The New Stablecoin Race, Hyperliquid’s Growth & Solana’s Revival

The stablecoin consortium story is the most structurally significant development covered. A new consortium has launched with 140 partners including Visa, Stripe, Mastercard, Amex, BlackRock, BNY, Standard Chartered, Coinbase, Solana, and Base, collectively covering over 99 percent of global card networks, 70 percent or more of payment processors, and 80 percent or more of crypto payment infrastructure. The consortium differentiates itself by sharing all treasury yield with protocols that use it, contrasting with Circle and Coinbase splitting yield 50-50 and with Hyperliquid receiving 90 percent of treasury yield under its USDC deal. Current legislation prevents passing stablecoin yield directly to end users, so protocols redistribute it as rewards instead. A separate consortium called USDG or Global Dollar targets a more crypto-native partner set including Aave, Robinhood, and OKX, and speakers suggested the two models may each capture share within their own niches rather than competing for the entire market. One caveat is that with 140 companies involved the new consortium may struggle to reach decisions, resembling a DAO in structure.

Strategy announced a digital credit capital framework alongside raising the STRK dividend to 12 percent yield from 11.5 percent, authorizing up to one billion dollars in preferred repurchases and up to one billion in common stock repurchases, and disclosing a Bitcoin monetization program under which it would sell Bitcoin to cover dividend and balance sheet obligations. Both MSTR and STRK rallied and outperformed Bitcoin following the announcement, suggesting the market read it as stabilizing. Speakers framed it as forward guidance that buys time without eliminating the underlying liability from preferreds, converts, and dividend obligations. If Bitcoin trades sideways for six to twelve months the same concerns could resurface, and if Strategy actually needs to sell Bitcoin in size the consequences could be severe. The best case remains Bitcoin appreciating enough to allow continued ATM issuance without touching reserves.

Hyperliquid's priority fee mechanism is generating meaningful and growing revenue. Base fees pay for block inclusion while priority fees pay for favorable ordering to exploit arbitrage and liquidations, and approximately 80 percent of REV on both Solana and Ethereum comes from priority fees. Hyperliquid processes passive liquidity orders before aggressive ones in each block, allowing market makers to refresh stale quotes first. Traders can attach priority fees of one to eight basis points of executed volume, with each basis point buying roughly 45 milliseconds of ordering improvement. Priority fees are paid in HYPE and burned. Despite being implemented recently, they are already generating over 100 thousand dollars on some days and making all-time highs during the current bear market, though only 244 wallets have paid them so far and they account for around 6 percent of base fees over the past seven days. Top traders are returning roughly 30 percent of their expected edge back to the platform via priority fees. Speakers predicted priority fee revenue could grow 10 times from current levels but cautioned that most blocks currently have only one fillable order, limiting competition within blocks, and that priority fees are unlikely to exceed base fees as they do on Ethereum.

Tokenized equities on Solana briefly flipped meme coin volume before memes rebounded, with only four stocks tokenized by Backpack and a few others currently driving meaningful volume. SpaceX tokenized equity has maintained relatively sustainable week-to-week volume since launch. Speakers described tokenized equity activity as more durable than meme coin activity and predicted tokenized assets will be 10 to 20 times the volume of memes on Solana within a year. Equity perpetual futures on platforms like Hyperliquid or Lighter are described as a better product than options because options involve theta decay, and equity trading volumes on Hyperliquid could be 10 to 20 times higher a year from now.

The Robinhood Chain announcement was assessed as well understood in advance and consistent with the direction the business has been heading, but Hood Chain and stock tokens will not be available to US users, who represent approximately 98 percent of Robinhood's roughly 28 million customers, making the international products not yet material to revenues. Robinhood expanding perpetual futures to more pairs including commodities and FX markets was judged more material than the chain announcement. The biggest potential upside for Robinhood is US regulatory easing, which could allow the company to rapidly enable its existing rest-of-world product suite for its entire US customer base. Lighter is providing 11 million tokens as incentives to Robinhood as part of the integration, and both Vlad personally and Robinhood as a company have invested in Lighter. Speakers predicted Robinhood could eventually bring perps execution more in house, similar to how it handled prediction markets after initially working with an external partner.

Meme coins were originally attractive because they lacked a dev team or market makers positioned to dump on buyers, making them more honest than altcoins where project teams had become efficient at extracting value. That dynamic eroded as developers and insiders became equally extractive, and Trump coin creators extracted approximately one billion dollars from the token. Speakers disagreed on whether genuine demand for memes exists, with one arguing no one truly wants to trade them and another pointing to documented 100x and 1000x returns as evidence of clear demand. Meme coins, NFTs, and AI agents are characterized as successive cycles of the same speculative game, with the AI agent meta described as essentially meme coins with an AI team attached.