To global CT, altcoin foundations, builders, and farmers: are you waiting for Korean buying power to return? Then please spread this message. Korea is recklessly pushing ahead with crypto taxation without putting investor protections in place. This is making Korean investors hesitant to enter the market, even during a bull run. How bad is it? Korea offers no loss deductions. Foreign exchange gains are generally tax exempt, yet buying USDT with KRW and profiting from exchange rate movements would be taxed. Taxation is being pushed through without ensuring fair treatment across assets and markets. As a result, crypto is currently trading at a discount on Upbit and Bithumb, and the Korean buying power everyone is waiting for is nowhere to be seen. Waiting for the kimchi power to return? Help amplify this message.

Been moving some of my trades over to @variational_io Platform is pretty new and still currently in closed beta. Its a RFQ perps DEX with a strong focus on altcoins. Current Features : - Vol and OI just hit ATH - No points campaign (yet.) - 516 trading pairs - 20-50x Leverage on most pairs - Zero Fees (They earn off spread revenue) - Loss refunds (Really nifty for scalpers like me) Upcoming features : - Spread Discount - Platform Credit - Access to OLP (Based on Trading Vol) Personal Thoughts: - The platform have improved tremendously since i last tried it a few months back. - The ability to use high leverage on many altcoin pairings is pretty capital efficient - Still pretty early stages of the platform but vol is picking up pretty rapidly - Current reward tiers + perks offers pretty sticky benefits to traders. - Loss refunds is pretty sick. Especially for the smaller traders. - Speaking to @variational_lvs during Token2049 gave me the confidence to really test out the platform extensively over the past week - Access to the OLP once its launched to the public shld be pretty lucrative P.S I'm not invested in @variational_io in any capacity and I'm just sharing my views after testing out the platform. Pretty good product imho. Ref link to those who wants to access the gated product: omni.variational.io/?ref=OMN…

Swapping Out Perpetual Futures with @variational_lvs My guest in this episode is Lucas Scheurmann, co-founder of Variational, which seeks to bring the trillion-dollar OTC derivatives market on chain. This is my second episode on Variational. A little over a year ago I spoke with Lucas's co-founder, Edward Yu. In that time, the mission hasn't changed, but a lot else has. We begin with a re-introduction to the business and its retail-facing platform, Omni. Unlike a central limit order book, where a crowd of competing market makers quote against unknown flow, every trade on Omni is quoted by a single, internal liquidity provider — OLP — through a request-for-quote model that segregates flow. Because OLP knows who it's trading with, it can price retail flow as non-toxic: netting offsetting positions against each other, warehousing what it chooses to keep, and hedging only the residual risk externally. It's a model that let Variational list a long tail of crypto-native assets at competitive spreads, even where on-platform open interest remained thin. The surge in demand for real-world asset exposure on chain has pushed that model in two directions. The first is widening where those hedges can go. Rather than trying to rebuild forty years of traditional market depth on a crypto order book, Variational has built a global network of dealer relationships to tap into it directly. The second is questioning whether the perpetual future is even the right instrument. Perp funding is driven by where the contract trades relative to its index, which makes it volatile and hard to forecast. Variational's answer is a swap: a price-return leg plus an explicit financing leg, priced off short rates — a far more predictable cost of carry for anyone who wants to hold levered exposure for the long haul. And there's currently over a billion dollars of dealer capacity behind it. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Lucas Scheurmann.

One of our key design goals with the upcoming swaps launch is to give it a more institutional feel. Of course, we will keep the perps markets around for those of you with more, ahem, speculative needs. The free market will give you the choice of both! Preventing liquidation cascades Over the years perps have shown to have two soft spots: the reliance on an external oracle (index) price and the snowball effect that comes with liquidations. The $SKHYNIX liquidations were kickstarted by a single erroneous print on the Korea Exchange (KRX) and read into the Hyperliquid oracle. The liquidation sell orders hit the thin orderbooks, moving the mark price down further. The new, lower mark price triggers more liquidations, causing further sell orders to be dumped onto the orderbooks... Eventually one of two things happen: 1) either the mark price goes to 0, clearing out all open interest and putting a permanent halt to the avalanche, or 2) brave liquidity providers realize the price is a bargain and supply enough liquidity on the bid side to absorb the liquidations. Swaps are completely different. There is no index price, except to serve as a visual reference price to where the underlying market is trading. There is only the bid and the ask, with no tethering mechanism to the index price. This would've changed the SKHYNIX situation in two key ways. First, any data errors from the index price oracle don't kickstart the liquidations. Second, orders route directly to TradFi liquidity sources, not the onchain orderbooks! This means moving the mark price requires moving the TradFi market, which has decades of experience in dealing with these types of situations. The main tradeoff with this design is that it requires more trust in traditional financial institutions to keep bid/ask prices in line. The return of the long term holder? If we accept the trust factor, the benefits are clear. Holding perps long term can be a tricky proposition as it requires a) not getting liquidated on wicks as described above and b) managing unpredictable funding rates, which be larger in magnitude than the return of the underlying asset in the first place. Swaps not only have safer liquidation mechanics, but stable financing rates tied to the USD borrow rate. Currently, we anticipate a flat ~4.5% annual financing rate (longs pay shorts). This rate will fluctuate slowly with interest rates and not wildly with PvP supply/demand imbalances like perp markets. We hope to usher in a new class of on-chain users: long term holders of real, productive assets.

Introducing Iris. The first-ever real-time intelligence stack for AI agents. A new era of context-aware agents starts now.