The Hidden Costs of Scaling Blockchains

How Tranching Turns Yield Into Tradable Markets Without Liquidations

🎙️What if leverage did not require liquidations at all and yield became something you can actually trade in real time? In this episode, Alex sits down with Alan from Covenant Finance to unpack a different way to think about DeFi markets. Instead of isolated positions and liquidation driven risk, Covenant treats risk like a banking system does through tranching, turning the “equity side” into a fungible leverage token that anyone can hold and trade. Alan connects this to how banks create liquidity on top of long duration assets, and why tranching can be a cleaner mental model for crypto yield markets. They also go deep on the mechanics that make Covenant feel “self balancing” including how the market targets specific leverage ratios, why yield changes create instant trading opportunities, and how denomination choices change the need for fast oracles like Pyth (and potentially Chainlink streams). The conversation lands on the most eye opening part: Covenant’s leverage design can avoid the liquidation game entirely, which reframes how people think about safety, solvency, and “robust leverage” on chain. Host: Alex Watts X: ⁠@ThogardPvP⁠ [https://x.com/ThogardPvP] Founder&CEO at ⁠@0xFastLane⁠ [https://x.com/0xFastLane] Guest: Alan Hampton X: ⁠ [https://x.com/0x70626a]@ahampt0n [https://x.com/ahampt0n] Founder & CEO at ⁠ [https://x.com/PerplTrade]@covenantFi

Inside Perpl - The Trading Tournament and Mainnet Secrets Every User Should Know

🎙️What happens when a DeFi protocol turns its launch into a global competition? In this episode, Alex sits down with PBJ, co founder of Perpl, to share everything happening as they move toward mainnet. This includes a high stakes testnet trading tournament with real prizes, possibly even PBJ’s car. PBJ also explains how Perpl is reimagining on chain trading by opening up their market making SDKs, releasing example bots in Rust, and creating a permissionless playground where anyone can experiment, compete, and build. Listeners will hear what to expect in the coming weeks, how developers can get hands on with the tools right now, and the mainnet secrets early users should not miss. Whether you are a trader, a developer, or someone curious about the future of on chain markets, Perpl wants you to jump in, try the product, and get on chain. Host: Alex Watts X: ⁠@ThogardPvP⁠ [https://x.com/ThogardPvP] Founder&CEO at ⁠@0xFastLane⁠ [https://x.com/0xFastLane] Guest: PBJ X: ⁠@0x70626a⁠ [https://x.com/0x70626a] Founder & CEO at ⁠@PerplTrade⁠ [https://x.com/PerplTrade]

The Hidden Costs of Scaling Blockchains

🎙️What happens when the economics of blockchains collide with their technical limits? In this episode, Alex Watts sits down with Max Resnick, Lead Economist at Anza, to explore the invisible costs of scaling blockchains. They dive into state rent, compression, and validator incentives—unpacking why memory growth and transaction propagation are not just engineering challenges but economic design choices. Listeners will learn how censorship resistance both empowers and complicates MEV, why inactive state is the hidden bottleneck for performance, and what compression and broadcast innovations like vector commitments and Turbine mean for the next generation of performant, censorship-resistant networks. Follow Us: Host: Alex Watts X: @ThogardPvP Founder&CEO at FastLane Labs; Guest: Max Resnick X: @maxresnick1 Lead Economist for Anza (Solana) @Anza_xyz

Intents, Privacy, and Building the Anoma OS with Apriori

🎙️ Exploring Anoma, where intents guide the system and users choose what to reveal. What if a blockchain worked more like an operating system than a ledger? And what if instead of submitting transactions you could simply express your intent and let the network figure out how to make it happen? In this episode of The Endofunctor, host Alex Watt sits down with Apriori (Patrick) from Anoma to explore a project that is trying to rebuild crypto infrastructure from the ground up. The conversation traces the origins of Anoma and the design of an intent based system that puts privacy and composability at its core. Patrick explains why Anoma talks about “shielded computation” rather than privacy, how programmable disclosure lets users decide what to reveal and when, and why building the right developer and user experience matters as much as the cryptography underneath. Along the way we get a glimpse into the philosophy and personal history that shape his work, from long hours wrestling with accounting homework to the role of meaning in good product design. Whether you are a developer, a founder, or simply curious about where the next generation of blockchain ideas might lead, this episode offers a grounded look at the thinking behind Anoma.

Building the Next-Gen DEX — Kuru’s Journey to Becoming Monad’s Liquidity Hub

🎙️What does it take to build a decentralized exchange that trades with the speed of a CEX, but the fairness of DeFi? In this episode, Rohan, co-founder of Kuru, breaks down how his team is designing one of the first fully onchain orderbook DEXs on Monad — and why this chain’s unique performance opens up a new design space for trading. Kuru’s mission is clear: create a trading venue that is capital efficient, MEV-resistant, and user-friendly. They’re introducing concentrated liquidity and cross-margining so liquidity providers can put their capital to work more effectively while traders benefit from tighter spreads and deeper books. But they’re not stopping at the orderbook. With the launch of their aggregator, Kuru is building the connective tissue for Monad’s DeFi stack — routing trades across multiple venues, reducing fragmentation, and moving toward becoming the true liquidity hub of the ecosystem. Kuru also collaborates with FastLane to tackle one of DeFi’s thorniest issues: MEV protection. By aligning validators with traders and designing orderflow that minimizes predatory extraction, they’re creating a trading environment where fairness is built in, not bolted on. Add to this their work on slippage controls, low-latency execution, and composability with other Monad dApps, and you get a vision for DeFi markets that are faster, smoother, and more accessible than ever. This conversation isn’t just about building an orderbook. It’s about how Kuru is re-engineering market structure, incentives, and user experience — and why they believe Monad is the perfect foundation for the next generation of onchain trading. Follow Us: Host: Alex Watts, Founder&CEO at FastLane Labs; Twitter: @ThogardPvP https://x.com/ThogardPvP [https://x.com/ThogardPvP] Guest: Rohan Shrothrium Co-founder of @KuruExchange X handle: @0xtrojan_