🟪 April is the cruelest month
Geopolitics and market chills

📚 Fear in a handful of posts
ZachXBT published a thread on X detailing a previously unreleased dataset exfiltrated from an internal North Korean payment server, exposing a coordinated DPRK IT-worker operation generating ~$1M per month. The data, shared by an unnamed source after a DPRK worker’s device was compromised, included chat logs, fabricated identities, forged legal documents, and crypto-to-fiat conversion records tied to 390 accounts.

Ray Dalio posted a sweeping macro warning, arguing that markets are badly mispricing the current geopolitical environment. What most see as an isolated US-Israel-Iran conflict is, in his view, part of an early-stage world war that won’t end anytime soon. He draws parallels to the 1913−14 and 1938−39 periods, flagging US military overextension, fracturing alliances, and escalating multi-theater conflicts as classic precursors to major war. He puts the odds of at least one significant new military conflict within five years at greater than 50%, with a US-China confrontation over Taiwan as the most consequential risk, peaking around 2028.

Lucas Bruder, founder and CEO of Jito Labs, argues that “MEV” as a term is functionally useless and should be retired in favor of Transaction Ordering Value (TOV). The piece traces the acronym’s drift from “miner extractable value” in the proof-of-work era to the catch-all “maximal extractable value,” a category error that conflates benign arbitrage with malicious extraction like sandwich attacks.

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recent research
Research
Prediction markets are scaling rapidly, with Kalshi reaching $14.4B in monthly volume driven by sports. Prices are highly efficient and closely track sportsbooks, but higher fees and thinner liquidity limit execution for size. As a CFTC-regulated platform with nationwide access and no stake limits, Kalshi offers structural advantages over traditional sportsbooks. Revenue is on track to reach $1.3B in 2026, and the platform trades at a premium multiple of around 16.9x forward sales, reflecting its positioning as exchange-like infrastructure.
by Kunal Doshi
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