Mindshare isn’t enough
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Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the Silk Road marketplace, became a cypherpunk hero after his heavy sentencing.
He was only freed thanks to a Trump pardon. Recently, his donation wallet received 300 BTC (over $31M). Some people suspected foul play.
_“Did Ross just donate to himself to clean dirty BTC?”_
Fortunately, blockchain is transparent, and we have ZachXBT. His analysis indicated that Ross didn’t launder black money.
Onchain sleuthing > conspiracy theories.
Here’s what we got today:
- Results of a mindshare experiment. Key takeaways from $LOUD.
- HyperLiquid is booming. What’s driving this growth?
- Around the web. Solv Protocol integrated Proof-of-Reserves, Arbitrum launched KAITO leaderboard, and more.
Today’s email is brought to you by Gearbox – DeFi’s credit layer.
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Analysis
Takeaways from $LOUD Yaps.
Loudio was the most interesting project last week. At some point, ~70% of mindshare was on $LOUD.
You can review its mechanism through the above image.
With huge mindshare, everyone was expecting a massive launch. But the token price was a disappointment. At its peak, it only had ~$16M market cap. Right now, it’s ~$6M. Random memecoins from Pump.fun have those market caps.
If the mindshare alone pumped the price, it’d be at least a $100M project. The mindshare = price pump thesis was proven wrong.
So what are the takeaways?
#1. Mindshare is not the goal, organic community is the goal.
Initially, the mindshare was supposed to measure the organic activity of a token community. High organic activity usually meant that there was organic interest & demand for that token.
$LOUD didn’t create an organic community. It just incentivized some top influencers to yap about it. No community = no buyer demand = bad price action.
In other words, fake mindshare is useless.
#2. Retail lost trust in X influencers
@crypto__kermit analyzed X activity of the LOUD leaderboard except the top 25.
The results were shocking.
- The average payout was only $160 per tweet.
- Top 100 creators tweeted about Loudio 31 times on average
- Some 50K+ follower accounts only earned $30-60 per tweet.
Now, I don’t want to judge every KOL who tweeted about Loudio, most weren’t “shilling”. But they were definitely trying to climb the leaderboard for pennies. They wouldn’t have done it if they were only going to get $160/tweet.
The failure of LOUD is a signal that retail is tired of influencers shilling memecoins and valueless tokens.
#3. $LOUD flywheel broke within the first week
When I talked about $LOUD in the last newsletter, I highlighted “trader defection” as a way $LOUD can fail.
Here’s 80/20: $LOUD mechanism depends on a liquidity pool that captures 4% fees and shares it with yappers. If a competing pool with low fees emerges, the whole mechanism will break down.
Well. It happened way faster than anyone expected.
Right now, ~85% of the trading volume is running through pools that don’t collect fees for yappers. So the whole game has broken.
The failure of the project was in creating demand. Theoretically, $LOUD founder can potentially add some benefits to the token to create demand or something, but I don’t see that happening.
The $LOUD experiment was a failure. Artificially pumping the mindshare of a token won’t pump its price.
That doesn’t mean that the InfoFi narrative is dead. $KAITO & $COOKIE are still valuable platforms with many utilities. And even more innovative platforms are coming. For example, Noise will allow you to trade mindshare directly.
We need InfoFi projects with fundamentals.
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Protocol
HYPER is Going Brrrr…
The above image tracks the total value locked of Hyperliquid.
It’s going parabolic. Increased from $300M in April to >$1.5B now. That’s a >400% increase in two months. Crazy stats like that should capture your attention.
We’ve already talked about HyperLiquid several times, but here’s the 80/20: It’s started off as the most successful perp platform. Then it expanded to create a blockchain and an app ecosystem around it.
Its success is backed by every metric
- It has >466k users. Most top crypto projects cannot boast that number.
- In the last 30 days, it generated >$70M. It’s the highest among all the L1s.
- Last week, it did ~$3.9B in perp volume. That’s ~85% of the total onchain market.
HyperLiquid has already won the onchain perp market. The above chart shows a clear story of domination.
Future growth will come from attracting CEX traders. The chart below compares the rolling 14-day average of trading volume of CEXes and HyperLiquid.
HyperLiquid has been consistently gaining market share against CEXes. The future growth of the perp platform should be monitored here.
The token price also reflects this performance. It hit a new all-time-high this week. And up 80% on the 30-day chart.
There are specific catalysts driving this performance.
- Airdrop farming. Many projects on HyperEVM, the blockchain of HyperLiquid, are running a points program. So activity is rising.
- Token Buybacks. Fees collected on Hyperliquid are directed to the Assistance Fund, which buys HYPE back from the open market.
- HYPE Burn narrative. Similar to Ethereum, transaction fees on HyperEVM are burned. This can create a narrative similar to the 2021 ultra-sound money narrative of $ETH.
You can monitor the HYPE Burn, buybacks, and other distribution details here.
Additionally, HyperLiquid will enable permissionless deployment of a perps orderbook for any asset by Q3 2025. This will be a major catalyst for the perp platform.
The HyperEVM ecosystem is growing fast. The developer interest seems to be increasing. The user activity is also going parabolic due to airdrop farming of the hot new ecosystem.
🚀 DeFi Catalysts
Meteora launched its v2. Changes include branding & UI updates and enhanced features like concentrated and locked liquidity.
Solv Protocol has integrated Chainlink Proof of Reserve (PoR) for real-time transparency for their tokenized BTC and RWA yield products.
Origin Protocol is discussing a proposal to allocate all of the protocol revenue for $OGN buybacks. Theoretically, the new demand should increase the price.
Arbitrum has launched a Kaito Leaderboard for X influencers/yappers. 400k in ARB will be distributed over the 3 months.
Resolv has launched $RESOLV. Eligible wallets can claim staked $RESOLV. Eligibility is based on total points.
TaoFi has deployed Uniswap V3 on Bittensor EVM. TaoFi describes itself as the financial layer for decentralized AI.
Maestro, the TG trading bot, has integrated HyperEVM. Maestro users can now access tokens from their familiar interface.
Exponent Finance integrated its Income Tokens on Kamino Finance. It’ll allow users to borrow SOL against some PT-tokens.
Malda introduced Unified Lending. It unifies the liquidity and user experience of lending across multiple chains using open-source zk-tech. Points program is live.
Dave White from Paradigm introduced Orbital. It’s described as an automated market maker for pools of 2, 3, or 10,000 stablecoins.
🪂 Airdrop Alpha
Humanity Protocol is allocating $2.2M worth of $H to Kaito stakers & Yappers who have verified their identity on Humanity Protocol.
Sophon, which describes itself as the consumer entertainment chain, has launched $SOPH token. 9% of the supply is allocated for the initial airdrop.
Huma Finance has launched the $HUMA tokens. The claim window closes on June 26th. Users can stake it to earn exclusive rewards.
🚀 New Launches
HyperDrive went live. It’s described as the stablecoin money market built for Hyperliquid.
Gamma introduced the first onchain limit order book built exclusively on Uniswap v4. It’s live on Unichain and Base.
📰 Industry News
Ethereum Foundation released a new structure for its R&D teams to focus on the new priorities: scale L1, scale blobs, & improve UX.
EigenLayer released EigenStudio. It’s an AI tool that allows anyone to create applications on top of EigenLayer.
🐦⬛ X Hits
- $ETH thesis from Cyber Fund.
- Stablecoin market map from CB Insights.
- Updates from major restaking protocols.
- Kaito founder on the value of attention.
- 2025 June crypto calendar.
😂 Meme
Until next time,
Edgy
Today’s email was written by Edgy and Yayya.
DISCLAIMER: I’m NOT a financial advisor. This content is for education and information purposes only. Crypto and DeFi are risky and speculative. Please do your research before investing.
Whenever you’re ready, here’s how we can help you:
- 🚀 The DeFi Edge Ventures – We identify, invest, and help amplify DeFi Protocols that positively impact the Crypto space.
EdgyWrites The DeFi Edge every Thursday
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