PaperImperium

How much do you read to learn?
I always assumed everyone is curious and never stops learning in areas they find interesting, but maybe not?
Assume 10 peer reviewed articles = 1 book. Fiction discouraged, but will leave to your judgement if it was with intent to learn.

Everyone’s out here dunking on MegaETH, but I think a small, new chain clocking ~15% of what Ethereum’s chain revenue was last 24 hours is pretty good!
That’s more than Arbitrum, 5x Monad, 9x Optimism the last 24 hours. About 2/3 what Hyperliquid’s chain revenue same period.
* Ethereum, Arbitrum, Monad, Optimism, Hyperliquid chain revenues according to DeFi Llama

We always talk about “tokenized tbills” but did anyone ever actually tokenize specific issuances? People mostly went the tokenized money market fund route, right?

All of these curators, yield aggregators, and lending protocols and there’s nowhere I can just deposit my stablecoins for 3-6 months for a reasonable fixed rate yield?
I don’t need instant liquidity, and don’t want to go further out on the risk curve. Is there nowhere to get duration other than Pendle tokens? Bonus points if I then get a bond token I could sell or use as collateral while I wait.
Is anyone doing this today?

A major unforced error in crypto is treating technical dashboards as financial dashboards. Nowhere is this as obvious as with TVL of lending protocols. TVL is NOT a substitute for accounting!
Let’s look at TVL defined as “Value of all coins held in smart contracts of the protocol”, and how it would treat a bank with the following balance sheet:
Deposits (a liability): $100m
Loans (an asset): $80m
Reserves (an asset): $20m
Equity: $10m
The TVL of this simplified balance sheet would show up as:
$100m deposits - $80m loans + $10m equity = $30m TVL
Does that feel accurate to you? It should not, be

I spoke with the head of a community bank yesterday - initially about stablecoin policy, but the conversation quickly expanded to ways community banks and DeFi can work together.
Years ago, under the Biden administration, I was a major proponent of a deal between MakerDAO and Huntington Valley Bank (since purchased by Citizens Financial), where a $100m loan participation agreement was finalized in 2022.
Those funds went primarily to business loans and construction loans, carrying interest of 5-9% (2022-23 vintage fixed and floating rate loans).
But that was DeFi financing real business formati

Picking up lunch and listening to two police officers shilling each other on Ripple and XRP.
A good reminder that we need to do a ton more financial literacy education in schools. It can serve as inoculation vs weak investment theses.

What do you wish was run through Pendle (or equivalent) but currently isn’t?

I feel like people in crypto aren’t aware of the rapid rise in long-term government bond rates pretty much everywhere.

A frustration I have with a subset of self-styled farmers is they can communicate as if they are merely receptive, with no proactive impulses of their own. As if only an incentives program manager has any agency in the farmer-chain relationship.
It’s bizarre, because traders and financial market participants are usually stereotyped as being (overly?) aggressive and high agency.
Very different from the farmers that min/max in creative/unforeseen ways, or casuals who use incentives on a kind of breakeven/free trial basis to play with interesting new apps.

DeFi needs to get fees down. Some fees for trading on major brokerage platforms are on par with or below many DeFi protocols:
IBKR: 0.18%
Morgan Stanley: 0.5%
Schwab: 0.75%
The typical 0.3% Uniswap pool doesn’t even have all huge stack of compliance, UI, tax reporting, KYC, marketing to pay for.
The difference is that DeFi protocols are almost all single-product, so there’s nothing to cross-sell. Meanwhile, inside a brokerage, there’s profit centers that can pay the bills for the entire bundle.

I’ve never understood why bridges have to always be fast. I get it for impatient retail or cross-chain arbitrage.
But many tasks aren’t very time sensitive. Which is why I always had a soft spot for the (now-defunct?) @fraxfinance bridge.
They called it Frax Ferry and gave the roles a nautical theme. The captain had admin roles, and a second set of actors called crew members had the power to temporarily pause to enforce a “stop, look, listen” process.
Normally I dislike meme-y themes (like food names), but in this case I think the ferry analogy helped communicate to users how it worked.
The Fr

When you step back, I think it’s clear that one of the lessons in the Kelp Incident is that DeFi needs to account better for priority of claims.
No, this doesn’t mean slap a tranching layer on top - many have defective features that will break them in my opinion, and they only address part of the problem space.
In no particular order, here are some pain points and my recommendations as a starting point:
1) Clarify that lending is non-recourse. If you’re a borrower, this means your maximum risk is your collateral securing the loan.
This is EXTREMELY valuable as a feature, and DeFi needs a way

Bank Failure Friday (it’s common for regulators to seize banks over the weekend to minimize disruption).
Less than $300m in deposits, so it’s smaller than the MegaETH Aave branch. This is the second bank failure of 2026, which is ~average recently.

As a former archaeologist, I’m struck by how blockchains fundamentally perform one of the same purposes as finger-counting systems and the abacus.
These systems tended to be heavily used in commercial and public markets, even when written numeracy existed. It is fundamentally associated with the production of a *public* math.
One party does the tallies, performing addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, sometimes the calculation of compound interest. The other party and perhaps observers are able to watch and follow along.
Of course, a huge advantage of blockchains is that the derivat