VCs Debate the Death of the 4-Year Cycle & Hyperliquid vs. Binance

Hi! In today’s edition:

• 🎧 Is the 4-year crypto cycle finally dead?

• 🐳 Hyperliquid whales walk away $48M richer

• ✂️ Tron’s about to slash its transaction fees in half

• 💵 Aave’s new Horizon opens doors for institutions

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Two VCs on Why the 4-Year Cycle Is Dead, DATs & Hyperliquid vs. Binance

Could Hyperliquid finally force Binance to play fair? Plus: ETH’s narrative flipped overnight—SOL may be next.

Is crypto no longer moving in predictable four-year waves?

From the rise of DATs and stablecoin-specific chains, to Hyperliquid challenging Binance itself, the industry is fracturing into segments with winners and losers.

In this episode, Hack VC’s Peter Hans and DBA’s Jon Charbonneau debate whether Solana is next in line for a TradFi pump, why ETH suddenly flipped from dead to indispensable, and how onchain exchanges could finally free projects from Binance’s grip.

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify,Pods, Fountain, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform.

XPL Manipulation Nets Hyperliquid Whales $48 Million

Four whales allegedly manipulated the price of XPL — the pre-market token of the Plasma Network — on decentralized exchange Hyperliquid, collectively netting around $48 million in profits on Wednesday.

Data from Spot on Chain flagged the manipulators’ wallet addresses on X, noting that the events marked “one of the wildest short squeezes and wealth redistributions” ever seen.

XPL soared 200% to a high of $1.80 within minutes after one particular address took a massive long position, essentially sweeping the order book and draining most liquidity.

Hyperliquid’s systems triggered auto-deleveraging once market liquidity proved insufficient for further liquidations.

While some analysts initially attributed the wallet leading the effort as belonging to Tron founder Justin Sun, pseudonymous onchain sleuth MLM later identified the manipulator as pseudonymous trader TechnoRevenant.

MLM noted that the trader longed over 9.4 million XPL tokens worth around $5.7 million in 40 separate trades within about 15 minutes. Only 15 seconds later, he bought about 7.3 million XPL tokens worth $4.44 million, with the size of the orders suddenly increasing from about $44,000 to $444,000.

“Over the next two hours, a total of $159M was liquidated on the XPL pair across 1,026 users and 2,465 liquidations,” said MLM.

Hyperliquid said via its Telegram channel that it plans to introduce new safeguards, including integrating external exchange prices into the mark price, which is a reference for liquidations.

Tron's Proposal to Halve Transaction Fees Nears Approval

Tron's fee-cut proposal, known formally as Issue #789 or Proposal#104, is nearing approval as the vote gains strong momentum ahead of the Friday deadline.

The proposal suggests halving Tron’s transaction fees by reducing the energy unit price from 210 sun to 100 sun, effectively cutting the cost of transactions in half. 

In the Tron blockchain ecosystem, a "sun" is the smallest divisible unit of the native token TRX. One TRX token equals 1,000,000 sun, similar to how one bitcoin is divisible into 100 million satoshis.

Tron’s blockchain explorer shows that 20 elected block producers dubbed “Super Representatives” had voted in favor of passing the proposal, with seven governance participants yet to vote.

It is worth noting that the fee cut does carry risks, including the potential for net inflation of the TRX token supply if increased transaction volume does not offset the reduced burn rate.

Aave Expands Into Institutional DeFi With Horizon

Aave Labs has launched Horizon, a new platform tailored for institutional borrowers to access stablecoins by borrowing against tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) like U.S. Treasuries and collateralized loan obligations (CLOs).

The platform supports lending in stablecoins like Circle's USDC, Ripple's RLUSD, and Aave's GHO, backed by tokenized assets from partners including Superstate, Circle, VanEck, and WisdomTree.

Horizon will operate on a permissioned instance of Aave V3, integrating Chainlink’s oracle services for real-time asset valuation to ensure loans are sufficiently collateralized.

The launch positions Aave, the largest protocol with $39 billion in Total Value Locked (TVL), as a key player in institutional DeFi.

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• 💥 Over 70,000 wallets lost a combined $8.2 million trading the Ye-linked YZY token, with insiders capturing million-dollar gains while most retail holders were left nursing losses of under $1,000 each.

• 🪙 Spot Ether ETFs pulled in $1.83 billion in just five trading days—ten times Bitcoin’s haul—as ETH funds now approach $10 billion in inflows since July, reflecting Wall Street’s growing tilt toward Ethereum’s broader use cases.

• 🇭🇰🚫 A top Hong Kong regulator and a lawmaker abruptly withdrew from the Bitcoin Asia 2025 conference after being advised not to appear alongside Eric Trump, to avoid signaling political alignment with his father’s presidency.

• 📊 The U.S. CFTC adopted Nasdaq’s market surveillance tools to strengthen its ability to spot manipulation and fraud in crypto markets as Congress weighs granting the understaffed agency broader oversight powers.

• ⚡ Solana’s proposed Alpenglow upgrade is now up for validator voting. It promises to slash block finality times from nearly 13 seconds to 150 milliseconds while improving security and bandwidth efficiency for DeFi and gaming apps.

• 🌍 The Sandbox laid off over half its 250 staff, shut multiple offices, and handed control to Animoca Brands CEO Yat Siu after daily users dwindled to a few hundred and its token collapsed nearly 90% from peak.

• 💵 Finastra, which processes $5 trillion in daily flows for major banks, integrated Circle’s USDC into its payments hub to cut out costly correspondent banking and speed up international settlements for financial institutions.

• 🏦 Canada’s VersaBank began piloting tokenized U.S. dollar deposits (USDVB) on Ethereum, Algorand, and Stellar, touting them as federally insured and interest-bearing alternatives to stablecoins in cross-border transfers.

• 🎲 Former Polymarket and Kalshi staff raised $15 million from Coinbase, USV, and others to launch The Clearing Company, a new prediction platform aiming to outpace incumbents with onchain, regulated betting markets.

• 🤖 Swarm Network raised $13 million—$10 million through NFT “agent licenses” and $3 million from investors like Sui and Ghaf—to expand its decentralized AI protocol that already powers fact-checking tools used by 128,000 people.

• 💴 Japan’s Metaplanet approved an $880 million overseas share sale that could lift its outstanding stock count by 77%, earmarking $835 million for Bitcoin buys to hedge inflation and Japan’s weak yen while expanding its BTC income business.

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