Big Tech Earnings, DeFi United and Pump Fun’s Token Burn

Summary

• Crypto trading is in outright decline even as crypto dominates earnings-call rhetoric. Robinhood’s crypto volumes fell 40% (fully offset by prediction markets), Hyperliquid perp volume dropped ~30% quarter-over-quarter, and Rob expects Coinbase’s retail side to be “quite bad as well” — while Visa, SoFi, Mastercard and Vlad Tenev all pitched stablecoins and “agentic commerce,” the most crypto mentions Yano has “ever seen in an earning season.”
• Yano’s ground-truth signal on stablecoins: adoption is now universal among global fintechs, whether they admit it or not. His VC deal flow shows the best-known fintechs quietly moved “all of our infrastructure to stablecoins” around GENIUS; Visa’s stablecoin-linked card volume with Rain and Bridge is up 200% YoY across 160 programs, Western Union launches its stablecoin next month despite operating margins collapsing 18%→13%, and Meta rolled out USDC payouts on Polygon and Solana via Stripe.
• Yano’s deliberately controversial chain take — Stripe’s Tempo and Canton “have been able to get more adoption in 1 year than most chains were able to get in five” — drew immediate pushback from Santi: “there’s not really any flow going through Tempo,” while Yano countered that “there are more stablecoin payments today going through Polygon than any other blockchain.” Yano’s value-accrual conclusion was that a standalone payments chain without Stripe’s bundling muscle “will be a struggle.”
• Macro warning flags: Paul Tudor Jones called this “the easiest bear market since 2000,” with equities at ~250% of GDP and IPO supply unable to be absorbed as buybacks fade — an unwinding event in 12–18 months. The hosts noted that PTJ flipped bearish around mid-2025 and the market is up ~20–30% since, though PTJ explicitly said he’s “comfortable missing” the blow-off rally. Santi says he keeps probably 30% cash, remains long and does not short.
• On the $292M Aave/Kelp hack, Yano dismissed criticism of the $300M+ “DeFi United” rescue as “completely brain dead” — a failure to grasp second-order effects, invoking TARP: letting it fail would have left critics “in a food line.” Contributors included ConsenSys (30k ETH), Mantle (30k on loan), LayerZero (10k), Stani personally (5k), Kelp 2k, plus Solana Foundation — which used the moment to bring Aave to Solana.
• North Korea’s Lazarus is the industry’s “enemy number one”: ~$6B hacked since 2017, and ~76% of the $770M lost across 30+ incidents YTD — pacing toward a record year versus the historical $600–900M range. Yano’s damning anecdote: one of the historically most active on-chain funds has been fully off-chain for two years purely on security grounds — and a live wallet-draining exploit on ETH mainnet hit mid-recording. Security-company fundraising is picking up, with firms such as Hypernative working on the problem.
• Pump Fun burned $370M of bought-back tokens (~36% of circulating supply) and pledged 50% of revenue to buyback-and-burn — and the token still fell. Yano’s diagnosis: it’s an investor-relations failure, not a capital-returns fix — “buybacks to me tell me that a founder doesn’t know what to do with your cash” — when the business itself ($27B Q1 volume, ~$300M revenue run-rate, roughly half its market cap) is “as good as it gets” on cash-flow durability.
• Santi’s structural read on why great crypto businesses have falling tokens: “people have forgotten the thing that matters most in markets, which is liquidity.” Protocols with up-and-to-the-right revenue are exploring take-privates; tokens trade like the Hong Kong-listed line of a Nasdaq company until liquidity returns. Separately, Blockworks announced a raise at a $192M valuation, co-led by ParaFi and Reciprocal, with Coinbase Ventures, MoonPay and ~20 customers participating.

Deep dive

1. Crypto trading is shrinking while equities trade like meme coins

• Rob’s read on earnings: “crypto specific stuff has just been crushed” — Robinhood’s crypto trading fell 40%, made up entirely by prediction-market volume, “not surprising considering how excited people have been about prediction markets.” He expects Coinbase retail, where the exchange makes most of its money, to look similar, with year-over-year comparison muddied by Coinbase consolidating offshore and institutional reporting.
• Even the winners aren’t immune: Hyperliquid “has obviously continued to do well” yet is down ~30% quarter-over-quarter in perp volume, with perps still taking share from spot. “There’s no denying that trading crypto, the tokens, is in decline at the moment.”
• The mirror image: “a lot of equities are trading like meme coins today.” Yano’s mechanism — the marginal buyer is now a retail derivatives trader layered on algorithmic flows — means equity vol has risen while crypto vol has fallen, and “maybe the right equilibrium in the future is somewhere between historical equity volatility and historical crypto volatility.”
• A telling AI aside from Yano: Blockworks’ internal survey went from 81% Claude to mostly Codex after 5.5, because “Claude feels like it’s getting worse” — Dario’s “disciplined approach” to CapEx versus Sam “YOLOing” his, and “it seems like Sam’s approach might have been the right approach.”

2. Stablecoins were the real story of earnings season

• Yano’s tally of CEO quotes: Visa positioned itself as “the hyperscaling bridge layer between stablecoins and real world solutions”; SoFi’s CEO said “the crypto supercycle will transform money movement”; Mastercard touted Agent Pay and its BVNK acquisition; Vlad Tenev said “crypto as technology infrastructure is going to be big.” His verdict: “it’s the most I’ve ever seen CEOs talk about crypto in an earning season ever” — zoom out from beats and misses.
• Yano’s deal-flow evidence, the episode’s strongest empirical claim: “every single fintech that I talk to today is doing things on stablecoins now if they’re going global” — including marquee fintechs with zero public crypto history who reveal that “a year ago, right before GENIUS, we started moving all of our infrastructure to stablecoins.”
• The specifics: Visa card volume with Rain and Bridge up 200% YoY, 160 stablecoin-linked card programs, five new blockchains supported; Visa Direct and Mastercard Send pushing non-bank settlement onto stablecoin rails; Meta launched USDC payouts in Colombia and another location on Polygon and Solana with Stripe — “one of the least talked-about news of the week.”
• Yano’s synthesis of Stripe Sessions: “the market kind of cares about two things right now… it’s stablecoins, and it’s how are agents going to transact… in the age of AI.”

3. Should everyone launch their own stablecoin? Probably not

• Santi’s lesson from studying Africa-to-China money flows: “the reality is USDT is the preferred currency,” and Western Union’s management admits they haven’t figured out how to incentivize people to hold a proprietary coin — some argue they’re “better served just working with USDT or USDC.” Yano’s correction on the data: USDT is actually losing market share right now, with USDC the top beneficiary, and fintechs increasingly ask for “not USDT… something else that they feel more comfortable with” — surprising given Tether’s “stranglehold on emerging market finance.”
• Western Union’s numbers were ugly — operating margin crushed from 18% to 13%, declining revenue against growing agent receivables as exclusivity with cash-out agents erodes — making it a live test of “how and to what extent a public company can pull off a transformation of this scale.”
• Yano’s dichotomy: bureaucracies versus founder-led speed. “Whop, founder-led business, boom, they can pivot in three days. Klarna, boom, two weeks” — expect two distinct classes of stablecoin adopters. Santi notes the incumbents’ compromise is internal settlement mechanisms, such as Western Union’s USDPT and Corner USD, rather than PYUSD-style external plays — though PYUSD, at ~$3.5B, “continues to grow” under heavy incentives.

4. Tempo, Canton, and the Polygon double standard

• Yano’s provocation, offered knowing it “is going to frustrate people”: Stripe’s Tempo and Canton “have been able to get more adoption in 1 year than most chains were able to get in five.” Santi’s immediate pushback — worth keeping: “how do you define adoption? There’s not really any flow going through Tempo at the moment… Great headlines.”
• Yano’s counter-take: “there are more stablecoin payments today going through Polygon than any other blockchain” — the chain that gets “the least amount of love amongst crypto natives.” He framed the Ethereum community’s treatment of Polygon as a double standard, including the recurring question of whether it is an L2.
• The value-accrual question, per Yano citing Blockworks Data: protocol revenue is down, and stablecoin transfers monetize far worse than meme-coin trading — so stablecoin growth doesn’t mean L1 value capture. Tempo “probably does a lot of things for Stripe as a business… people always make money on bundling, but if you’re just a standalone payments chain without the muscle of Stripe… it will be a struggle.” Santi’s partial counter: Tron actually does make decent fee revenue — by jacking up prices “Ethereum should have done.”

5. PTJ and Druckenmiller are bearish — with an honest caveat

• Yano’s summary of the Invest Like the Best episode: PTJ called this “the easiest bear market since 2000,” with equities at ~250% of GDP, Americans levered to stocks, and the historical buyback bid giving way to IPO supply the market can’t absorb — “that might be the unwinding event in 12 to 18 months.” Druckenmiller is bearish too: photonic stocks “look like Wi-Fi did back in the day” — to Yano, “late cycle kind of behavior.”
• Yano asked whether Druckenmiller and Paul Tudor Jones had been bearish while markets continued to do well. Santi said PTJ’s recent tone was bearish; Yano noted PTJ flipped bearish around mid-2025 (“this feels exactly like 1999”) and the market is up ~20–30% since — but PTJ explicitly predicted a blow-off rally he was “comfortable missing,” so calling it 2000 a year later is internally consistent.
• Santi’s positioning: probably ~30% cash, still long, never short. “I know myself psychologically, I just feel better when I have a big bucket of cash and I can be very aggressive” into the dislocations he expects from a structurally more volatile world. The alternative camp, per PTJ himself: “be like Warren and just be long and compound and not do anything” — “I had such cope about Warren for the longest time and then he just keeps compounding.”

6. DeFi United: bailout or necessary rescue

• The setup: the forged cross-chain message through a compromised DVN on Kelp’s LayerZero bridge handed North Korea $292M; the industry raised over $300M to fill the hole — ConsenSys 30k ETH, Mantle 30k on loan, LayerZero 10k, Stani personally 5k, Kelp 2k, Circle Ventures buying Aave tokens, and an Arbitrum vote pending that Yano abstained from discussing since Blockworks is Arbitrum’s second-biggest delegate.
• Yano’s dismissal of critics: “the pushback against this happening is completely brain dead… a real inability to understand second and third order effects.” His TARP analogy: everyone who said let the banks fail in 2008 “would have been in a food line trying to get handouts.” Aave remains crypto’s largest money market (Morpho closing in), and an unresolved hole “was going to be a massive overhang for the industry for a long period of time.”
• Santi’s framing — “gun to your head, would you rather not resolve it or resolve it in this way?” — plus the noteworthy detail that Solana Foundation contributed despite zero exposure and used the moment to bring Aave to Solana, “a big head scratcher” for an investor in Kamino and MarginFi, but “you take advantage of an opportunity.”

7. Lazarus is on record pace — and it’s already chilling institutional flows

• Yano’s numbers: Lazarus has hacked ~$6B since 2017 — “probably more than the revenue the crypto industry has produced.” YTD: 30+ incidents, ~$770M lost, including Wasabi for $5M the day of recording, roughly 76% attributable to Lazarus, pacing past the historical $600–900M annual range toward a record year.
• The market-structure cost, from an anecdote Yano shared after speaking with one of the largest historically active on-chain funds: it has done zero on-chain yield for two years — purely because of security, not yields — running CeFi carry and delta-neutral instead. “That is pretty damning, to be honest.”
• Cinematic verité: mid-recording, Yano flagged a live exploit — “hundreds of wallets just got drained by the same address on ETH mainnet… I’m literally on Etherscan looking at the funds go out.”
• Yano’s response function: security-company fundraising “is picking up a lot, as expected”; his most professional portfolio company — never hacked — locked down for a two-day full review post-LayerZero and is adding “the third or fourth or fifth extra step,” though one founder now drowning in Hypernative real-time alerts told him “I haven’t slept in 3 weeks.”

8. Pump Fun’s burn, the IR gap, and Santi’s liquidity thesis

• The facts: Pump burned $370M of bought-back tokens (~36% of circulating supply) and committed 50% of revenue to programmatic buyback-and-burn “to instill trust” — after Alon revealed 100% of revenue went to buybacks for nine months. Yano’s core objection, channeling the Runa Digital Assets piece (“the hidden driver of token performance is investor relations”): crypto conflates users with shareholders — Apple’s iPhone customers and its shareholders “are two really different people” — and a one-off trust announcement is like Tim Cook skipping every earnings call then once saying “guys, calm down, Apple’s a good stock.”
• Yano’s deeper critique: “buybacks to me tell me that a founder doesn’t know what to do with your cash,” and 100%-of-revenue buybacks signal “the product is the token.” Pump should instead talk about the business — $8B volume across Pump Fun and Pump Swap in March alone, $27B in Q1, tracking $300M+ revenue this year. Santi, an early investor still holding: “it’s a cash machine. I still don’t understand why it needs a token” — and the token fell after the burn. NFA per Santi, but at roughly half its market cap in revenue it’s “the cheapest protocol in crypto” and “from a pure cash flowing durability perspective, this is as good as it gets.”
• Santi’s structural explanation for tokens falling while fundamentals rise: after Across’s take-private, multiple protocols with up-and-to-the-right revenue are exploring the same, and one is simply too big (hundreds of millions in market cap). “People have forgotten the thing that matters most in markets, which is liquidity” — tokens currently trade like the Hong Kong-listed line of the same Nasdaq company, a discount he doesn’t expect “exists forever” as tokens and equities converge as asset classes.
• Housekeeping with numbers: Blockworks announced its raise at a $192M valuation, co-led by ParaFi and Reciprocal, with Coinbase Ventures, MoonPay and founders from ~20 customers participating — and Yano’s own rule applied to himself: “you get one day a year to go talk about your valuation… then you got to go back to building.”