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As the market gets more volatile, even degen traders are questioning what level of risk they're willing to stomach. Today's Issue ⬇️ - ☀️ Need to Know: Withdrawals Freeze
A crypto lender raises alarms. - ✍️ Cheat Sheet: Social Trading
Premium-only opps, reads, yields, and airdrops. - 🗣️ Deep Dive: Traders Rethink Perps
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. . . NEED TO KNOW Withdrawals Freeze - 🧊 Crypto Lender BlockFills Freezes Withdrawals and Deposits. It's possibly the first institutional crypto credit casualty of this market cycle.
- 🎊 Payments Processor Stripe Acquihires PartyDAO Team. The party may be over for the PartyDAO product, but its team is headed to Stripe.
- 👻 Aave Labs Wants $33M from DAO for Product Revenue Rights. Aave Labs is seeking one-quarter of the DAO's cash reserves for future product rights.
📸 Daily Market Snapshot: A week after a brutal market crash hit crypto traders, recovered prices are sinking back toward lows. | Prices as of 5pm ET | 24hr | 7d |  | Crypto $2.27T | ↘ 1.7% | ↗ 3.2% |  | BTC $65,987 | ↘ 2.3% | ↗ 3.3% |  | ETH $1,932 | ↘ 1.3% | ↗ 3.4% | . . . CHEAT SHEET Social Trading Once a week, Premium subscribers get access to the top Market Plays, Hot Reads, Farming Opps, and Airdrop Hunts that our analyst team is tracking! Don't miss out! 👇 . . . PLAY OF THE WEEK Why Some Traders Are Rethinking Perpetuals Crypto’s 10/10 market massacre wasn’t a fluke. It was a warning. The crypto industry remains torn about who or what is to blame for the now-infamous liquidation flash crash that occurred four months ago on October 10, but if there was one definitive takeaway to be gleaned, it’s that perps are not safe under severe stress. On that fateful day, many crypto exchanges that offer perpetual futures – including both Binance and Hyperliquid – forcibly “auto-deleveraged” their traders, refusing to pay out on profitable positions in an effort to preserve solvency. Today, we’re exploring the problematic nature of perpetual futures and examining time-tested alternatives to leverage with less venue risk. The Perpetual ProblemPerpetual futures may not have been invented by crypto, but they’ve been fully embraced and scaled by the industry. In many ways, perpetuals have become the defining trading instrument of crypto: always on, globally accessible, extremely liquid, and never expiring. They allow traders to magnify their exposure to the price fluctuations of an asset, and while maximum leverage varies depending on a number of factors, exchanges often enable traders to amplify their position size with hundreds of times more money than they put down. Perpetuals also operate in a regulatory void. Unlike traditional markets – where the intermediation of a regulated and independent clearinghouse is required – these markets are self-policed, overseen by a single profit-motivated exchange that acts as counterparty to every trade placed through its platform. There are no standardized leverage caps, no uniform margin requirements, no mandatory disclosures, and no universal risk mitigation policies. Traders must simply trust that their exchange is appropriately managing risk in real time. Crypto exchanges with too much risk can experience sudden solvency stress when volatility spikes; October 10 served as a demonstration of the systemic vulnerabilities that can accumulate in the absence of proper oversight and controls. On that fateful Friday – with BTC open interest elevated at historic highs and positive funding rates suggesting stretched longs – an unexpected crypto market crash persisted into the low liquidity post-close trading session, sparking a liquidation cascade into already stressed order books that sent some altcoin prices to literal zero. In lieu of realizing potentially enormous losses, many perpetual futures exchanges (as per their terms of service) decided to forcibly close short positions and nullify trader payouts under the guise of “auto-deleveraging.” While exchanges can protect their own solvency and profits through auto-deleveraging, the decision comes at the direct cost of users. This dynamic embeds uncertainty at the core of unregulated and opaque perpetual markets, begging the question: why trade on an exchange where profit is conditional? The AlternativesAs financial instruments, perpetual futures are not inherently flawed. Their main problems revolve around the venue risk created for traders by opaque balance sheets, blackbox risk engines, and limited protections against insolvency. When volatility spikes, traders depend on their hedges paying out as anticipated, and fortunately, multiple alternatives do exist... FRIEND & SPONSOR: FIGURE Use Figure’s Democratized Prime for your chance to win big with $25k USDC. The more you participate, the better your odds! Every dollar gets you another chance to win $25K USDC. Enter to win while earning 9% yield on your crypto with Democratized Prime*. | 
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