From fixing broken casino games to Head of DeFi at one of the most bespoke curators in the space. In January, his team was the first curator out of a failing market on Base. Their depositors took zero bad debt, while other parties got hit. Their next mandate: grow Cardano's TVL by a quarter billion dollars. Join @EricWaisanen & @snj_peters to learn everything about how @alphagrowth1 curates risk, survives blowups, and builds ecosystems. Topics covered: 00:00 — Intro & what Alpha Growth is 01:00 — Economic philosophy, casinos & game theory 03:02 — Card counting is investing: fixing games for the house 04:44 — January on Base: first curator out, zero bad debt 06:06 — Security vs scalability & coming through October 10th clean 06:57 — Becoming Euler's house curator & the numbers that didn't add up 08:28 — Bespoke curation vs off-the-shelf formulas (and how those get gamed) 11:14 — "There's lots of fugazi in the ecosystem" 12:14 — Insurance, tranching & the first liquidation-insured money markets 14:05 — We made DeFi too efficient: the race to zero killed deal flow 15:54 — Morpho's curators: the middlemen re-injected 16:45 — Who should pay for risk ratings? The DeFi mullet answer 18:45 — Why rating vaults is hard: different builds, janky oracles 20:50 — One outlier and your whole methodology is doubted 23:21 — "Our grade was low, and we totally understood": off-chain deals & OpenFi 24:52 — Who curates the curator? Conflicts of interest in max-extract mode 27:03 — Off-chain NAV: monthly is unacceptable, per-block is the goal 30:01 — The Cardano Prime mandate: a general contractor for a whole chain 33:51 — Nested transactions & UTXO: what Cardano can do that others can't 35:13 — Hurdle rates: buying TVL without overpaying mercenary capital 40:58 — Should Ethereum cut staking yield? An economic philosopher answers 43:22 — DAOs, prediction-market governance & tools of freedom
Livestream: Xerberus x @alphagrowth1 Tomorrow at 3pm EST / 8pm UK @EricWaisanen, Chief Strategy Officer at AlphaGrowth, joins Xerberus co-founder @snj_peters to talk vault risk, regulation, and what it takes to deploy treasury capital safely. For those new to them: AlphaGrowth is the official growth team of Compound DAO. They take protocols and ecosystems from idle treasuries to deployed capital: incentive programs, lending markets, vault strategies. Compound, Arbitrum, Base and Near are on the client list. That work puts them on the sharp end of the questions we care about. When you route serious capital into vaults, whose job is it to know what can break, and what will regulators expect you to have checked? Drop your questions below, and see you there.
$34.0 billion in TVL tracked across 92 vault protocols, and risk ratings are moving in next to the yields. @TradingProtocol now shows Xerberus ratings on their vault rankings: 24 protocols carry a Dendrogram score from 0 to 100 so far, including Aave, Morpho, Ethena, Spark and Euler. Vault risk is the question we built that score for. More coverage to come.
EIP-8361 is being debated as monetary policy. Our dependency graph says it is also infrastructure policy for DeFi. We ran percolation analysis on every on-chain dependency in Ethereum DeFi, roughly 12,200 building blocks. Two findings matter for this debate: 1. Remove 1% of the network at random and connectivity barely moves (90.5% to 89.4%). Remove the top 1% of hubs instead and the connected web collapses to 21.3%. The system is robust to chaos and fragile to anything that lands on the hubs. 2. The hubs do not back each other up. Assortativity is negative (−0.24) and the rich-club coefficient falls to zero at the top. Each hub stands alone. Now look at what the hubs are. In our live systemic-token ranking, five of the top eleven are ETH liquid staking tokens. wstETH alone sits under roughly $1.6B of potential forced-sell pressure from positions that use it as collateral. Staking yield is the gravity that built that layer. Every leveraged staking loop, every wstETH lending market, every restaking wrapper prices off it. EIP-8361 would cut net consensus yield from about 2.6% to 1.2% today, and to zero if half of ETH ends up staked. There are many valid arguments on Ethereum issuance policy. The following is not one, but a view on potential systemic risk of the proposed policy. The debate so far weighs stakers' revenue against ETH's monetary premium, and the dependency graph adds a third item to the ledger: DeFi's collateral layer is concentrated in yield-bearing ETH wrappers with no redundant backbone behind them. Changing the economics of that yield changes the load on the load-bearing walls. Which walls, exactly? We ranked every building block by that question. That list is in Part 4, out next. The percolation analysis behind this post is Part 3, linked below: https://t.co/rA6wouAHHN
A strong framing from @R2D2zen, and the closing line is one we can measure: “DeFi is splitting at the surface, but becoming more connected underneath.” In our 24 June snapshot of Ethereum mainnet, 96% of 14,607 building blocks belonged to a single connected network. Just 146 of them, the top 1%, carried 55% of all dependencies. Consumer apps and institutional rails may serve different users, but underneath they often rely on the same small group of critical hubs. That changes how risk should be understood. As interfaces become better at hiding the infrastructure, analysing risk becomes less about what the product looks like and more about the dependency map beneath it. Consumer or institutional, every position inherits the network it depends on. We explored that network in a recent series, starting with what a DeFi dependency graph actually is: https://t.co/dGluZL1iCn