Jai Bhavnani

It feels like crypto forgot how to dream.

It feels like 99% of products are now:
- Only for crypto people
- A fork, or chasing some narrative

Satoshi dreamed of disrupting USD. Now we dream of forking Uniswap on a scam L2.

Today, more than 50% of the liquidity on Drift (Solana) is provided just in time.

Wow

Requirements to win as a protocol have changed a lot in 5 years:

2020: smart contract innovation, fair launches, onchain incentives

2025: institutional partnerships, VC raise, founder network size

LIQUIDITY POOLS -> INTENTS

DeFi is outgrowing its liquidity pool era.

First Uniswap. Now Morpho. And a whole slew of CLOBs on their way.

LOCK IN

<$40M of capacity remains on these Plume Royco markets

With COLD HARD $PLUME as rewards

Notifications on for @RoycoProtocol tomorrow morning (~10 hours from now). You won't regret it.

2900 people voting on a single Arbitrum DAO proposal is pretty crazy. Very cool

Every DeFi protocol is either an exchange or an asset manager.

There is no in between.

Personal pet peeve: folks posting token revenues and not accounting for token emissions

It’s pretty crazy that we’ve seen little innovation in the biggest risk to DeFi

Smart contract security

Increasingly clear that asset issuance is highly accretive to an L1. New L1s that understand this (like Plume) will have a significant edge.

Every DeFi protocol starting to learn asset management is a business of scale.

Think we might be cooking the biggest innovation to onchain liquidity in a long time.

Royco was initially built to price liquidity. But it can only price liquidity in terms of incentives. What if Royco could price liquidity in terms of...anything...?

Royco V2.

Crypto is well on its way to eating finance:

1. Stablecoins > Traditional payment rails ✅
(See Stripe rolling out Stablecoin accounts)

2. Tokens > stocks, traditional securities ✅
(See Superstate tokenizing equities)

3. DeFi rails / smart contracts > TradFi ⏳
(TBA)

Royco V2, alpha leak:
- End-to-end redesign, with users top of mind.
- Managed systems to automate a lot of the LP experience.
- Completely redesigned protocol architecture, unlocking many new markets.

Will be a phased rollout over next few months. Stay tuned.

Every crypto startups that lives long enough either becomes, or is acquired by an exchange, stablecoin or settlement layer.

Nobody is fighting on behalf of retail users

The exchanges, the market makers, the token teams, and the venture funds are all incentivized to take advantage of retail. And most do