Middy (38.888 MODE)

trade[XYZ] launched its first market on Hyperliquid 381 days ago. Today, we are joining forces with ICE, parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, to bring perpetual futures on Hyperliquid to U.S. regulated markets. I don’t usually write long posts, but today merits reflection. For years, builders across this industry have worked to show that open, onchain markets could support price discovery, manage risk, and withstand stress to the standards of traditional market infrastructure, all while staying open when and where those markets aren’t. Our achievements stand on the shoulders of those builders. And today, the company that owns the New York Stock Exchange has chosen to build upon the work of every developer, trader, market maker, and user who took a chance on us and our markets. We share this moment with all of you. Markets are shaped by their participants. A new generation of investors trades from their phones, across asset classes, at any hour of any day. Until Hyperliquid, the right infrastructure for those markets didn’t exist. Building these markets was hard. It took novel approaches to pricing, funding, and risk, refined with real capital at stake, in markets that don’t close. It also meant earning the trust of the people trading on them. We’re honored that the community recognized that effort and responded in kind. That trust is what allowed us to grow our volumes to a ~$1 trillion annualized run rate in just over a year, to help pioneer new instruments like pre-IPO perps, and to earn the confidence of storied institutions like S&P Dow Jones Indices. That’s why ICE has chosen trade[XYZ] as its exclusive partner to bring 24/7 perps to the U.S. Shifts in technology have pushed markets toward greater transparency, better price discovery, and broader access: from the coffee house to the curb exchange, ticker tape to the telephone, the trading floor to digital exchanges. ICE helped write that last chapter. In 1997, Jeff Sprecher bought a small power-trading technology business for $1. ICE launched as an electronic energy marketplace in 2000, helped digitize major commodity markets, and acquired the NYSE in 2013. It has grown exponentially because of this appetite for innovation. That’s the partner we wanted: a partner that looks forward and embraces progress. Americans deserve access to the most innovative markets in the world, and the protections of U.S. regulation. With trade[XYZ] and ICE, subject to regulatory approvals, they’ll have both. The difference isn’t just access. Perps don’t expire, so traders never have to roll positions, and liquidity concentrates in a single deep market for each asset. Cross-margining enhances capital efficiency by letting one pool of collateral back positions across stocks, commodities, and crypto. Underpinning it all are atomic clearing and settlement, real-time risk management that enables continuous markets, and universally applied rules that anyone can verify. This is the next chapter we’ll write together. My responsibility, our responsibility, is to now build markets worthy of the confidence our partners and our users have placed in us. Our commitments will not waver: to fair and transparent markets, to diverse markets, to low costs of execution, and above all, to market integrity. All of this in pursuit of one thing: A universal exchange, open around the clock, coming to the United States. We’re proud to have deployed more than 100 markets on trade[XYZ]. But measured against the opportunity ahead, we’ve barely started. There is an enormous universe of assets we haven’t reached, alongside things people want to trade that have no established market at all. Wherever there is demand to trade an asset, we want trade[XYZ] to be where its price is discovered. Global stocks, commodities, bonds, pre-IPO companies, compute, new indices, digital assets, interest rates, equity baskets, volatility products, alt assets… Anything. Anytime. Anywhere. Ultimately, everything you own should work with everything you trade. Picture a headline breaking on Saturday night. You should be able to post tokenized shares as collateral, hedge your portfolio with an index perp, add exposure to oil, and take a view on a company that has not yet gone public. All in one account, all on one risk engine, before any traditional market opens. trade[XYZ] and Hyperliquid were built for this. I hope someone opens their first investment account years from now to find that trivial, and to wonder why their predecessors needed so many separate financial relationships. Getting there will take liquidity, reliability, trust, and prices people have reason to believe. It will take years. I’m prepared to spend them. Finally, a few thank yous. First to the XYZ team: For the tireless nights and for committing to this vision before it was obvious. To Jeff Sprecher and ICE, with special thanks to Michael Blaugrund and Trabue Bland who championed us throughout: You’re a world-class, technology-embracing team that proves innovation and scale are in fact not at odds. To Stan Druckenmiller: For your partnership and helping us turn the next page. To Hyperliquid Labs: For being the best partners we could ask for. You set an impossible standard, one we continually strive to meet. @chameleon_jeff, @iliensinc, @xulian_hl And most importantly, to our users: You traded these markets when no one thought it mattered. Guess what? It did.

The Hyperliquid community event will take place on the evening of October 5 in Singapore: luma.com/HL2026Community This is a chance to spend time with the builders and users who've shaped the ecosystem The event is oversubscribed; you will only be able to attend if your RSVP was accepted. If your RSVP was accepted but you're no longer able to attend, please cancel your RSVP to make space for others

The $AI Thesis: Chips at the Busiest Table in Vlad’s Casino TLDR: Tokenized stocks failed three times for lack of demand. @longdotxyz is the first model to actually generate that demand, by making a casino that consumes them. The casino needs a table that generates enough activity and winners to attract fresh money. Robinhood’s edge has never been serving the sophisticated… it’s making markets feel like a game for retail. They’re not Vanguard, they’re the meme-craze venue, and that’s exactly why $AI and the meme-paired tokenized stocks through long.xyz are so compelling. Novel Tech Stock-paired memes are the first demand engine tokenized stocks have ever had. Everyone tried this. Everyone died. Binance and FTX shipped tokenized stocks in 2020-21. Backed put redeemable xStocks on Solana. Clean wrappers, real backing… zero demand. A tokenized share is a worse version of something every brokerage customer already has. The product worked. Nobody came. long.xyz’s unlock: make the casino consume them. Every LONG meme launches paired against a stock token (AI/NVDA, MEME/AMC, ICOIN/AAPL). So every launch needs stock tokens as collateral, every LP holds them as inventory, and every trade drips them into vaults that never open. Tokenized NVDA’s first real market is memecoin collateral. Degens are involuntarily doing the job professional market makers wouldn’t: building two-sided books for a product that had none. Why LONG’s model beats the current alternatives: 1. Passive listings (the xStocks graveyard): tokenized stocks sitting on a DEX waiting for buyers. No engine, no reason to exist today. This is the control group and it’s dead. 2. Generic launchpads (the Pons model): launches pair against ETH or USDG. Fine casino, but it’s max-IL pairing for meme LPs, consumes zero stock tokens, builds zero vaults, and creates nothing Robinhood strategically wants. Activity without alignment. 3. Dividend models (Flap): pays the stock OUT to holders. Sounds better for you, but it drains value from the books instead of compounding it into depth, attracts yield farmers instead of traders, and walks straight at the securities line. Payouts leak; depth compounds. 4. LONG: stock consumption built into every launch, permanent POL that can’t rug and buys dips, a fee ratchet that compounds depth instead of paying it out, factory discipline (ticker locks, launch caps, PND monitoring), and native AI-pairing that gives the whole eco one deepening denominator. It’s the only model where the casino’s growth and Robinhood’s corporate strategy are the same number going up. $AI’s tokenomics: 1. Fair launch via the LONG, ~1B supply, all float, no team bags. Permanent protocol-owned liquidity: can’t be pulled, mechanically buys dips 0.7% fee on AI/NVDA, split three ways every trade: burn (supply only shrinks), permanent lock, and a vault stacking real NVDA (~$2.7M, one-way ratchet) 2. LONG recycles platform fees into $AI’s books; LongX leverage fees flow back to $AI Flattest holder book on the chain: no wallet holds 3%, top ~26 hold ~27%. Nobody can nuke this chart alone… which is why it survived four 80% drawdowns and reclaimed ATH every time 3. Why it HAS to stay a meme (this is design, not a phase): Legal: the vault being ornamental (no claims, no redemption) is what keeps $AI a collectible instead of an anonymous unregistered fund on a public brokerage’s chain. The disclaimer IS the moat. Flap pays stock dividends to holders and is skating this exact line… that’s their risk, not their edge. 4. Demand: a token that’s just a stock vault is a worse ETF, and worse-ETFs are the product that already failed. The meme is the demand engine, the vault is the trellis. 5. Skew: vault-tied tokens trade at NAV and NAV can’t 50x. No lottery, no trenchers, no volume, no fees. The gap between price and backing is where the dream lives, and the dream pays the fees (memes). 6. Free call option nobody’s pricing: if the SEC tokenization exemptions land, the legal wall moves, and Nate can ship vault-tied features (stock airdrops, real distributions) the moment they’re permitted. The machinery to pay holders already exists behind a wall regulators may be about to relocate. The Only Alignment That Matters Why Vlad built the chain (he’ll never say it this plainly): sequencer fees are a new revenue line, tokenization grows platform assets, and selling US equities to the planet on-chain skips a decade of brokerage licensing in 100 countries. It’s a distribution hack wearing a blockchain costume, and it’s consistent with the distribution brilliance Robinhood is known for. Robinhood doesn’t need a token. The goal is maximizing $HOOD… sequencer fees, USDG reserve yield, global customers, it all rolls up to the stock. Their GTM has never been about appealing to the sophisticated investor… they’re not Vanguard or BlackRock… they’re Robinhood, and they’re raising an entire generation of younger millennials and zoomers in finance. One of the best traders I know (@GuthixHL) told me HOOD is the one stock he feels comfy holding for the next decade, and I tend to believe him. So how does RH chain pump HOOD stock indirectly? And how much more obvious could Vlad’s activity be in signaling at this? That’s the trade: the most HOOD-aligned asset pumps hardest, because the platform’s entire self-interest points at letting it run. LP math already elected $AI. Pairing a meme against dollars costs LPs ~5.7% impermanent loss per 2x, and these things 2x weekly. Pairing against $AI, which moves with the same meta beta, costs nearly nothing. Same capital, deeper book, routers chase the deepest book, fees feed more LPs. Nobody decides this… it’s the same equilibrium that made Ethereum’s long tail quote in WETH while USDC sat right there. Scoreboard: 40+ AI pairs, 1/6 of all chain pool liquidity, record 23% of $AI’s tape settling as cross-pair routing, and the USDG meme pools sitting next to them with a few thousand bucks in them. The market voted. Why LONG and not PONS: every chain gets its launchpad token trade… pump is to SOL, hfun is to HYPE, PONS is trying to be that for RH. PONS runs a real fee-and-burn machine (80% of revenue burns PONS, ~29% of supply torched, briefly out-earned pump.fun). But it’s the generic-launchpad trade: valued on fees that crater when launches dry up, in a category where dominance flips overnight. LONG has the dual mandate: memes with no ceiling AND manufacturing the tokenized stock demand that is literally Robinhood’s corporate strategy. LONG’s growth is sponsored; PONS’s is tolerated. @Natan_benish says LONG will never have a token, so all value expression for the sponsored machine concentrates in its denominator. PONS is the fee token of the tolerated casino. $AI is the money of the sponsored one. In other words, Vlad is bootstrapping liquidity for tokenized stocks by launching the RH chain and letting projects compete to do so. Zoom out one level: meme-paired stocks aren’t only aligned with HOOD’s corporate strategy. They’re aligned with the corporate strategy of every company whose stock already trades on memes and attention with zoomers anyway. We’ll see that play out as more of these meme pairs take off and corporate CEOs start engaging with them. The Attention Flywheel and the Exit Liquidity Four loops, all spinning: 1. 8-9 Figure Meme runners recruit more soft money. Nobody checks the aggregate chart, they see the BONER candle. 10,000 launches in one day after the pre-IPO feature. Every winner is free customer acquisition, every launch locks more stock and more $AI inventory, deeper books, cheaper routes, next launch. One bridge in five weeks. Eight in six days. Then forty. Vlad is a non-stop attention engine...he doesn’t even aim. Redemptions and voting rights announced. SEC exemption window open. HOOD Summit on deck. One follow from his account candled $MEME 150% in an hour. He bull-posts tokenization to tradfi weekly and every impression lands one click from the casino whose chips are $AI. Fortune 500 marketing budget, zero dollars spent. The eco builds on the hub. OPEN is a protocol whose whole business is owning the liquidity in AI pairs and earning the fees… which means if $AI ever stops being the denominator, OPEN dies. So they now work to deepen $AI’s books every day, for their own reasons, for free. LongX routes its leverage fees back into $AI the same way. It’s like vendors opening shops on the casino floor that only accept your chips: every new shop makes the chips harder to replace, and none of the shopkeepers work for you. The moat compounds without you lifting a finger. Corporate attention is starting to arrive, friendly or hostile, and both fuel the machine. AMC’s CEO attacked Robinhood’s tokenization publicly and the AMC-paired meme candled anyway… hostile attention is still attention. This is the tip of the iceberg. If in-kind redemptions happen, some of these memes will quite literally meme “board sit” into existence (tokenholders coordinating the votes behind the redeemed shares to push for board seats), and plenty of forgotten companies will learn to use their meme pair to drive attention to their stock. A Much Better $VIRTUAL Setup The closest comp is $VIRTUAL. Same design on Base: launchpad hub, everything paired against it, $50M to $5B in three months. Currently down 88% with every structural feature intact, because the launch machine stopped producing winners and the denominator premium evaporated anyway. Why I think the ceiling here is higher: $AI is a meme, not infrastructure cosplaying as one (no roadmap to disappoint you); the substrate has a sponsor (a public company shipping redemptions and voting rights… Base never needed the agent meta, Robinhood demonstrably benefits from this one); and distribution VIRTUAL never dreamed of (the CASHCAT listing proved the chain-to-app pipe, and no hub token has ever had a retail brokerage one tap away). The mechanism that killed VIRTUAL still applies here in full. Where the demand comes from, ranked: 1. The Robinhood app listing. $AI’s ETF moment. CASHCAT did +100% on listing at a fraction of the profile; tens of millions of funded accounts one tap away. The single biggest catalyst on the board. 2. LP adoption for memefi. Bridge LPs buying AI-side inventory, launches consuming $AI at creation, trenchers holding it between trades like SOL in memecoin season, profits parking in the hub. The 23% cross share is this happening live. 3. OPEN. If it scales, a structural accumulator that permanently owns AI-pair liquidity… the closest thing an anon memecoin gets to a DAT. Watch it. 4. The machine’s own bid. Burn, locks, POL dip-buying: ~$10-15M/yr today, ~$31M/yr base case. Floor, not fuel. The Risks, the Numbers, and the Plan You own chips, not equity. No claim on the vault, no dividends, no redemption. Burn is a buyback, the vault is a floor narrative, depth is a moat… none of it pays you. The only harvest is the exit. The full risk stack: 1. Formation death (the VIRTUAL death). Metas die when launches stop producing winners, not when the hub loses its role. The seat is structural; the seat’s VALUE is the meta’s pulse. This killed a $5B version of this exact design. 2. Competitors. Launchpad crowns flip fast (LetsBonk took pump.fun’s, Blur vampired OpenSea in a winter). I wonder if a competent operator who did a points program selling “be early again,” would vamp this. Flap already ships stock dividends to holders and needs no hub token at all. LONG’s locked books can’t be vampired, but rivals capturing new launches starves the flywheel. 3. Contract and platform risk. No whitepaper, no published fee split, no audit. Vault, POL, and factory params sit behind keys held by an anonymous deployer and an operator who changes platform behavior “with a click of a button” (his words). RH can censor at the frontend and sequencer any day the casino becomes a liability. US persons are already fenced off the stock side; an SEC that blesses tokenized equities and frowns at the meme layer is a fully coherent outcome. This is the biggest risk to me. 4. Keyman x3, contracts x0. Vlad (tolerance… and in the success case his megaphone rotates toward the institutional port, so the bull thesis partially consumes its own fuel), Nate (fees and params by discretion), anon deployer (vault keys). All have behaved well so far, but that could change at a moments notice. The bear, base and bull case already written @okay_lets_ride wrote the article already so just give him a follow. bear $0.02-0.09 (20%) base $0.50-1.20 (50%) bull $2.70-12 (20%), extra-bull $8.50-40 (10%). EV ~$3.70 target.