Crypto remains a paradox: wildly risky yet wildly efficient. Hyperliquid, Tether, and Pump[dot]fun generate staggering revenue with lean teams. DeFi undercuts banks on cost, but exploits like Cetus expose lingering fragility. And then there’s the curious case of “James Wynn” — a perps gambler surfing billion-dollar trades with improbable precision.

— Macauley

Maple Finance Protocol Revenue:

Maple Finance is clocking in new monthly highs in revenues this month at $753m. TVL has continued to climb to $2.1 billion, about a whopping 55.6% increase MTD.

Its native token SYRUP is up 172% in the last month. At current FDV of $520m, SYRUP is trading at about a rather high 85x P/S multiple, suggesting pricing in a lot of continued growth.

Thanks to Maple DAO’s MIP-013 proposal, 20% of protocol revenues ($235K) bought back nearly 2 million SYRUP over Q1 2025, all of which were repaid to SYRUP stakers. This buyback-and-distribute program looks to continue after Maple DAO passed the MIP-016 Snapshot vote.

Monday Mailbag

What value does crypto provide?

If you define value as “doing more with less” (AKA economic productivity), then the answer is apparently a lot.

The below chart aptly displays the sheer human capital efficiency of crypto companies like Tether, Hyperliquid and Pump[dot]fun, who far outpace traditional businesses in terms of revenue generated per employee headcount.

Coinbase makes $2.1m per employee (assuming global headcount of 3,772 and annualized revenues of $8b), which still pales in comparison to $67.2m per Hyperliquid employee. 

Or, here’s another way to look at it. The following is from a 2022 IMF report showing the comparatively lower marginal costs of DeFi protocols against traditional banks.

— Donovan

Could Sui’s Cetus exploit have been prevented?

New postmortems from Dedaub and independent developers confirm that the $223M Cetus exploit stemmed from a faulty overflow check — and one that probably could have been avoided, with better testing tools like fuzzing.

The bug involved a low-level function that shifts numbers to the left — similar to multiplying by powers of two. In simple terms, the code tried to handle very large numbers but failed to catch when those numbers got too big, breaking key calculations.

The attacker used this flaw to create fake liquidity and drain real assets. According to Aftermath developer Yakitori, the bug had existed since October 2023 and was in fact flagged in a protocol audit!

How did “James Wynn” not get liquidated?

Good question — it’s baffling! In a whirlwind week on Hyperliquid, a degen trader going by the name James Wynn turned heads with high-stakes trades totaling billions, with razor-thin margins for error.

Wynn opened a staggering $1.2B long position on BTC on Hyperliquid, only to fully close it days later. He then flipped short on $1B BTC, briefly driving funding rates negative, before closing again and pivoting to a 10x leveraged PEPE long. In both cases liquidation could have resulted from just 4-5% move in the spot price.

Some don’t buy that positions of this size were unhedged, but this is nearly impossible to know.

On Sunday, he claimed to “leave the casino,” after reportedly cashing out $25 million in profits — down from a peak of $87 million.

But Wynn is clearly still playing, doing livestreams and moving markets as he goes. Hailing from “one of the worst areas in England” — likely a Northern post-industrial town based on his dialect — Wynn tells a rags-to-riches story bouncing between crypto and high-stakes poker. While admittedly an “onchain degenerate gambler” Wynn also said, “I like to believe I’ve got a special edge.”

— Macauley Peterson

What is the state of trading apps?

Danny Knettel: A large amount of activity still happens on trading bots/apps – it’s an incredibly competitive category. Axiom has taken >50% of trading bot volume on Solana, which is a massive tally in the span of three months post-launch. Axiom combines two of the hottest features now (memecoin trading and Hyperliquid perps) to capture signature market share, which has worked out well so far. I think the multi-product DeFi approach is playing out. Everyone is moving in the direction of becoming a “Robinhood”-like app where everything is available in one spot.

Does revenue matter for L1 tokens?

Ryan Connor: People have more or less admitted that revenue matters, which is a big step in the right direction, but just isn't enough. Now there's kind of this consternation about how revenue's not the only thing that matters. Dude, no shit. No one thinks that the trailing 12-month (TTM) revenue multiple is the only measure that you should look at on planet Earth and consider it in the context of only itself.