18th May 2026 > > UK politics (oh my!) and Hyperliquid.

tl;dr

UK politics … and how Hyperliquid is a force for good.

Market Snap

Market Wrap

Bond yields are rising everywhere, even in Japan. Over 85% of the UK’s annual current borrowing requirement is needed purely to pay the annual interest on our giant debt pile. That is not sustainable in anyone’s books – raising new money to pay off current investors looks much like a Ponzi scheme.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – UK politics

It’s a bit boring I know, but I must keep repeating this very plain fact.

The CCC has always been and will always remain fiercely apolitical.

However, the political environment, and the shenanigans that go with it (especially in the UK as we have learnt to our cost over the last decade or so), affects us as both crypto investors and as fighters for freedom, liberty, democracy, and privacy. We cannot ignore the machinations of the bureaucratic and technocratic elite, as they pretend daily to engage in productive activity.

In a recent CCC our research team was very clear that despite all his obvious flaws when it comes to politics, and despite his natural disdain for all things crypto (he is a self-proclaimed socialist, a political philosophy incompatible with the crypto revolution), from a purely crypto perspective, Sir Keir Starmer is our best PM by far out of all the available runners and riders.

Andy Burnham’s fight to get back into Westminster in a seat that voted heavily for Brexit with his public track record of wanting the UK to be back in the EU is a ballsy move, however you look at it.

If Burnham doesn’t win the by-election, a contest that is going to be very close as the Stop Farage and the pro-Farage camps are both highly motivated, Starmer will likely be the PM at the next general election in 2029. Streeting does not have the numbers, and no-one else seems to be up for the fight. I am not getting into the debate about whether that is a good thing or not in general, but I am convinced that is the best option for cryptos. Which is our only concern in these near-daily missives.

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I can’t help but notice there is also a glaring edge on offer for your entertainment dollars, if you so wish.

If you think that the forthcoming by-election is a coin toss, you can buy a proxy for Starmer being PM at the next GE at just $0.13 right now on Polymarket, with the kicker of no downside for two and a half years:

My “Starmer Out June 30” bet returned nearly double which was nice, so I closed it yesterday. Though I must admit I flaked at the 3x take, a rare and bad decision which keeps niggling away at me, however much I tell myself to let it go.

Anyway.

I am quietly confident that my “Starmer In December 31” bet is going to perform so much better.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Hyperliquid (*)

 Hyperliquid is an online DeFi platform that is mostly used for perpetual futures trading at up to 40x (gulp!) leverage across a wide range of cryptos. There is also an element of spot trading, though whether you have legal redress to physically receive say BTC bought on spot at Hyperliquid remains, to my mind, a grey area.

The platform works in the usual manner. For a UK investor you simply add USDC on Base, probably sourced from Coinbase, to your MetaMask wallet, fire up the Arbitrum bridge, and deposit the funds on Arbitrum into Hyperliquid and off you go. Not that I am suggesting you should – the golden rule in cryptos is to never use leverage. But equally the best place to buy HYPE, and stake it, is Hyperliquid itself. If foolish people are happy losing money on perp trades, you might as well participate in the rewards.

Not content with building an overly dominant position in the crypto perp market, Hyperliquid now hosts the first of what is likely to be many pre-IPO markets for real world companies, in this case SpaceX.

This is an entirely synthetic market – because it utilises perpetual futures contracts, nothing ever actually settles. There is no physical exchange of SpaceX shares nor is there any cash settlement at a specified date. Participants simply buy and sell synthetic shares with leverage options available.

I know this all smacks of financial engineering of little or no benefit to anyone. But that really is not true.

As a small retail investor, one rarely gets the chance to participate in IPOs – they tend to be reserved for the institutional market. IPOs can and do provide the juiciest of returns. If you fully collateralise your pre-IPO trade using Hyperliquid’s market your financial outcome is the same (ignoring fees but with the benefit that there is no CGT for a UK investor) as one of the institutions.

Yet another example of how the DeFi world is democratising finance for the masses, breaking down the moats that prevent us from getting our just rewards.

Gotta love cryptos on so many levels.

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(*) For disclosure purposes, the CCC Treasury has long been a holder of HYPE, Hyperliquid’s native token.

Yes, you are right. It has performed very nicely indeed, thank you.