Imagine if Figma’s IPO had Hyperliquid’s pre-launch perps

This is part of the 0xresearch newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.


The 13 -year -old design software company Figma IPO’D on the New York Stock Exchange yesterday.

While I write this edition, Figma shares are traded at $ 115. This is ~ 250 % of pop of the opening price of $ 33-higher than the public subscription public subscription in the district by 168 %, and greatly outperform the pop publicity pop 17 % day in the past decades.

Great success! But according to the comment of Crypto Twitter, this “convincing theft”.

Specifically, investment bankers from the public in retail.

The general idea behind this criticism is:

Investment banks intentionally lower subscription subscriptions than fair value, then allocate stocks to favorite hedge funds and customers. These men turns them to get easy profit at the expense of the non -advanced retail investors who buy naively public subscription noise once the stock is already trading.

Retail investors lose because public subscription supply prices are determined by private markets (unlike, for example, excessive pre -excessive PERPS that allowed the discovery of prices before the ICO pump).

In addition, they cannot buy early – Wall Street does.

This current situation is not different from the mines.

I remember the launch of Javier Millei-Abrai-Arabain Memecoin in February. My colleague David Kneles also wrote:

… In 2025, anyone who releases Mimikoin in 2025 fighting invisible forces that have not been discovered how to overcome snipers that will provide new bids in the hat drop, just to empty them shortly after buying anyone who bought them in the pump that they created, and usually kill the project in this process.

It was a kind of open encryption in any case.

But in tradfi, all of this is completely legal according to the capital market rules. It is the Securities Law of 1933, which forces companies to imprison the fixed public supply price before trading.

Like the emergence of most government regulations, the Securities Law was not intended to enrich Wall Street at the retail expense: It started in real violations and targeting by the sellers of a bucket store in the thirties of the twentieth century.

But today’s capital market laws, the authority to pricing hard wires and estimating allocation in traditional public subscription is estimated.

The encryption project

The President of SEC Paul Atkins revealed the Crypto project yesterday, an initiative aimed at achieving “President Trump’s vision to make America the capital of encryption in the world.”

It is almost read like the Christmas Wishes for Industry: Most of the assets of coding will not be securities, create exceptions and safe ports for ICO and Airroprops, protect software engineers, protect the self -body, and make the Onchain program a part of the stock markets, etc.

But Satan is always in the details.

No one examines the details, except for pressure groups and lawyers at the policy -making table.

How will this wish list interact with the current laws? What will they turn into 10 or 50 years from now?

Nobody knows – just like how no one expected that the Securities Law of 1933 expected to enable “convincing theft” today.

Government regulations are not bad because they are badly designed or policymakers are evil in itself, but because they are created and they are in a set of fixed institutions.

We would like to think about the “government” as a precise mechanism that the voters can amend to create laws that frustrate specific problems. We would like to believe that the government will remove the laws that are bad.

But democracy is more chaotic in practice. In fact, policymakers are burdened with special interests, and unpopular voters dominate the elections.

This is what the economist Mike Monger call “Unicorn problem”.

Today’s words are a breath of fresh air in the post -Jinsler era. But don’t be surprised when today’s rules hardening about who learns to play it better. It is just a policy.


Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks:

Leave a Comment