Research Library
Research Topics
The Castle Labs library organised around the questions our readers actually ask: where capital moves, which systems become infrastructure, and which markets are changing fastest.
Market Structure & Capital Flows
Castle Labs' broadest research lane is market structure: where liquidity sits, which venues capture flow, how capital moves across public and private markets, and what the data says before the narrative catches up. This is the home for our market maps, tokenisation work, exchange and venue analysis, volatility coverage, and macro-to-onchain research. It serves readers who need to understand not just what happened, but what changed in the structure of the market.
DeFi & Onchain Finance
DeFi is becoming the operating layer for digital asset finance: vaults, lending markets, stablecoins, tokenised collateral, and structured yield products. Castle Labs tracks the infrastructure making that transition real, from Morpho and Aave to the curator model, RWA collateral, and the products that connect offchain capital to onchain execution. The reader question is practical: which systems are becoming durable financial infrastructure, and which are still yield theatre?
Networks, Rollups & Ecosystems
Network coverage is where Castle Labs connects protocol design to ecosystem outcomes. We write about L2 economics, sequencer and data-availability tradeoffs, incentive design, consumer-app bets, and the strategic positioning of ecosystems like Arbitrum, Starknet, Mantle, MegaETH, and Base. This lane matters to foundations, protocols, investors, and builders because the question is no longer whether blockspace can scale; it is which networks can turn scale into durable demand.
AI, Agents & Autonomous Finance
AI and crypto converge around agency, ownership, and execution. Castle Labs covers agentic finance, AI-managed capital, autonomous vault curation, verifiable compute, private inference, and the protocols trying to make machine-led markets real. Our audience does not need generic AI excitement; it needs to know which agent systems can actually hold keys, allocate capital, verify work, and become part of financial infrastructure.
Trading, Perps & Derivatives
Onchain trading is where market structure changes first. Castle Labs covers perp DEXs, options, commodity markets, prediction markets, volatility venues, and exchange design from the microstructure up. Our commodities report benchmarked Hyperliquid's oil perps against CME futures tick by tick; our options and prediction-market work asks the same question for binary outcomes and volatility: where is price discovery moving onchain, and what still blocks institutional depth?
Protocol & Ecosystem Deep Dives
Deep dives are Castle Labs' high-conviction format: one protocol, mechanism, or ecosystem examined through architecture, tokenomics, competitive position, adoption data, and market context. This is where flagship reports sit alongside long-form protocol analysis. The audience expectation is institutional-grade synthesis: fewer shallow takes, more evidence, better maps, and clear conclusions that survive contact with the data.
Privacy, Identity & Compliance Infrastructure
Privacy is not a side quest for digital assets; it is a prerequisite for institutional, consumer, and enterprise adoption. Castle Labs maps the full stack: privacy chains, Ethereum privacy systems, privacy-first L2s, FHE, MPC, TEEs, private compute, identity, and selective-disclosure systems. The core reader problem is clear: how can users and institutions keep sensitive information private while still proving what regulators, counterparties, and applications need to know?
Prediction Markets & Volatility
Prediction markets and options both turn uncertainty into a tradable object. Castle Labs tracks Polymarket, Kalshi, Azuro, onchain options protocols, binary markets, volatility venues, and the products forming around probabilistic pricing. This topic is deliberately narrower than Markets or Trading: it is for readers who care about how crypto markets price information, risk, and future events.
Policy, Regulation & Institutional Access
Regulation matters to Castle Labs when it changes what can be built, traded, held, or distributed. This topic covers policy shifts, compliance infrastructure, institutional access, permissioned rails, privacy rules, stablecoin frameworks, and the legal constraints shaping market structure. It is intentionally practical: what does the rule change mean for protocols, allocators, exchanges, and users?