KBW Recap 🇰🇷 What a week! Somehow I ended up winning Perp DEX Day on Monday, then spent the rest of the week bouncing between events and private dinners with @Lighter_xyz , @variational_io , @extendedapp , @MetaMask , and a bunch of builders, KOLs, and traders in the space. I’m not a farmer. A lot of perp DEX users "farm points" using delta-neutral strategies, OI hedging across exchanges, arbitrage, and all kinds of ways to limit directional risk. Me? I only trade directionally. I know in my head that farming is probably the smarter way to make money while keeping risk limited. But what can I do? After years of trading, my brain is already soaked in dopamine.😂 And that’s exactly why I evaluate perp DEXs from the perspective of an actual trader who needs to use the product every day. Rather than getting into a bunch of perp DEXs "early" just to farm points, I tend to pick one exchange that I genuinely want to use as my main venue and just trade there. - Right now, I have roughly: • 30,000 Extended Points • 8,000 Variational Points Everyone has a different opinion on what these points are worth, but personally, my realistic expectations are around: Extended: $1.2–1.5 / point Variational: $50–60 / point So combined, somewhere around $500K at my midpoint expectations. Some people might think that’s too low, and some might think I’m valuing them way too high. (I’m not going to explain exactly why I came up with those numbers because there’s no right answer here. I’m simply valuing them based on my own data and my experience in the market.) But the important thing is that, I’m not planning to sell the tokens I receive after TGE. Last year, I received roughly $200K worth of $LIT from the Lighter airdrop. I sold some, held some, and staked some. Then during the selloff toward $0.80, I made the classic mistake of falling in love with the coin and started taking leveraged longs. I ended up cutting more in losses than the original airdrop was worth. lol But later, I bought spot around $1 and now I’m sitting on more profit than that. Same story with $BP. I didn’t farm much Backpack because I was focused on Lighter and Variational. But after TGE, when $BP was trading far below what I believed the business was worth, I started buying around $0.15. That position is now up roughly 10x. - And I believe something similar can happen with Extended and Variational. Of course, I know the way up won’t be smooth. Maybe we get something like Lighter, where we have huge hype for the first few days and then grind lower for months. Or maybe we get something more like Backpack, where there isn’t much hype at all and it just spends a long time building a bottom. I don't know. But one thing became much clearer to me after meeting and talking with people in the industry, traders, and users with great insights throughout this week. Perp DEXs are still only at the beginning of becoming a major sector in crypto. And the growth and price action of $HYPE, the current leader of the sector, is probably the clearest evidence of that trend. If you missed Hyperliquid… If you missed Lighter… There will be more opportunities. but that does not mean every perp DEX will win. There are countless perp DEXs out there, and I absolutely do not believe all of them deserve your capital or your time. EdgeX and GRVT are probably the most extreme examples for me. I never seriously considered either of them. I barely even clicked around their trading interfaces, let alone connected my wallet. lol. Just like choosing the right token matters in investing, choosing the right perp DEX matters just as much, maybe even more. Because with a token, you can change your mind and sell it with one click, but farming a pre-TGE project is different. You are investing your capital, time, attention, trading volume, and opportunity cost. And none of that is instantly liquid. You stay with that project while the company grows and works toward TGE, and in the end you’re basically waiting and hoping that the company actually grows and the TGE turns out well. In a way, isn’t that closer to what “investing” actually is? I’m a trader. And based on where I think the perp DEX market is heading and what I believe Extended and Variational still have ahead of them I’d rather keep my exposure after TGE and bet on the upside. - So if you’ve never actually used Extended or Variational before, I’d say put a little capital in and get some exposure before it gets too late. It doesn’t have to be a huge amount. Being positioned in a growing narrative is valuable beyond just PnL. Psychologically, having some exposure is also one of the best ways to control FOMO. You stop watching the train leave the station from the sidelines. Between now and the end of the year, I expect we’re going to hear a lot about both Variational and Extended, especially around their TGEs. If they outperform everyone’s expectations? Great. That could be the beginning of something much bigger. And if they disappoint? That’s still useful experience. You’ll walk away with a much better framework for identifying which perp DEX deserves your capital the next time around. Because this trend is only getting started. And honestly, I haven’t even talked about the actual roadmaps here. Do I really need to explain Variational opening up its API, launching Pro, OLP, and the potential for larger institutional investment? Or Extended’s connections to eToro and Revolut, multi-collateral, XVS, and everything else they’re building toward? Do I really have to spell it all out?😉 Don’t be late to the trend. Perp DEXs are only getting started.

Had a great time at the @reboundx_net Perp DEX Day trading competition hosted by @magonia_B I first entered the perp DEX world through @Lighter_xyz , and since then I’ve traded across countless perp DEXs and they’re still where I do most of my trading today. This time, I had the chance to compete against some great traders representing @variational_io , @Aster_DEX , and @Lighter_xyz in a short 30-minute competition. And somehow, I managed to take 1st place. Having used all four exchanges myself, I personally felt that Extended was the easiest and most comfortable venue for HTF trading, and I think that ended up being a pretty meaningful edge for me during the competition. I’m also sitting on around 30K Extended points myself, so I’m definitely looking forward to the upcoming TGE. Had a lot of fun competing with everyone. Expecting more!

perp dex started out as just another insanely lucrative airdrop meta. Then came $HYPE, followed by $LIT. At this point, imo, this is no longer just an “airdrop sector.” It’s becoming one of the major metas of this market and probably one of the few sectors in crypto where the upside still feels massively open. If you think about it from a traditional equities perspective, none of this is even that revolutionary. Crypto was just completely backwards for years lmao 😂 Most projects made fuck-all in actual revenue, sold people dreams and narratives with barely any real business underneath, raised a shit ton of money, burned through it, dumped tokens on retail, exited, got delisted, renamed themselves, spun up a new narrative, and repeated the whole cycle again. Rinse and repeat. Some could have amazing tech, but that didn’t necessarily mean the protocol generated meaningful revenue. And even when a project did generate revenue, the token itself usually had almost zero connection to that value. Most of them were basically governance tokens with a chart attached. Then buybacks started becoming a real thing. For the first time, the value created by a protocol could actually start flowing back toward the token. Protocol value and token value started to align. And tbh... This is literally just what “normal” looks like. What we’re seeing now is crypto slowly figuring out a structure that should’ve existed from the beginning. Perp DEXs just happened to become the first major sector leading that transition. Sure, crypto is still a relatively small market. So valuations for projects like Hyperliquid, Lighter, etc. can look absurd or “overvalued” depending on how you look at them. But the market itself is still maturing. CLARITY act, or something structurally similar to it, will eventually come. Regulation will become clearer. The industry will get bigger. And as this immature market grows up, I think capital will increasingly rotate away from the endless pile of garbage tokens and toward assets that can actually prove why they deserve to be bought. Real users. Real revenue. Real cash flow. Real token value accrual. When you look at it that way, out of the hundreds or thousands of altcoins out there, the line between what’s worth owning and what isn’t becomes pretty damn obvious. We’re still early.

GM to all @Lighter_xyz believers 🕯️ 1 ethereum:0x232ce3bd40fcd6f80f3d55a522d03f25df784ee2 = 1 lambo