Eric Conner: DeFi's 52-month bear market is over as perps decouple from Bitcoin

Perp exchanges and Zcash break their old link to Bitcoin

Eric Conner, co-author of EIP-1559 and an investor in crypto since 2012, said he is seeing something he has never witnessed in 14 years of watching these markets: assets like Zcash and the perpetual-exchange tokens trading independently of Bitcoin's price action. Previously, he said, "everything was tied directly to Bitcoin," but now Zcash and perp coins "are not tied to Bitcoin at all."

Conner attributed this to a changing regulatory backdrop rather than pure speculation. He argued that in the past, projects and their founders were scared of US customers and regulatory exposure, whereas now "we could actually have some like major used crypto apps that have laws and regulations written around them." He said if Bitcoin fell sharply, the broader market would likely follow, but he is "not even convinced that perp coins wouldn't just recover" independently.

Owning both Hyperliquid and Lighter instead of picking a side

Conner described selling ETH roughly a year and a half to two years ago to buy Hype, saying he saw the "24/7 stock trading" pitch to normies and Wall Street as obvious. He said he learned a lesson from missing the Solana cycle as an ETH maxi and vowed never to over-commit to a single token again, leading him to build positions in both Hyperliquid and Lighter rather than tying his fortunes to one perp platform.

"Why not own both? I think there's plenty of pie to be had right in the per space." — Eric Conner

He said Lighter appeals to him specifically because it offers Ethereum-level security guarantees with a fast user experience, calling the team's approach "pretty Ethereum aligned." The hosts noted their own shift away from ETH as a top-three holding toward hype and Zcash, describing themselves as "recovering ETH maxis."

Whether ETH needs a thesis to keep rising

One host pushed Conner on where ETH fits into a "barbell" framework of hard money (Bitcoin, Zcash, gold) on one side and revenue-generating tokens (Hyperliquid, Lighter, Pump) on the other, since ETH doesn't cleanly belong to either camp. Conner said he does not think ETH needs a thesis at all to move higher.

"I think price leads narrative. I don't think narrative leads price." — Eric Conner

He said he is currently "very underexposed" to ETH but conceded he could "easily see ETH hate rallying to 20K," adding that he previously jinxed ETH by calling a top at $2,500 years ago, which prompted him to raise his own target to 20K. He was clear this remains speculative and admitted uncertainty about where ETH goes from here.

Robinhood Chain's early revenue and Wall Street's blind spot

Conner cited an unconfirmed figure — "I could be totally misquoting this" — suggesting Robinhood Chain revenue may be running at roughly 300 to 500 million annualized already. A host followed up that if the figure is above 500 million, that would place it among one of Robinhood's top five business lines by revenue, something he argued Wall Street has not priced in.

Conner argued Robinhood's advantage comes from composability: building on an Ethereum layer 2 let it plug directly into Uniswap and Lighter, instantly bootstrapping liquidity for tokenized stocks through meme-stock trading pools. He said this liquidity bootstrap would be very difficult for a chain without Ethereum's composability to replicate.

Meme stocks as a new, contested trading meta

Conner said he believes "meme stocks are a new meta" that people are sleeping on, pointing to a token tied to Hims (referred to as "Boner") that at one point reportedly accounted for around 10% of the on-chain trading volume of the underlying Hims stock on a given day. He argued each major public stock could eventually get its own meme-stock community acting as an informal marketing arm.

Not every executive is receptive: the hosts and Conner discussed public disagreement from AMC's CEO, who has raised concerns about unregistered instruments and consumer protection, versus Robinhood's Vlad Tenev, who has pushed back with "what's the concern here?" Conner speculated this may stem from a misunderstanding around synthetic shares and custody, possibly linked to AMC's past experience with naked shorting, though he stressed he does not know for certain and floated a generational gap between older and younger CEOs as another possible explanation.

CFTC guidance on tokenized collateral, reacted to live

During the conversation, a host noted that new CFTC guidance had just been published and ran it through an AI summary tool live on air. The takeaway, as described on the show, is that CFTC staff are providing "a clear path for tokenized assets and qualifying crypto to function as collateral in regulated derivatives markets."

The host argued this could allow holders to borrow or margin against tokenized stock positions such as Hims or AMC shares, unlocking additional yield-generating use cases and significantly expanding the addressable market for these instruments beyond simple trading exposure. Conner agreed, framing it as an extension of "the great unlock of composability."

Open questions on custody, synthetic shares, and share supply

Several points were left unresolved. Conner said he is unsure exactly how tokenized shares are backed or what shareholder rights token holders have, noting Robinhood has been "pretty transparent" but that voting rights and in-kind redemption are still described as "coming" rather than live. He raised the open question of what happens if meme-stock trading volume outpaces the actual float of shares available on-chain, citing a case where Hims share price briefly ran up on Robinhood before market makers had to arbitrage it down by minting more shares over a weekend.

The hosts and Conner also debated, without resolving, whether tokenized and derivative exposure to stocks dilutes real price discovery the way some critics argued synthetic Bitcoin exposure did during the ETF and treasury-company era, agreeing this was a question worth posing to a custody-focused guest appearing later in the same episode.