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Thesis: compute becomes a commodity, like oil. Supply-constrained today, but heading toward standardization. Like oil, it needs market infrastructure — futures, storage/logistics, price discovery, hedging instruments. First movers are the cloud operators; the real prize is the exchange layer that gets built atop them. The venture opportunity is backing that layer, not the underlying chips or data centers.
Every few years RWA tokenization gets reannounced before it arrives. Part 1 sizes the opportunity: $400T addressable across bonds, credit, real estate; less than 0.1% is onchain today. The structural shift is finally underway — this opening installment maps where the first meaningful volumes are likely to land (institutional-grade yields, T-bill-backed stablecoins, corporate credit).
Sam argues Solana's perps problem runs deeper than liquidity—the chain lacks execution guarantees market makers need for tight quotes, while Hyperliquid processes 5-10x Solana's entire perp volume. Bulk's answer is a validator-native sidecar network handling matching and risk separately from Solana's leader-based execution, paired with a SPAN-style portfolio-aware risk engine that cuts margin requirements 70%+ on hedged books—the institutional standard CME has used for decades but no live crypto venue currently offers. The model preserves composability by keeping collateral productive on Solana while supporting trades, with mainnet targeting this half.
Solana hosts crypto's deepest retail user base but has ceded perpetual futures dominance to Hyperliquid, which runs 5 to 10x the volume of Solana's entire perps complex. Sam Schubert attributes this to Solana's general-purpose design lacking the execution guarantees perp makers need—non-deterministic ordering, opaque fees, and rotating validator leaders every 1.6 seconds make quoting impractical. Three new protocols (Phoenix Perps, Bulk, Bullet) are attacking the execution gap with different approaches, but closing that gap may not matter if Solana can't convert its memecoin-focused retail base into active perps traders.
Between December 2025 and March 2026, Coinbase, NuBank, PayPal, and Revolut all pursued banking charters while Kraken secured a Fed master account—four major fintechs making the same bet simultaneously. The neobank playbook is shifting from unbundling (outsourcing regulatory complexity) to rebundling: vertically integrating charters while public blockchains expose permissionless settlement rails. Neobanks owning both layers—traditional banking infrastructure and blockchain plumbing—will define the next decade, with stablecoin-first models accessing DeFi yield instantly via smart contracts.
Robbie argues the agentic commerce thesis is inverted: while the agentic economy will be massive, most agents won't transact autonomously. Commercial agents (95%+ of agentic deployment) embedded in SaaS won't spend money—they'll research, review, or generate output. Consumer agents will remain orchestrators requesting authorization, not independent economic actors. Only bottom-up agents outside organizational control genuinely need granular, autonomous payments, where blockchains' permissionlessness beats card networks' compliance friction. The real bottleneck isn't payment rails but regulatory frameworks and legal structures enabling autonomous decision-making—a protocol upgrade can't solve that. Most agentic economy activity gets billed monthly, not settled per transaction.
Kalshi and Polymarket have comparable weekly volumes, but their compositions diverge sharply. Kalshi relies on sports (80-90% of volume) with crypto just 3-5%, creating vulnerability through its 50% dependence on Robinhood distribution as prediction market revenue hits 8.5% of Robinhood's total. Polymarket's crypto volume has surged from 5% at start of 2025 to 30% today, driven by 15-minute Up/Down markets that grew from 5% to 60% of crypto volume, where one address accounts for 52% of volume through systematic mint-and-distribute liquidity seeding that enables arbitrage at scale. Kalshi's newly launched 15-minute crypto contracts show demand signals at $40M weekly volume, but Polymarket's edge may be structural liquidity design rather than product format alone.
Kunal argues equity perpetuals will onboard retail traders not by competing with options but by displacing leveraged ETFs, which see $800-900B in monthly volume. Leveraged ETFs mechanically lose value through daily rebalancing even when underlying assets trade flat, while equity perps offer constant notional exposure without decay. Though early traction shows $12.9B cumulative volume on Hyperliquid since mid-October, adoption will ultimately depend on distribution—Robinhood and Coinbase are best positioned to capture this market once regulatory frameworks permit, potentially capturing 5% of leveraged ETF volume and driving 17-70% volume growth.
Matteo outlines core design challenges for onchain equity perpetuals: oracle pricing gaps during off-hours and weekends make traditional funding mechanisms economically meaningless. Instead of pretending basis exists, he proposes symmetric weekend fees feeding insurance, matching bands clamped around Friday's close (like regulated equity ATS), synthetic dividend settlement to avoid oracle jumps, and base funding rates around 4% rather than crypto's ~10% to compete with CFDs. The constraint: build honestly about fragility and cap maximum weekend PnL distortion the insurance fund must absorb.
Carlos maps prop AMM dominance on Solana: HumidiFi now captures 50% of SOL-stablecoin volumes and 28% of all DEX volumes as of September, up from 7% when SolFi launched in October 2024. While FastLane's Thogard argues the SVM disadvantages prop AMMs, aggregator competition is intensifying—DFlow and Titan combined averaged $1.5B in volume over two weeks—and DFlow's new JIT Routing technology dynamically re-optimizes swaps onchain, routing 98% of SOL-stablecoin volumes to prop AMMs versus Jupiter's 80%. This shift has compressed Solana's weekly REV to $9.1M last week, the lowest since pre-election September 2024.