The Edge Podcast @edge_pod

The DeFi Loan That Made Ethereum Click It sounds like you were very early to Bitcoin, but it also sounds like you were very early to primitive DeFi. I think you mentioned ETHLend to us when we were talking prior to recording. What can you recall? What were some of the major light-bulb moments after doing so well with Bitcoin? Yeah. It's exactly what you said. Coming from my business, I remember it was so hard to get a small-business loan, for example. It was mountains of paperwork. You had to prove this, show that, everything like that. When I realized, “Wait, I can load up a million bucks of ETH into a wallet and just take a $500,000 loan at like 2% interest. This is insane. This is going to change the world.” I think that was my biggest moment of realizing, “Okay, Bitcoin isn't just kind of a pet rock. This is more the building block of a much, much, much larger digital ecosystem.” That, to me, was when my conviction flipped almost on a dime from just being like, “Oh, this is cool. I was early to Bitcoin. Very lucky. Woo-hoo.” But now it's like, “Okay, there's actually a business to be made here, potentially. There's a lifestyle you can fund from yield generation. There's trading that could be done here.” Prior to that whole ETH summer, I didn't really consider myself much of a trader. I was kind of just a very fortunate investor, and really more on the tech side. I was a very early miner of Bitcoin, but there wasn't really anything trading about that. I wasn't really swing trading at that point in time. Whereas the moment ETH summer came along, that's when I really threw myself into, “Okay, what does it mean to trade all these different types of assets, to generate yield? What does liquidity provide?” I was entirely self-taught. I didn't go to college at all. I had no financial background whatsoever. Having to teach myself all those different primitives early on was what really got me into it. Because I realized, “Oh, wait. If I could get into this sort of stuff, then anybody's going to be able to access this stuff. It's going to be very, very accessible for the entire world to use.” So that was the big thing for me. ft. @koolkrypto223 @DeFi_Dad @Nomaticcap

The Hyperliquid Bet That Broke Their Position Limits I think for the Hyperliquid trade, it was such an extremely high-conviction thing. I was over here trying to scrounge up points, buying points from people on the market. The funny story is, we had to mark our points internally in the fund because we still had to credit investors with the fact that there's a value to these points. I kept kind of erring on the high side, but it's one of those things where it's way better to be low than high. I don't want to tell people, “Oh, I think it's going to be worth [unclear].” I'm over here like, “These are going to be worth $8 a point or something,” which was extremely bullish at the time. I really thought it was going to be worth quite a bit more, so I kept being extremely conservative. I remember every month just rerating them up and up—from $2 a point, to $4 a point, to $8 a point. At one point, there were really early primitives of those protocols. I remember there was LPoint and the whale thing, where people were trying to OTC points from one another. I was trying to find so many different ways to find points. The thing we found that was incredibly good for generating points was basically doing very rudimentary market making on the PURR spot market. If you did a lot of PURR volume back then on the spot ticker, you got thousands of points a week. It was extremely incentivized. The moment we found that out, we just went incredibly hard into it. Looking back on it, the P&L of that particular trade is revolting. I think we might have spent $2,000 on fees market making the PURR spot market, but got 20,000 or 30,000 points from it, which is now worth—I have no idea how much at this point. So that was a very large “make it” trade for us, essentially. My partner wouldn't love me telling this story, but it's funny because the TGE was at 4 a.m. He was in a different time zone from me. I wanted to buy more at TGE. He wanted to sell some of our point allocation at TGE, and he was completely well reasoned in why he wanted to. He was like, “It's going to come out at a $2.5 billion to $5 billion FDV. That's the ceiling for perp DEXs. It's going to be like every other airdrop and it's just going to dump. We got a nice, chunky airdrop. Let's just sell.” And I was like, “No, no, no. This is going to go to a minimum of $20 billion.” They're like, “No, there's no way. That's crazy.” Our fund, up to that point in time, our biggest positions were like 10% positions. We had these caps on what we were allowed to hold. As Hyperliquid kept going up to $4, $6, $8, $12, and $20, it kept creeping up in position. I kept adding to it as well. Then I had all the people at my fund saying, “Okay, we have to sell now. We actually have to sell. We literally have to sell.” And I was like, “Okay, everybody, shut up. We're going to keep holding this,” essentially. We even kind of broke some of our previous rules that we set for ourselves because we just thought it was such a generational trade. At that time, I didn't have a Twitter, so I wasn't putting it out there. But I was probably one of the few people who genuinely believed that. I remember telling my partners, “No. This is a $20 billion to $50 billion TAM thing,” if it really hits. Now, the fact that it's even trading north of that is very gratifying, but we had extremely high conviction that it was going to get to this point. ft. @koolkrypto223 @DeFi_Dad @Nomaticcap

“I don’t necessarily think kinetiq:native hitting $1 is more likely than it was before. I just think that if there is a bullish move, it’s now $5.” @koolkrypto223's Kinetiq bull case, explained. (Also, listen for some @Markets_xyz alpha at the end 👀)

DeFi Dad ⟠ defidad.eth @DeFi_Dad

12 hours ago

🎙️ New @edge_pod 🐂 Kool Krypto: The Story Behind The Anon DeFi Investor & Trader | What He's Betting On This Cycle 0:00 - Intro 2:25 - From mining BTC at 13 to fund manager 5:25 - Early to ETHLend and DeFi 7:38 - The poker game that led to a fund 10:26 - Is TradFi “in the

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So many golden nuggets in that one. Use everything, buy what you use. I traded a lot on GMX, so I bought a ton of GMX I traded a lot on Hyperliquid, so I bought a ton of HYPE I traded a lot on Derive, so I bought a ton of DRV

DeFi Dad ⟠ defidad.eth @DeFi_Dad

12 hours ago

🎙️ New @edge_pod 🐂 Kool Krypto: The Story Behind The Anon DeFi Investor & Trader | What He's Betting On This Cycle 0:00 - Intro 2:25 - From mining BTC at 13 to fund manager 5:25 - Early to ETHLend and DeFi 7:38 - The poker game that led to a fund 10:26 - Is TradFi “in the

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🎙️ New @Edge_Pod 🐂 Kool Krypto: The Story Behind The Anon DeFi Investor & Trader | What He's Betting On This Cycle 0:00 - Intro 2:25 - From mining BTC at 13 to fund manager 5:25 - Early to ETHLend and DeFi 7:38 - The poker game that led to a fund 10:26 - Is TradFi “in the arena” with DeFi? 14:17 - Early to onchain perps like GMX, HL 20:13 - Liquid fund, yield gen, and a little VC 23:28 - Why Kool doesn’t trade memecoins 28:01 - The DRV bull thesis 41:14 - Kool’s winning BTC call spread 45:58 - Pros/cons of Derive’s RFQ trading 50:14 - AI agents, a tailwind for options 52:50 - His onchain options trading tools 56:29 - Pros/cons of options vs perps 1:02:37 - Managing risk and closing trades 1:05:35 - Why Opulent October makes sense 1:11:12 - His viral ETH call spread on Derive 1:17:38 - Bull thesis for KNTQ 1:25:07 - Derive V3’s ability to list new markets 1:28:31 - What if HL/Lighter launch options? 1:34:19 - Why Kool remains bullish on LIT 1:38:24 - Closing 🙏 Thanks to @koolkrypto223 for joining us!

🔗 Find all the links to this new episode of The @edge_pod and future pods by subscribing to The Edge Newsletter. the-edge.xyz/p/kool-krypto-…

🎙️ Ep 253 is live 🐂 Kool Krypto: The Story Behind The Anon DeFi Investor and What He's Betting On This Cycle ✨ Featuring crypto investor and trader @koolkrypto223 youtu.be/9E4iRENPdZM

New @Edge_Pod! The lore behind @koolkrypto223 is epic: mining BTC at 13, early to DeFi with ETHLend, early to onchain perps with GMX, bet big on the HYPE airdrop, and now runs his own fund trading and investing in crypto, backed by one of the most iconic family offices in the world. "People forgot to believe a little bit. Everybody's been so bear-pilled... that a lot of people forget a lot of what we've been thinking about for the last 5-7 years is finally coming to fruition. The [onchain] options market is a great example of that." Listen to his first major interview where he breaks down his viral ETH and BTC bets on @DeriveXYZ, why he thinks ETH extreme upside is mispriced, how he's been accumulating DRV + KNTQ, and despite CLARITY failing, why "Opulent October" is just around the corner.

Ethereum Versus Zcash on Privacy The question I want to get to is Zcash versus where you're going with Ethereum. One thing I'm curious about is: could Ethereum become feature-parity on the privacy side with Zcash, or could it go beyond it? Or is that even a comparison that you're thinking of internally at the EF? Are they even on your radar? Are you drawing from anything that they've done in the space? What do you make of that? I think it's a very interesting question. I think the Zcash protocol itself is very strong. The team and the cryptography behind it is strong. It's almost like Ethereum and Zcash are at very different, opposite ends of the spectrum, but converging on a few things. Ethereum is proof of stake, right? And I think it has way better economic properties than proof of work. But now Zcash wants to maybe add proof of stake to its already existing proof-of-work thing, so they're working on this. Zcash has an enshrined pool. I talked about completely enshrining something like they did, but it's just for private transfers, right? So it's great, but it is not about DeFi or composability or money legos or things you can build on top of it. It is transfers. And so, with Ethereum, I think we have private DeFi in mind. Ethereum is programmable, and I think there are so many use cases that are unlocked by this that we can go way beyond simple transfers. And so I think that would probably be the difference. FT @soispoke @DeFi_Dad @Nomaticcap

Why Extra Wallets Do Not Make You Private So I'm just going to read this. You say: “If we ship FOCIL, which is EIP-7805, frame transactions, which are EIP-8141, keyed nonces, which is EIP-8250, and recent roots, EIP-8272, in Hegota, we get native, trustless, censorship-resistant private transactions on Ethereum by next year.” It's that last sentence that I want to dive into a bit because I think, personally, after just running through that mess of wallets, I see something like this and I'm like, “Wow. This is great, and it's on the horizon. It's not five years away.” So can you speak to, more at a high level, maybe less technical, when is this impact coming for us, and when can we expect it? Even if you have a good insight into when Hegota might be coming, or even when Glamsterdam might be coming as well. So, yeah, before that, I do want to also note that the creating-many-wallets trick is not a good way to protect your privacy. It is very, very, very easily trackable. Any sophisticated actor will track the gas you sent to other addresses to fund them and do other actions online. So it is something a lot of people use. Just to be clear, I never send gas between the wallets. I usually use an exchange as an intermediary that I think is easier to obfuscate. Again, I don't think it's perfect, but— Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. Once you get into it, it's a bit annoying. But if you use that intermediary and they have done a KYC, it's easy for them, at least, to know who you are. In any case, I think it's way better than having everything on this one wallet that is very public and that everyone knows is associated with you. But it doesn't give you the privacy guarantees we could get on Ethereum by hopefully next year. So I can get into this now. The EIPs—I'm not going to go into the technical details. But high level, FOCIL is also very close to my heart because I'm championing it, and I've been doing that for a year and a half. And it's really about censorship resistance. So right now, I don't know if you're familiar, but you have two big builders on Ethereum—two, three big builders that are building most of the blocks. And so the problem is, if they don't want your transaction to land on Ethereum and to be included, they can quite easily censor you. And so FOCIL is a mechanism that basically forces those builders to include the transactions that the whole set of validators monitors. So it's a very efficient way to make sure transactions that are submitted to the public mempool are force-included in blocks. So it's really good for censorship resistance—for general transactions, not just for private ones. But the goal is for private transactions to benefit from FOCIL and these strong guarantees. FT @soispoke @DeFi_Dad @Nomaticcap

Why Digital Cash Is Not Enough “For financial privacy, cash is great, but it's not super convenient in this day and age... We at least need to get the equivalent of cash, but in a digital form... You have the private money legos, and that goes beyond what you can do with simple transfers and also beyond what you can do with cash, generally. And so private lending, borrowing, swapping becomes something exciting and tangible.” ft. @soispoke @DeFi_Dad @Nomaticcap

Who is @koolkrypto223? Who's the man behind the mask? Podcast with Kool dropping tomorrow 👀 We cover: - His story - His $DRV thesis - His kinetiq:native thesis - The viral $ETH trade - How he's positioning in q4 - Lots more... Subscribe to @edge_pod on Spotify, Apple or YouTube...

1/3 For years, onchain options were always “about to take off.” Then @koolkrypto223 started posting multimillion-dollar PNL cards on @DeriveXYZ, and CT started copying his trades. I wrote about why I think this could be the turning point, and how I’m getting involved 👇

🎙️ New @Edge_Pod 🕵️ Private DeFi Is Coming: Why Privacy Is Ethereum's Next Frontier | Lean Ethereum 0:00 - Intro 2:31 - Why Ethereum? 5:11 - What is broken with privacy today? 6:52 - What should be private in DeFi? 11:50 - The call for privacy on Ethereum 15:05 - Private txns on Ethereum by 2027 20:53 - Importance of FOCIL for Ethereum 26:51 - When will private DeFi be ready? 30:58 -Network vs protocol vs wallet-based privacy 35:04 - Aztec’s approach to privacy 38:14 - Private DeFi on Ethereum vs Zcash 41:22 - Privacy for institutional investors 43:36 - Network meta data and privacy 45:44 - The future UX of privacy on Ethereum 51:22 - Closing 🙏 Thanks to @ethereumfndn Researcher @soispoke for joining us!

🔗 Find all the links to this new episode of The @edge_pod and future pods by subscribing to The Edge Newsletter. the-edge.xyz/p/private-defi…

🎙️ Ep 252 is live 🕵️‍♂️ Private DeFi Is Coming: Why Privacy Is Ethereum's Next Frontier | Lean Ethereum ✨ Featuring @ethereumfndn Researcher @soispoke youtu.be/XrMAGHwayy8

New @edge_pod's out! Today, every transaction you make onchain is trackable. But private DeFi on Ethereum is closer than you think. EF researcher @soispoke says it's possible we get native, trustless, censorship-resistant private transactions on Ethereum by next year.

Derive V3 looks like it'll be a zkRollup on Ethereum. "I would certainly say that it would take a really compelling reason for us to to not deploy this on L1." @nickforster from @derivexyz dishes on why Ethereum's credible neutrality is a magnet for builders: "I know for sure they're not gonna compete with me. I know for sure they're not gonna pick up another project and start shilling it. I know for sure they're not gonna rob me of my core economics." Ethereum is the choice for DeFi's best 🫡

DeFi Dad ⟠ defidad.eth @DeFi_Dad

a week ago

🎙️ New @edge_pod 🐎 Could Derive V3 Be "The Lighter" of Onchain Options on Ethereum? | DeFi Frontier 0:00 - Intro 2:29 - Building blocks for onchain options 7:56 - The massive TAM for onchain options 11:28 - What is Derive V3? A new ZK app 16:48 - Where will V3 launch? 22:12 -

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Most crypto traders express a trade idea with perps. But options are often the better way, more specific, better hedge, more yield, no scam wick liquidations. @nickforster from @derivexyz explains why people aren't thinking in options terms yet, including how to set up a trade like the one below 👇

Derive Trade Tape @DeriveTradeTape

a week ago

📈 Bullish $ETH Call Spread 🟢 Buy 10,000x $5,000C / 🔴 Sell 10,000x $7,000C - 26 Mar 27 Max profit: $20M · Max loss: $313K 🔗 Copy on Derive: app.derive.xyz/trade/options?…

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The most programmable financial instrument (options) in the most programmable environment for capital (DeFi), on the most programmable chain (Ethereum). According to @nickforster, V3 will make @DeriveXYZ the most integratable derivatives exchange in the world. ethereum:0xb1d1eae60eea9525032a6dcb4c1ce336a1de71be

DeFi Dad ⟠ defidad.eth @DeFi_Dad

a week ago

🎙️ New @edge_pod 🐎 Could Derive V3 Be "The Lighter" of Onchain Options on Ethereum? | DeFi Frontier 0:00 - Intro 2:29 - Building blocks for onchain options 7:56 - The massive TAM for onchain options 11:28 - What is Derive V3? A new ZK app 16:48 - Where will V3 launch? 22:12 -

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