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Robinhood’s on a roll. 

The Vlad Tenev-led firm — questioned relentlessly following the memestock saga — seems like it’s on top of the world. Robinhood is expanding its crypto offerings without fear of the SEC, and it’s also looking to give retail investors access to wealth management and private banking services. 

Robinhood is even rolling out a feature that’ll allow you to get cash delivered to your door.

I’m not trying to shill Robinhood, but I am beginning to think it’s the prime example of where we’re headed. Now we just need to promote more financial literacy and up the crypto offerings.

Meanwhile:

• Bitcoin’s down 1% to just over $87,000. ETH’s down 2% to $2,018 to start the day.

• HYPE’s faced a rocky 24 hours, down over 10% to $14. 

• The overall crypto market cap is down over 1% to $2.83T in the past day.

✅ Quarterly review

So no one’s surprised that the first quarter of the year wasn’t exactly a stellar one, right?

(If it makes you feel better, tech stocks also sank, according to Grayscale’s Research Insights.)

Overall, the crypto sector's price index fell 18% during the quarter, which just ended on March 21. 

If you break it up by segments, Consumer & Culture had it bad. Some memecoins — like DOGE — were included in the segment, which helped explain the dramatic decline. 

That’s also the case for smart contract platforms because Solana’s pretty popular with the memes. But despite the slowdown, Solana still managed to generate roughly half of the estimated total fees for the segment ($390 million) last quarter. 

If folks continue to lose interest in memecoins throughout this quarter, then — as Lightspeed’s Jack Kubinec noted earlier this week — “Solana’s validators, stakers and probably even token holders are in for some harder days ahead.”

The flipside is that it perhaps allows for some expectation resets and, if we’re going to stay narrative-driven, then maybe a new one can take the place of memecoins. Or perhaps it has already, given the fresh conversations around stablecoins and RWAs. 

Grayscale’s Research team even noted that, for the current quarter, they’re focused on tokens tied to RWAs and DePIN. Funny that.

Specifically, they’re looking at Maple and Geodnet. Both should be familiar to our readers, given that Geodnet is one that Ryan Connor of Blockworks Research previously told Empire readers to watch, and we talked about bitcoin margin loans with Maple CEO Sid Powell a few months back. 

On the other hand, despite the negativity last quarter, bitcoin network activity measures were “generally healthy,” analysts noted. 

“In contrast, monthly active on-chain users were about unchanged from the prior quarter at 11 million. The growing difference between these two indicators suggests that recent demand for Bitcoin has likely come from users interested in its function as a ‘store of value’ rather than a ‘medium of exchange,” they wrote. 

Outside of bitcoin, RWAs and DePINs, the analysts continue to keep an eye on DeFi and staking solutions, Ethereum scaling solutions and the intersection of crypto and AI. 

Now I’m curious: What are you interested in?

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• Wyoming wants to issue its own stablecoin with a potential launch this summer. 

• Web3 security provider Harpie, backed by Dragonfly Capital and Coinbase Ventures, announced that it will shut down.

• GameStop is raising $1.3B in convertible debt to buy bitcoin after the board gave the go-ahead earlier this week.

🧠 Understanding the hype

Let’s talk about HyperLiquid. 

To recap: A trader took out a relatively large short position on JELLY, then, when the short position was liquidated, HyperLiquid’s vault, HLP, took on the position to wind it down. That’s according to Blockworks Research analyst Boccaccio.

However, JELLY kept rising, which led to the HLP taking losses, so the team overrode the oracle price — a controversial move — and closed the position. 

The choice to shut the position was perhaps a wise one, despite the controversy, because both OKX and Binance then listed JELLY futures — a move that Boccaccio called “shady.” While we don’t know exactly what the motives were to list the futures, it was clear that HyperLiquid was struggling at the time and “made it seem like an attack on HyperLiquid.”

“Notably, HyperLiquid is the only DEX that has been able to compete with CEX volumes,” Boccaccio told me. 

We’re not going to get too into the weeds of the DEX vs. CEX debate or some of the other controversy that’s arisen since, though I know my colleagues at 0xResearch have been closely following this. 

However, the nuance of the situation is pretty important.

“All positions on Hyperliquid are onchain (unlike some other DEXs). The oracle price being overriden was decided by the validator set. This was clearly a nuanced situation, so the team had to take some serious, and potentially controversial action (even though it was decided by the validator),” Boccaccio noted.

“It's a tough situation: Either let people lose money in the HLP and erode confidence, or close somebody's position by overriding the oracle price. I think, to an extent, you want your money in a semi-controlled environment, where there aren't nefarious actors taking advantage of the situation at the expense of your funds/users.”

So, HyperLiquid and HLP will need to adjust both the risk and margin moving forward to try to prevent another similar situation, Boccaccio said. 

But is it anything like what happened at FTX, like BitGet’s Gracy Chen tried to claim? Let’s not kid ourselves.

It’s a builders market. It will always be a builders market. 

Permissionless IV is for the ones deep in the code — building infra, launching new systems, and reshaping how this space runs.

🎤 Speaker apps are open — got something that matters? Say it on stage.

💻 Hackathon is live — $100K+ in bounties. Builders get in free.

June 22–26 | Brooklyn

On my minds: FTX

After seeing Chen’s FTX comparison post yesterday, I couldn’t shake this thought: We have got to stop comparing everything to FTX. 

FTX was a disaster. Full stop. What happened was horrible and it’s certainly still a healing wound for our industry. For that, I actually do understand why the comparisons keep being made. It’s easy for folks — even non-crypto folks now — to understand, and it definitely packs a punch. 

But it’s like saying any startup fraud is like Theranos. It’s just not wholly accurate. 

It’s not only industry folks who make these types of — let’s be honest — lazy comparisons either. It’s also the media whenever a bad actor does anything similar. 

For me, personally, it lands flat. It takes away from the seriousness of the situation at hand. Comparisons can help, but they can also hinder. 

I’m not saying let’s put FTX to rest. But rather, let’s acknowledge that every situation is different. And, thankfully, FTX is in the past.