GM, and happy Thursday! 

Risk assets remain under pressure as equities extend their correction and BTC sits at range lows. ETFs continue to bleed AUM.

Meanwhile, Fogo's flagship perps DEX still hasn't launched. Seven months in, how long can the chain wait for its own thesis to arrive?

Risk assets are red across the board as equities continue to correct. The S&P 500 is now close to 5% off its highs after 4 consecutive days of trading lower, erasing the gains of the past 25 days. The VIX moved higher with this, closing Wednesday at 22, up from its recent low of 15. Crypto remains weak, with BTC price action staying sideways within the range of last Friday’s sell-off and at range lows. Looking at index returns on the weekly, there’s no safe haven, as all indices register deep declines. The privacy index is the hardest hit, with ZEC down 28% on the week. 

With the weakness, ETFs continue to bleed AUM, with the recent week showing continued outflows. 

As the bear market persists while BTC teeters on range lows, one must ask where they may find deep value. Historically, every bear on BTC at some stage trades at a discount to the realized price. This measure of the value of all BTC at the price they were last transacted onchain, is akin to an estimate of the average onchain cost basis. Currently, the realized price sits at $53.3k, just 14% below spot. This was always the downside target, it’s just been a long and painful journey to get there. Regardless, high-timeframe indicators of bear market lows are close to firing green, giving the prudent and patient grounds to be optimistic. 

— Luke

Superluminal's long runway

Fogo launched its mainnet in November 2025 with its institutional trading thesis resting on two things: a Firedancer-native SVM chain with 40 ms blocks and Ambient Finance as its enshrined perpetuals DEX. Seven months later, the chain is processing ~300 TPS on a typical day with ~10K daily active addresses. Spot DEX volume on Fogo has drifted from a weekly peak of $11M in late January to $1.4M today. The perps DEX, now rebranded as Superluminal, has not launched on mainnet.

Superluminal is not incidental to Fogo's thesis; it is the thesis. The chain was designed specifically to support the settlement demands of a high-frequency perps venue. Dual Flow Batch Auctions, the matching mechanism at the core of Superluminal's Prism execution model, require the kind of sub-100ms settlement that most chains cannot support without degrading trader outcomes. The entire Fogo architecture — its geographic validator rotation, its enshrined Pyth oracles, and its gasless Fogo Sessions primitive — was purpose-built to make Superluminal viable at institutional scale.

But the rebranding from Ambient to Superluminal also signals a meaningful scope expansion. Ambient launched in 2021 as CrocSwap, then rebranded in 2023, and processed $4.2B in cumulative spot volume across Ethereum, Blast, Scroll, and Canto. The pitch for Superluminal goes further: zero taker fees, up to 100x leverage, and a matching architecture that the team argues removes the structural latency arbitrage tax that plagues conventional perp books. However, it remains unclear if that framing translates into volume.

Superluminal is entering a market with several well-capitalized, battle-tested venues already occupying the performance-focused positioning it is targeting. The top five perp DEXs by open interest (OI) collectively hold $12.2B. Hyperliquid holds $5.9B in OI, currently generating $2.2M in daily fees. Trade[XYZ] carries $3.1B in OI, Aster $1.7B, Variational $834M, and Lighter $680M. 

Prism's batch auction structure is a genuine design difference from the continuous order books that Hyperliquid and most of the field run. If the mechanism delivers on its core claim — that speed advantage is redistributed rather than extracted — it creates a structurally different trading experience for market makers, one that could attract flow from institutions specifically averse to high-frequency adverse selection. 

The risk is timing. Fogo has been live since November. The chain's current activity, a few hundred TPS and sub-$100K daily spot volume, reflects an ecosystem in early formation without its flagship application. Solana's Alpenglow upgrade, targeting 100-150 ms finality, entered community testnet in May 2026 with Toly pointing to Q3 for mainnet, narrowing Fogo's performance gap on a shorter timeline than it appeared six months ago. That window was always finite, and Superluminal's launch timetable has been slow relative to how the project framed its roadmap in March 2025, when Ambient activity first began accumulating Fogo Flames points on testnet.

The chain needs Superluminal more than Superluminal needs Fogo. Every day the perps DEX remains off of mainnet, the primary use case for the chain's performance advantage goes undemonstrated. Fogo Fishing and Valiant gave the network early transaction activity and stress testing, but they did not validate the institutional trading thesis. That validation only comes with live perp volume, real open interest, and fee revenue that can be benchmarked against the $17B-a-day market Superluminal is entering.

— Nick

1. Ethena's Next Act

   

   Blockworks Research published an analysis of Ethena's evolving reserve strategy as sUSDe yields have compressed from 20%+ at peak to ~3.5-4.5% today, with the basis trade increasingly crowded and TVL down from $16.6B in September 2025 to $5.6B. The piece examines Ethena's April 2026 proposal to expand USDe backing into institutional lending, AAA CLOs, and commodity basis trades, arguing the shift is less about boosting returns and more about reducing concentration risk, with the author concluding Ethena is becoming a yield curator rather than a single-strategy product, and flagging the fee switch thresholds as increasingly disconnected from the protocol's current reality.

2. A Farewell to Boccaccio

   

   A two-year chapter of 0xResearch came to a close as Boccaccio hosted his last episode, joined by Carlos, Toma, Matt, Aryan, Ian, Noah, Jim, and Danny for a wide-ranging market roundtable. The conversation covered the Zcash selloff, MicroStrategy's self-described leverage trilemma across equity, bitcoin, and preferred vehicles, and where conviction is actually sitting, with guests broadly landing on Hyperliquid as the clearest near-term trade, Noah making the case for Maple Finance at roughly 6x sales, and Matt noting that ex-Hyperliquid, tokens with buyback-and-burn mechanics are still down 55-60% over the past year. Bocc, it's been a good run. We'll keep the seat warm.

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