This week, one of my personal idols shared a quote on X that I really liked. More importantly, it closely reflects how I’ve been approaching every investment decision myself.

The idea Ray Dalio was conveying is this: “Treat every decision as a bet with probabilities and payoffs if you’re right, and probabilities and penalties if you’re wrong. A good decision is one with positive expected value, meaning the probability-weighted reward exceeds the probability-weighted loss. The best decision is the one with the highest expected value.”

Of course, reward, penalty, and probability are not numbers you can just make up based on preference. They must be grounded in concrete factors and reasoning. This part deserves a much deeper discussion, and it’s also the core theme of today’s piece.

On that note, I’m sharing an article by Cobie, the first place where I personally learned how to apply probabilistic thinking to investing.

Now, back to the main topic.

Trump and Xi have agreed to meet. That, in essence, sums up this week’s narrative: vague good news intertwined with bad news.

However, because of the neutral factors listed above (which are positive in the short term but potentially problematic if prolonged), I’m left with one key question:

How much higher can the market realistically go?

Objectively, markets have been rising since December 2022, driven primarily by a single dominant narrative: the monetary debasement trade, following the Fed’s pivot toward rate cuts.

Markets cannot rise indefinitely on a single driver. More precisely, it’s very difficult for one factor alone to continuously push markets higher.

So the question becomes: Is there anything beyond monetary debasement?

My conclusion is: yes, but not strongly or clearly enough yet.

That factor is the development of the real economy, which could counter two major fears: recession and an AI bubble. However, real economic growth is currently being pulled in opposite directions by trade tensions, a weak labor market, and tightening consumer spending.

As a result, capital flows back into risk assets perceived as long-term hedges against currency debasement. This explains why U.S. stock markets today are supported nearly 70% by technology and AI-related stocks.

A few months ago, I shared my view on where the market stands: Upslope, Peak, or Bottom?
At the time, my answer was that we were definitely not at the peak yet.

Looking ahead, if rate cuts continue but the negative factors above remain unchanged, the monetary debasement trade may no longer be able to stand on its own.

In that scenario, we may indeed be closer to the top than the bottom of the cycle.

That doesn’t mean you should try to call the exact top. Even if the market is closer to a peak, no one knows how long it can continue climbing before a true downtrend begins. It could run for several more months, or even another one to two quarters.

Even when a fire is already burning, more fuel can always be added before the firefighters arrive.

I am not bearish on the market yet.

Identifying that we may be closer to the top than the bottom is about becoming more cautious during future drawdowns. This is very different from the mindset I had months ago, when every dip felt like an automatic buying opportunity.

This is simply my personal perspective based on observation and experience.

HIP-3 has officially gone live, further intensifying the competition between DEX and CEX.

If Uniswap represented a “Netscape moment” for DeFi, then Hyperliquid could be seen as the next “Facebook or YouTube moment” that pushes DeFi closer to mass adoption.

In simple terms, HIP-3 is an upgrade that allows any builder, not just the Hyperliquid team, to list tokens. By staking 500,000 $HYPE, builders can launch their own Perpetual markets, with customizable oracles, fees, and up to 50% revenue sharing.

Each newly created market adds liquidity, trading fees, and staking demand for $HYPE, strengthening protocol revenue, buybacks, and token economics simultaneously.

At a market-wide level, HIP-3 could democratize market creation, shifting speculation away from centralized venues like Binance or Bybit, and enabling markets such as pre-IPO perps, commodities, and financial indices.

It also fuels the ongoing debate: Will Binance and other CEX gradually lose dominance? Should listing fees eventually trend toward zero?

Tokenomics is one of the most controversial topics in crypto. Projects want to retain supply to fund long-term development (assuming good faith), while communities generally want as much supply as possible in their own hands, expecting projects to simply pump price.

At its core, tokenomics is a story about trust.

Believe is a platform that allows coin creation through a simple tag on X. Its rise was accompanied by a wave of memecoin launches, many with lifespans of less than a week. As a result, Believe’s image was already questionable in the eyes of many.

When trust is still fragile, the product is immature, and sustainable revenue has yet to be proven, Believe’s proposal to mint an additional 25% supply to fund development was almost guaranteed to spark controversy.

Shortly after the announcement, the Believe token dropped 23%.

Weekly DEX volume on Base reached a new all-time high of $15 billion. Last week, daily volume peaked at $3.3 billion during the record liquidation event.

Perpetual trading and content creator coins from Zora were the primary drivers of capital flow on Base.

Memecoin activity on Solana has dropped sharply, from 62% of trading volume to just over 7%.

This is both a stress test and an opportunity for Solana to prove that memecoin were merely a temporary phenomenon, and that the chain offers much more than just “meme coin.”

In stark contrast to Base and Solana, BNB Chain is currently following the same path Solana took about a year ago. Memecoin now account for more than 88% of total trading volume on the ecosystem.

You can revisit this article where Ivy shared perspectives on memecoin on BNB Chain.

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