that left the company nearly bankrupt. Stock crashed from $333 to $120 per share on March 20 and to $33 the next month. Saylor’s net worth fell $6 billion. Despite the scandal, Salyor somehow remained CEO and a major shareholder while the company went into recovery mode, taking a $125 million “death spiral” investment.
For 20 years, MicroStrategy was a zombie company – that is, until it’s $250 million investment into Bitcoin. Saylor orchestrated a massive narrative shift: MicroStrategy was now a Bitcoin holding company.
MicroStrategy markets their Bitcoin investment strategy as intelligent leverage. The mechanism works as follows:
(1) Issue new shares/debt at a premium
(2) Use proceeds to buy Bitcoin
(3) Calculate “Bitcoin-per-share” (divide total Bitcoin by total shares to show an increase)
(4) Repeat
This cycle simultaneously runs up the price of BTC and the price of MSTR: sell shares at a premium and buy Bitcoin –> this increases BTC asset value –> premium expands, sell more shares.
For investors, the mechanism supposedly goes something like this: Let’s say X company has 100 Bitcoin and 1,000 shares = 0.1 Bitcoin-per-share. Then, X issues 100 new shares but charges premium prices (enough to buy 60 Bitcoin). Now X has 160 Bitcoin and 1,100 = 0.145 Bitcoin-per-share. The narrative becomes we increased Bitcoin per share by 45%.
But this framing obscures the fact that MicroStrategy is a “perpetual dilution machine.” Because MSTR trades at a massive premium (often 2-3x the actual value of BTC), new investors increase the Bitcoin-per-share for existing holders but get diluted ownership.
Continuing the example above: The 100 new shares funded 60 BTC worth but those shares are only worth 100 * 0.145 = 14.5 BTC worth. In other words, new investors funded 37.5% (60/160 BTC) of the total Bitcoin holdings but only received 9.1% (14.5/160) ownership while the rest goes to existing shareholders for free.
If you think this sounds like a house-of-cards, you’re right.
But the strategy has worked so far because it does makes the numbers go up as long as (a) MSTR trades at a premium (so that more Bitcoin can be bought than shares issued), (b) there’s fresh capital flowing in, (c) Bitcoin price direction is generally up, which attracts the new investors.
And remember, before Bitcoin ETFs, MSTR was one of the only way for many institutional and retail investors to long Bitcoin using regular stock trading accounts. Now, Bitcoin ETFs are a threat because investors can get direct exposure to BTC with only a 0.25% fee vs. a massive premium (but people still buy MSTR for various reasons like leverage and the Michael Saylor cult).
A huge reason why the MicroStrategy playbook was able to be run up so much is Michael Saylor’s ability to build a narrative. People seem to have forgetten his past as a sketchy fniancial fraud guy since he’s gained so much mindshare as a Bitcoin maxi.
Zooming out, this means that Bitcoin as an asset has succeeded but the chain becomes a ghost chain. You can start to see some of this phenomena in Ethereum too: ETH the asset is increasingly priced as an institutional store of value as opposed to a reflection of the chain itself.
Hyperliquid is a decentralized perpetual futures exchange founded by this guy named Jeff. With only an 11-person team, Hyperliquid has $6.5 billion TVL (as of today Sept 22, 2025).
Perps are a derivative contract that allows you to speculate on the price of an asset without having to actually own the underlying asset itself. You can open long positions or short positions with leverage and no expiration date.
The ability to leverage is high risk and high reward. It’s high risk because you can get entirely liquidated even prices move a bit (depending on your collateral) but also amplify returns on successful trades.
A concrete example: Let’s say Bitcoin is at $50,000 and you open a long with $1,000 collateral at 10x leverage (controlling $10,000 worth). If Bitcoin goes to $55,000 (10% increase), your position gains $1,000. If Bitcoin drops to $45,000 (10% decrease), you lose $1,000 (your entire collateral).
Perpetual futures match the spot price of an asset as closely as possible. In traditional futures contracts, prices converge naturally as the contract approaches its expiration date — but since perps have no expiration date, a more elegant mechanism is required to keep the prices aligned over time: funding rates. Every 8 hours, longs pay shorts if perpetual trades above spot price (to incentivize shorting, which brings price down) or vice versa. This funding rate changes based on the delta between the perp and the spot prices. (alignment is also done via arbitrade and market makers)
So in the above example (remember you have a long position), if the funding rate is positive, you have pay fees to shorts and if negative, you earn fees from the shorts.
Perps are essentially a bet on price direction without needing to hold the actual asset. Since they don’t expire, traders can enter and exit positions more flexibly. You can also use perps to hedge against short-term price flucuations (e.g. if you hold a ton of Bitcoin and are long the asset but suspect there will be a dip soon).
Other things that make Hyperliquid bullish are hip-3 (anyone can launch perps if you stake $20 million worth of $HYPE), USDH (Hyperliquid’s stablecoin), and integrations with Phantom’s perps. There’s still a lot of room for interesting things to be built on Hyperliquid.
So what? Binance was always the dominant exchange in crypto but Hyperliquid was able to slowly climb the ranks. This is a feat in itself — perps are a lucrative market and Hyperliquid captures most of this value. This made CZ mad so Binance launched its own Hyperliquid competitor called Aster, which is doing pretty well since launch (still not as good as Hyperliquid though).
The Kalshi vs. Polymarket PvP has been all rage recently. (Unclear who will “win” - I think Polymarket is more popular with the crypto heads right now but I think Kalshi is better suited to dominate everyday consumer mindshare)
The most crypto-y thing that my non-crypto friends do is sports betting. They use platforms like PrizePicks and Underdog to make casual bets. It’s a pretty big market: sports betting market revenue is estimated around $10-20 billion in 2025.
An even bigger market than sports betting? Blind boxes.
My friend John Wang wrote this piece about the subtle emergence of softcore gambling (forms like mystery item unboxings) and how it is dominated by women. Just look at the numbers: Pop Mart (the company behind Labubus) has a market cap of $355 billion HKD ($45B USD) with 75% of buyers being women (with a 50% repurchase rate!).
These are both signals of emerging behavioral phenomena: more people are gambling. The people are addicted to the dopamine hit from playing the game of chance, and it’s becoming more and more normalized.
And it’s not totally obvious either…it’s not a casino or pachinko, it’s a parlay that your favorite player is going to drop at least 20 tonight or that you are going to get that one Labubu. Whatever form it’s in, prediction markets can surely capitalize on this shift. It’s the natural evolution of gambling.
Stablecoins have always made sense (e.g. cheaper for cross-border payments, etc.) but it’s hard to make crypto payments “a thing” isolated outside of traditional payment rails. Outside of the US, stables are an extremely popular way for countries with volatile local currencies to access the U.S. dollar — historically, Tron has abslutely dominated this market with USDT.
Earlier this month, Stripe and Paradigm announced an incubated stablecoin L1 called Tempo an EVM-compatible blockchain purpose-built for real-world payments. Circle’s stablecoin L1, Arc, was also recently announced.
I think stablecoins work much better as a “crypto trojan horse into tradfi” (so to speak) as opposed to “look at this entirely new way of sending money, now go switch over to it!”, which to me, makes Stripe’s participation particularly exciting. This also seems like the right time given regulatory clarity (GENIUS act in July 2025), proven demand - especially overseas (e.g. SpaceX uses stablecoins for Starlink payments in South America, many Argentinians hold stablecoins for payments using apps like Lemon, cross-border payments in Asia), and tech maturity (Tempo is built on open-source Foundry & Reth, spearheaded by the one and only Georgios Konstantopoulos).
Stablecoin L1s allow companies to capture more value in the global payments market by controlling the underlying infrastructure. Instead of using underlying payment networks like Visa and Mastercard, Stripe simply use Tempo as their payment rail – allowing Stripe to earn the entire profit margin instead of just the smaller percentage on top of network fees. Stripe’s massive payment volume (trillions of dollars) means Tempo will earn tons of revenue in transaction fees.
On top of that, Stripe has now built an end-to-end crypto porfolio: they own the end-user wallet (Privy), the on/off ramp (Bridge), and the underlying transaction ledger itself (Tempo). This is quite powerful.
Yes this means that stablecoins are becoming more widely adopted, which is exciting for the future of international transfers, faster payments, etc. but this is also indicative of a much needed vibe shift in crypto.
The crypto industry has long lived in dysfuntional extremes: either ideological la dee da land OR degenerate gambling land. Lots of smart people have been nerd-sniped by interesting cryptography problems but oftentimes this work doesn’t necessarily compounding into widely adopted, value-additive products. On the other hand, lots of crypto products that do have “PMF” or make a lot of money simply take advantage of degeneracy (e.g. memecoins, etc.).
The fact that stablecoins are actually being adopted for what they were made for is really exciting! I don’t think people realize how big of a deal this is. Yes, this is “boring payments infra” but that’s exactly where the real-world value is. The fact that Bridge quietly built a great product (I can attest, my old company used to use them) outside of all the usual crypto shenanigans shows just how divorced the industry had become from building actual utility.
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