Fundamentals may have started to matter in crypto. Amid stiff competition from DEXs like Lighter, Aster, and edgeX, to name a few, $HYPE has completely round tripped this year, from $26 to a high of $58 and back to $25. At the same time, annualized fees have also round tripped by roughly the same magnitude. The correlation between fees and price for the token is 0.86. A similar dynamic played out in $HYPE MC/Fees multiple, which went from 12-13x at the start of the year to 9-10x today. This price action is highly reminiscent of growth equities, and I believe the gap between revenue producing crypto and traditional fintech companies will continue to narrow.

The @base @solana bridge is crucial for payments. Solana is the cheapest mainstream L1 for payments, has massive stablecoin velocity (8.2x supply growth YoY vs 2.5x for Ethereum), and can handle retail-scale throughput. Base is the most compliant U.S.-aligned L2, has merchant tooling (Stripe, Shopify, Coinbase), and has smart wallets, gas abstraction, and session keys. Base <-> Solana means that a merchant accepting USDC via Base can settle back into Solana instantly, while users with Solana wallets can pay in Base apps without friction. This is essentially a marriage between scale and compliance + commerce that is a meaningful step toward a unified onchain economy.

Crazy chart from the $IBIT product brief from @iShares. In the 11 years since 2014, Bitcoin is the top performing asset among major asset classes 8 times, and the worst 3 times. It has been in the middle a grand total of zero times. $10k invested in 2014 would have become ~$1.2 million by 2024. Second place? SPX which would have compounded to ~$300k.