Saffron ETH call spreads will bring tvl to $100m Expanding this to onchain stocks will bring the protocol to $1b tvl Powered by Uniswap and the incredible team by my side

Uniswap just launched StablePair Hook, its first dynamic fee mechanism built specifically for stablecoin pairs, live now on USDC/USDT and USDC/USDG. The problem it solves is simple. A stablecoin pool normally charges the same fee whether the price is sitting right at parity or has drifted off it. When it drifts, arbitrage bots profit off closing that gap and keep most of the value for themselves, LPs barely see any of it. StablePair Hook changes the fee in real time based on how far price has moved from the reference rate and which direction a trade pushes it. Trades that widen the gap pay less. Trades that correct it back toward parity get auctioned off, the fee starts high and falls each block until someone takes it, so LPs capture a share of the correction instead of losing it all to bots. Stablecoin to stablecoin swaps did $43.4 billion on Uniswap last quarter alone, more than the next three onchain venues combined. A fee model built specifically for that volume is a real infrastructure decision, not a small tweak.

I look forward to hosting these two events next week during @kbwofficial 2026 🚤 Two private yacht evenings on the Han River, hosted by @CoveyNetwork × @Saffron × @CryptosBatman EPOCH 1 📅 28 September 🕔 Boarding 17:00 🛥 18:00–21:00 📍Seoul, Han River luma.com/YachtEpoch1 EPOCH 2 📅 2 October 🕔 Boarding 17:00 🛥 18:00–21:00 📍Seoul, Han River luma.com/YachtEpoch2 Food, drinks, music and a curated guest list. Invite only / approval required. See you on the water 🌊

Bitcoin broke above $85,000 today, its highest level since January, continuing a sharp rally that’s carried through the past several days. What’s notable is what didn’t stop it. The Senate blocked the CLARITY Act from advancing last week, a real setback for crypto regulation, and the market barely flinched. Bitwise’s CIO went as far as calling crypto winter over on CNBC this morning, saying this could turn into the strongest bull run the industry’s had. Worth holding two things at once here. The rally is real and broad, ETH, XRP, and most majors are moving with it, not just BTC alone. But crypto’s correlation to the Nasdaq is still sitting around 61%, so a lot of this move is still tied to broader risk appetite, not purely crypto specific conviction. Strongest rally since January. Also still tethered to how stocks are feeling this week. Both true at once.

Welcome to Saffron @fablesfi

A new story starts tomorrow

Robinhood Chain isn’t even 100 days old 👀

Integration with other platforms, especially those that have accretive overlap with the fundamentals of @Saffron's new DeFi primitive, is a core component of our strategy. Saffron is built to become the world's largest liquidity network on top of Uniswap. The ability to earn upfront yield from Uniswap and use that upfront yield in other areas of DeFi is what makes this such a big thing. Here's how this makes sense in English, in particular, for the Lighter integration: LPs on Saffron can use yield from the future to go long an asset they believe in, and want to support. They can short to hedge their position, calculating their exact risk and return profile ahead of time, and observe all future outcomes before making a decision.

Deutsche Bank just confirmed the answer to the question this account raised when Robinhood Chain first launched. Daily chain revenue sat under $200k through mid August. Then it moved fast, nearly $500k on August 29, $1.92M on August 31, $3.38M on September 1, $4.01M on September 2. Five days, $10.8M total, more than double Deutsche Bank's entire prior Q3 estimate for the chain. That's the actual test this account flagged months ago, whether onchain products could create enough real usage to justify Robinhood's distribution advantage, not just carry it. Fee revenue is the cleanest proof of usage there is, people paying to transact, not just holding an account. Worth noting the caveat in Deutsche Bank's own note too, they flagged limited visibility into how durable this run rate actually is. One strong week isn't the same as a new baseline yet.

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The CLARITY Act vote is getting messier right before it happens. Democrats just floated a counteroffer on the bill’s terms, and Coinbase, one of the loudest industry voices pushing for this exact bill, is now threatening to pull its backing if the Senate version doesn’t hold up. An exchange walking away from legislation it lobbied for isn’t posturing. It usually means a specific provision changed enough to matter. Regulatory clarity has been priced into crypto markets for months as close to a certainty. A counteroffer this close to the vote, with a major backer wavering, is the first real sign that certainty was softer than the market assumed. Covey’s take: legislation this close to done has a way of staying “close to done” for longer than markets expect. Worth building for the world where clarity takes another two quarters, not the one where it lands next week.

I think Saffron Finance is one of the more mispriced DeFi infrastructure plays right now. Most people remember @Saffron from 2020. That’s exactly why they’re missing what it has become. The new product is already at $2M+ TVL while still in closed private beta.

The Options Spirit Bomb If everyone copytrades this Then the result will be an insane transfer of wealth From bears to bulls ethereum:native

Ethereum just set October 6 as the target date for Glamsterdam to hit testnet, the next major upgrade after this year’s fork. Testnet first is the whole point. Bugs get caught while nothing real is on the line yet, not after mainnet ships and users are already depending on it. That’s the same logic behind how we work with founders. An embedded team catches the broken assumption in month one, in the repo, before it’s a production incident at 3am. Direction, execution, and capital sitting at the same table means problems get caught earlier, the same way testnet exists to catch what mainnet can’t afford to. Not every protocol upgrade gets that discipline. Most teams either skip the testnet step under pressure to ship, or don’t have anyone in the room senior enough to insist on it.

Ethereum just set October 6 as the target date for Glamsterdam to hit the Sepolia testnet, the next major network upgrade after this year’s earlier fork. Testnet first means production is still months out, this is the stage where actual bugs get found before mainnet ever sees it. Worth watching what changes get flagged here, testnet activity is usually the more honest preview of an upgrade’s real impact than the announcement blog post. Separately, real infrastructure move worth flagging, India’s Demat 2.0 pilot just issued ₹1,025 crore, roughly $123M, in tokenized corporate bonds settled using the RBI’s own digital rupee. That’s a central bank digital currency actually settling a real bond issuance, not a pilot running on a public testnet somewhere. Two different kinds of progress happening the same week, one is crypto native infrastructure maturing, the other is a government building the exact same rails independently. Worth watching whether those two paths stay separate or eventually have to meet.

Casual 2000% fixed APR, and the protocol fees earned from this yield buys back SFI

That’s the part worth sitting with. TVL shrank. Actual usage, measured in fees paid, held up better than the capital sitting in these protocols did. There’s a sharper version of this metric worth knowing too, revenue density, fees generated per dollar of active liquidity rather than per dollar deposited. Across major DeFi protocols, somewhere between 83% and 95% of deposited liquidity sits idle at any given time. A protocol earning $10M in fees off $200M in active liquidity is doing something completely different from one earning $3M off $2B in deposits, even if the second one has the bigger TVL number. Institutional capital evaluating DeFi is already looking at revenue density over raw TVL. Retail mostly isn’t yet.

Direction. Execution. Aligned capital. Most firms give a founder one of those three and call it a relationship. We built Covey around doing all three from the same table, not three separate vendors a founder has to manage and translate between. A founder who has to coordinate their advisor, their engineers, and their investor separately is doing a job that should’ve been ours to begin with.

A hacker just pulled $320M in BTC from the Liquid Network sidechain using a bug in the peg out key. They’re calling themselves white hat and say they’ll give most of it back, once developers prove the bug is actually patched. Nobody agrees on what to call that. Is holding $320M hostage until a fix ships responsible disclosure, or just theft with a better PR strategy? What do you think on this one?

Three DeFi protocols got hit by exploits within the same day this week. Full Sail shut down entirely after a Switchboard oracle exploit drained about $91,000 from three Sui based vaults. Virtue Protocol lost roughly $455,000 to fabricated price liquidations. A Solana AMM called Aquifer took a $2.5 million hit and had to offer a 20% white hat bounty just to get some of it back. Different chains, different teams, same underlying failure. Each one trusted a price feed that could be manipulated faster than the protocol could react to it. Oracle risk gets treated as a checkbox in most audits, one line item among fifty. These three incidents landing on the same day are a reminder it’s usually the line item that actually matters when something breaks. Covey’s take: the protocols that survive long term aren’t the ones with the cleverest mechanism design, they’re the ones that assumed their price feed would eventually be attacked and built for that day specifically.