Research on Kai — DeFi Research

Perp DEXs: The Mismarked Capital Stack

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 09:00:00 -0400

Since the early days of GMX, the market has treated the token as the equity-like asset and the LP as the yield product. The token captures the narrative and gives investors a liquid claim on protocol growth. Meanwhile, the LP is usually evaluated on its APY.

That framing misses the risk structure of the exchange. Every leveraged position creates exposure that has to be priced and resolved, and in pool-based designs, the LP carries that exposure. When the system prices risk well, trading revenue accrues to LP NAV. When it does not, trader P&L from toxic flow hits the LP first. LP NAV therefore becomes a live mark on the protocol’s underwriting quality.

Aave: The Bank of DeFi

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0500

@aave has grown to become DeFi’s Trojan Horse, reaching a scale comparable to traditional banks. With $35 billion in TVL and $57 billion in net deposits, it now controls 25% of DeFi TVL and ranks among the 50 largest US banks by assets under management (AUM).

Prime Intellect's Case for Decentralized AI

Wed, 14 May 2025 09:00:00 -0400

Frontier model training has consolidated into a small set of operators with the capital to assemble tightly-coupled GPU clusters. That concentration produces the fastest path to capability, but it also limits the decisions about what gets trained, on what data, and on what terms to those same operators.

For workloads that prioritize censorship-resistance or sovereign infrastructure, teams require frontier-level models that are structurally open. However, existing open-weight releases like LLama or Mistral are only open at the discretion of the sponsor.