A 4-Sharpe crypto fund. 27 of 28 months positive. Leigh Drogen (@LDrogen) is CIO of Starkiller Capital, a crypto quant fund running momentum and market-neutral crypto strategies. His edge is diligence — and a "never lose more than 1%" position rule. We cover: - Why block space is worthless — and the fiber-optics-in-1999 analogy that explains every L1 collapse since blobs launched on Ethereum - Starkiller's "never lose more than 1%" position sizing rule (how it compounds into 27 of 28 positive months) - The Ripple / RLUSD / USCC trade — borrowing at 2.5% against a 5-8% yielding tokenized basis fund, hidden in plain sight on Aave Horizon - How Starkiller dodged the Kelp DAO hack, lending USDC at 17-18% APR while the rest of DeFi was on fire - Why momentum is the only actual persistent alpha (it's the only persistent behavioral characteristic of humans) - "F*ckery risk" on the short book — why Drogen runs a more diversified short book than long book, even when his thesis screams short - Why "sales is way overcompensated" relative to the difficulty of the job — and what that means for ambitious young quants - The 2019 DM from a 21-year-old that became Drogen's biggest career miss — and how Polymarket's Shane Coplin (@shayne_coplan) actually solved the SEC problem ("USDC and VPNs") Highlights: 00:00 Intro 01:09 Mechanics of a 4 Sharpe market neutral DeFi strategy 03:24 Quantifying protocol risk and code provenance 06:40 Case study: Exploiting incentivized spreads in carry trades 10:53 Three primary sources of alpha in liquid crypto markets 14:28 Capacity constraints and institutional yield compression 18:54 Position sizing via the 1% max loss rule 21:38 Pro-cyclical returns and the risk modulation framework 26:44 Compounding capital through trend following and cross-sectional momentum 33:35 Why momentum is the only persistent behavioral alpha 48:39 Extracting alpha from token unlock schedules and market structure 51:20 Lessons from building Estimize and the SEC/ForceRank fight 55:00 The Polymarket origin story: Arbitraging regulatory hurdles 01:01:45 Career risk premia and the value of "eating sh*t" 01:05:34 Table selection: Positioning your career on the right macro curve

Kalshi is the only financial market where Main St. has an edge over Wall St. Gigi, Nicholas, Brandon, Joel, Heather, Paul, and Stephanie have all found their edge and mastered their own niche on Kalshi. Prediction markets are the people’s markets.

started speaking to a lot of builders on hyperliquid there's some v talented and smart ppl launching interesting things. reaffirms my thesis that hyperliquid will indeed be the blockchain to house all finance i will say though the focus is heavily concentrated toward trading and HIP-3/HIP-4. i think there's a lot of potential for ppl to build with hyperEVM as the central focus (treating it as an L1), not just the trading systems already present been enjoying it though, been good to get to know some of the teams doing cool stuff

We've heard today's feedback on Kumbaya's LP fee mechanics. Updated documentation along with more details on Kumbaya's fee structure is coming tomorrow.

An encrypted mempool is a holy grail of blockchain design @category_xyz released BTX, the first practical Batched Threshold Encryption scheme that suits the needs for encrypted mempools A working encrypted mempool would keep transactions hidden until finalized, reducing MEV