This Week in Digital Finance
Week ending Saturday, April 18, 2026
A note on what’s new at Artemis. This newsletter marks the first issue under our new Artemis platform: our full digital-finance research and investment platform. Artemis now ingests the same public-company fundamentals you’d get from CapIQ or FactSet (filings, transcripts, KPIs, IR presentations) and combines them with our blockchain, stablecoin, and protocol data in one workspace. If you’re covering COIN and Aave in the same model, or modeling Circle’s float against USDC supply growth, this is the stack we built for you.
Market Overview: The Weekly Recap
Market Sentiment: cautious risk-on. Prices have continued to rebuild meaningfully off the February lows this week. The U.S.–Iran two-week ceasefire pulled geopolitical risk premium out of commodity and crypto markets, and spot BTC ETF flows turned net positive for the second week in a row. Sentiment sits in greed territory: 62 for crypto, 68 for equities (Artemis).
Assets across digital finance returned an average of 10.66%, led by AAVE, DRIFT, HOOD, COIN and CIRCLE, each of which returned above 20%. Crypto majors BTC, ETC and SOL returned about 5% each.
Today We Highlight
Aave “Will Win” vote passes. The DAO now captures 100% of Aave-branded app-layer revenue. Arguably the most consequential DeFi governance event of the year so far.
Artemis Research Spotlight: PURR 0.00%↑
Robinhood leads digital finance stock growth as earnings approach April 28th.
1. Aave Just Rewired Itself Around $AAVE
The Aave DAO has spent the better part of four months re-litigating a deceptively small question: who owns the front end? The dispute traces to late 2025, when delegates flagged that a CoWSwap integration on Aave’s interface had quietly routed swap-related fees away from the community treasury to an external recipient. That surfaced a deeper tension. Aave Labs had been building application-layer products (Aave Pro, Aave App, Horizon, Aave Kit) that sat atop the permissionless protocol but whose economics bypassed AAVE holders entirely. The Labs vs. DAO split, in other words.
On April 12, the “Aave Will Win“ (AWW) proposal passed with overwhelming support: 75% of voters voted in favor (aave.com). The proposal does three things: (i) redirects 100% of revenue from every Aave-branded product to the DAO; (ii) pays Aave Labs a one-time package of $25M in stablecoins plus 5,000 AAVE; and (iii) consolidates brand and economic rights under the token itself. An on-chain AIP ratification still has to clear. That’s the real catalyst.
Aave protocol revenue hit $140M in 2025 and is tracking to roughly match that in 2026. The incremental piece is app-layer revenue: swaps on Aave.com and Aave Pro are already running at $10–20M/year that previously accrued to Labs, with Aave App, Horizon, and Aave Kit layered on top. A conservative 10× revenue multiple on ~$20M of incremental accrual is roughly $200M of implied fundamental value, or ~13% of AAVE’s fully-diluted cap. AAVE traded up nearly 30% after the vote.
Now execution has become the biggest question for Aave. BGD Labs, the DAO’s primary technical contributor, wound down its partnership on April 1 (BGD governance post, Feb 2026). ACI, another leading service provider for Aave, is choosing to leave the ecosystem in July of this year. V4’s cross-chain hub-and-spoke rollout, which Stani has publicly targeted as a trillion-dollar credit layer, now needs to ship without its most senior engineering counterparty.
2. Artemis Research Spotlight: $PURR
Artemis Research Spotlight: Hyperliquid Strategies ($PURR): The Only DAT With a Productive Underlying Asset by Zheng Jie Lim.
The framing: most DAT vehicles wrap an asset that either earns nothing (BTC) or runs at a negative operational cash flow once staking emissions are netted against fees (ETH: $526M fees vs. $3,035M in emissions; SOL: $680M vs. $3,936M). Hyperliquid is the outlier. It generated $857M in 2025 fees (of which $797M from perps at a 2.72 bps take rate), with 99% of earnings flowing to the Assistance Fund for buyback-and-burn ($837M on $857M of fees). Staking emissions come from a pre-allocated reserve rather than fee revenue, which the piece argues is the right way to evaluate operational cash flow. On that basis, HYPE is the only major crypto asset with positive underlying unit economics. Per outstanding HYPE (477M), that works out to roughly $1.76 of earnings per token. Hyperliquid is also the highest revenue generating company in the world per employee:
The vehicle: PURR (NASDAQ) is a zero-debt, zero-preferred, zero-convertible wrapper around 18.8M HYPE plus $112.6M cash, trading at ~1.12x mNAV with a $30M buyback program (~$10.5M deployed, retiring ~3M shares) and a $1B equity line as optional dry powder. Cap table anchored by Paradigm, D1, Galaxy, and Pantera; board includes Bob Diamond (ex-Barclays), David Schamis (Atlas Merchant / ex-JC Flowers), Eric Rosengren (ex-Boston Fed), and Larry Leibowitz (ex-NYSE COO). The piece frames the structure as the inverse of the Strategy trade: Strategy issued equity at premium to fund BTC accumulation (a mechanism that breaks when the premium compresses, which is where the category sits today at ~1.15x mNAV); PURR’s buyback program mechanically increases HYPE-per-share only when the stock trades below NAV.
Growth vectors laid out in the note: HIP-3 (permissionless perps, 500k HYPE stake per market, expanding TAM from $3–5T crypto derivatives toward the >$100T global derivatives market), HIP-4 (options + prediction markets, mainnet Q4 2026), builder-routed distribution (~40% of DAUs already flow through third-party frontends), and USDH (native stablecoin, 50% of reserve yield to the Assistance Fund, currently ~$1M/yr to buybacks at $93M supply, scaling to $40–100M/yr at $2–5B supply).
Valuation summary:
Base: HYPE at $76 by 2030 on $1.71B of earnings at 20x P/E, PURR held at 1.1x mNAV → $10.59/share, +63% over 5 years.
Bull: HYPE at $127, mNAV 1.3x → $20.84, +220%.
Bear: HYPE at $27 at 16x P/E, mNAV 0.95x → $3.32, -49%. Bear-case mitigant: zero liabilities mean no forced-selling dynamic, the protocol still generates $782M of fees at trough, and the token remains deflationary net of emissions.
Key risks: HYPE drawdown, potential CFTC/SEC enforcement on Hyperliquid’s no-KYC operations (where PURR itself actually benefits as the regulated wrapper), equity-line dilution if drawn at the wrong price, and general DAT-premium compression.
Full note on Artemis Research.
3. Robinhood leads Digital Finance theme growth
HOOD was +31.16% on the week, the best-performing name on the crypto-adjacent equities list (ahead of COIN +22.93% and CRCL +20.30%). The stock had seen a nearly 60% drawdown since October highs before the rebound. A major catalyst this week was the SEC’s reversal of the “pattern day trader” rule, which had been an inhibitor to retail trading volume. This is expected to bring more trading volume to Robinhood, arguably the biggest beneficiary of this rule reversal.
Fundamentals:
Robinhood has also seen exceptionally strong fundamental growth. KPIs have grown significantly over recent quarters. The growth in Gold Subscribers is a particularly important metric to look at since it is a key component of Robinhood’s non-trading revenue.
Robinhood saw record quarterly revenue in Q4 2025, growing at 26.5% YoY. Revenue growth was driven by strong net interest income growth. NII made up about 30% of Robinhood’s top line in Q4 2025, and grew 38.9% YoY.
The sell-side view: Bernstein reiterated Outperform with a $130 PT on April 14, ~60% above spot. Their thesis centers on Bitstamp, the $200M institutional crypto exchange Robinhood closed in June 2025, which now drives ~60% of HOOD’s total crypto transaction volume. Bernstein models 2026 crypto revenue at $1.1B (+23% YoY, 31% above consensus) (Bernstein via Parameter, Apr 17; Robinhood/Bitstamp press release, Jun 2, 2025).
HOOD is one of the clearest expressions of retail brokerage and crypto infrastructure converging into one product surface.
Charts of the Week
Chart 1: HIP-3 Open Interest has stalled but remains above $2 billion
Chart 2: We highlight the effect of incentives on prediction markets in our new Prediction Markets dashboard: Dashboard Link, Analysis Link
Other Notable News
Morgan Stanley launches MSBT at 0.14%: First spot BTC ETF issued directly by a major U.S. bank. Over $100M in week-one flows.
Schwab introduces spot crypto trading: Schwab is one of the world’s largest brokerages, and is planning on a phased roll out of spot crypto trading to its 38.5m accounts.
SEC CLARITY Act roundtable held April 16. Market-structure bill has bipartisan noise but no markup date. Watch the Senate Banking Committee calendar next week.
Thanks for reading! Stay ahead this week by using the Artemis Terminal to pull the underlying data on any of the stories above (Aave revenue, Robinhood financial and comps, HIP-3 OI by market type) or pull live numbers straight into your models with =ART() in Excel.
Disclaimer: This newsletter is produced by Artemis for informational and educational purposes only. It does not constitute investment advice, a recommendation to buy or sell any security or digital asset, or an offer to provide advisory services. Artemis and its employees may hold positions in assets discussed. Figures are accurate to the best of our knowledge as of publication; markets move quickly.