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Macro finally reminded cryptocurrencies that they still matter.
The Fed presented the expected 25 basis point cut but signaled a tougher path ahead, forecasting only one cut for all of next year. That was enough to knock BTC out of its early strength and reinforce the idea that liquidity is not opening up as quickly as many had hoped.
At the same time, the Perp Wars are heating up as Aster and Lighter overtake Hyperliquid’s dominance, and the gap between cryptocurrency cash flows and investor relations infrastructure has become too large to ignore.
Indicators
The markets saw a clear split yesterday between BTC and major benchmarks. BTC closed at -0.73% while Gold, S&P 500, and Nasdaq finished at 0.57%, 0.53%, and 0.22%, respectively.
The move came on the heels of the Fed’s widely expected 25 basis point cut. What surprised markets was the guidance that followed.
The Fed has indicated that policy is likely to remain tight for longer, with only one cut expected throughout next year. Officials He pointed out To a cold labor market, inflation that remains above target, and growth that is expected to remain flat. The message was clear that liquidity was not opening up as quickly as many had hoped; This tone likely explains why BTC is retreating from its early strength.
Performance was mixed across cryptocurrency sectors. L2s and Memes managed to achieve gains of 1.70% and 1.27%, respectively. L2’s strength came almost entirely from MNT, which jumped 4.5% and now makes up nearly a third of the index. The meme sector told a similar story, with M (MemeCore) stock rising 6.2% while most other meme names declined.
AI and DePIN were the laggards, at -3% and -4%. AI was influenced by IP and ICP, which were down -6% and -7.9%, while DePIN was weaker than FIL and HNT at -4.9% and -5.6%.
The price of BTC is around $90,000, and the market seems stuck in neutral. Until the macro chooses a trend, cryptocurrencies will continue to drift with it.
Market Update: Hype on Evolving Perp Wars
Does the noise fade away? This has been the question on everyone’s minds as the currency struggles to keep up with the broader recovery. In the past 7 days, HYPE price has fallen by -20% while BTC price has fallen by only -3%. When we look at HYPE/BTC’s weekly returns, it becomes clear that HYPE has given back nearly half of its outperformance since its April lows after peaking in mid-September.
So what has changed? The most obvious answer is increased competition. Peak performance coincided almost perfectly with the launch of Aster, which quickly took market share and attention away from Hyperliquid. Since mid-September, Hyperliquid’s share of perp volume has fallen from 49% to 19% today. The majority of that lost share went to Aster and Lighter. In fact, Lighter has slightly outperformed Hyperliquid in weekly volume since mid-October.
But size alone does not tell the whole story. When we compare weekly volume relative to open interest, we see that both Lighter and Aster score much higher than Hyperliquid. Higher ratios indicate faster turnover of premium positions, and often indicate agricultural-driven inorganic activity. Both Aster and Lighter are trigger point programs, so much of their activity could evaporate when incentives cool. The lighter has TGE Approaching This will give us our first real read on how much of her activity is slimy and how much of it is farm and escape.
For a while, many assumed that Hyperliquid would run away with the Perp Wars. The picture now looks more competitive. I don’t think this will be a winner-take-all market, but the dominant Perp exchange will be the one that offers the lowest fees, the deepest books, the widest market selection, and the most seamless trading experience.
Lighter wins the fees battle with Zero maker/receiver fees, and last week we male How the rise of malware aggregators could push more traffic toward lower-fee venues. yet depth Market choice is equally important, and Hyperliquid continues to lead on both counts – especially after the launch of HIP-3, which introduced perpetual equity markets that saw strong early traction.
Recent headwinds such as Team opens In November and concerns about Hyperliquid Automatic reduction design It affected sentiment in the short term. However, the underlying fundamentals remain strong. Hyperliquid consistently generates $10 million to $20 million in weekly revenue that is used to buy back HYPE. Very few protocols have this level of real economic engine behind them.
Success is never guaranteed, but anyone who writes off Hyperliquid at this point will likely do so very quickly. The real battle for startup dominance has only just begun, and the next few months will reveal who is building a lasting advantage and who is simply riding the incentive wave.
Fix broken investor relationships
Cryptocurrencies have matured quickly. What was once a purely speculative infrastructure market has developed into diverse income-generating streams. The average monthly protocol revenue (excluding stablecoins) was $175 million in 2025, an increase of 133% year-over-year from $75 million in 2024.
The ability to coordinate globally via a decentralized network has led to unprecedented growth; Hyperliquid became the fastest team ever to reach $1 billion in ARR, Tether amassed a $500 billion valuation, and Axiom generated $63 million in monthly revenue less than six months after launch.
If fundraising is any indication, with total monthly increases ranging from $500 million to $2 billion, the industry continues to expand rapidly and aggressively.
However, despite this growth, navigating the industry has become more difficult than ever, especially for TradFi investors looking to diversify into the asset class. While these assets have become largely proprietary-based, operating like cash-generating businesses, their unique crypto properties make due diligence very difficult.
Take Pendle Finance, a fixed/variable rate swap yield optimization platform. The traditional interest rate derivatives industry trades $7.9 trillion daily. Understanding the size of the TradFi market, investors are curious about how this will extend to cryptocurrencies. However, the nuances are dense:
- USDe dominance (yields and rollover rates)
- Pricing power and the Ve (Vote-Escrow) token.
- Aave integrations (PT lists) and chain-specific dependencies
- Metapoints, new protocols emerge with point incentives
This complexity extends to almost every product in today’s rapidly changing environment. How do you explain the advantages of the CLOB model versus the GLP model? How would you explain the trade-offs between standardized versus homogeneous lending? How stable are different user acquisition models? Could this be the reason why many protocols are trading at significant discounts compared to their TradFi equivalents?
For the professional distributor, the workflow is basically broken. Important information is restricted to multiple dashboards, GitHub pages, and private Telegram channels. This fragmentation creates three distinct barriers to entry:
- Fragmentation: There is no legal source for diligence. Data, documents, governance and research are scattered across different platforms.
- Data reliability: Public pools are often inconsistent or misclassified. Without uniform definitions, one bad input can jeopardize your entire investment thesis.
- Translation Layer: Most of the material is written for cryptocurrency natives. They lack translation into the metrics required by investment committees: revenues, retention, unit economics, and cash flows.
To fill this gap, Blockworks was launched Speed of light IR In partnership with the Solana Foundation. The platform is designed to professionalize the relationship between issuers and capital, replacing the current fragmented workflow with a unified, gated environment. It focuses on replacing open pools with highly granular onchain metrics, turning raw governance activity into IC-ready research, and centralizing roadmap updates for direct communication between teams and distributors.
We started with Solana, given its intersection of high user activity and cash flow generating applications, but Delegation is a broader platform, allowing crypto-native projects to communicate effectively with capital allocators and investors.
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