Happy Friday!

For today’s 0xResearch, we’ve got highlights from some of the best panels on the final day of Permissionless, a look at Ostium’s rise in open interest and an update on Lido’s long-awaited dual governance vote.

— Donovan

Ostium’s open interest:

The Ostium perps DEX on Arbitrum is seeing all time-highs in open interest — about $136m as of yesterday.

This burst in growth is largely coming from synthetic commodities, mainly gold and oil. Total commodities open interest grew 127% to $84m in the last week.

The increase in trading appetite for commodities is likely sparked by recent geopolitical flux, in particular the Israel-Iran conflict. Brent crude futures traded above $80 on Monday after US strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.

— Donovan Choy

Blockchain tech altering the global economy is no longer a distant hope. With the market projected to grow almost 600% over the next five years, it’s safe to say the blockchain revolution is well underway.

The latest report from Blockworks Research and OKX shows how blockchain is a new alternative, shifting the landscape for 4 major industries: financial services, technology, consumer goods, and entertainment. 

These data-driven insights on the future of blockchain are a must-read for degens and empire builders alike.

Permissionless Day 3

Permissionless day 3 concluded yesterday, and we’re back with some highlight quotes. In case you missed it, we also did a recap of day two here.

What role will crypto play in working AI products?

Haseeb of Dragonfly Capital: “We all know the obvious answers which is engineer, accountant, lawyer, girlfriend, maybe in reverse order.”

Casey Caruso of Topology cited brain models coming within the decade: “The long story short is that we don't have enough data on neural activity to train a brain model today and one thing that crypto is really good at is incentivizing people to aggregate data, so I'm super convinced that there's going to be a DePIN network to collect this data and from there we'll have a model that can actually unlock things like mind reading — as crazy as that sounds.”

Does this Bitcoin treasury strategy thing going on in TradFi actually have legs?

Thomas Lee CIO of FundStrat Capital is optimistic:

“Oil companies have historically traded on a premium to their proven reserves because of expectation of future reserves. ExxonMobil was in the top five largest stocks in the S&P 500 for 25 years from 1990-2015. Never valued on earnings but a price premium to its proven reserves. [Strategy] will probably become the biggest stock in the US. It doesn't make earnings — it’s valued purely on its price to bitcoin reserves.” 

Joe Lubin of Consensys on what motivated their lawsuit against the SEC:

The SEC “secretly decided to reclassify ether as a security… [and] tried to pin it on essentially people responsible for the Merge — on us as promoters, EIP writers, builders and Danny (Ryan)... when we saw that researchers were getting subpoenas, that’s when we decided to sue the SEC.” 

Felix Jauvin on the macro factors driving stablecoin hype:

“We’re going into this world now where fiscal deficits are increasing across the world. The big question at hand is who is to be the one buying this debt? There’s a very logical reasoning for why we’re seeing such a push for the Genius Act right now because that is a huge unlock for US T-bills coming forth.”

Joe Cutler, Partner at Perkins Cole lamenting the entry of institutions into crypto thus far:

Crypto was about “democratizing access to the control over value and that's not happening in the institutional rebuild. I worry about that. The second thing is it was also destined to sort of remake the value propositions of aggregation of wealth, money, power and control into a more balanced system than it was before, and I don't see that happening either in the march towards institutional adoption… I just hope that we get out the map once in a while and remind ourselves what country we're in, not what road.”

Is JPMD a permissioned coin on a permissionless network?

Suresh Shetty CTO of Kinexys by JPMorgan: “I’d say JPMD is a deposit token that is going to connect to public chains of which its primary use cases are cross border payments and settlement of securities.”

— Donovan Choy

Lido: ETH stakers to get a veto

The stage is set for Lido DAO to implement “Dual Governance,” via a vote closing Monday morning. The proposal would give stETH holders — users whose ETH is staked via Lido — a formal veto mechanism over DAO decisions, adding a novel layer of accountability to liquid staking governance.

Key to this is a custom dynamic timelock that extends execution delays based on opposition levels. If 1% of stETH signals objection, execution is delayed five days; at 10%, it grows to 45 days. This design gives users time to exit before harmful changes take effect — a vital innovation given Ethereum’s variable withdrawal queue.

“This reduces the risk that users have from any kind of governance attack [and] the trust that they need in the maintainer companies and the LDO holders,” Hasu told Blockworks.

Victor “kadmil” from Lido’s team said the mechanism was rigorously tested: “We have paid people to try to break the design with flash loans,” and the resulting improvements “make it flash loan resistant.”

An earlier Snapshot vote passed with 99.96% in favor. As of Friday at 11:30 am, turnout in the on-chain Aragon vote has just exceeded the 5% participation threshold required for a quorum.

— Macauley Peterson