Lucas Tcheyan

Lucas reports USDC secures Hyperliquid's quote-asset role as Coinbase effectively acquires USDH, with Circle deployed technically and Coinbase as treasury deployer sharing 90%+ of reserve yield. HL gains $160M+ in annual revenue—a 20% bump over $760M projected 2026 revenue—while eliminating UX friction that hindered HIP-4 trading velocity. Coinbase locks in USDC incumbency at the moment HIP-4 made it most contestable, and the deal structurally enables Coinbase to deploy perps and outcome markets on HL rather than building on Base.

Lucas maps Ethereum's Strawmap as a fundamental pivot from rollup-centric scaling back to base-layer prioritization, targeting five north stars through decade's end: sub-second finality, 10,000 TPS on L1 (200x current capacity via zkEVM), 10 million TPS across L2s, post-quantum cryptography, and privacy. Glamsterdam (H1 2026) raises the gas limit to 200M and Hegotá (H2 2026) adds FOCIL and account abstraction, but execution risk on seven planned forks is binding—delays compound. The roadmap addresses ETH supply expansion across all lenses, yet whether demand materializes for that capacity and whether AI agents and tokenized assets drive adoption remain the central tensions.