Since September the $AERO share of spot RWA volume (green) has been inching closer and closer to parity with the $UNI share (blue). ty @Blockworks for graph This is before they deploy on mainnet, RH chain, Arbitrum, Elysium (?👀?) etc... Not extremely hard to see where this trend is heading.

I'm way less concerned about whether we're a little higher or lower in the next few weeks than where all the value will flow in the next few months. I can stomach a dip to $75k on $BTC and 20%+ lower on alts. I can't stomach being sidelined for the on chain finance/tokeknization trend nearly a decade in the making. You're not going to 10x your portfolio selling $BTC at $81k and buying $75k or buying $81k and selling $85k. Nobody has extreme macro edge here; we live in unpredictable, volatile, crazy times. If the vocal bears end up right, they'll have been sidelined since summer anyway and if the overlevered bulls are right, they'll still blow up eventually. My only actionable advice is to shrink your bet sizing a little to take the volatility into account, eliminate the bloat and levered beta from your portfolio where you have no edge, and heavily concentrate into high conviction, idiosyncratic bets with near term catalysts. For me that looks like sizing down $BTC and even $HYPE exposure in favour of kinetiq:native for the upcoming Elysium launch, $AERO for the upcoming Aero multi-chain expansion, and $DRV for on chain options TAM expansion. Maybe for you it's $PRL and $NEAR. Very unpopular take, but $ZEC and $HYPE currently trade more like majors and levered beta than "idiosyncratic bets with near term catalysts that you have edge on". Doesn't make them bad long term investments at all, just don't feel the need to be overweight them at this time when they lack asymmetry. My example here would be if we're risk off, $HYPE could be $60 by EOY, and $100 if we're risk on. Pretty symmetric. kinetiq:native could be $0.15 if we're risk off, but it could be 5-10x higher if Elysium goes well. We want alts that behave like OTM calls, not 1.5x levered perps. TLDR: Figure out where the next $1trn of value will flow on chain, place your bets (sized to survive), and let the macro LARPs chop each other up. The correctness of your allocations will more heavily dictate your 2027 performance than your current exposure level.

$AERO strength looks extremely notable after this micro-dump. Think anything sub $1 will look cheap prior to the update in a few days. Please don't dilute me but the full range $AERO USDC pool is deceptively one of the best sources of yield in the industry right now. 31% full range yield is approximately the same as 300% yield on a $0.75-1.15 concentrated LP pool adjusted for IL. Framed differently, 31% APR full range LP outperforms IL if $AERO ends within $0.75 and $1.15 in 1 week. I think there's a good chance we're north of $1.15 in a week, but still one of very few worthwhile LPs available right now if you're less bullish.

base:0x940181a94a35a4569e4529a3cdfb74e38fd98631 looks primed to rip higher over the next 10 days before the Aero upgrade I had previously weighted base:0x940181a94a35a4569e4529a3cdfb74e38fd98631 slightly lower in my core positions because I worried that the tokenomics were too complicated for institutions and whales to understand and feel comfortable bidding. @citrini not only included base:0x940181a94a35a4569e4529a3cdfb74e38fd98631 in their token basket, they had it at the same weight as $HYPE and nearly twice the weight of ethereum:0x1f9840a85d5af5bf1d1762f925bdaddc4201f984. Don't think the market has fully digested how much that stamp of approval means. I also worried that there could be some last minute delay, as the previous Aero launch date delay led to a considerable nuke. With the greenlight for launch on 10/21 and the recognition from Citrini, both of those risks are removed, and I now feel considerably higher conviction on base:0x940181a94a35a4569e4529a3cdfb74e38fd98631. Previously to the Citrini piece, I expected most people to stay sidelined and wait for the flywheel to fundamentally prove itself post Aero upgrade. @wagmiAlexander expects spot volumes to roughly double by EOY, so that was my timeline where a rerating would organically occur without speculative fervor. I'm now of the opinion that this recent bit of attention will cause price to lead fundamentals, and we might actually get a real pre-upgrade breakout. The early August 2025 price action where base:0x940181a94a35a4569e4529a3cdfb74e38fd98631 doubled from $0.75 to $1.50 in just 10 days is a good example of what I think could happen in the pre-upgrade window. Due to how much supply is locked in LPs and veAERO, base:0x940181a94a35a4569e4529a3cdfb74e38fd98631 is naturally extremely reflexive. It's very difficult to justify why ethereum:0x1f9840a85d5af5bf1d1762f925bdaddc4201f984 is trading at 5x the market cap of base:0x940181a94a35a4569e4529a3cdfb74e38fd98631. I don't expect parity until after the upgrade, but I do think there's a world where base:0x940181a94a35a4569e4529a3cdfb74e38fd98631 rerates to 50% of ethereum:0x1f9840a85d5af5bf1d1762f925bdaddc4201f984 market cap as the sidelined scramble to get exposure prior to the 10/21 upgrade. This coincides nicely with a run at the previous base:0x940181a94a35a4569e4529a3cdfb74e38fd98631 ATH of ~$2.30.

After listening to Jeff's DAS interview, my $DRV bull thesis is unchanged, and possibly strengthened. No, this isn't cope. Strap in for a long one. First off, it was framed in a terribly misleading way by CoinTelegraph for clickbait (shocking). Jeff was asked if we he wasn't forced to be focused on perps infra, their core business, and was instead a 3rd party builder, what would he find interesting to build. His answer was that he'd look for whatever hadn't really been built yet, and mentioned options as a good example. He then added that they're tremendously important as an instrument in TradFi, so figuring out why that hasn't translated over to crypto would be an interesting problem to solve. He then added that HIP4 is already their attempt at building the infrastructure to allow teams to build options on @HyperliquidX. There are dozens of teams building binary options already using HIP4 infrastructure. There are several teams building vanilla options on top of Hyperliquid already. None of these products have taken a meaningful bite out of @DeriveXYZ market dominance yet, and they are live right now. He didn't say that they were building options in house, he just said that someone should build options on chain because there's a massive gap between the success and traction they've had on chain vs in TradFi. This is extremely validating of the $DRV thesis. People need to realize and remember that @DeriveXYZ wasn't specifically written off for all these years, the entire sector of on chain options was deemed as impossible and uninvestable. We've heard, "Options can't exist on chain, options are obsoleted by perps, no retail crypto traders will learn to trade options, etc etc". Jeff negated all of the FUD that on chain options have received over the years and basically said it was the place to be right now. Jeff did specifically say that no on chain options protocol has reached "escape velocity" yet. So if you read between the lines, he's basically saying that on chain options are interesting and necessary as a tool, that they're nascent in their growth as compared to TradFi TAM, and that it's one of the most interesting spots of the market to be focused on building right now. $DRV pumping 10x and having insane hockey stick volume growth YTD isn't "escape velocity" in his eyes, and he's right. $DRV is still cheap and early relative to the market it's expanding into. Job's not finished by any means. It's important to highlight that unlike Vlad from @Lighter_xyz who explicitly says they are building options in house, Jeff said nothing of the sort. Hyperliquid sees themselves as building the neutral infrastructure layers of liquidity for builders to come and build on top of. Look at TradeXYZ and HIP3. He didn't say that they hired a team of 20 ex-Optiver and ex-SIG guys to be their internal options trading desk, he didn't insinuate a launch date, he didn't say HIP-5 is vanilla options. He basically said, "On-chain options are cool and underexplored, I hope teams come and build them on top of our existing infra". Sidenote, I actually think his description of priority fees was actually way more signal and very bullish $HYPE. Way more bullish priority fee growth and obviously AQAv2 fees than anything HIP4 related. At the end of the day, none of what he said is new information. I always have stated in my $DRV bullposts that they will not maintain their current 90%+ market share in 2027. This is an entire primitive that does quadrillions of dollars in volume in TradFi. The on chain pie will grow massively. There will inevitably be more competition for that pie. $DRV could lose half their market share to @Lighter_xyz and @HyperliquidX and still be cheap here at these prices when on chain options volume 10x's or more. I'd also like to point out the irony that I'm long $HYPE and $LIT calls on @DeriveXYZ right now, and I still can't long $DRV perps on Lighter or Hyperliquid. I just refuse to subscribe to this notion that I should sell a phenomenal asset today because maybe there will be competition tomorrow, or next month, or next year. When they have live products, I'll reaccess the situation. Until then, competing against non-existent products that are just presumed to be superior is an unfair standard that seemingly only $DRV gets held to, and irrational selloffs like today, especially based off misleading headlines, are just better entries for me in the long run.