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Pumpfun's new perps fill on the same Hyperliquid order book, but a taker round trip through the app can cost about twice as much: $19 on $10,000 notional versus $9 going direct.
That's because Pumpfun adds a builder fee on top of Hyperliquid's own. Its fees page says up to 0.05% of notional on every order you submit, whether it opens, adds to or closes a position. Hyperliquid's base taker rate is 0.045%, so at the full builder fee one taker fill through Pumpfun comes to 0.095%, or 0.19% for a round trip.
The pitch is simple: long or short crypto, stocks and commodities straight from a USDC balance, no bridging, with up to 40x on $BTC . Leverage is where the fee line bites. A $10,000 BTC position at 40x needs $250 of margin. Open and close it as a taker on Hyperliquid directly and you pay $9, or 3.6% of that margin. Do the same in the Pumpfun app and it's $19, or 7.6%, before funding.
Resting limit orders don't escape it. Hyperliquid's base maker fee is 0.015%, so the builder fee takes a maker fill to 0.065%, more than four times the direct rate.
Moving money in costs extra too. Pumpfun lists up to 0.25% on each transfer to or from Hyperliquid through its in-app bridge, on top of the bridge operator's own fee. A $250 deposit and withdrawal can run $1.25 before anything trades.
On Hyperliquid's base tier, a $10,000 taker round trip costs $9 direct and up to $19 through Pumpfun, and both fills land on the same order book.

Robinhood booked $173M from prediction-market contracts in Q3 and only $120M from crypto trading, so yes/no bets now earn it more than buying and selling coins does.
The crypto line fell 55% from a year earlier. @RobinhoodApp reported $50B of crypto volume for the quarter, down 38%. Meanwhile customers traded 16.4B event contracts, and each one pays out $1 if it's right.
The per-dollar math is why prediction markets matter so much to them. $173M over 16.4B contracts is about 1 cent of revenue per contract. If you put $100 into contracts priced at 50 cents, you're holding 200 of them, which is roughly $2 for Robinhood. Crypto brought in about 0.24% of volume, so the same $100 of spot earns it around 24 cents. That 0.24% blends in volume from its Bitstamp exchange, so the rate on the app alone is higher than that.
Robinhood CFO Shiv Verma told @CNBC that contracts on crypto price moves did well. REX Financial research head Bill Birmingham told @Reuters these look like the same active traders finding a second outlet. At those averages, a trader who swaps a spot buy for a bet on $BTC 's direction pays Robinhood about 8 times more per dollar.

Robinhood Chain's daily DEX volume has dropped 79% from its peak of $3.67 billion on September 4. Yet the $1.13 billion parked on the chain has barely moved. Robinhood reports third-quarter results after the US close today, October 27. Before that, I pulled the numbers myself from DefiLlama, the Morpho API, Merkl's reward data and the chain's own RPC to see what's actually holding that money in place.
The short version is that most of it isn't trading capital and it isn't stock-token credit either. About $323 million sits in a single lending market where roughly a hundred wallets borrow USDG against USDe at an average 89% loan-to-value, and two reward campaigns pay them and their lenders about $96,000 a day to stay. All figures below come from a snapshot taken around 19:45 Taipei time (11:45 UTC) on October 27 unless I say otherwise.
Trading on Robinhood Chain has shrunk in six of the last seven weeks
Robinhood Chain is the Ethereum layer-2 network that @RobinhoodCrypto took to public mainnet on July 1, built on Arbitrum's stack and pitched as a home for tokenized stocks and DeFi.
Its decentralized exchanges had a huge late summer. DefiLlama's chain page shows daily DEX volume topping out at $3.67 billion on September 4, and the week of August 31 to September 6 cleared $18.2 billion. Cumulative volume passed $100 billion on October 9 and now stands near $121.9 billion.
Since that week the curve has gone one way with a single pause. Weekly volume fell to $14.1 billion and then $11.0 billion. It kept sliding to $6.4 billion in the week of October 5, ticked up once, and dropped to $5.4 billion for the week of October 19 to 25.
The last 30 days produced $29.7 billion of DEX volume. That's 46.6% less than the 30 days before. On October 26 the chain did $758 million, about a fifth of the peak day.
Fees followed the same path. The chain's apps earned $101.8 million in fees over the last 30 days. Uniswap's V4 exchange alone took about $37.9 million of that. A launchpad called Pons came second with about $20.7 million. That's still real money, but it's a trading economy that has cooled for two months.
Lending, not trading, holds most of the chain's money
Total value locked tells a different story. TVL, the dollar value of assets deposited in a chain's apps, went from $174 million in mid-July to $529 million a month later. It reached $930 million by mid-September and a record $1.153 billion on October 22. It's at $1.128 billion today, 2% below that high, while trading volume sits roughly 80% below its own high.
The split by app explains why the two lines don't move together. Morpho Blue, the lending protocol run by @Morpho, accounts for $617.5 million, or 55% of the chain's TVL. Uniswap V4 holds $174.7 million and the perps venue Lighter holds $116.4 million. DefiLlama also lists the Steakhouse vault at $544.3 million, but that vault deposits into Morpho, so adding the two would count the same dollars twice.
Stablecoins tell the same story from another angle. The chain's stablecoin supply is $1.082 billion, almost unchanged from $1.069 billion on September 20, even as weekly trading volume roughly halved over the same stretch. USDG, the Global Dollar stablecoin that Robinhood's products use, makes up $679 million of it, and Ethena's USDe makes up $369 million. Money that doesn't leave when trading slows usually has another reason to stay, and on this chain that reason is lending yield.
One stablecoin market carries two-thirds of all borrowing
Morpho works as a set of isolated markets. Each one pairs a single collateral token with a single loan token, a fixed liquidation threshold called LLTV (the loan-to-value ratio at which a position can be liquidated), and one price oracle. On Robinhood Chain the Morpho API shows $546.1 million supplied and $489.5 million borrowed across all markets.
The biggest market by far lends USDG against USDe collateral with a 91.5% LLTV. It has $360.5 million of USDG supplied and $323.4 million borrowed, so 89.7% of the lendable USDG is out on loan. Borrowers have posted $363.1 million of USDe as collateral. Lenders earn 3.81% a year and borrowers pay 4.25%. That one market is 66% of all Morpho borrowing on the chain, and it was created on June 9, three weeks before the public mainnet opened.
The next three markets also lend USDG against other dollar tokens. Borrowers owe $122.2 million against syrupUSDG, $30.1 million against mGLO and $11.0 million against spUSDG.
The stock-token markets get most of the headlines. Morpho and Robinhood made Robinhood Stock Tokens usable as collateral on October 22, with NVDA and SPCX at a 62.5% LLTV and SPY at 77%. Five days in, the API shows about $3.9 million of stock tokens posted and about $1.7 million borrowed against them. NVDA leads with $1.41 million of collateral, and borrowing rates on the four largest stock markets run from 24% to 35% a year. Stock-token loans are about 0.35% of the chain's Morpho borrowing today, which is a fair start for five days but nowhere near what's holding the TVL up.
About a hundred wallets run that market at 89% loan-to-value
Who's on each side of the USDe market matters more than the market's size. On the supply side, 99.9% of the $360.5 million comes from a single address, the market adapter of the Steakhouse USDG vault run by @SteakhouseFi. That vault holds $544.7 million in total, so about two-thirds of it is lent into this one market. The vault also carries a Merkl reward campaign labeled "Robinhood Users Only," and deposits for that campaign are made through the Robinhood app.
The borrowing side is much narrower. The API lists 991 positions in the market, but only 104 of them owe more than $1, and the rest are empty or leftover dust. The largest borrower owes $78.8 million against $88.6 million of USDe, which is 24.4% of all the debt in the market. The top five hold 66.0% of the debt and the top ten hold 88.5%. The four largest are plain wallets rather than smart contracts, since an RPC check returns no contract code at those addresses.
The leverage is tight. Weighted by debt, the average borrower sits at 89.2% loan-to-value against the 91.5% liquidation line. About 84% of the debt sits in positions at 88% LTV or higher. More than a quarter of it, 27%, is at 90% or higher. For the largest borrower, USDe would need to be priced about 2.8% below USDG before the position became liquidatable. For the debt-weighted average, the gap is about 2.5%.
Two reward campaigns turn a thin spread into double-digit returns
Borrowing at 4.25% against a stablecoin that pays nothing on its own wouldn't make sense without outside money. USDe itself doesn't earn yield; only staked USDe does. The extra money comes from Merkl, a service that distributes reward campaigns on behalf of protocols and token issuers.
The first campaign pays people who post USDe as collateral in this market. It's capped at 5% a year on the collateral's value, which works out to about $49,700 a day on $363.1 million, paid in USDe. Its funder, a single address, has topped it up in weekly rounds since early July, starting at 160,000 USDe a week.
For three straight weeks the round was 341,609 USDe. The round running from October 23 to October 30 is 459,589 USDe, 34.5% larger. The campaign page says "No borrowing required," but positions that post collateral and borrow less than $1 hold only about $111,000 in total.
The second campaign pays the lenders. Depositors in the Steakhouse USDG vault earn 3.20% a year on top in steakUSDG, about $46,000 a day on the $526.1 million that Merkl counts. That campaign was funded with 100 million steakUSDG for July 1, 2026 to July 1, 2027, plus a second 15-million round. Add the vault's own 3.80% net yield and a depositor sees about 7.0%, which matches the "estimated 7% APY" Robinhood quoted for its Robinhood Earn lending product at launch.
The borrower math is simple once the rewards are in. Take $100 of USDe posted at 89% LTV. The borrower owes $89 of USDG at 4.25%, which costs about $3.78 a year. The 5% reward on the collateral pays $5.00 a year. That leaves about $1.22 on roughly $11 of the borrower's own money, close to 11% a year before swap costs and before the borrow rate moves.
Getting to 89% LTV usually means looping, which is swapping the borrowed USDG back into USDe and posting it again several times. I didn't trace every wallet's swaps, but that's the standard way a small group of wallets ends up carrying this much debt.
Lenders carry the depeg risk, and a 16-hour timer decides when it lands
The oracle is the part I'd want any USDG depositor to understand. I read it straight from the chain. The market's oracle is a clone of Steakhouse's MetaOracleDeviationTimelock, a design that switches between two price sources. The primary source returns a fixed price of exactly 1 USDe per USDG. The backup reads a feed labeled "USDE / USD," which showed $0.9996 at my snapshot.
The switch isn't automatic. The backup only takes over if the two prices differ by more than 0.5%, someone calls the contract's challenge function, and the gap is still there after 57,600 seconds, which is 16 hours. Switching back to the fixed price needs another 24 hours of prices staying close. Until a challenge clears, the market values USDe at $1 no matter where it trades.
There's a good reason for this design, and October 10, 2025 shows it. During that crash USDe printed as low as $0.65 on Binance, whose own order book fed its oracle, while Curve's pools stayed within about 0.3% of a dollar. Binance later compensated users whose USDe collateral was liquidated between 21:36 and 22:16 UTC. A fixed-price oracle with a 16-hour challenge window would've ignored that 40-minute wick completely, and @ethena founder Guy Young said at the time that money markets pricing USDe off the deepest liquidity wouldn't have liquidated anyone.
The cost shows up in a slower, real depeg. If USDe traded 3% below a dollar for a full day, borrowers in this market couldn't be liquidated for at least 16 hours, and after the switch most of the debt would sit above the 91.5% line at once. Liquidators would then have to sell a large amount of USDe into a market that's already weak. Any shortfall from that would land on the suppliers, and 99.9% of the supply comes from the vault that Robinhood users deposit into. Robinhood described the Earn product's insurance as covering losses from cyber or smart-contract exploits, and a price depeg isn't that.
The more ordinary risk is that the rewards change. Without the 5% collateral reward, the same $100 position earns nothing and still owes $3.78 a year, so the loop flips to a loss. If borrowers unwind, the vault's lending income from its largest market goes with them. Withdrawals can also bunch up. The vault shows $40.0 million of idle liquidity, 7.4% of its assets, and the market itself is 89.7% lent out.
A three-step check works on any chain's TVL record
None of this needs a paid tool, and the same steps work on any chain that's announcing a TVL record.
First, open the chain's TVL page and the DEX volume page side by side. If TVL keeps climbing while volume falls, the money is staying for a reason other than trading.
Second, open the lending protocol's market list and sort by borrowed amount. If one market holds most of the debt, check how many positions actually borrow, what share the top ten hold and how close the weighted LTV sits to the LLTV.
Third, look up the market's oracle address and read it. A fixed price behind a challenge timer is a reasonable design for stablecoin pairs, but it tells you who carries a slow depeg. Then check the reward pages for the same market, because a campaign that pays more than the borrow rate is often the reason the market exists in its current size.
On Robinhood Chain, the market to start with is 0xc845…cddd6, and its oracle address is 0xE648…055f.
The record TVL measures paid stablecoin carry more than trading
Put together, the numbers don't say Robinhood Chain is empty. DEX users still cleared $5.4 billion of volume last week, and the stock-token loans are a five-day-old product that's already being used. What the numbers do show is that the chain's TVL mostly measures how much stablecoin carry two reward budgets hold in place, and much less how much trading or stock-token credit the chain has attracted. Any mention of that record on today's earnings call would mostly be describing the USDe market.
The two campaigns pay about $96,000 a day together, close to $35 million a year at today's rates, against about $1.7 million of stock-token borrowing. The current USDe round of 459,589 USDe ends at 00:00 UTC on October 30.

Barclays, American Express and Kroger announced more than 11,000 job cuts between them this month, and BTC has barely moved off $80,000. The old playbook says weak jobs news brings rate cuts and rate cuts lift crypto. Right now that chain is stuck at the first link.
Look at who's cutting and why. @Barclays put 5,000 cuts into its Q3 results on Oct 22, with about 60% of them in support functions that include developers. A day later @AmericanExpress said it would trim about 5% of its roughly 77,000 staff, and its CFO said the goal was to get leaner and prepare for AI. Kroger's 3,000 head office jobs go over three years. Both banks reported solid profits that same week, so they're moving payroll into automation while customers keep spending.
The Fed sees it the same way. It raised its target range to 3.75% to 4.00% on Sept 16, and September CPI then came in at 3.7%. Futures price about a 90% chance of a hold this Wednesday and roughly three-in-four odds of a December hike. With inflation that high, the bond market reads AI layoffs as cost cuts rather than collapsing demand, so they don't pull rate expectations lower or hand BTC a liquidity tailwind. Challenger's September report backs that up, since announced cuts were the lowest for the month since 2022 while planned hiring was the weakest since 2011. The September data shows a hiring freeze more than a firing wave.
Crypto companies sit inside the same trend. The Singapore exchange run by Kris Marszalek cut about 12% of its staff in March, and he tied the move to AI. Block let go of more than 4,000 people in February for the same stated reason.
Weekly jobless claims for the week ending Oct 24 come out Thursday, the day after the Fed decides, with forecasts around 196,000 against 194,000 the prior week. A print near that would mean these layoffs still aren't turning into unemployment filings, which leaves the December hike priced and gives crypto no rate-cut story to trade on.

Hyperliquid handed out 310 million HYPE, 31% of its supply, in its November 2024 genesis airdrop. Under the SEC's current airdrop guidance, an airdrop like that still isn't clearly covered, and @HyperliquidPC wants that fixed in rule text.
In its Oct 19 letter on the proposed Regulation Crypto Assets, the policy center led by Jake Chervinsky made five asks, and the airdrop one comes first. The SEC's March 2026 interpretation already says there's no "investment of money" when recipients give nothing for a token, but it only covers drops that weren't announced before the tokens went out. A points season that's public for months, where people keep trading because they know a token is coming, falls outside that wording.
HPC wants the test to be whether the recipient gave up "tangible and definable consideration," the standard from a 1979 Supreme Court case, not when the team made its announcement. Its conditions are that the network already works, rewards track the user's own activity, and the drop isn't a capital raise. It also lists steps that shouldn't count as payment: connecting a wallet, signing a claim, paying gas, accepting terms, attesting to eligibility, and passing sanctions, anti-money-laundering or geographic screening.
That's a long way from 2018, when @SECGov treated Tomahawk's "free" bounty tokens as a securities sale because the company got online promotion in return. Back then, doing promotional work in exchange for tokens was enough to count as payment.
The other four asks cover secondary trading outside broker and exchange rules, a safe harbor that doesn't force a project to admit its token was once a security, written rules for programmatic buybacks, and state preemption that doesn't end the moment a project qualifies for that safe harbor.
Not everyone's on board. On Oct 16, former SEC enforcement official John Reed Stark and Duke's Lee Reiners asked the agency to withdraw the whole proposal and warned it would invite a court challenge. Comments closed on Oct 20, and the SEC hasn't set a date for a vote.
If the final rule keeps the "unannounced only" limit, would teams drop public points programs, or would they just stop announcing what the points are for?