Research

Leverage on prediction markets is a harder problem than adding margin to an existing venue. Four models are emerging to solve it: the lending pool, the prime broker, the synthetic desk, and the perps exchange. The retail case is intuitive, but the institutional case may be more consequential. Weather markets on Kalshi, with roughly $595M in cumulative volume and a continuous underlying variable, are natural candidates for capital-efficient hedging by energy companies, agricultural traders, and insurers, especially under a continuous-settlement design. In the base case, a platform-wide leverage layer generates approximately $15M in annual fee revenue, with over 87% driven by financing rather than trading fees. Every model, however, shares a dependency on CLOB venue structure, where stale limit orders during jump events create downstream risk that no individual protocol can resolve alone.

Research

Hyperliquid’s weekend markets were initially framed as an architectural proof of concept, but the Strait of Hormuz disruption forced a more practical question: can a 24/7 venue do meaningful price discovery when the primary benchmark is offline? During the closure window, with CME crude futures shut and oil markets repricing rapidly, TradeXYZ’s crude market became the only continuously available venue for risk transfer. Prices moved directionally with incoming information, participation scaled materially after the initial shock, and by the reopen, a significant share of the adjustment had already been incorporated. Across a broader cross-asset sample, this pattern persisted, with weekend prices systematically converging toward the eventual reopen rather than reverting to Friday’s close. The evidence suggests that weekend are increasingly informative, particularly in regimes where traditional benchmarks are most stale.

Research

Solana's perps market lags Hyperliquid, a gap rooted in architectural constraints rather than purely application-layer failures. Three new protocols, Phoenix, Bulk, and Bullet, are attacking the execution problem from different points on the composability-performance spectrum. We benchmark execution costs across venues, isolate the L1 constraints holding makers back, and assess whether Solana's infrastructure roadmap and these new entrants can close the gap before purpose-built chains lock in their liquidity advantage.

Research

Collateralized Onchain Infrastructure Lending (COIL), sometimes referred to as InfraFi, lowers the capital cost and operational friction for deploying physical infrastructure.