DeFi Dad: The Ethereum Bull Thesis In 2026 (What's New)

**Andy** (0:00)
We are here with DeFi Dad in the studio, guys. Robbie just texted me. I know you guys, if you guys are watching there, he just texted me to be bullish for the sake of his ETH bags. So Robbie, if you're watching this or other ETH bulls, we got the right guy. DeFi Dad's in the house. Great to have you, sir.

**DeFi Dad** (0:17)
Yeah, thanks for having me, Andy. Good to see you.

**Andy** (0:19)
Welcome to New York again. I know you've been very busy doing dad things as you are. A lot of little leagues, so it's good to have you in the city.

**DeFi Dad** (0:25)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think I was joking with you guys yesterday, but I was like running between three different little league games and like gymnastics and lacrosse with the kids. So but I came in New York for at least a day. So it's been great. I went to the ETH conference and I've been just trying to catch some talks and obviously get the pleasure of getting to hang out with you.

**Andy** (0:45)
Yeah, I'm stoked, man. So yeah, I'm stoked. So I was just telling you before we hopped on Edward from the chat. What's up, Rocky? Good to see here. He says, would love for you to compare lighter and hyperliquid a bit more.
Feel like there's some alpha in lighter with its regulatory set up. It has stronger buybacks in terms of its total buybacks per on like a market cap kind of weighted basis, way smaller valuation, but hyperliquids kind of hit this point of no return in terms of global macro, in terms of mainstream awareness. Lighter has not quite got there, seemingly kind of like this one, two punch right now. How do you think about the hyperliquid and lighter as products and as investments in the current space?

**DeFi Dad** (1:30)
Yes, so the advantage for me with lighter, and keep in mind, I'm a positive sun bull here. I'm very bullish on hyperliquid. I'm very bullish on lighter. As much as I think everyone wants to get excited about a smaller market cap, you have to remember that the best part about lighter is that you have an escape hatch to Ethereum. So we have, in my opinion, I think you have this greater security guarantee, whereas there's the argument that hyperliquid, if you listen to the hyperliquid bulls, that it's decentralized enough. I think again, if you were to compare the two, I think one again provides for that guarantee to get back to Ethereum L1, which is lighter, which to me is huge. Most important thing is that I can retrieve my assets.
Whereas with hyperliquid, there's some give and take there. In terms of the market caps, though, I mean, it's as simple as this. Like, I know everybody wants to bet on the smaller market caps, and they want to say that they want to look at the two and say, if this one can one day be valued the same way this one is, it'll be worth that. And so then they look at the market caps and they do the multiple. The one thing you want to pay attention to is, if you use something like DeFi Llama AI, you can ask it to spit out, like, what's the last 30 days in terms of fees on both platforms? Nomadic and I were just looking at this recently. We were kind of hoping that there would be a more obvious difference. Yeah, that it was like, oh my gosh, like, lighter is clearly undervalued. And I do want to just point out, I think it was like hyperliquid is just doing that much more in terms of fees. It was like 20 or 30x the day we were looking at it. So again, like huge opportunity in something that is probably sitting at 1.5 billion, I think is a fully diluted valuation.
I think there's probably some mispricing there though, to like that, having that guarantee to get back to Ethereum.

**Andy** (3:33)
I think that's an unknown thing about lighter. But I think I don't think people are really that aware of the security trade off between the two.

**DeFi Dad** (3:43)
And by the way, I don't mean that as like a knock on hyperliquid. No, but it's just unreal.

**Andy** (3:46)
You've been in this space for a while, right?

**DeFi Dad** (3:48)
Yeah, it's like, you know, like for example, most of us probably never worried about the shared pool model with a money market like Aave.
Many folks didn't consider like what risk was there. But then when you have an incident like what happened, suddenly you go, Oh boy, now I understand what worst case scenario can happen. So again, I'm like fingers crossed. I hope hyper liquid just continues to grow and doesn't experience any sort of setback. But my concern is always like, what if? Just what if something bad goes wrong?