[Alpha Test Log 002] We continue to release more spots in our Alpha testing experience. With this sprint, we focused on user preferences and accessibility. 🔸Languages: Added support for 10 new languages. 🔸Market Colors: market colors adapted to regional preferences. 🔸Trade Screen Preferences: We’ve learned traders in certain regions want simplicity and ease of trading while others want sophistication with depth and data-rich experiences. We're building for both. More coming as we adapt and pressure test our app for a global release.

CLOBs are not going to take us to the RWA promised land. Today Hyperliquid owns the liquidity for a handful of RWA macro names. But outside the top 10 traded assets (which are ~90% of volume) liquidity falls off a cliff. When there's enough retail demand, order books can work. But "perps on everything" is a different problem, and TradFi solved it decades ago. The answer isn't every venue rebuilding its own order book. That's not what Robinhood does, it's not what Schwab does, and it's not what DeFi should be doing either. Building your own book for every asset means bootstrapping demand ticker by ticker, renting liquidity with subsidies, and ending up with thin markets that blow out 200x the moment news hits. It's like sucking the ocean of TradFi liquidity through a straw. Variational skips all of it via the RFQ model. RFQ is how institutions like Dragonfly actually trade. In RFQ, dealers quote just-in-time and hedge on the primary venue as orders come in. This lets Variational mainline TradFi liquidity directly and mirror it on-chain. Margin in smart contracts, settlement in stablecoins, liquidity aggregated from the people who already trade on the biggest underlying markets, like the CME and NYSE. It makes it permissionless to access the same depth and spreads the big boys get. With the cold start problem gone, new markets can ship at the speed of software. By next year I expect RWA perps to be the biggest contract class on-chain, bigger than BTC and ETH perps combined. That's how crypto truly becomes the market for everything. I believe the platform that wins that won't look like a traditional exchange. Proud to lead Variational's $50M Series A. Watch this space.

[Alpha Test Log 001] Last week, we gave access to the Alpha version of our app to 100 traders all over the world. Here’s what we learned: 🔸UI/UX is increasingly important even for crypto native users. The bar for trading applications is much higher than even one year ago. 🔸Top traders are looking for more sophisticated tools to better compete with professional investors. 🔸Users are excited about the opportunity to access a wide range of assets and exposure vehicles all from one app. We’re feeling the momentum and alignment. If you have DMed us, you’re in our queue. We’re slowly releasing more Alpha tester seats. More to come 🫡

Who wants to test some stuff?

This GPT Image 2 prompt is going insanely viral right now. “Redraw the attached image in the most clumsy, scribbly, and utterly pathetic way possible. Use a white background, and make it look like it was drawn in MS Paint with a mouse. It should be vaguely similar but also not really, kind of matching but also off in a confusing, awkward way, with that low-quality pixel-by-pixel feel that really emphasizes how ridiculously bad it is. Actually, you know what, whatever, just draw it however you want.”

As a trader, I understand that sentiment doesn't take the weekend off. On Saturday mornings, I'm drinking my coffee and thinking about my positioning. That weekend thinking drives markets, even if they're closed. @airlovsky and @ColinSt30481392 use calendar days for exactly this reason. Trading infrastructure catching up with how cycles actually trade is pretty wild. NYSE announced a few months back that they're building 24/7 on-chain settlement for tokenized securities. This is a big deal. Non-futures traders will have access to #Gold, #silver, $GDX, $SPX when they're having their coffee on Saturday morning. I'm going to have to start (slowly) updating my cycle counts. businesswire.com/news/home/2…