Delphi Digital (@Delphi_Digital)

Zcash's shielded pools are back near record levels. Most of the ZEC that left after the Orchard bug came back within weeks of the new Ironwood pool launching in late July. That recovery comes weeks before NU7 is planned to go live in November. The upgrade would cut the target block time from 75 seconds to 25, giving payments and swaps their first confirmation about three times sooner.

Yan explains the bind frontier AI labs are in. "It's a race to stay ahead, and if you optimize for profitability, you'll fall behind. So they need to keep telling this growth story that the market will keep buying. But it can be a rough unwind for sure."

Yan explains how AI nationalization could play out for markets. "Is it a binary thing where we run this whole thing? Or is it we invest in it and now we have skin in the game? Because the latter is bullish."

PumpFun is seeing a resurgence. Fees across its products passed $140M in September and nearly matched the roughly $150M record from January 2025. Most of that total now comes from trading on its PumpSwap exchange. PumpSwap's fees topped $100M for the first time as memecoin trading on Solana recovered. Volume on the exchange ran about 50% higher than a year earlier.

Yan on why the tokenization wave took off faster than expected. "I don't think most people were bullish on Clarity passing just because of how polarized the government is... I was pleasantly surprised with how quickly afterwards, though, you had friendly SEC guidance that came out and kind of allowed that wave to continue."

Ceteris explains why crypto needs less venture funding than it used to. "We've literally built all the infra, and what people need to build now are the scrappy little app teams that honestly don't need a lot of funding."

Onchain options are no longer a one-venue market. Notional volume more than doubled to $4.83B in September. Derive nearly kept pace and remains the clear leader. Its share of notional eased from 88.1% to 79.3% as two smaller venues grew even faster. Hypercall and Paradex together held under 4% of the market in August. Hypercall went from $9.4M to $538.8M in a single month and now ranks second. Paradex nearly quadrupled after opening its request-for-quote system to the public. Onchain options are starting to look like a competitive market.

A new episode of Hivemind is out now! In this special in-person episode, the team discusses crypto’s move from experimentation to adoption, the rise of tokenization, and why onchain options could be the next major opportunity. Timestamps: 00:00 Intro & Market Surprises 06:00 Tokenization, Zcash & Crypto’s Winners 20:51 Onchain Options: The Next Big Opportunity? 32:52 Is Crypto Still the Frontier? 46:40 AI Labs, Infrastructure & Bubble Risks 1:08:00 What We’re Avoiding 1:20:34 Biggest Risks & What Comes Next

NEAR is building the infrastructure for AI agents to hire one another. Most agent commerce today is built around fixed services that can be priced per call. Hiring another agent creates a different kind of transaction because the buyer is paying for an outcome that may take several steps to produce. NEAR is building a single stack around the full process. Agent Market turns a task and budget into an open job that agents can bid on. The selected provider executes the work and is paid through escrow. Delivery can run through IronClaw with private inference supplied by NEAR AI Cloud. NEAR Intents supports settlement. Completing the transaction requires one more step: deciding whether the provider delivered what was promised. That becomes difficult when the work requires expertise the requester does not have. With reliable verification, the model NEAR is building could take agentic commerce beyond pay-per-call services and into markets for completed work.

Andrew Kang explains why Robotics remained overlooked until now. “Even though to us, it seemed like robotics and physical AI were going to become a multi decade trillion-dollar industry, I don’t think it was obvious to most.”

Travis Good explains why AI model tests may not reflect real world performance. "As a consumer, you want consistent delivery... if things are up and down because someone's trying to game a metric or they're dealing with high demand, that's a real problem for you."

Marcus explains why Oracle’s backlog isn’t as reassuring as it looks. “Oracle’s RPO is actually bigger than its market cap right now. The market is basically saying it doesn’t buy that the companies are able to pay the amount they agreed to.”

José explains why high-quality projects may avoid launching tokens. “If you’re a high-quality project, why would you go through the hassle of doing a token and dealing with angry token holders just to be underpriced vs. equity?"

José explains why he remains bullish on AI infrastructure. “The market reacts very strongly to things like Meta announcing they’re selling compute... I don’t think it’s very rational. I still think owning land and having power is going to be incredibly valuable going forward.”

Jason explains why riding the trend matters more than catching the bottom. “Buying the lows and selling the highs, those are more like ego things than anything… Just ride the trends. Buy it when the trend is confirmed.”

Scott notes that Bitcoin speculative activity has fallen below 2022 levels. “Speculators have pretty much exited and are no longer driving price action… I think we’ve gotten the washout in positioning now.”

José argues most crypto startups shouldn’t spend all their revenue on token buybacks. “Most startups should not be using all their revenue to buy their own token... They’re all reinvesting in growth and in crypto markets that doesn’t really get priced or valued.”

Jordan Nel explains why founder taste matters when evaluating a GP. “Sometimes if somebody says, ‘This is the best founder I’ve met this year,’ that’s a ton of signal and you just back up the truck. But knowing when it’s signal and when it’s not is hard.”

Ceteris explains why blockchains need better assets. “Your job as an ecosystem is to get the best assets, then build products around them... It doesn’t matter what applications you build if there aren’t good assets to use.”