Gm. Today, we’re looking at two major announcements in the last 24 hours: Phantom Wallet’s recent integration with Hyperliquid, and xStocks’ launch on BNB Chain.

— Donovan

Launchpad wars and moats:

Following up on the new pump competitor, LetsBonk, this chart pair shows how launchpad revenue can swing without affecting underlying bonding-curve order flow from tools like Axiom. Application revenue for the Telegram bot trading interface remains steady even as pump and LetsBonk volumes fluctuate (bottom chart).

While many fixate on the launchpad brand or the memes themselves, owning the frontend and capturing traders at the point of execution is key for these players. Middleware providers like Axiom, or, for that matter, Solana itself, remain insulated. The takeaway is: As applications vie for dominance, infra wins either way.

— Macauley Peterson

Who owns the users?

Phantom wallet announced yesterday that it was integrating Hyperliquid perps right into its wallet interface.

This is surprising mainly because Phantom is Solana’s marquee wallet, far ahead of competing wallets like Solflare or Backpack, with 15 million monthly active users (MAUs).

If Phantom wanted a cut of the perps market, I suppose one would’ve naively expected it to partner up first with a native Solana perps DEX like Drift or Jupiter.

But though Drift or Jupiter might be hometown favorites, Hyperliquid is where the money already is.

So the wallet that onboarded millions to Solana is now shepherding flow to a rival venue, which doesn’t boost Solana fees or TVL at all.

Just this morning, Kraken and Backed announced that xStocks would also be launching on BNB Chain.

Soon, eligible Kraken customers will be able to deposit and withdraw those BEP-20 stock tokens straight from the exchange.

xStocks is Kraken and Backed’s tokenized stock product that debuted on Solana less than two weeks ago (I wrote about it last week).

Tokenized stocks may have been Solana-first, but they will be fiercely multichain. Bybit is also integrating xStocks.

xStocks’ move to BNB Chain is no surprise, given Backed co-founder Adam Levi’s stated goal for the product to “be a neutral, public good asset class” and eventually “expanding xStocks to other exchanges and chains.”

What investor mental model do these pieces of news affirm?

The Phantom x Hyperliquid news seems to simultaneously affirm both the Fat Wallet thesis and Fat App thesis.

Build a great wallet like Phantom, because wallets, not apps, own the users.

Or build a great app like Hyperliquid, because users follow the app, not the underlying chain.

But if you can, you should most definitely build a Fat Exchange like Robinhood or Kraken, because then you can take your users to whichever chain you want.

Kraken is a Fat Exchange, but it’s not quite as Fat as Robinhood’s 14 million MAUs. 

That may explain Kraken’s decision to go multichain fast and cement its position on each respective blockchain.

There was never really a reason to believe that wallets, apps or CEXs would be loyal to any particular chain to begin with.

Time to totally disabuse that notion.

— Donovan Choy

The vault revolution in DeFi

DeFi vaults are on a tear. Curated strategies are seeing “TVL grow 28x in 12 months,” from under $150 million in June 2024 to over $4.4 billion by June 2025, according to a report out today by Kiln Research. That surge outpaces the broader crypto market’s torrid growth pace and signals strong demand for onchain income products.

The lamentably-but-stickily-named real-world assets (RWAs) category already makes up nearly a fifth of DeFi TVL, with “tokenized Treasurys, private credit funds, and trade receivables” accounting for 19.8%. But single-asset vaults are scaling too: “Some USDC Supply Vaults on Morpho hold several hundred million dollars,” the report notes, rivaling mid-tier money-market funds while settling every few seconds onchain.

Institutional representation is growing as well. Apollo’s ACRED vault loops private credit at ~16% yields onchain, and Coinbase has originated over $350 million in bitcoin-backed loans via permissioned Morpho markets.

With the advent of modular ERC-4626 designs, enhancements like AI-automated allocation, first-loss reserves and growing standards like ERC-7540, Kiln sees vault TVL “past half a trillion dollars” by 2030 as plausible.

Such vaults could become the crypto-native answer to money-market funds and ETFs, offering programmable yield wrappers built for an onchain future.

— Macauley Peterson