Stories about Marketing | Co-Founder of @PinkBrains_io - DeFi Creators🧠
Defi
Joined October 2016
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Arthur | Defi KOLs retweeted
That's why permissionless perp DEXs have huge PMF.
People around the world want to trade assets they can't easily access because of where they live, broker restrictions etc.
Like going long Samsung / short SK Hynix not being possible.
Perp DEXes that offer these geolocked assets will do well.
Arthur | Defi KOLs retweeted
World-leading financial institutions are bringing TradFi onchain.
Funds, deposits, payments, exchanges, and stocks.
Here's a breakdown of the categories and players 🧠👇
Arthur | Defi KOLs retweeted
The Death of KOL-as-a-VC is a fun one:
Just until recently KOLs were actively investing in private/seed sales at better terms than top VCs.
I used to get tons of invitations to join sales at lower valuations & shorter lockups.
That all dried out.
And KOLs who actively invested in seed are mostly rekt.
But I think believe projects should try to onboard ambassador/believer KOLs to help them grow.
But choose quality over quantity. One to three flag bearer KOLs will do you good.
On the flip side, an extractor KOL will damage reputation for good.
Arthur | Defi KOLs retweeted
More crypto infra projects are pivoting to building apps. And it's a positive signal.
@ZetaChain plans to wind down its L1 to focus on ZetaLabs, a private AI app on Solana for trading, where chats and memory are encrypted by each user with keys they hold.
The app builds on the same private chat and memory tech as Anuma Chat launched by Zeta in Feb.
$ZETA is used to pay at a discount, vote, and lock for Premium from Q1 2027.
On Dec 9, $ZETA becomes a native Solana token and ZetaLabs launches: private AI on Solana, with ZETA as the token behind it.
Governance Proposal 2 is live on ZetaHub. It sets the mechanism, the dates and the holder protections.
Voting runs
72 hours. Nothing moves until it passes.
Arthur | Defi KOLs retweeted
End of Crime Season:
- Crime coins/extractooor KOLs get no bid
- Trump & His Cartel face responsibility for their scams
While
- OG devs who built for years get rewarded: $FLUID solana:KMNo3nJsBXfcpJTVhZcXLW7RmTwTt4GVFE7suUBo9sS $AAVE $UNI etc.
- Tradfi x crypto merges more ($HYPE $LIT $VAR + tokenized stocks)
- High rev tokens continue to outperform
But
- Privacy coins serve as hedge: $ZEC but also $ETH
Arthur | Defi KOLs retweeted
Sucks that crypto is getting run by lawyers now.
Brian Armstrong (Coinbase) said that:
"if you have a company run by lawyers [...] you're not going to get in trouble, but you're never going to do anything innovative ever again"
In Kast case, even if they spent millions on lawyers, it's not clear what users receive.
Perhaps more sad point is that "Tokens are almost always not aligned to the community."
So please spend millions on lawyers to make a community aligned token!
This would drive crypto industry forward instead of backwards.
But his point shares a broader sentiment in crypto:
that tokens are extraction tools. Either by team or insiders.
And tokens lack ownership & other legal rights.
Still, tokens could offer utility features that equity doesn't but that's beyond this post.
In any case, Kast enters the naughty list together with Pump, Opensea, Metamask that promise one thing and underdeliver.
On the email users got, about converting points for KAST Pioneer Units. Let me say this, and then will leave it for you to absorb.
—-
First -
We are super limited in the language we can use, because of country-by-country rules. Use that for context, in what we released.
Second -
We didn’t just come up with some program out of thin air. The conversion of points to KAST Pioneer Units, came after a long and super expensive process with Tier 1 law firms, and with approvals from investors to create this setup. It literally cost us millions just to setup. We got legal opinions on dozens of countries. Obviously, we would only do this because we are really trying our absolute best to create a strong program for the community.
Third -
Just to reconfirm.
The KAST Pioneer Units, will be issued by a KAST-linked SPV. This is the only practical step for issuance globally. The points will convert to the KAST Pioneer Units.
There will be periodic cash out events. We can’t legally promise you the amounts, the dates, whether it goes up or down. No surprise in that.
But we are putting in the hard work, so the community gets an outcome aligned to the success of KAST.
The only thing you have to do, is quickly accept the conversion, details early December in app.
Fourth -
Why is there no token? Because no single project in the crypto card or Neobank space in history, has ever delivered a token which is not down. Tokens are almost always not aligned to the community. The founders and team most often end up with a treasury they wholly control, they along with investors cash out, and the token holders deal with the volatility and the ultimate decrease in price.
By not launching a token, our team and investors get none of that optionality. They stay locked in equity. To date, I have personally only net purchased equity in KAST and never sold.
Launching a token completely counter to our ambition to build a $100B+ company. We believe the KAST Pioneer Units will be the best long term outcome, and in time people will realise this.
Finally -
We understand that in a market which is very far down, many are looking for anyway to cash out. We get it. There is real pain in crypto prices, many have seen their wealth fall substantially.
But still strongly believe the KAST Pioneer Units, issued by the SPV, will ultimately prove to be the right decision. Time be our witness.
Thanks all.
(Note: I won’t respond to most comments, as I’m keeping to approved language)
Arthur | Defi KOLs retweeted
"Where does the value go?" has killed most DeFi tokens.
@kamino shows how value should be accrued.
The Kamino Foundation owns the IP and receives all revenue, including from institutional deals.
solana:KMNo3nJsBXfcpJTVhZcXLW7RmTwTt4GVFE7suUBo9sS is the only token, and nobody holds separate equity: not the founders, the investors, the team or the CEO.
That matters.
When insiders keep the equity and the community gets the token, the revenue goes to the company, and token holders get only the narrative.
@WeiszM commits to putting $20M in 2 years to bring Kamino into banks, brokerages and wallets. Most of his own allocation vests only if solana:KMNo3nJsBXfcpJTVhZcXLW7RmTwTt4GVFE7suUBo9sS hits and holds a series of valuation milestones.
So the answer to "what's DeFi's moat when banks tokenize?" may be this.
Banks can tokenize and earn from spread, but they never hand their users the upside.
Tokens accrue value to holders. Banks don't.
What is the moat for DeFi when banks adopt tokenization?
Blockchain decentralization? No, corporate clients want things they can control.
Tokenomics? I guess they don't need airdrops.
Permissionless access? It would never pass a legal team.
Composability? That's also how one hack spreads across 10 protocols in a night.
@StanChart launched tokenized deposits in Hong Kong, which are regulated bank deposits that are onchain, built for corporate treasurers and banks.
Enterprises want faster settlement, programmable money, less counterparty risk, privacy and more importantly, compliance.
But DeFi's pitch has been the same - openness.
So when companies want to move serious funds onchain, I bet most would pick the bank. They'll take the tech and skip the ideology.
Is it time for DeFi to tell a different story for enterprises, not just for degens?
Arthur | Defi KOLs retweeted
Rotation to crypto already underway
Crypto up while retail AI stocks are down.. Even gold is down 7%.
I think a big part is simply timing/technical:
BTC took got rekt earlier, while AI stocks kept pumping.
Crypto had already priced in a lot of disappointment.
I've also always believed BTC would catch up with gold.
And the gap is still here to close.
But whether this continues depends on WHY investors are selling:
- If they're losing faith in AI valuations and big spending, crypto could attract some of the money.
- If they're reducing leverage and selling risk assets, crypto can dump too.
I also noticed more articles in Tradfi media on alternative assets. Everything looks bad to tradfi:
- Stocks ATH and exposed to AI risk
- Treasuries risky to inflation
- private credit is getting rekt too
Crypto meanwhile could look interesting: most are underexposed to it and ETFs make it easy to buy.
The ICE/Hyperliquid deal gives them another reason to look at crypto.
Although the real rotation targets are cash and boring healthcare stock.
Arthur | Defi KOLs retweeted
Tokenizing stocks is only crypto's "newspapers online" phase.
@nemild, a Visiting Partner at YC and former head of USDC at Coinbase, on @Unchained_pod's @_choppingblock:
The next wave of tokenization is things that weren't possible in the old world.
1. Microsecurities and microtokens could exist, such as $500 or $10,000 tokens.
2. AI agents could write smart contracts between each other to enforce how they interact.
He also expects many more financial primitives across both DeFi and CeFi, and says banks might run some of them.
Once all of this is onchain, it becomes an API, and in his words, "what agents want is APIs."
YC just ran a "make something agents want" hackathon, and he expects personal agents to start doing payments and trading pretty rapidly.
He says YC's big themes are agents, stablecoins and trading. 🧠
Arthur | Defi KOLs retweeted
Stablecoin neobanks, privacy and onchain credit are still top crypto narratives.
Here are 6 crypto apps worth testing this week 🧠👇
1. @EthenaPay: Earn+ puts your $USDe into a vault on Avalanche, run by Upshift and Steakhouse, that loops USDe/USDT on @aave v4 at ~11x target leverage for up to 12% APY. It's live for Pro and VIP users and rolling out to everyone else, with a $4.5M overall vault cap.
2. @0xprivacypools: Privacy Pools v2 by @0xbowio lets you send, swap, request payments and earn Aave yield privately. It's live on 7 chains, though swaps and yield depend on the chain. Over $700k has been deposited so far.
3. @torosfinance: Toros Options went live on Base this week, powered by @DeriveXYZ. Trade BTC, ETH, HYPE, ZEC and SOL options, and eligible Derive traders get 5% USDC cashback on options they buy and hold for at least a day.
4. @Exa_App: Exa Blue, the web version of Exa on Base, lets you back your Exa Card credit with @coinbase tokenized stocks (NVDA, AAPL, META, GOOGL, AMZN) and pay in fixed-rate installments.
Non-US persons only. Exa Blue is web-only for now. Price feeds hold their last value over weekends, so liquidations can hit when markets reopen.
5. @peerxyz: Peer, formerly ZKP2P, opened an Alipay beta this week, so you can buy or sell $USDC for CNY peer-to-peer, with escrow onchain on Base. Payments are verified privately in a TEE, and it now supports 12 payment methods.
No extra ID checks, so your counterparty's funds could be scam-linked and Alipay can freeze accounts. Check your local rules and size small.
6. @BirchHill_io: Birch Hill is building a regulated path for US credit onchain. Its Groma Ecosystem Vault on @Morpho (Base) is live since Oct 13, lending USDC against Boston and Providence apartment buildings, with NAV published onchain. Raised a $4M seed led by @multicoin. It's private credit, so borrower risk is real, and the team notes restrictions may apply.
DYOR/NFA.
Anything we should test this week?
Arthur | Defi KOLs retweeted
$TRUE is a rare asymmetric trade in crypto right now.
Defillama's website traffic of native users and Trueo tech is a unique partnership.
Trueo lacks liquidity. But Defillama might be the missing piece to jump start the liquidity machine.
The first 10 days of our DefiLlama partnership served mostly as a market survey experiment.
A sliver of its full potential, if you will.
And despite the conservative launch, @Trueo_ is seeing material growth.
Heading into the New Year, we’re going to ramp up this integration.
More markets. More categories. More liquidity.
We’re just getting started. So much more to come 🫡
Arthur | Defi KOLs retweeted
Did we actually learn how to deal with hacks by now?
- Binance communicated the exposure & said it would cover all losses with SAFU + company funds.
- Tether & Circle quickly froze billions in stolen stables.
- Aave froze new DEPOSITS & BORROWING while keeping WITHDRAWALS open. Users could still repay loans too.
- Arbitrum's Security Council froze 8.4k ETH and 74,6M ARB (last time it took them longer. Now they know what to do).
- Elliptic shared a free live list of hacker linked wallets so others could flag and block the funds.
Most importantly, the market did not overreact and BTC trades just ~5% lower.
Arthur | Defi KOLs retweeted
The Binance drain is a lesson in what a signature can do.
Over $6B in impact, just $3B frozen so far, and no evidence of a private key leak.
Here's what happened, simply explained 🧠👇
Arthur | Defi KOLs retweeted
Signatures can make a normal wallet run smart contract code.
That power upgrades crypto wallet UX to the next level, but it's also probably behind crypto's biggest hack.
EIP-7702 in plain English.
Do's and don'ts to protect your funds 🧠👇
Arthur | Defi KOLs retweeted
201M ethereum:0xc20059e0317de91738d13af027dfc4a50781b066 bought back, more than double the 91.7M cumulative total in July
@sparkfinance has spent 4.07M USDS on it at a ~$0.0203 average. That's nearly 6% of circulating supply,
How the buyback works:
→ The Spark treasury is valued on the 1st of each month against a governance-set target
→ 25% of the excess goes to buybacks, 100% of anything above 2x target
→ USDS is spent through a 90-day onchain TWAP, lately 1,000 USDS every 2 hours
→ Purchased SPK goes to the Spark SubDAO Proxy (treasury), not a burn
648K USDS is sitting in the buyback executor.
How Spark has performed so far:
- $22.4M projected yearly net returns vs $10.9M opex
- $4.4M net returns in Q3 (~$17.5M annualized), net positive every month of 2026
- SparkLend $5.06B TVL, Savings $3.74B, SLL $3.14B allocated
ethereum:0xc20059e0317de91738d13af027dfc4a50781b066 sits at a ~$61M market cap, ~3.5x Q3's annualized net returns.
teapaw.org/sparkfinance/status/21…
Update on Spark's SPK buyback program.
SPK buybacks have passed 200M.
Spark has used over 4M USDS to buyback over 200M SPK. Each buyback is sized according to protocol parameters and settled onchain.
Track Spark’s buyback activity here👇
data.spark.finance/financial…
