GM, and happy Thursday!

Markets bounced yesterday, with BTC going to $68,000 and risk-on sentiment spilling into the long tail. 

In today’s note, we dive into Inframarkets and how onchain event contracts could bring more precise, short-dated instruments to energy markets.

Markets were green across the board yesterday. After three consecutive down days, BTC rebounded 6.0%, reclaiming $68,000 and outperforming both equities and gold. The Nasdaq gained 1.1%, with Nvidia’s earnings call a key highlight — its Q1 revenue outlook exceeded expectations as Big Tech’s AI investments continue to drive chip demand. The S&P 500 also had a solid session, up 0.67%, while gold lagged risk assets but still finished the day 0.52% higher.

Looking at TradFi flows, yesterday saw the strongest daily ETF inflows of the past 30 days for BTC ($507 million), ETH ($157 million), and SOL ($31 million) — a positive signal that risk appetite may be returning.

The risk-on move in the majors spilled into the long tail, with many crypto tokens posting double-digit gains on the day. The best-performing indices were DEXs (+18.5%), Modular (+16.0%) and Oracles (+12.5%). Within DEXs, UNI led the rally, up 20%. Uniswap is conducting two governance votes this week (the first already approved, the second expected to pass), kicking off the protocol-fee rollout approved under the UNIfication plan. The two votes will activate protocol fees on eight additional chains and enable fees on all v3 pools.

Despite yesterday’s bounce, it remains to be seen whether the move is durable. The rally across crypto sectors looked less like a fundamentals-driven repricing and more like a technical rebound after an aggressive selloff. For instance, TIA led the Modular index yesterday (+17%), yet the token remains down more than 90% over the past year.

We still appear to be in a broader consolidation phase, and most long-tail tokens are unlikely to ever recover. The flip side is that flows should increasingly concentrate into the smaller set of tokens with credible value accrual and improving fundamentals.

— Carlos

Trading the AI-energy bottleneck

The crypto industry has often been criticized for its casino culture, in which capital chases speculative narratives while real-world economic systems starve for liquidity and efficiency. Energy — encompassing power, commodities and the climate variables that govern them — is the most fundamental force in the physical world, yet its markets have remained a closed loop reserved for utility giants and institutional prop desks. Traditional energy derivatives, typically structured as monthly or quarterly futures, are often too broad to isolate discrete, near-term risk events. 

Inframarkets, a new prediction market on Solana, aims to fill this gap by providing targeted, short-dated instruments for energy hedging and speculation. While Bitcoin is often cited as a volatility benchmark, North American power markets frequently experience intraday price swings that dwarf crypto volatility by an order of magnitude. These violent gaps between supply and demand represent the software of the energy world, yet retail participants have historically been locked out of trading these signals. Inframarkets weaponizes public infrastructure data, converting grid load, commodity price shifts, and climate events into clean, tradable instruments accessible to anyone.

The platform distinguishes itself from legacy prediction markets by utilizing a deterministic resolution framework. Instead of relying on human committees, contracts resolve via the Inframarkets Oracle System, which verifies outcomes against authoritative real-world data from official sources. This objective verification provides the auditability required for institutional commodity desks while ensuring a level playing field for retail traders. 

Inframarkets addresses operational risk through a fully collateralized model where maximum downside is pre-funded at entry, eliminating the systemic risk of margin calls and forced liquidations. As digital infrastructure continues to demand more megawatts, the ability to read and trade energy signals has become a critical bet on the global economy’s real bottleneck.

Currently in private beta, Inframarkets is onboarding trading desks, utilities and developers to begin pricing the physical forces that move markets.

— Nick

1. Archer v1 - Introducing micro order books on Solana

Archer introduced its v1 implementation, a rearchitected onchain order book on Solana that addresses the fundamental design flaws of shared CLOBs. 

The protocol replaces shared order book accounts with Sovereign Maker Books to eliminate write-lock contention and utilizes parametric pricing to reduce the compute cost of quote updates. This approach ensures that updates take a constant amount of time and effort regardless of the number of orders. 

The core thesis argues that rewarding liquidity depth via pro-rata execution, rather than arrival speed, creates a more sustainable environment for market makers and superior execution for takers by removing the “latency tax.” Notably, Archer claims its architecture allows market-maker updates to consume only ~200 CUs versus 40,000 CUs for takers, providing makers a 200x priority advantage for block inclusion within the same fee budget.

2. Aave Labs: $86 Million, 23% of the Token Supply, and this is their Track Record

Marc Zeller from ACI wrote an accountability post on the Aave governance forum. He argues that Aave Labs has already captured roughly $86 million and ~23% of the token supply, yet much of Aave’s core revenue engine (V3) was built by other contributors. 

He criticizes side projects like Lens, GHO and Horizon as weak or overhyped, and warns that freezing V3 to push an unproven V4 under tighter Labs control looks more like rent extraction than a technical necessity.

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