Welcome to this week’s Friday Feature!

Every Friday, we cover a project making waves in the DeFi space.

We provide timely coverage of what they’re doing, why it’s important, and how you can benefit. We also tell you exactly how we’re using the project to put money to work in the Machines & Money Portfolio, and show how you can do the same.

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A central theme of Machines & Money has been to highlight three qualities of DeFi which give it a significant advantage over legacy financial infrastructure, including markets, assets, payment rails, and more. 

These qualities are permissionlessness, composability, and programmability – and Nova combines all three.

What Is Nova?

Nova is a new platform which enables the creation, listing, and funding of new markets in the Hyperliquid ecosystem. 

The entire process is crowdsourced, showcasing DeFi’s inherent permissionlessness

Once new markets are listed, they can be used across the $5.5B Hyperliquid ecosystem, demonstrating DeFi’s composability

These markets aren’t just limited to crypto; Nova users can submit proposals to create markets on just about anything, from stocks to commodities to Hyperliquid’s brand-new HIP-4 markets, and much more. This wouldn’t be possible without DeFi’s programmability

In this article, we’ll cover Nova’s market listing process, the role of NLP (the Nova Liquidity Pool), what Nova has in store for the future, and how we’re using the platform from an investment perspective within the Machines & Money Portfolio.

Nova’s Impact On DeFi

When Nova launched, it became the first project of its kind – before Nova, listing new markets on Hyperliquid was a costly process, involving a commitment of 500K staked HYPE tokens (currently valued at ~$30M) and responsibility of sourcing and integrating data fees to ensure that the market presented accurate real-time pricing. 

While Hyperliquid’s listing process became permissionless with the advent of HIP-3 last fall, it was limited to large teams with deep capital reserves. However, there was still no way for the general public to express crowdsourced demand and discovery for completely new markets on Hyperliquid.

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Nova’s Market Listing Process

A month ago, Nova launched the first phase for submitting and voting on market proposals.

During this phase, anyone can propose a new HIP-3 or HIP-4 market on the Nova app via a simple proposal process. All that’s required is entering the market’s name, ticker, and thesis on why it should be included:

Additionally, users have the option to include the asset’s chart or a link to their data, as well as their HyperEVM address:

Participating in the proposal process – either by proposing a new market or backing an existing proposal – is also incentivized:

  • Proposers earn a portion of all trading fees generated on that market in perpetuity

  • Voters receive exclusive access to the NLP Vault, with a maximum deposit of $50K – this helps bootstrap liquidity for new markets

Broadcom Equity (AVGO)

The first market to go live on Nova was AVGO, which received 71 votes and launched on May 21st.

Following AVGO’s success, several of the most popular equity entries fall under the semiconductor/AI theme, with Anthropic, SanDisk, and two semiconductor ETFs all battling in the top 5. However, the current leader is Take Two (TTWO), the company behind the long-awaited GTA VI release:

Beyond AVGO, there are currently 212 pending markets that anyone can support via voting.

To ensure that high-quality, feasible markets are listed during this initial phase, the Nova team currently decides which ones are ultimately supported. However, the first step towards full decentralization is next: Conviction Markets.

Conviction Markets: Nova’s Next Phase

When Conviction Markets go live, they’ll achieve something that no “TradFi” infrastructure ever could: they’ll become the first scalable method of crowdsourcing ideation, liquidity, and conviction for completely new onchain markets. 

Since Conviction Markets enable traders to interact with markets before they’re fully launched, you can think of them as a tool to gauge onchain demand for any type of asset – whether it’s financial or real in nature. 

Before a proposed market goes live, they trade in isolated-risk, independently margined, pool-based perpetual markets on HyperEVM to prove that demand and liquidity are sufficient to drive meaningful activity over time.

Once demand and liquidity thresholds are met, the market launches as a HIP-3 risk-isolated perpetual futures product that can be used across the Hyperliquid ecosystem. 

Everyone who participates in the success of the market – proposers, traders, and liquidity providers – earn a share of revenue from every trade in perpetuity.

Essentially, Nova incentivizes domain experts and traders to surface market demand, then use vault capital and market-making infrastructure to bootstrap liquid listings. 

Its structure is different than any other perps DEX on the market – rather than simply list assets for traders to speculate on, Nova’s focus is on finding and launching markets that Hyperliquid does not already cover deeply, and compensating everyone involved in the process:

  • For traders, it could create access to new onchain markets earlier

  • For vault depositors, it offers exposure to trading fees and market-making PnL

  • For market creators/domain experts, it could create a path to propose markets and earn revenue share if those markets prove demand

HIP-4 Support

While Conviction Markets will initially support HIP-3 markets, Nova plans on enabling the creation of new HIP-4 markets (outcome markets) once they can be created in a fully permissionless manner.

HIP-4 markets are following a tough act (HIP-3), and the expectations are massive. After all, they’re the largest product release on Hyperliquid since HIP-3 markets, which are now approaching $3B in open interest and consistently account for over 25% of all volume in the Hyperliquid ecosystem. 

Outcome markets are currently being rolled out in phases, and their initial phase launched in early May. At a very high level, they’re similar to prediction markets for the Hyperliquid ecosystem. 

Since prediction markets can span any possible topic – politics, sports, markets, weather, pop culture, and many more – there’s essentially an infinite number of possibilities for new markets to be created. Since Nova’s launch coincides perfectly with the start of the HIP-4 rollout, and as the infrastructure matures, Nova will be ready to become the incubator for outcome markets as well.

The Nova Liquidity Pool (NLP)

At Nova’s core is the Nova Liquidity Pool (NLP): a USDC vault that funds market making for Nova-supported HIP-3/HIP-4 markets. 

NLP allocates capital to market-making strategies across Nova-supported markets. Market makers use proprietary strategies to fill order books, capture spread, manage inventory, and hedge exposure. To maximize capital efficiency, idle funds within the vault are put to use on Morpho to generate additional yield. 

Depositors are also rewarded for their contribution, receiving 70% of all trading fees and 100% of market-making PnL.

While phase 1 of NLP is capped at $1M, the following assumptions still calculate a distribution of $550/day – or 20.07% APY – to participants:

Wrapping Up

Looking ahead, Nova has a chance to add a new dimension to the thriving Hyperliquid ecosystem. Never before has there been a way to gauge public interest in new asset markets in real-time via crowdsourced funding. With Hyperliquid cementing itself as the home of price exposure to potentially any type of real or financial asset, as well as binary outcome markets, the upside for Nova 

Currently, the NLP Vault is at max capacity of $1M – its limit was reached within hours of going live, showcasing the demand for Nova’s unique product. 

So, for now, we are unable to take a position. However, we will look for ways to get exposure to Nova in the future as the deposit cap is raised, or if new opportunities emerge.

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