It's striking how much the crypto world depends on trust in other parties. The whole point of crypto was supposed to be that it was "trustless". But it's not set up that way. All these crypto derivatives are not set up as contracts on a blockchain, with assets locked up until the derivatives settle. They're book entries with some weakly regulated exchange in Outer Nowhere.
The people who want trustless decentralization and the people who want leveraged gambling and the people who want KYC-free international money transfer may be different people. The only problem with Liberty Reserve was that it got shut down; if a "decentralied" fig leaf can allow it to operate... let there be "decentralization".
There are other exchanges that are much more centralised, like Hyperliquid, and it is incorrect to call these decentralised. But there are truly decentralised alternatives as well.
GMX is not as popular, let's say Binance, because onchain user experience has been very hard. You don't want to sign every order from your crypto wallet. Transaction cost ("gas fee") used to be too high for trading. This is finally changing with the latest Ethereum improvement proposals, dealing with so called account abstraction.
[1] Because futures always settle on an external price, the price feed must come from some oracle. In the case of GMX, there are keepers (multiple of them) who are responsible to bring the correct price to Arbitrum chain and trigger the settlement. But it's not a single party.
There is a common confusion in this (perhaps?). Most businesses get created primarily to make money. Not primarily to solve the world's problems. It's easy to say "if they really had their customers at heart...". Well, yeah, but that's not and has never been the priority. It's not a cynical view, it's being realistic.
All kinds of mayhem follows. All the way to fundamental research papers such as "on average actively managed mutual funds do not beat XX index". Well, yeah, mutual funds don't get created because someone is good at it. They get created because someone wants to make money. Beating XX is not the first objective, or competence, of the entrepreneurs. Hopefully that fund doesn't last too long but often it does, and anyway there are many of them.
So anyway, there are plenty of ways to try and leverage ideas of cryptography, crytocurrencies, block chain - most of which are still accessible - and most of the ventures in the field are not going to be primarily about solving the users' problems.
There are some exchanges that are more decentralised (and older) than Hyperliquid. Hyperliquid, while being the most popular one, is not the only horse in the town.
E.g. GMX on Arbitrum chain is no longer prohibitively expensive.
Ethereum and similar chains run arbitrary computation on-chain. You can make a futures exchange on Ethereum (or Solana, etc). However, the fees for doing so are very large, and confirmation times are very long, like any other on-chain transaction.
> HyperCore includes fully onchain perpetual futures and spot order books. Every order, cancel, trade, and liquidation happens transparently with one-block finality inherited from HyperBFT. HyperCore currently supports 200k orders / second, with throughput constantly improving as the node software is further optimized.
Key part:
> fully onchain perpetual futures and spot order books
> Importantly, HyperCore does not rely on the crutch of off-chain order books. A core design principle is full decentralization with one consistent order of transactions achieved through HyperBFT consensus.
And in fact they did just this when their vaults started bleeding money on an unfavourable position (JellyJelly). They handed out a closed source binary and the validators ran it immediately, closing out the market at an arbitrary price.
Different cryptocurrency products offer different properties and guarantees. Much like different databases offer different concurrency models. Folks that use currency backed stablecoins do not care for the trustless properties. There are various algorithmic stablecoins out there that you can use to stay free of KYC/AML but they aren't very popular.
Largely the folks that want trustless currency use chains like BTC, BCH, XMR, or ZEC.
This is a common place in any thread about cryptocurrencies on HN unfortunately... I could be convinced of my own message also being a sweeping generalization if anyone can point out a single post where top comments aren't doing exactly this when it comes to this topic, even the technical ones.
This is a useless comment for most readers (myself included!) unless you specify what you think those sweeping generalizations are, and why you think they're unsound.
By now crypto-in-practice has violated so many of its supposed founding principles that it's tired and cliche to point it out.
It was supposed to be limited in supply unlike fiat, and yet Tether underpins the whole thing and they print that out of thin air all the time. It was supposed to be decentralized, but in practice a few big exchanges control all the transactions and a few big mining pools control all the minting. It was supposed to be "code is law", and yet if you find a big exploit on smart contracts it'll be unwound later on and the cops will still show up for you. And as you say, it was supposed to be trustless, but counterparty risk is everywhere.
And it turns out nobody cares, because to a first approximation nobody is in crypto for the libertarian principles. It is all about number go up; always has been, always will be. It's not even worth pointing out anymore.
> It was supposed to be limited in supply unlike fiat, and yet Tether underpins the whole thing and they print that out of thin air all the time.
This is a joke right? Tether (USDT) is pegged to the dollar... and there is not really a limit to the USD printing machine, nobody ever claimed a stablecoin would have a limited supply. It's literally the main critique of the fiat system levied by crypto proponents.
The only asset which has made and still hold promises of not increasing its supply over its limit set through its consensus code is Bitcoin. And it is nowhere close to ever change... as a matter of fact if it changed, most people wouldn't call that fork Bitcoin.
Well they publish attestations from third-parties, but no full audits, so sure they could be much more transparent.
But the claim about USDT ever claiming that its supply wouldn't increase is pure fantasy. It literally makes no sense if you understand how the peg is maintained (technically by minting and burning tokens).
I took their comment to mean that tokens valuations are tied to stablecoins. Sufficiently tied enough as to be de facto properties of tokens themselves.
Yes. Cryptocurrencies operate within the larger econo-political system we live in, and as long as cryptocurrencies replace only a part of that system, the rest of the system will continue to operate as it does otherwise. Its quite clear that the way capitalism operates in practice is that most markets end up being oligopolish, and that people with guns are needed to keep the system stable. So not at all surprising.
> And it turns out nobody cares, because to a first approximation nobody is in crypto for the libertarian principles. It is all about number go up; always has been, always will be. It's not even worth pointing out anymore.
I agree 100% - Meme stocks go brrrrrrrr
The idea that it's a currency that lives beyond the reach of governments is laughable (as soon as something goes bang a lot of the owners call for... regulators and government oversight)
Neither ETH nor BTC are being utilised for anything other than "Money goes in, price goes up, weee more money should go in, I'm a financial genius"
It's incredibly difficult to see either instrument as a currency, or a share, or an asset other than the fact that other people will (at this point) buy it back off you for more than you paid for it.
> The adoption was criticized both internationally and within El Salvador, due to the volatility of Bitcoin, its environmental impact, and lack of transparency regarding the government's fiscal policy. In 2024, El Salvador agreed to partially limit its involvement with Bitcoin as part of a deal made with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In March 2025, The Economist wrote that El Salvador's bitcoin experiment had been a failure, bringing more costs than benefits to the El Salvador economy.[4]
> In 2025, Bitcoin was rescinded as legal tender in El Salvador.[5] Besides the aforementioned problems and hacking incidents, research showed it was rarely used by the public.[5]
The Central African Republic has had similar (well worse really) experience
People putting their self-interests before maintaining support for more general principles is par for the course.
Even the vast majority of free-market maximalists will support a government bailout of large banks or the auto industry if it will save their investment portfolio.
Hyperliquid being on chain in the traditional sense is fiction. You have a closed source piece of software run by closely controlled "validators" with additionally centralised components.
whats more important to me is that you don't have to ask anybody if you can deploy an entire financial services suite
and not only will other people worldwide use it immediately, they will also pay for all your infrastructure costs as they update the chain state with every transaction fee that they pay
the permissionless nature means you can deploy anything as cenralized or decentralized as you want, and its up to consumers to be discerning and its only their fault if they are not
cost wise this will always be attractive to developers and for them to bring over every audience they can muster, because web 2.0 cloud cannot compete with that cost structure and permissionless nature
BTC almost exclusively enables crime. It's fundamentally too bad at basically everything to replace any part of the real economy. It is almost exclusively used for crime, admittedly fun technological exploration, and gambling on a valuation based not on actual net utility in current context but on perception of future utility that will probably never materialize.
Web 2.0 based on boring old primitives like ad dollars and banks actually funds things that in real life provide ultimately virtually all the actual utility obtained by the world from software.
You said
> web 2.0 cloud cannot compete with that cost structure and permissionless nature
It appears to me that that is just incorrect on its face because web 2.0 cloud actually DOES compete insofar as its literally everywhere as we speak and web 3.0 is a buzzword from 2014 that has yet to achieve actual meaning.
To rephrase do you feel it is accurate to say that something that represents basically all the real value obtained by network computers doesn't competes with something that provides? What again?
BTC doesn’t really operate in the decentralized finance world, all the platforms for applications are on other chains so your arguments are also stuck in 2014
Ask an AI about it to catch up, this is a decade too late to have that conversation
the only thing that matters is that there is liquidity and permissionless deployment, we are far far beyond “should there be liquidity”, you can build business on smart contract platforms solely because there is liquidity and people with frictions you can solve just like any other industry or the financial services sector in general
BTC isn't a programmable chain. As yieldcrv says, your talking points are too old to make sense anymore. BTC's big "innovation" has been its version of an L2: the Lightning Network. Otherwise BTC people mostly treat it as a gold-like asset at this point.
I spent a few years leading dev on decentralized exchanges, building bridges to other chains and building a sophisticated margin system on top of the trading pools.
A few things I think I've learned:
In its current state, most retail investors are simply supplying to the sophisticated investor.
Although some DeFi projects make a genuine effort to provide analysis tools to level the playing field, it's not nearly enough.
The safest least volatile yields in DeFi are lending your stable coins into a system such as aave. The yield is not far from a high yield USD savings account.
Exchanges such as Uniswap may be the most important legit tool in DeFi. The biggest problem is the liquidity provider's ability to protect their downside...so the investor adds on more sophisticated monitoring/hedging schemes. This gets us back to the retail investor being at a severe disadvantage.
Yes if you start doing analysis on DeFi and a lot of cryptocurrency markets, you can see very quickly that retail investors ("dumb money") are just providing liquidity to the smart money. There's a lot of unsophisticated money in these markets which makes it pretty fun to compete as someone trying to be smart.
It's even more brutal in the more established, traditional markets though. Obviously if you're going long and managing a portfolio that's a different perspective, but it's very hard as an outsider to compete with the smart funds in the world. You might be smart but most of those funds are very smart, well capitalized, and have a very deep understanding of market structure.
Why would I want a perp on BTC when I can just buy the coin? The example quoted the price of the perp as (close to) the same as the price of BTC, so if I'm not getting leverage why not just buy the coin and avoid counterparty risk?
If the goal is just to buy and hold, then you wouldn't use perps, not only because of counterparty risk but also because the funding rate is typically positive, meaning you pay (usually ~10% APR) to be long.
The point of perps is:
- Easy access to leverage. Unlike options or futures, there's no need to roll over.
- It's the easiest way to short a coin. Most of the time you even get paid the funding rate to be short.
- Trading fees are typically much lower than for spot.
- Volume and liquidity can be better for perps than for spot. The BTC/USDT perp did 10x the volume of the spot pair in the last 24h on Binance.
Because the exchanges offer 20x leverage on perps but not on spot. In theory perps can have deeper liquidity because they can go beyond the 21M BTC limit. If you don't care about those factors then you shouldn't trade perps; they aren't intended to be magically superior to spot.
You want to buy bitcoin to be a bitcoin investor. But if you want to actively trade, both buy and sell, futures offer much more capital efficient solution. With leverage, you can make larger trades with less money.
A perp is a future which is different from buying BTC at its spot price. If you remove the "perpetual" aspect of the future and it was a regular future that was settling soon, likewise it would be similar in price but not the same as the underlying. There's lots of uses for futures and they're often used as hedges against various forms of risk, like currency risk.
>The basis trade, classically executed, is delta neutral: one isn’t exposed to the underlying itself. You don’t need any belief in Bitcoin’s future adoption story, fundamentals, market sentiment, halvings, none of that. You’re getting paid to provide the gambling environment, including a really important feature: the perp price needs to stay reasonably close to the spot price, close enough to continue attracting people who want to gamble. You are also renting access to your capital for leverage.
Patrick is largely correct on perp futures being mostly used as a leverage instrument to gamble on bitcoin or ether by retail. However I think he's missing one point which is that actually some institutional players also use CME futures to gain exposure to Bitcoin (e.g., BITO ETF or a pension fund that wants to gain exposure to crypto and have a fiduciary duty to hold assets with AAA custodians).
The thesis being that if you're an institution, you don't trust the relatively "fly-by" offshore crypto or even US-regulated custodians of crypto. When you trade CME bitcoin futures, your settlement is guaranteed by the clearing entities of Chicago Mercantile Exchange which are bulge bracket firms of TradFi. So why CME futures largely reflect a premium over the spot BTC price - and this premium is a function of the demand of bitcoin at anytime and the Fed fund rate. As the bitcoin futures market is highly efficient, the CME futures premium is arbitraged across the various DeFi and CeFi exchanges with basis points added relative to the default risk of each venue.
And the basis trade itself is not a "risk-free" arbitrage. The seller on the other side of gamblers are exposed to "right-tail" risk - your premium you get paid to "carry" the bitcoin is fixed while the collateral you must hold in theory to "hold" the coin on behalf of the buyer could be in theory infinite if bitcoin skyrockets to infinity. Sell too much and you might not have enough collateral before the futures settlement happens (for a fixed term futures, not perps) kind of like a reverse but still deadly scenario with Silicon Valley Bank (i.e., you incur "paper loss" that goes away if you can hold it to expiry; but you get force liquidated before then).
If the price of Bitcoin increases, you collateral value increases along the losses from the short. This is why it's "delta neutral".
The real risk is to be auto-deleveraged when the other side blows up and no one is here to buy its long. Then the perp exchange closes your short and you have a naked long.
> When you trade CME bitcoin futures, your settlement is guaranteed by the clearing entities of Chicago Mercantile Exchange which are bulge bracket firms of TradFi.
The CME clearinghouse itself is the guarantor. And below it are the clearing firms. The trading firms don't guarantee trades, the clearing firms do.
In fact, for many products, the CME is the counterparty for both sides of a trade.
It appears to me that majority of the article is about (unregulated) leveraged trading, with perps being an instrument to get leverage. I seen similar stories of blowing up outside us in forex market, for example, where no one were talking about futures, it was just 100x leverage that was biting many (most?) traders.
>In cases where management deems paying winners from the insurance fund would be too costly and/or impossible, they automatically deleverage some winners.
I don't think many people on HN realize how globally systemically important public blockchains are on track to become, especially Ethereum.
The understandable hatred of the casino and many scams has blinded most of HN as to the true potential of the technology and its associated new public institutions.
That's what a decentralized public blockchain is, a new kind of public institution.
One small example of this is that the most state-of-the-art perpetual futures market in the world is an Ethereum Layer 2 named Lighter https://app.lighter.xyz/markets/
2. Tokenizing all assets (equities, commodities, real estate, etc.)
3. Being able to use those stablecoins/tokenized assets in DeFi protocols that are more automated, more impartial, and less extractive than corresponding traditional finance systems. Including lending and marketplaces to buy/sell. Many industries will see parts of their back offices go onchain. Tokenized real estate + onchain swapping = onchain real estate markets. Stablecoins + onchain swapping = onchain forex markets.
4. All of these being inherently global, so anyone in the world with a mobile phone can access these assets and the onchain financial system.
5. All of these being size-agnostic. The same assets and technologies work with a 5 cent buy of tokenized TSLA stock just as they do with a 50 million buy.
6. All of these capabilities enjoy instant settlement. The act of trading the tokenized asset also settles the trade. There is no more T+1 settlement risk or delay. This reduces risk and improves capital efficiency.
7. Decentralized public chains, especially Ethereum, offer new kinds of credible commitments that are strong enough to bind corporations and governments because the agreements are automated by the highly decentralized chain. Centralized chains (almost all chains) can't do this because they are too easy to rewrite history if governments apply pressure. When using Ethereum, instead of relying on a counterparty to keep their word and then suing them if they don't, parts of that agreement can become automated by the chain, reducing risk of breach of contract and cost of compliance. Maximum decentralization greatly reduces overall risk, which is very valuable at global scale.
8. Generally increased permissionless innovation, stronger property rights, and freer markets. Anybody can use onchain or build onchain, there's no gatekeepers.
> Tokenizing all assets (equities, commodities, real estate, etc.)
How does that work?
The blockchain can only enforce its desired state on the blockchain itself. It cannot affect the real world unless you delegate said effects to a trusted party... which defeats the whole point of a decentralized, trust-less blockchain, and you could let that trusted party just run a centralized database.
How do you reconcile the ability to lose a private key with real-world assets? In the "fiat" system we rely on courts to be the ultimate arbiters in such cases and it works well enough. In this system, what should happen if someone owning a tokenized real estate asset loses the corresponding private key?
> The act of trading the tokenized asset also settles the trade
This again only works on the blockchain. When the tokens represent real-world assets the two are not in sync, and there's a risk they may not be reconcilable (you "buy" some real-estate on the blockchain, but the government having jurisdiction over the real-world location contests your ownership claim and people in uniform with guns prevent you from entering into said real estate).
> which defeats the whole point of a decentralized, trust-less blockchain, and you could let that trusted party just run a centralized database
A centralized token (like USDC) being held in a trustless wallet is much much better and more useful than the traditional financial system.
For example, USDC in my wallet can be lent out in any onchain lending venue I pick and be sent to anybody in the world instantly.
> lose a private key with real-world assets
You're right, private key security is super important. The practical solution here is that there will be many different kinds of wallets with different trust assumptions and recovery models, and people/corporations will be directed to use the one that's net best for them. Many will be fully or semi custodial.
> When the tokens represent real-world assets the two are not in sync, and there's a risk they may not be reconcilable
Right. The idea here is to have very stringent evaluations of tokenization frameworks, to figure out which real-world asset tokens are actually quality bearer assets (from both a legal and technical standpoint) and which are not. An early example of the work here is BlueChip's stablecoin ratings https://bluechip.org/en
the tokenized assets are only as good as their backing entity allows them to be. It's a centralized system with a facade of decentralization. Same applies to stablecoins.
You inherit all of the inefficiency of cryptocurrency and none of the decentralization. This is why the idea was abandoned back with colored coins in like 2013. With etherium, you inherit even more centralization due to the nature of the scripting system and PoS.
> It's a centralized system with a facade of decentralization. Same applies to stablecoins.
Centralized assets in an on-chain wallet are much more useful than in the traditional financial system, for many reasons, but it comes down to friction reduction.
It's true that perp platforms are zero-sum games mostly catering to extremely high risk traders that overwhelmingly rely on luck more than skill. I don't use perp platforms myself.
It's also true that perp platforms can provide very accessible and efficient hedging. For example, if you own NVDA and don't want exposure to their quarterly results volatility, you can take a much smaller amount of collateral than your underlying NVDA shares and use that to open a 10x leveraged short on NVDA in the same size as your main NVDA position. This makes you "delta neutral" so the USD value of your position won't change even if NVDA craters on quarterly results. All without selling your underlying shares. Then you can close the short after the quarterly results are absorbed by the market.
Crypto at this point is neither decentralized nor anonymous. It’s a Ponzi scheme wrapped in increasing level of complexity and involving an increasing number of banks, and controlled by a decreasing number of very large players. This crypto octopus is putting tentacles in Fidelity, and major US banks, and pension funds, and 401k accounts, and any other money holder. They are putting debt on banks at leverage levels beyond any reason. So when the music stops playing the octopus can slurp the real money liquidity out of as many US banks and savings institutions as possible, to eventually collapse the savings even of people who have nothing to do with Crypto.
That's really not true. Sure, there are huge amounts of scams and ponzi schemes and that's what gets attention, but crypto is absolutely used every day by many in a decentralized and effectively anonymous way.
Dark markets are still active and people move large amounts across international borders effortlessly.
As an example of being effectively anonymous, I can easily take some cash, meet up at a cafe nearby with someone from a p2p site to swap it to crypto, and then pay a foreign company for hosting services for years with that crypto, sharing zero personal information.
It's striking how much the crypto world depends on trust in other parties. The whole point of crypto was supposed to be that it was "trustless". But it's not set up that way. All these crypto derivatives are not set up as contracts on a blockchain, with assets locked up until the derivatives settle. They're book entries with some weakly regulated exchange in Outer Nowhere.
The people who want trustless decentralization and the people who want leveraged gambling and the people who want KYC-free international money transfer may be different people. The only problem with Liberty Reserve was that it got shut down; if a "decentralied" fig leaf can allow it to operate... let there be "decentralization".
You can trade perpetual futures, onchain, mostly decentralised, in self-custodial manner [1] e.g. on GMX
https://gmx.io/
Some more modern decentralised exchanges (DEXes) dealing with leveraged trades and try to minimise centralisation also include YieldBases:
https://yieldbasis.com/markets
There are other exchanges that are much more centralised, like Hyperliquid, and it is incorrect to call these decentralised. But there are truly decentralised alternatives as well.
GMX is not as popular, let's say Binance, because onchain user experience has been very hard. You don't want to sign every order from your crypto wallet. Transaction cost ("gas fee") used to be too high for trading. This is finally changing with the latest Ethereum improvement proposals, dealing with so called account abstraction.
[1] Because futures always settle on an external price, the price feed must come from some oracle. In the case of GMX, there are keepers (multiple of them) who are responsible to bring the correct price to Arbitrum chain and trigger the settlement. But it's not a single party.
> The whole point of crypto
There is a common confusion in this (perhaps?). Most businesses get created primarily to make money. Not primarily to solve the world's problems. It's easy to say "if they really had their customers at heart...". Well, yeah, but that's not and has never been the priority. It's not a cynical view, it's being realistic.
All kinds of mayhem follows. All the way to fundamental research papers such as "on average actively managed mutual funds do not beat XX index". Well, yeah, mutual funds don't get created because someone is good at it. They get created because someone wants to make money. Beating XX is not the first objective, or competence, of the entrepreneurs. Hopefully that fund doesn't last too long but often it does, and anyway there are many of them.
So anyway, there are plenty of ways to try and leverage ideas of cryptography, crytocurrencies, block chain - most of which are still accessible - and most of the ventures in the field are not going to be primarily about solving the users' problems.
That's not true with decentralised exchanges like hyperliquid, no?
Hyperliquid and similar exchanges aren't decentralized. That is their long term goal but they are very far from achieving it.
The few actual decentralized exchanges are too slow and expensive.
There are some exchanges that are more decentralised (and older) than Hyperliquid. Hyperliquid, while being the most popular one, is not the only horse in the town.
E.g. GMX on Arbitrum chain is no longer prohibitively expensive.
Left some comments here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46172450
I mean, as soon as synchronisation is required in any system, block chain, distributed SAAS, even Peer to Peer sharing, decentralisation fails hard
That's one of the sticking points I have with the /idea/ of the technology
Ethereum and similar chains run arbitrary computation on-chain. You can make a futures exchange on Ethereum (or Solana, etc). However, the fees for doing so are very large, and confirmation times are very long, like any other on-chain transaction.
What I am loving about this comment, and the downvotes, is the idea that blockchains can escape things like basic laws of the universe.
> confirmation times are very long, like any other on-chain transaction
Yes. synchronisation is where everything breaks down because you have to get everyone to agree to the new state.
edit: Sorry, not everyone, but a consensus, and that consensus is then what everyone agrees is the state.
> HyperCore includes fully onchain perpetual futures and spot order books. Every order, cancel, trade, and liquidation happens transparently with one-block finality inherited from HyperBFT. HyperCore currently supports 200k orders / second, with throughput constantly improving as the node software is further optimized.
Key part:
> fully onchain perpetual futures and spot order books
Being on a blockchain and being decentralized are two different things. The HyperCore client isn't even open source.
That's just patently false.
> Importantly, HyperCore does not rely on the crutch of off-chain order books. A core design principle is full decentralization with one consistent order of transactions achieved through HyperBFT consensus.
The basis of decentralized software is open-source. Otherwise a centralized authority can just push an update to, for instance, blacklist addresses.
https://github.com/hyperliquid-dex/node
"For lowest latency, run the node in Tokyo, Japan."
Decentralization means to run all of the closed-source nodes in the same AWS datacenter!
And in fact they did just this when their vaults started bleeding money on an unfavourable position (JellyJelly). They handed out a closed source binary and the validators ran it immediately, closing out the market at an arbitrary price.
The basis of decentralized software is open protocol. Then it doesn't matter that somebody runs closed source while somebody runs open source.
as an operator you don't even get the real validator / node binary directly, nor can you control which version to run.
all you can do is run their visor, and they push out whatever proprietary blob they produce and restart "your" nodes at their command.
Different cryptocurrency products offer different properties and guarantees. Much like different databases offer different concurrency models. Folks that use currency backed stablecoins do not care for the trustless properties. There are various algorithmic stablecoins out there that you can use to stay free of KYC/AML but they aren't very popular.
Largely the folks that want trustless currency use chains like BTC, BCH, XMR, or ZEC.
This comment makes sweeping generalizations.
This is a common place in any thread about cryptocurrencies on HN unfortunately... I could be convinced of my own message also being a sweeping generalization if anyone can point out a single post where top comments aren't doing exactly this when it comes to this topic, even the technical ones.
This is a useless comment for most readers (myself included!) unless you specify what you think those sweeping generalizations are, and why you think they're unsound.
By now crypto-in-practice has violated so many of its supposed founding principles that it's tired and cliche to point it out.
It was supposed to be limited in supply unlike fiat, and yet Tether underpins the whole thing and they print that out of thin air all the time. It was supposed to be decentralized, but in practice a few big exchanges control all the transactions and a few big mining pools control all the minting. It was supposed to be "code is law", and yet if you find a big exploit on smart contracts it'll be unwound later on and the cops will still show up for you. And as you say, it was supposed to be trustless, but counterparty risk is everywhere.
And it turns out nobody cares, because to a first approximation nobody is in crypto for the libertarian principles. It is all about number go up; always has been, always will be. It's not even worth pointing out anymore.
> It was supposed to be limited in supply unlike fiat, and yet Tether underpins the whole thing and they print that out of thin air all the time.
This is a joke right? Tether (USDT) is pegged to the dollar... and there is not really a limit to the USD printing machine, nobody ever claimed a stablecoin would have a limited supply. It's literally the main critique of the fiat system levied by crypto proponents.
The only asset which has made and still hold promises of not increasing its supply over its limit set through its consensus code is Bitcoin. And it is nowhere close to ever change... as a matter of fact if it changed, most people wouldn't call that fork Bitcoin.
The problem with Tether is that they are tight-lipped about their backing assets. No one knows if the peg is real, it's just "trust me bro"
Well they publish attestations from third-parties, but no full audits, so sure they could be much more transparent.
But the claim about USDT ever claiming that its supply wouldn't increase is pure fantasy. It literally makes no sense if you understand how the peg is maintained (technically by minting and burning tokens).
I took their comment to mean that tokens valuations are tied to stablecoins. Sufficiently tied enough as to be de facto properties of tokens themselves.
Also interesting that tether is the private largest holder of gold at 14 billion $ xaust
Yes. Cryptocurrencies operate within the larger econo-political system we live in, and as long as cryptocurrencies replace only a part of that system, the rest of the system will continue to operate as it does otherwise. Its quite clear that the way capitalism operates in practice is that most markets end up being oligopolish, and that people with guns are needed to keep the system stable. So not at all surprising.
> And it turns out nobody cares, because to a first approximation nobody is in crypto for the libertarian principles. It is all about number go up; always has been, always will be. It's not even worth pointing out anymore.
I agree 100% - Meme stocks go brrrrrrrr
The idea that it's a currency that lives beyond the reach of governments is laughable (as soon as something goes bang a lot of the owners call for... regulators and government oversight)
> I agree 100% - Meme stocks go brrrrrrrr
Mostly, meme coins go into a screaming dive after the initial pump. Go type some meme coin names into Coinmarketcap.
Except for Bitcoin and Ethereum, almost everything in crypto has crashed hard.
Neither ETH nor BTC are being utilised for anything other than "Money goes in, price goes up, weee more money should go in, I'm a financial genius"
It's incredibly difficult to see either instrument as a currency, or a share, or an asset other than the fact that other people will (at this point) buy it back off you for more than you paid for it.
FTR (because El Salvador is often mentioned because it had BTC as legal tender)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_in_El_Salvador
> The adoption was criticized both internationally and within El Salvador, due to the volatility of Bitcoin, its environmental impact, and lack of transparency regarding the government's fiscal policy. In 2024, El Salvador agreed to partially limit its involvement with Bitcoin as part of a deal made with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In March 2025, The Economist wrote that El Salvador's bitcoin experiment had been a failure, bringing more costs than benefits to the El Salvador economy.[4]
> In 2025, Bitcoin was rescinded as legal tender in El Salvador.[5] Besides the aforementioned problems and hacking incidents, research showed it was rarely used by the public.[5]
The Central African Republic has had similar (well worse really) experience
People putting their self-interests before maintaining support for more general principles is par for the course.
Even the vast majority of free-market maximalists will support a government bailout of large banks or the auto industry if it will save their investment portfolio.
It was the case up until recently. But today Hyperliquid does it on chain and very popular.
Hyperliquid being on chain in the traditional sense is fiction. You have a closed source piece of software run by closely controlled "validators" with additionally centralised components.
Settlement is on chain which removes clearing house, exchange and brokerages from the picture.
whats more important to me is that you don't have to ask anybody if you can deploy an entire financial services suite
and not only will other people worldwide use it immediately, they will also pay for all your infrastructure costs as they update the chain state with every transaction fee that they pay
the permissionless nature means you can deploy anything as cenralized or decentralized as you want, and its up to consumers to be discerning and its only their fault if they are not
cost wise this will always be attractive to developers and for them to bring over every audience they can muster, because web 2.0 cloud cannot compete with that cost structure and permissionless nature
Isn't basically virtually 100% of the money that isn't crime adjacent web 2.0 implying it can compete?
What are you asking? Can you rephrase that in a different way?
Can I leverage trade derivatives and also earn fees from liquidity pooling with Robux?
BTC almost exclusively enables crime. It's fundamentally too bad at basically everything to replace any part of the real economy. It is almost exclusively used for crime, admittedly fun technological exploration, and gambling on a valuation based not on actual net utility in current context but on perception of future utility that will probably never materialize.
Web 2.0 based on boring old primitives like ad dollars and banks actually funds things that in real life provide ultimately virtually all the actual utility obtained by the world from software.
You said
> web 2.0 cloud cannot compete with that cost structure and permissionless nature
It appears to me that that is just incorrect on its face because web 2.0 cloud actually DOES compete insofar as its literally everywhere as we speak and web 3.0 is a buzzword from 2014 that has yet to achieve actual meaning.
To rephrase do you feel it is accurate to say that something that represents basically all the real value obtained by network computers doesn't competes with something that provides? What again?
BTC doesn’t really operate in the decentralized finance world, all the platforms for applications are on other chains so your arguments are also stuck in 2014
Ask an AI about it to catch up, this is a decade too late to have that conversation
the only thing that matters is that there is liquidity and permissionless deployment, we are far far beyond “should there be liquidity”, you can build business on smart contract platforms solely because there is liquidity and people with frictions you can solve just like any other industry or the financial services sector in general
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BTC isn't a programmable chain. As yieldcrv says, your talking points are too old to make sense anymore. BTC's big "innovation" has been its version of an L2: the Lightning Network. Otherwise BTC people mostly treat it as a gold-like asset at this point.
I spent a few years leading dev on decentralized exchanges, building bridges to other chains and building a sophisticated margin system on top of the trading pools.
A few things I think I've learned:
In its current state, most retail investors are simply supplying to the sophisticated investor.
Although some DeFi projects make a genuine effort to provide analysis tools to level the playing field, it's not nearly enough.
The safest least volatile yields in DeFi are lending your stable coins into a system such as aave. The yield is not far from a high yield USD savings account.
Exchanges such as Uniswap may be the most important legit tool in DeFi. The biggest problem is the liquidity provider's ability to protect their downside...so the investor adds on more sophisticated monitoring/hedging schemes. This gets us back to the retail investor being at a severe disadvantage.
Yes if you start doing analysis on DeFi and a lot of cryptocurrency markets, you can see very quickly that retail investors ("dumb money") are just providing liquidity to the smart money. There's a lot of unsophisticated money in these markets which makes it pretty fun to compete as someone trying to be smart.
It's even more brutal in the more established, traditional markets though. Obviously if you're going long and managing a portfolio that's a different perspective, but it's very hard as an outsider to compete with the smart funds in the world. You might be smart but most of those funds are very smart, well capitalized, and have a very deep understanding of market structure.
Why would I want a perp on BTC when I can just buy the coin? The example quoted the price of the perp as (close to) the same as the price of BTC, so if I'm not getting leverage why not just buy the coin and avoid counterparty risk?
If the goal is just to buy and hold, then you wouldn't use perps, not only because of counterparty risk but also because the funding rate is typically positive, meaning you pay (usually ~10% APR) to be long.
The point of perps is:
- Easy access to leverage. Unlike options or futures, there's no need to roll over.
- It's the easiest way to short a coin. Most of the time you even get paid the funding rate to be short.
- Trading fees are typically much lower than for spot.
- Volume and liquidity can be better for perps than for spot. The BTC/USDT perp did 10x the volume of the spot pair in the last 24h on Binance.
Because the exchanges offer 20x leverage on perps but not on spot. In theory perps can have deeper liquidity because they can go beyond the 21M BTC limit. If you don't care about those factors then you shouldn't trade perps; they aren't intended to be magically superior to spot.
You are getting leverage. Leverage and liquidity are the reasons you deal in futures.
You want to buy bitcoin to be a bitcoin investor. But if you want to actively trade, both buy and sell, futures offer much more capital efficient solution. With leverage, you can make larger trades with less money.
You can buy (go long) a BTC future with only $10,000 or less of collateral. So you can get lots of leverage.
Another reason is that the future may be trading slightly below the spot price of BTC due to lots of traders shorting.
It's not just the difference in price that would compensate you, it is also the funding rate.
Other than that, futures tend to be more liquid and capital efficient.
A perp is a future which is different from buying BTC at its spot price. If you remove the "perpetual" aspect of the future and it was a regular future that was settling soon, likewise it would be similar in price but not the same as the underlying. There's lots of uses for futures and they're often used as hedges against various forms of risk, like currency risk.
maybe to avoid checking a box on an irs form?
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>The basis trade, classically executed, is delta neutral: one isn’t exposed to the underlying itself. You don’t need any belief in Bitcoin’s future adoption story, fundamentals, market sentiment, halvings, none of that. You’re getting paid to provide the gambling environment, including a really important feature: the perp price needs to stay reasonably close to the spot price, close enough to continue attracting people who want to gamble. You are also renting access to your capital for leverage.
Patrick is largely correct on perp futures being mostly used as a leverage instrument to gamble on bitcoin or ether by retail. However I think he's missing one point which is that actually some institutional players also use CME futures to gain exposure to Bitcoin (e.g., BITO ETF or a pension fund that wants to gain exposure to crypto and have a fiduciary duty to hold assets with AAA custodians).
The thesis being that if you're an institution, you don't trust the relatively "fly-by" offshore crypto or even US-regulated custodians of crypto. When you trade CME bitcoin futures, your settlement is guaranteed by the clearing entities of Chicago Mercantile Exchange which are bulge bracket firms of TradFi. So why CME futures largely reflect a premium over the spot BTC price - and this premium is a function of the demand of bitcoin at anytime and the Fed fund rate. As the bitcoin futures market is highly efficient, the CME futures premium is arbitraged across the various DeFi and CeFi exchanges with basis points added relative to the default risk of each venue.
And the basis trade itself is not a "risk-free" arbitrage. The seller on the other side of gamblers are exposed to "right-tail" risk - your premium you get paid to "carry" the bitcoin is fixed while the collateral you must hold in theory to "hold" the coin on behalf of the buyer could be in theory infinite if bitcoin skyrockets to infinity. Sell too much and you might not have enough collateral before the futures settlement happens (for a fixed term futures, not perps) kind of like a reverse but still deadly scenario with Silicon Valley Bank (i.e., you incur "paper loss" that goes away if you can hold it to expiry; but you get force liquidated before then).
If the price of Bitcoin increases, you collateral value increases along the losses from the short. This is why it's "delta neutral".
The real risk is to be auto-deleveraged when the other side blows up and no one is here to buy its long. Then the perp exchange closes your short and you have a naked long.
> When you trade CME bitcoin futures, your settlement is guaranteed by the clearing entities of Chicago Mercantile Exchange which are bulge bracket firms of TradFi.
The CME clearinghouse itself is the guarantor. And below it are the clearing firms. The trading firms don't guarantee trades, the clearing firms do.
In fact, for many products, the CME is the counterparty for both sides of a trade.
It appears to me that majority of the article is about (unregulated) leveraged trading, with perps being an instrument to get leverage. I seen similar stories of blowing up outside us in forex market, for example, where no one were talking about futures, it was just 100x leverage that was biting many (most?) traders.
>In cases where management deems paying winners from the insurance fund would be too costly and/or impossible, they automatically deleverage some winners.
that's deep, in all senses.
Is there a good resource on how perps actually work? i.e a technical specification on how to implement them?
Yes!
If you want to get into the deepest detail there are several decentralised perpetual futures exchanges.
Here are some open source codebases on Github:
https://github.com/vegaprotocol/vega
https://github.com/dydxprotocol/v4-chain/
https://github.com/gmx-io/gmx-synthetics
https://github.com/0xOstium/smart-contracts-public/
Vega is a stalled project, but they have good documentation:
https://docs.vega.xyz/release/concepts/new-to-vega
https://github.com/drift-labs
you can go through the drift labs code to see implementation of perps
BitMEX and Hyperliquid have fairly detailed documentation about how they implement perps and there are probably open source projects out there.
Only missing the bit about the insurance fund and so on.
I don't think many people on HN realize how globally systemically important public blockchains are on track to become, especially Ethereum.
The understandable hatred of the casino and many scams has blinded most of HN as to the true potential of the technology and its associated new public institutions.
That's what a decentralized public blockchain is, a new kind of public institution.
One small example of this is that the most state-of-the-art perpetual futures market in the world is an Ethereum Layer 2 named Lighter https://app.lighter.xyz/markets/
I guess you could help educate us by giving some non-gambling and non-criminal examples of innovation powered by Ethereum that justify its importance.
I would say stablecoins.
They are so important that now every country in the world has and is making laws about them.
1. Stablecoins
2. Tokenizing all assets (equities, commodities, real estate, etc.)
3. Being able to use those stablecoins/tokenized assets in DeFi protocols that are more automated, more impartial, and less extractive than corresponding traditional finance systems. Including lending and marketplaces to buy/sell. Many industries will see parts of their back offices go onchain. Tokenized real estate + onchain swapping = onchain real estate markets. Stablecoins + onchain swapping = onchain forex markets.
4. All of these being inherently global, so anyone in the world with a mobile phone can access these assets and the onchain financial system.
5. All of these being size-agnostic. The same assets and technologies work with a 5 cent buy of tokenized TSLA stock just as they do with a 50 million buy.
6. All of these capabilities enjoy instant settlement. The act of trading the tokenized asset also settles the trade. There is no more T+1 settlement risk or delay. This reduces risk and improves capital efficiency.
7. Decentralized public chains, especially Ethereum, offer new kinds of credible commitments that are strong enough to bind corporations and governments because the agreements are automated by the highly decentralized chain. Centralized chains (almost all chains) can't do this because they are too easy to rewrite history if governments apply pressure. When using Ethereum, instead of relying on a counterparty to keep their word and then suing them if they don't, parts of that agreement can become automated by the chain, reducing risk of breach of contract and cost of compliance. Maximum decentralization greatly reduces overall risk, which is very valuable at global scale.
8. Generally increased permissionless innovation, stronger property rights, and freer markets. Anybody can use onchain or build onchain, there's no gatekeepers.
> Tokenizing all assets (equities, commodities, real estate, etc.)
How does that work?
The blockchain can only enforce its desired state on the blockchain itself. It cannot affect the real world unless you delegate said effects to a trusted party... which defeats the whole point of a decentralized, trust-less blockchain, and you could let that trusted party just run a centralized database.
How do you reconcile the ability to lose a private key with real-world assets? In the "fiat" system we rely on courts to be the ultimate arbiters in such cases and it works well enough. In this system, what should happen if someone owning a tokenized real estate asset loses the corresponding private key?
> The act of trading the tokenized asset also settles the trade
This again only works on the blockchain. When the tokens represent real-world assets the two are not in sync, and there's a risk they may not be reconcilable (you "buy" some real-estate on the blockchain, but the government having jurisdiction over the real-world location contests your ownership claim and people in uniform with guns prevent you from entering into said real estate).
> which defeats the whole point of a decentralized, trust-less blockchain, and you could let that trusted party just run a centralized database
A centralized token (like USDC) being held in a trustless wallet is much much better and more useful than the traditional financial system.
For example, USDC in my wallet can be lent out in any onchain lending venue I pick and be sent to anybody in the world instantly.
> lose a private key with real-world assets
You're right, private key security is super important. The practical solution here is that there will be many different kinds of wallets with different trust assumptions and recovery models, and people/corporations will be directed to use the one that's net best for them. Many will be fully or semi custodial.
> When the tokens represent real-world assets the two are not in sync, and there's a risk they may not be reconcilable
Right. The idea here is to have very stringent evaluations of tokenization frameworks, to figure out which real-world asset tokens are actually quality bearer assets (from both a legal and technical standpoint) and which are not. An early example of the work here is BlueChip's stablecoin ratings https://bluechip.org/en
I don't realize, care to enlighten us?
Here's a list of some transformative benefits of decentralized public chains https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46175312
the tokenized assets are only as good as their backing entity allows them to be. It's a centralized system with a facade of decentralization. Same applies to stablecoins.
You inherit all of the inefficiency of cryptocurrency and none of the decentralization. This is why the idea was abandoned back with colored coins in like 2013. With etherium, you inherit even more centralization due to the nature of the scripting system and PoS.
> It's a centralized system with a facade of decentralization. Same applies to stablecoins.
Centralized assets in an on-chain wallet are much more useful than in the traditional financial system, for many reasons, but it comes down to friction reduction.
> the most state-of-the-art perpetual futures market in the world is an Ethereum Layer 2 named Lighter
Is this not just a state of the art innovation in the Ponzi scheme and online casino space?
It's true that perp platforms are zero-sum games mostly catering to extremely high risk traders that overwhelmingly rely on luck more than skill. I don't use perp platforms myself.
It's also true that perp platforms can provide very accessible and efficient hedging. For example, if you own NVDA and don't want exposure to their quarterly results volatility, you can take a much smaller amount of collateral than your underlying NVDA shares and use that to open a 10x leveraged short on NVDA in the same size as your main NVDA position. This makes you "delta neutral" so the USD value of your position won't change even if NVDA craters on quarterly results. All without selling your underlying shares. Then you can close the short after the quarterly results are absorbed by the market.
Separately, here is a list of transformative benefits of public decentralized chains https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46175312
Sad to see patio11 fell victim to Mammon. The great beast tempts us all.
Crypto at this point is neither decentralized nor anonymous. It’s a Ponzi scheme wrapped in increasing level of complexity and involving an increasing number of banks, and controlled by a decreasing number of very large players. This crypto octopus is putting tentacles in Fidelity, and major US banks, and pension funds, and 401k accounts, and any other money holder. They are putting debt on banks at leverage levels beyond any reason. So when the music stops playing the octopus can slurp the real money liquidity out of as many US banks and savings institutions as possible, to eventually collapse the savings even of people who have nothing to do with Crypto.
There are some new-ish attempts to improve crypto anonymity and decentralization. For example zcash and monero.
That's really not true. Sure, there are huge amounts of scams and ponzi schemes and that's what gets attention, but crypto is absolutely used every day by many in a decentralized and effectively anonymous way.
Dark markets are still active and people move large amounts across international borders effortlessly.
As an example of being effectively anonymous, I can easily take some cash, meet up at a cafe nearby with someone from a p2p site to swap it to crypto, and then pay a foreign company for hosting services for years with that crypto, sharing zero personal information.