Uneasy Money: Is Jupiter Incompetent or Evil? And Is Hyperliquid's ADL Flawed? - Ep. 976
Episode
70 min
Read time
2 min
Topics
Career Growth, Productivity, Investing
AI-Generated Summary
Key Takeaways
- ✓Isolated Lending Pools: Jupiter claimed zero contagion risk between lending pools, but users could borrow from one pool and deposit in another, creating cross-contamination risk. Multicoin framed this as either incompetence or deliberate misrepresentation, though organizational communication breakdowns at large teams likely explain the disconnect between engineering and marketing messaging.
- ✓Lending Protocol Economics: Lending protocols operate on thin margins of approximately 20 basis points on deposits, making them far less profitable than swap businesses which can earn multiple percentage points per trade. Jupiter likely generates 50-100x more revenue from swaps than lending, suggesting their lending expansion serves user retention rather than direct revenue generation.
- ✓Zero-Fee Trading Tradeoffs: Lighter's zero-fee tier imposes 200-300 millisecond latency, creating worse execution prices than fee-based alternatives. This latency filters out sophisticated traders, leaving only uninformed retail flow for market makers to trade against profitably. Only retail traders would accept poor latency for zero fees, making them definitionally uninformed and easier to extract value from.
- ✓Token Launch Timing: Launching tokens too early creates infinite downside for founders, as communities judge success by all-time-high prices rather than seed valuations. Synthetix raised at 8 million dollars, now trades at 200 million, but reached 5 billion at peak, making the team appear unsuccessful despite 20x returns. Delaying tokenization until product-market fit exists protects founder reputation and focus.
- ✓Senior Engineering Value: Hiring expensive senior engineers with 15 years experience in release management or DevSecOps provides immediate infrastructure improvements that junior crypto-native engineers cannot deliver. Senior engineers quietly fix architectural problems without criticism, understanding why suboptimal decisions were made initially, whereas junior engineers get frustrated by existing technical debt and organizational choices.
What It Covers
Jupiter's lending protocol faces scrutiny over misleading isolated collateral claims, Hyperliquid's auto-deleveraging algorithm draws criticism, Lighter's zero-fee model hides costs in latency spreads, and Farcaster pivots from social network to wallet after failing to break Twitter's network effects.
Key Questions Answered
- •Isolated Lending Pools: Jupiter claimed zero contagion risk between lending pools, but users could borrow from one pool and deposit in another, creating cross-contamination risk. Multicoin framed this as either incompetence or deliberate misrepresentation, though organizational communication breakdowns at large teams likely explain the disconnect between engineering and marketing messaging.
- •Lending Protocol Economics: Lending protocols operate on thin margins of approximately 20 basis points on deposits, making them far less profitable than swap businesses which can earn multiple percentage points per trade. Jupiter likely generates 50-100x more revenue from swaps than lending, suggesting their lending expansion serves user retention rather than direct revenue generation.
- •Zero-Fee Trading Tradeoffs: Lighter's zero-fee tier imposes 200-300 millisecond latency, creating worse execution prices than fee-based alternatives. This latency filters out sophisticated traders, leaving only uninformed retail flow for market makers to trade against profitably. Only retail traders would accept poor latency for zero fees, making them definitionally uninformed and easier to extract value from.
- •Token Launch Timing: Launching tokens too early creates infinite downside for founders, as communities judge success by all-time-high prices rather than seed valuations. Synthetix raised at 8 million dollars, now trades at 200 million, but reached 5 billion at peak, making the team appear unsuccessful despite 20x returns. Delaying tokenization until product-market fit exists protects founder reputation and focus.
- •Senior Engineering Value: Hiring expensive senior engineers with 15 years experience in release management or DevSecOps provides immediate infrastructure improvements that junior crypto-native engineers cannot deliver. Senior engineers quietly fix architectural problems without criticism, understanding why suboptimal decisions were made initially, whereas junior engineers get frustrated by existing technical debt and organizational choices.
Notable Moment
One participant revealed they initially believed they lost substantial money during the October 10 liquidation event, but discovered Hyperliquid's auto-deleveraging closed their short position at the absolute bottom of the price wick, actually improving their returns beyond expectations and contradicting claims the system penalized traders unfairly.
Episode Transcript
Thing is just lending is where everyone's blown up in the past. That seems to be like nine out of the 10 blow ups come from some sort of lending mechanism. That's the one place in crypto I'd be afraid to build. Obviously, people should have business models so that they can build, like, sustainable business and create new value. Ethereum foundation says what you're going on today. I know. This is super controversial at Ethereum, by the way. Like, you shouldn't have business models. Unfortunately, in crypto, once you have a token, price becomes like the only signal of success. Right? You can release a feature. If the if Bitcoin randomly dropped 10% that day, it's suddenly a bad feature. Hey, everyone. I'm Kean Warwick and welcome to the fifth episode of Uneasy Money because what happens on chain never stays on chain. I'm here with Luca Netz, CEO of Pudgy Penguins and Taylor Monahan, security at MetaMask. Hey, Luca and Tay. Before we begin, here's a word from the sponsors that make the show possible. Multichain Advisors is an emerging technology growth firm that has helped create 50 plus billion dollars in enterprise value for 80 plus clients over the past four years. They're the partner to help navigate markets. Build real traction today at multichainadv.com. One quick thing before we start, nothing you hear on uneasy money is financial advice. We're just three builders talking about what's happening on chain, and we want you to always do your own research before aping in. You can find all our disclosures at unchainedcrypto.com/uneasymoney. All right, guys, let's get into it. It's been a very busy week this week. I think the first thing, that we're gonna talk about is a little bit of Solana, warfare between Solana DeFi teams, Camino and Jupiter. So Jupyter, lend is a lending protocol within the Jupyter ecosystem. Jupyter started off as, I guess, a DEX aggregator slash DEX and has expanded vertically, horizontally, diagonally into other dimensions over the last, like, four years. And, I think has done a very good job at kind of dominating the Solana DeFi ecosystem. Basically, like any evolutionary niche that is available, they will go in and occupy it. As you can imagine, Camino, that is a pure lending protocol, maybe hasn't loved that. It was cool when they were just a dex aggregator, but now they're like a lending aggregator. And so it's created a bit of tension, I think, within Solana ecosystem. In particular, there was this conversation about this zero contagion claim made by which any time anyone in the fire tells you zero anything run because it's going to be some kind of psyop. So the the claim, I think, was that there was zero risk of contagion within Jupiter land within their pools. So the idea here being that, you know, you have these isolated lending pools within defi. The design is supposed to protect someone who's in one pool from having …
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company
“Jupiter's lending protocol faces scrutiny over misleading isolated collateral claims. Jupiter claimed zero contagion risk between lending pools, but users could borrow from one pool and deposit in another, creating cross-contamination risk.”
“Hyperliquid's auto-deleveraging algorithm draws criticism. One participant revealed they initially believed they lost substantial money during the October 10 liquidation event, but discovered Hyperliquid's auto-deleveraging closed their short position at the absolute bottom of the price wick.”
“Lighter's zero-fee model hides costs in latency spreads. Lighter's zero-fee tier imposes 200-300 millisecond latency, creating worse execution prices than fee-based alternatives.”
“Multicoin framed this as either incompetence or deliberate misrepresentation, though organizational communication breakdowns at large teams likely explain the disconnect between engineering and marketing messaging.”
“Farcaster pivots from social network to wallet after failing to break Twitter's network effects.”
“Synthetix raised at 8 million dollars, now trades at 200 million, but reached 5 billion at peak, making the team appear unsuccessful despite 20x returns.”
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