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Venezuela’s sanctions are stablecoins’ proof of concept

Byron Gilliam — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 14:00:00 GMT

“I don’t see it as a bad thing, this process that they call ‘dollarization’… Thank god it exists.”

— Nicolás Maduro

The New York Times recently reported that Venezuela had become “the first nation to manage a large share of its finances in crypto.”

Not by choice, though.

Roughly half of Venezuela’s revenue comes from oil sales denominated in dollars, which Venezuela, being a sanctioned country, cannot legally send or receive.

Previously, sanctioned governments would sell their oil for dollars through a web of shell companies and offshore banks — or barter their oil in return for goods or infrastructure investments.

Now, they have an easier option: Accept payment in stablecoins. Economist Asdrúbal Oliveros estimates that Tether’s USDT stablecoin is the means of exchange for roughly 80% of Venezuela’s oil sales.

The government once banned transacting in stablecoins, which it viewed as a threat to the bolivar. But the crippling effects of US sanctions left Venezuela little choice but to embrace them.

Delcy Rodriguez, now the interim president of Venezuela, recognized the inevitability of crypto-enabled dollarization last August, when she told businesspeople that “non-traditional mechanisms of management” were being implemented to better manage the bolivar exchange rate.

“The Venezuelan government has since June allowed the use of more USDT,” Reuters reported shortly thereafter. With state approval, banks now sell the USDT earned from oil sales to local businesses, which use them to pay both domestic and international suppliers.

They want stablecoins to circulate at the retail level, too: The head of the country’s National Association of Supermarkets recently told state television that grocery stores were working to implement systems to accept payment in USDT.

In other words, the Venezuelan government is encouraging the use of dollars issued by Tether in place of the bolivars it issues itself.

As a result, USDT — or “Binance dollars” as many Venezuelans refer to them — is now used “for everything from groceries and condo fees to salaries and vendor payments.”

So for a stablecoin enthusiast like myself, it was disappointing to see that neither crypto nor stablecoins were deemed worthy of a mention in the US government’s indictment of Nicolás Maduro.

Instead, prosecutors described illicit money moving the old-fashioned way: planes returning from Mexico “loaded with drug proceeds,” weapons like grenades and grenade launchers being bartered for cocaine, protection services paid for by a portion of the cocaine being transported, and a $2.5 million bribe paid in cash dollars.

Why no mention of crypto?

There are two possibilities: 1) The US government no longer says anything mean about crypto, so the prosecutors knew to judiciously leave it out, or 2) crypto and stablecoins aren’t quite capable of moving money in the size Maduro and his associates needed to move it.

The former is the more fun explanation, but the latter is the more likely one.

“The state is struggling to liquidate these [crypto] assets expeditiously,” Asdrúbal Oliveros explains, “because moving crypto funds requires passing various controls that are not being met.”

A report from TRM Labs reaches a similar conclusion: “Large-scale trafficking organizations continue to rely heavily on physical cash, trade-based laundering, and state or quasi-state protection for moving core proceeds, with crypto generally playing a secondary or complementary role rather than replacing these mechanisms.”

The national security analysts at Lawfare agree: “Cryptocurrency-based sanctions evasion still represents only a drop in the bucket compared to traditional illicit financial pathways.”

Others are more upbeat about the utility of stablecoins and crypto in, um, “international payments.”

InSight Crime, for example, reports that Mexican drug cartels are being “sustained” by an “industrial-scale crypto laundering pipeline moving dirty cash through digital networks to Chinese chemical suppliers.”

As they detail, stablecoins have found a niche matchmaking between Chinese money brokers who need dollars to sell to clients evading China’s capital controls and Mexican cartels who need to buy the chemicals they mix into fentanyl from China.

It’s not the product-market fit we crypto enthusiasts have hoped for, but revealed preferences suggest it’s a powerful one. The DEA, for example, says its seizures of illicit cash are sharply lower because criminal groups are “prioritizing crypto over traditional cash-based laundering schemes.”

Seizures of “virtual currency” are correspondingly higher: From 2020 to 2024, the DEA has seized $2.5 billion of crypto vs. just $2.2 billion of cash.

That might explain why Maduro and his associates have stuck to more traditional means of payment — traceable crypto and freezable stablecoins aren’t quite ready for the largest money-laundering needs.

Nevertheless, Venezuela’s embrace of digital dollars is breaking new ground: “US adversaries have established an operational proof of concept,” Lawfare concludes, “and emerging financial technologies will likely further solidify it.”

If so, it might further solidify the dollar, too.

Being banned from using dollars didn’t make Venezuela accept, say, yuan for its oil — it just made the government use digital dollars instead.

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The Strategy playbook looks different in 2026

Shaunda Devens — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 17:36:33 GMT

Strategy has stepped back in as a visible treasury bid for BTC, but with a very different financing backdrop compared to 2024-2025

At the end of December, Strategy raised cash but barely deployed it into BTC. On Dec. 29-31, it sold 1,255,911 MSTR shares for $195.9 million net proceeds, yet bought only 3 BTC. In early January, deployment resumed: Jan. 1-4 saw another 735,000 shares sold for $116.3 million net, and 1,283 BTC bought for $116 million (avg $90,391/BTC), bringing holdings to 673,783 BTC.

The bigger signal sits in the financing backdrop. In 2024 through early 2025, Strategy funded itself cheaply via convertible debt (cash coupons 0.625% to 2.25%, then multiple 0% converts). That playbook works best when MSTR trades at a premium to Bitcoin NAV (mNAV > 1) because of the equity optionality.

However, by mid-to-late 2025, that premium compressed and flipped to a discount (mNAV < 1), making equity-linked financing harder to place and common issuance mechanically dilutive to BTC-per-share. As a result, the financing shifted toward high-cash-cost preferred, often issued below par, printing roughly 10% to 12.5% effective cash cost on proceeds. STRC’s dividend rate has been stepped up from 9% (August 2025) to 11.0% (January 2026) to keep the channel open.

Interestingly, Strategy is still funding buys by issuing common via the ATM even at an mNAV discount, accepting short-term dilution to keep accumulating and maintain liquidity. When mNAV is below 1 and marginal funding costs are double-digit, scaling purchases becomes both more dilutive and more expensive. That makes Strategy a less-reliable, less-price-setting buyer compared to prior premium regimes. It will still matter as a sentiment marker, but unless the premium reopens, its flow is more likely to be episodic clips than a sustained engine for the tape.

Zooming out, 2025’s marginal bid was essentially a two-horse race: spot ETFs and Strategy. On the accumulation chart, Strategy’s cumulative purchases tracked in the same range as ETFs for much of the year, meaning Strategy was comparable in flow impact to the ETF complex at points.

The setup for 2026 looks materially weaker. With mNAV compressed and financing shifting toward double-digit preferred costs plus dilutive ATM common issuance, Strategy’s bid becomes harder to scale without worsening BTC-per-share dilution. Strategy is still a sentiment marker, but the buying pressure should be more muted and episodic, leaving ETF flows and broader crypto risk appetite as the more reliable price-setting forces.

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Ranger’s ICO starts today, and MetaDAO eyes a reset

Carlos — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 15:07:05 GMT

Ranger’s ICO begins today and will run through Jan. 10. For context, Ranger is a full-stack trading terminal with three core products.

First is Ranger Perps, a perps aggregator for Solana-based venues like Jupiter Perps, Drift, and Flash Trade, with Hyperliquid support in the works.
Second is Ranger Spot, a meta-aggregator that routes across other aggregators like Jupiter and DFlow for optimal price execution.
The third pillar is Ranger Earn, a newer product that offers curated access to institutional-grade yield strategies through Ranger’s vault infrastructure.

Ranger is seeking a minimum raise of $6 million and is selling 39% of the total RNGR supply in the ICO. Proceeds from the raise will be held in a token holder-governed treasury, with the team receiving a fixed monthly stipend of $250,000. The Ranger ICO marks an important milestone for MetaDAO: It’s the first token sale on the platform to include a project with existing pre-ICO investors. The table below shows RNGR’s supply distribution.

ICO participants who receive an allocation will be 100% liquid at TGE (no vesting), while pre-ICO investors will follow a 24-month linear unlock schedule with no cliff. Notably, the team allocation will be tied to price performance: Up to 7.6M RNGR (30% of total supply) becomes unlockable for the team via five milestone tranches triggered at 2x / 4x / 8x / 16x / 32x of the ICO price. Each milestone must be maintained via a three-month TWAP, and there is a minimum 18-month cliff before any team tokens can unlock.

The chart below shows RNGR’s unlock schedule. The team performance pool is an estimate based on the parameters above, but realized unlocks will ultimately depend on RNGR’s sustained price performance post-ICO.

The last six MetaDAO ICOs have been heavily oversubscribed, with allocations settled pro rata. This allocation mechanism favors whales, who can afford to overcommit capital to secure a meaningful allocation. As the chart below shows, across the past six MetaDAO ICOs, participants have received an average of ~5% of their desired exposure.

Ranger will guarantee point holders access to the ICO via a dedicated allocation bucket, directly addressing the oversubscription dynamic above. I’m constructive on this structure: It rewards early users and contributors through preferential access rather than giving away 10-30% of supply via an airdrop, which can introduce unnecessary sell pressure and weaker alignment. In this regard, any allocation not taken by point holders will roll over and be pro-rated to public ICO buyers.

While the Ranger ICO is compelling on its own (and likely worth participating in, particularly for points holders), the bigger story, in my view, is what it means for MetaDAO: a catalyst that could reaccelerate launch cadence and revenue to start the year.

MetaDAO monetizes ICOs through swap fees on its Futarchy AMM and its LP position on Meteora. The Futarchy AMM charges a 0.5% fee on volume, which was originally split evenly between MetaDAO and the project raising (e.g., 0.25% to MetaDAO, 0.25% to Ranger). On Dec. 28, after mutual agreement with teams, the split was retroactively adjusted so that the full 0.5% now accrues to MetaDAO.

Since the Futarchy AMM went live on Oct. 10, 2025, MetaDAO has generated about $2.4 million in revenue, with roughly 60% coming from the Futarchy AMM and 40% from its Meteora LP position.

That said, MetaDAO’s revenues have declined sharply since mid-December as ICO activity slowed. Today, MetaDAO’s ICOs remain curated, placing far more weight on founder quality, credibility and long-term alignment than on simply maximizing the number of launches. This approach was necessary to validate the product, but it has come with a clear tradeoff: Without a steady stream of new launches, it’s difficult for revenues to increase, and MetaDAO has fallen short on cadence over the past few weeks.

The chart below highlights why. Token volumes tend to be highest around TGE and the days immediately following, meaning sustained Futarchy AMM volumes, and by extension, revenues, are highly dependent on new launches coming through the pipeline.

Despite declining daily revenue, META has performed remarkably well, rallying roughly 40% over the past week. As a result, META’s 30-day trailing P/S has increased to ~36x, well above its prior two-month range of ~10-15x.

Markets are forward-looking, though, and I expect META’s P/S to compress back toward its historical range over the coming weeks and months as revenue reaccelerates (i.e., not through a price decline, but through higher trailing revenues).

The near-term catalysts are twofold. First is Ranger’s ICO, which will likely be oversubscribed and lead to a spike in Futarchy AMM volumes post-TGE. Second is the Omnibus proposal, which passed last night and will

migrate roughly ~90% of META liquidity from Meteora DAMM v1 into the Futarchy AMM and
burn roughly ~60,000 META (about $550,000 at current prices). Capturing trading volumes from RNGR and META should increase Futarchy AMM revenue in the near term.

Beyond the next few days and into the coming months, I expect MetaDAO’s revenues to trend higher as launch cadence accelerates by an order of magnitude. Two catalysts stand out: permissionless launches and Colosseum’s STAMP.

MetaDAO has debated in public comms whether to preserve a fully curated (permissioned) model or experiment with permissionless launches. The latter, despite the risk of lower-quality projects, is a necessary experiment to increase throughput and validate the platform’s scalability, and is probably the direction the team will ultimately pursue.

Finally, I think the market is underpricing what Colosseum’s STAMP could mean for MetaDAO. Colosseum sits upstream of Solana’s startup funnel, spanning hackathons, an accelerator and a venture fund. Many of the ecosystem’s top teams trace their roots back to hackathons (e.g., Jito, Kamino, Drift, Exponent, Hylo). STAMP effectively plugs MetaDAO into that deal flow, creating a steadier pipeline of high-quality launches to complement permissionless ICOs and normalize launch cadence over time.

In conclusion, Ranger and the Omnibus proposal may help reaccelerate revenues in the near term, but permissionless launches and STAMP are what could ultimately drive a tenfold increase in MetaDAO’s ICO cadence (and, by extension, volumes and revenue) over the coming months.

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ETH derivatives reset and the next retail trade

Marc Arjoon — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 15:14:17 GMT

Markets opened the year with subtle but important shifts. BTC outperformed both equities and gold, higher beta crypto narratives reawakened, and derivatives positioning pointed to a careful rebuild of risk rather than excess. In today’s note, we break down index performance, what ETH derivatives are signaling under the surface, and the growing case for equity perps as a retail driven product nearing an inflection point.

Indices

BTC quietly stole the show this week, benefiting from a rare but timely negative correlation to both equities and gold. Traditional markets softened, with the Nasdaq 100 (-1.7%) and S&P 500 (-1.1%) drifting lower while gold sold off sharply (-3%), BTC (+3.7%) ground higher. It was a steady, low-drama move that stood out precisely because of how long it’s been since crypto outperformed across both risk and defensive assets in the same window. The week felt less like speculative exuberance and more like BTC reminding the market of its role as a portfolio diversifier, a dynamic largely absent through much of the past year when correlations repeatedly snapped back toward one. Whether that decoupling persists will likely hinge on macro follow-through, but for now, BTC’s ability to outperform both stocks and gold marks a notable shift in tape behavior worth watching.

Last week’s winners were concentrated almost entirely in the higher-beta, most narrative-driven corners of crypto, signaling a shift toward speculative positioning. Launchpad tokens (+27.8%) led by a wide margin, benefiting from renewed retail participation and a resurgence in short-duration token launches as traders chased velocity over fundamentals. Modular (+21.0%) and AI (+19.4%) followed closely, while DePIN (+18.9%) and the Solana ecosystem (+16.1%) also stood out.

Within our Launchpad index, leadership once again belonged to MetaDAO, which extended its run of relative outperformance and reinforced its status as the bellwether for the sector. META’s sharp gains this week reflected renewed interest in token issuance infrastructure, as traders gravitated toward platforms most levered to new launches and velocity-driven flows.

What stood out just as much was the breadth: Nearly every constituent in the index finished higher on the week, underscoring how synchronized the move was across the complex. The lone exception was Launchcoin, which lagged while the rest of the cohort participated in the upside. That kind of near-universal participation is typically a sign of sector-level positioning rather than idiosyncratic token news. Looking ahead, the setup remains compelling, with regulatory frameworks expected to crystallize in 2026 and compliant launch infrastructure likely to move from a speculative niche to a structural pillar of the crypto stack, making Launchpads an area investors will be increasingly forced to pay attention to rather than trade opportunistically.

Market Update

ETH derivatives markets in December 2025 were defined by a clear divergence between participation and positioning. Perpetual futures volumes continued to cool, with aggregate ETH perps volume falling roughly 31% month over month, extending November’s decline and reflecting fading speculative intensity amid consolidation and compressed volatility. Activity fell broadly across major venues, signaling reduced appetite for short-term directional trading, particularly during thinner holiday liquidity.

Despite this pullback in turnover, open interest rebounded sharply. Average ETH open interest rose approximately 63% over the month, reversing November’s contraction and climbing steadily as price action stabilized. The combination of falling volumes and rising OI suggest that exposure was rebuilt quietly and deliberately, pointing to longer-horizon or relative-value positioning rather than aggressive leverage-chasing.

This measured rebuild in positioning was reinforced by a continued decline in liquidation activity. ETH liquidations remained subdued throughout December, with weekly liquidation volumes down 56% from November and well below October’s forced deleveraging extremes. Both sides of the market stayed relatively contained as prices consolidated, with short liquidations still modestly exceeding longs but at significantly lower absolute levels. The absence of large liquidation cascades alongside rising open interest underscores a healthier leverage profile, where positions were added gradually and risk was managed more tightly.

Taken together, declining volumes, rising open interest and falling liquidations characterize December as a period of risk reduction and positioning reset, rather than a return to speculative excess.

The bull case for equity perps

Equity perpetuals are often framed as a crypto-native attempt to bring traditional markets onchain. In reality, their real competition is not options but leveraged ETFs, a product class that already has massive retail adoption. The appeal is simple. Retail investors increasingly want leverage in a clean and intuitive wrapper.

JPMorgan estimates retail equity flows in 2025 are over 50% higher than 2024 and above the meme stock peak of 2021. Leveraged ETFs have absorbed much of this appetite, with AUM growing from $41.6 billion in 2020 to $250 billion by late 2025, and monthly trading volumes exceeding $800 billion.

Source: Bloomberg

But leveraged ETFs are flawed: They rely on derivatives to reset exposure daily, which introduces volatility drag. Even when the underlying index goes nowhere, leveraged ETFs can lose value over time. These products are designed for short-term trading but are widely misunderstood and held longer than intended.

Equity perps fix this. They provide constant notional exposure without daily resets, meaning leverage does not decay mechanically. Volatility does not compound against the trader in the same way. For anyone seeking leveraged directional exposure, equity perps are simply a cleaner instrument.

Early traction supports this view. Since mid-October, equity perp volume on Hyperliquid has reached roughly $12.9 billion, with daily volumes commonly found between $200 million and $300 million. Hyperliquid currently dominates market share, followed by Lighter.

Accessibility matters here. It’s no coincidence that equity perp volume has emerged on the same onchain venues that dominate crypto perps.

Source: Hyperzap

But there are frictions. When equity markets are closed, market makers cannot hedge, liquidity thins, and funding rates can spike. Platforms manage this differently through restricted trading hours or internal oracle adjustments. These issues explain why adoption has grown steadily rather than explosively.

The long-term winners will not be determined by venue design but by distribution. Just as centralized exchanges dominate crypto perps, equity perps will likely scale through platforms with massive retail reach. Robinhood and Coinbase are best positioned.

Source: The BlockBoth have already taken steps toward tokenized equities, and a compliant version of equity perps could emerge as early as 2026. The opportunity is large; leveraged ETFs currently trade between $800 billion and $900 billion per month. Capturing even 5% of those flows would increase trading volumes by an estimated 17% for Robinhood and nearly 70% for Coinbase. Ultimately, equity perps are not a crypto experiment. They are a retail product waiting for the right distribution channel.

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Friday charts: Finding good news, in spite of bad headlines

Byron Gilliam — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 23:41:06 GMT

“Despite what we hear on the news… the great story of our era is that we are witnessing the greatest improvement in global living standards ever to take place.”

— John Norberg

As years go, 2025 was a pretty good one, I think.

Derek Thompson goes so far as to say it was “an exceptional year for America,” citing, among other things, huge declines in traffic deaths, drug overdoses and suicides, the largest-ever drop in murder rates, and dramatic advances in healthcare.

“This seems to be the first period on record when every major cause of premature death — overdose, auto accident, homicide, obesity — is falling at the same time,” he adds.

Noah Smith similarly lists 10 reasons America might be “putting itself back together,” including rising life expectancy, peaking social media usage, and a surge in business dynamism.

Most comprehensively, Human Progress collates 1,084 good-news stories reported this year: everything from the astonishing decline of poverty in India to the return of puffins to the UK.

If I wasn’t a regular reader of the Human Progress website, I’m not sure I’d be familiar with any of them, because good news rarely makes headlines.

This has always been the case — as the old newsroom saying goes, “If it leads, it bleeds.”

But it’s even more true now. In the fierce competition for our scarce attention, news outlets appear to be doubling down on the traditional strategy of terrifying us with bad news.

In 2022, an academic study found “a pattern of increasing negative sentiment in headlines.” Specifically, headlines in 2019 were found to be 314% more likely to reflect anger, disgust, fear or sadness compared to 2000.

It feels like things have only gotten worse since.

“We are experiencing a contagion of negativity,” Marain Tupy warns, “driven by the hypercompetitive media environment, with newspapers, television stations, radio and websites presenting a highly skewed picture of the state of the world.”

The state of the world was far from perfect in 2025, of course. War continued to rage, the climate continued to warm, governments continued to fall ever deeper in debt, migrants everywhere continued to be persecuted.

But the world is almost certainly better than we think it is.

Consider the Gallup poll that found that 81% of Americans are satisfied with the way things are going in their life — and only 20% are satisfied with the way things are going in the country.

“A country cannot be doing that poorly if a supermajority of its citizens are having an excellent time,” Malcolm Cochran observes.

Or consider as well the “affordability crisis” that is currently making headlines. After examining the evidence, The Economist concludes that “never has life been so affordable in America for so many.”

Excellent news! But I suspect that won’t get many clicks.

So here’s my New Year’s resolution: Give more of my clicks to reports of good news.

Let’s check the charts.

All the bad news that’s fit to print:

Here’s the graphic from the study finding “a pattern of increasing negative sentiment in headlines.” Whatever the current state of the world, it’s not 314% worse than it was in 2000.

I’m alright, but we’re not:

The aforementioned Gallup poll: 81% of Americans say they are satisfied with their lives but only 20% say they are satisfied with America.

The kids are not alright:

As measured by employment and parenthood, the FT reports that young adults are becoming increasingly disengaged from society. I’m guessing this upward trend is at least partially caused by the upward trend in negative headlines.

Not making headlines:

For all the hand-wringing over the “affordability crisis,” wages have grown faster than prices for the last decade, at least. In other words, things have gotten more affordable, not less. (Yes, this accounts for housing.)

Sentiment disconnect:

Starting with the pandemic, consumer sentiment (in green) decoupled from real disposable income (blue) and has never recovered. More than ever, people are more pessimistic than the data suggests they should be.

Some other things that never recovered:

JPMorgan finds that things like restaurants and air travel have fully recovered from the pandemic, but the film industry and mass transit have not.

Trend change?

The Economist reports that “the world has become surprisingly less grump.” Feelings of worry, stress and anger are off their highs, while feelings of laughter are recovering.

Generation alpha is here:

Over 20% of Americans now play Roblox daily. I don’t know what that means for America, but I’m sure it means something.

The changing world:

There are now more births per year in Nigeria than all of Europe; more in Ethiopia than the US; and more in Afghanistan than Japan.

In 2026, maybe there will be more optimists than pessimists, too.

I doubt it would make the news, though.

Have a great year, headline readers.

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DePIN and crypto gaming led a surprising end-of-year rebound

Kunal Doshi — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 16:53:02 GMT

It was a mixed week for crypto, with BTC ending higher but sharp divergence across sectors. DePIN and Gaming led a surprising rebound after a rough year, while L2s, RWAs and the treasury trade continued to grind lower as flows stayed choppy.

To add some insight to the new year, we’ve rounded up some weekend reads on stablecoin yield, payments infrastructure, interoperability and last year’s fastest-moving narratives.

Indices

With a shortened equity trading week due to the holidays, the focus shifts to crypto performance over the past week. BTC finished the week up 1.6%, though performance across altcoins remains highly fragmented.

The biggest movers may come as a surprise. DePIN and Gaming led all sectors with gains of 13.1% and 12.6%, respectively. These have been two of the weakest performers in 2025, down -79.5% and -81.3% on the year, making the rebound notable.

DePIN strength was driven by FIL and RENDER, which rose 22% and 13% on the week and together account for 49% of the index. Gaming followed a similar pattern, with IMX up 11%, doing most of the heavy lifting for the sector.

On the downside, L2s and RWAs lagged, falling -2.67% and -0.84% over the week. L2 weakness was led by MNT and ZORA, down -5.7% and -6.4%. At the same time, other L2 names such as OP, ARB, and ZK posted gains between 10% and 20%, highlighting sharp divergence within the sector. RWAs were pressured by a pullback in Gold after its strong run this year, with PAXG and XAUT both down around -3.4%.

Flows remain choppy. On Dec. 31, ETFs saw $417.8 million of outflows, nearly offsetting the $428.2 million of inflows recorded the day prior.

Digital asset treasuries continue to feel the strain, with mNAV multiples compressing further. MSTR and BMNR now trade at mNAV levels of 0.69 and 0.85, underscoring the pressure on the treasury trade as the new year begins.

Recommended end-of-year analyses

Neutrl: Unlocking Institutional OTC Yield for Stablecoins

Blockworks Research finds that Neutrl brings institutional-grade OTC arbitrage into a stablecoin wrapper, offering market neutral yields that are less reliant on funding cycles than existing synthetic dollars. Early traction and double-digit sNUSD yields suggest strong demand, supported by deep token unlock pipelines and privileged OTC access via STIX. The core upside rests on scalable deployment into hedged OTC deals, while risks center on execution, counterparty performance and liquidity management. If yields hold as TVL grows, Neutrl could mirror early Ethena dynamics in a more structurally defensive form.

Crypto Card Moats

Polaris Fund finds that crypto cards and neobanks have reached a real inflection point where value is shifting away from rewards and branding toward infrastructure, compliance and liquidity control. The analysis shows that durable moats come from owning primitives like regulated access, programmable liquidity and deep integrations, not cashbacks. Infra rail providers and DeFi native card models capture the most leverage through recurring fees and aligned economics, while CeFi distributors face margin compression. As regulation tightens, scale will increasingly favor players that control licensing, settlement and compliance workflows rather than consumer-facing incentives.

25 Stats Explaining How LayerZero Accelerated Crypto in 2025

LayerZero finds that 2025 marked the shift of interoperability from a theory into core infrastructure for crypto. Data shows tokenized assets and stablecoins increasingly distributed across many chains, with interoperability accelerating asset velocity, capital mobility and global access. Rather than chains competing in isolation, crypto now functions as a connected network where value moves freely to where demand exists. Adoption of message-based transfers and open primitives reduced costs and friction, making cross-chain activity feel more like software than finance. Interoperability is no longer the bottleneck, but the default layer enabling scale.

2025: The Year Narratives Moved Too Fast

Tiger Research finds that 2025 was defined by rapid narrative cycles that generated attention faster than they could be validated, leading to widespread fatigue and skepticism. Most narratives faded quickly, but a subset translated into real use cases that pushed the market forward, particularly where retail access was simple and intuitive. Memecoins showed how quickly users can onboard, but also how fragile engagement is without retention. Experiments like InfoFi highlighted incentive-driven growth but exposed quality and trust issues. The clearest progress came where crypto demonstrated product-market fit, including stablecoins, prediction markets and payment rails, showing that durable value emerges only when narratives align with real utility.

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Canton’s $6T RWA rails and Lighter’s Hyperliquid multiple

Kunal Doshi — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 18:00:00 GMT

As we step into the new year, mindshare across crypto has rotated meaningfully. Prediction markets, stablecoins and RWAs have emerged as the clear winners, while AI, modularity and memecoins have fallen out of favor. One protocol that stood out this week touches two of the three leading narratives and has quietly been putting up impressive metrics: the Canton Network.

Canton is a blockchain built specifically for financial institutions, designed to enable secure, interoperable and privacy preserving transactions. Its token became transferable on Nov. 10 and, after an initial drawdown of more than 50%, it has fully recovered. It’s now up 47.6% over the past month.

The scale of RWA activity on the network is already notable. As of Q4 2025, Canton has processed $6 trillion in real-world assets and currently handles about $350 billion per day in US treasury activity. Much of this traction comes from institutional partners like Broadridge Financial Solutions, a global fintech leader in trading and settlement infrastructure. Broadridge’s Distributed Ledger Repo platform runs on Canton and processes more than $8 trillion per month in repo transactions, using blockchain rails to improve efficiency in one of the largest markets in global finance.

Momentum has continued to build through deeper integrations. A partnership with Nasdaq connects Canton to Nasdaq Calypso, enabling automated margin and collateral management and allowing institutions to move and reuse capital more efficiently across traditional and digital assets. More recently, DTCC, the central clearing and settlement backbone of US financial markets, selected Canton to support RWA tokenization. The initial rollout will allow a subset of US treasurys held at DTCC’s depository to be issued on Canton following SEC approval. Given that DTCC clears roughly $10 trillion of securities transactions every day, the ability to move settlement from T+2 to near real-time could meaningfully improve efficiency and free up capital within existing market infrastructure.

The network usage is closely tied to the token. Canton’s Global Synchronizer coordinates cross-institution transactions, with predictable fees paid in CC that are burned as network activity increases. Over the past 20 days, the network has burned a median of 6.71 million tokens daily, equating to about $627,000 per day, with peaks between $750,000 and $850,000. For context, Solana averaged roughly $670,700 in REV daily over the last seven days, yet trades at a FDV about 16x higher than Canton.

Usage metrics complete the picture. Since November, Canton has averaged around 28,500 daily active users and 678,300 daily transactions, putting it in line with networks like Monad on DAUs and Ton on transaction count.

There is still much more to unpack around architecture, validators and long-term token design, but the early signals are hard to ignore. With exposure to narratives such as tokenization, stablecoins and privacy, Canton is shaping up as one of the more interesting protocols to watch as we head into 2026.

Lighter’s TGE

Lighter airdropped and launched LIT on Dec. 30, closing out a timeline that traders had been stress-testing via a Polymarket contract that effectively functioned as a TGE proxy. Odds briefly slipped to ~60% intraday before the launch went through.

LIT’s max supply is 1 billion with 250 million circulating at TGE, a 25% day-one float. The airdrop was funded by Seasons 1 and 2 points, with 12.5 million points converted into LIT, implying roughly ~20 LIT per point on the headline math. Allocation splits are 50% ecosystem (25% now, 25% later), 26% team, and 24% investors. Team and investors sit behind a one-year cliff followed by three-year linear vesting. Against that backdrop, premarket points pricing has repriced sharply post-TGE, with points buyers down around 50% from peak levels that implied roughly $100 per point at the top.

The more interesting debate is not the airdrop, but token holder protection. Lighter is leaning directly into the token equity mismatch critique, arguing that revenues from the core DEX and future products can be tracked onchain in real time and allocated between growth and buybacks depending on conditions. It goes further by claiming the value created by all products and services will fully accrue to LIT holders, with the token issued directly from its US C-Corp, which will operate the protocol “at cost.” Directionally, that is a stronger posture than the common separate labs capture profits model, but it is not a hard guarantee: “At cost” is elastic (e.g. Uniswap Foundation employee salaries).

On comps, the market is valuing Lighter similarly to Hyperliquid. At $2.7 billion FDV and $700 million circulating, Lighter’s float is ~25.9%, nearly identical to Hyperliquid’s ~25.4% ($24 billion FDV and $6.1 billion circulating). More importantly, Lighter is trading on a fees multiple that is already in Hyperliquid’s range: 26.6x FDV/annualized fees (and 6.9x circulating/annualized fees) vs. Hyperliquid at 29.9x (and 7.6x). That’s despite a large gap in absolute scale, Lighter printed $8.5 million in 30D fees vs. Hyperliquid’s $66.8 million, and Lighter’s open interest is $1.45 billion vs. $7.44 billion for Hyperliquid.

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The long wait for crypto’s “coffee pot” moment

Byron Gilliam — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 14:00:00 GMT

“Technology is everything that doesn’t work yet.”

— Danny Hillis

The world’s first webcam was an inadvertent hit.

Computer scientists at a University of Cambridge lab, to avoid the disappointment of walking to the kitchen only to find their communal coffee pot empty, cobbled together a network application called XCoffee.

A spare video camera, mounted in the kitchen and connected to the laboratory’s network via Ethernet, was programmed to send low-resolution photos of the coffee pot to the scientists’ desktops every 20 seconds or so.

It was a novel arrangement in 1991 — and when the researchers migrated it from the laboratory network to the still-novel world wide web in 1993, it became the world’s first webcam.

It also became the web’s first mainstream use case.

The world wide web was a lonely place in 1993, with few web pages to look at and no search engines to find them with.

Somehow, though, people found their way to the coffee pot webcam.

These early surfers of the internet were so eager to do something — anything! — on the web that they found themselves enthralled by a fixed view of a standard coffee pot.

Is it almost empty? Is the coffee getting darker? Has someone had a cup while I was away???

It was reality TV at its very worst.

It was also a hit.

The opportunity to keep tabs on a Cambridge coffee pot must have spread strictly by word of mouth, because there was no social media to share it on, no search engines to find it with.

But the pot’s audience grew steadily, with the lab’s servers receiving first hundreds and then thousands of visitors — and then exponentially: Millions of people were soon using the web to monitor someone else’s coffee.

One of the lab’s researchers received emails from Japan requesting that the kitchen light be left on overnight so that people in different time zones could have a chance to watch the (presumably empty) coffee pot.

The Cambridge, England tourist information office began offering directions to the lab to visitors hoping to see the star coffee pot in real life.

Finally, peak coffee pot mania hit in 2001, when the lab’s decision to permanently unplug its webcam made front-page headlines.

By that time, there were more substantial things to do on the internet, of course, like watching cat videos and pirating music — and not much later, there would be all-consuming things to do like scrolling through Facebook and posting videos on TikTok.

None of that was imaginable in 1993. But the popularity of the coffee pot webcam was a first hint that the world wide web would soon go mainstream: People’s eagerness to use the web to watch coffee stay warm was a clear sign they’d also want to use it for anything and everything.

This is a hallmark of great technology: If people are eager to use new tech when it’s not very good (three-frames-per-minute video) and for unexpected reasons (watching coffee), it’s a surefire bet that much bigger things are coming.

So, here’s something on my wishlist for ~~2024~~ 2026: Crypto has its coffee pot moment.

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Failure is an option in crypto finance

Byron Gilliam — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:18:58 GMT

“You have to enjoy failure.”

— James Dyson

In a 2003 research paper, Google engineers shared their new approach of building “reliable computing infrastructure from clusters of unreliable commodity PCs.”

This was a radical change. Instead of paying up for super high-end Sun servers engineered for near-perfect reliability, Google was embracing cheap, commodity hardware running free Linux software. They then developed additional software to work around the hardware’s frequent failures.

Redundancy through volume, they found, is cheaper than precision through engineering.

This is the model for modern AI data centers, too: You can’t have a three-month training run crash just because one GPU dies out of 20,000.

It’s not, however, the model for manufacturing the GPUs themselves.

Instead, semiconductor fabrication plants are built to produce GPUs with an ultra-low level of defects, which demands near-perfection at every step of an incredibly complex process — the opposite of Google’s recommendation for data centers.

But this is not engineering perfectionism. It’s an economic necessity.

“Why do we need to have 99.9999% reliability at every step of the process?” Ben Thompson asks. “It’s all the cost of capital equipment.”

Mostly that’s because the $200 million ASML machines every fabrication plant uses to make cutting-edge semiconductors “are the most overengineered things on earth,” Thompson explains.

This creates a feedback loop of spiraling cost and perfection: Fabrication plants have to be near-perfect to be profitable because the ASML machines are so expensive — and the ASML machines are so expensive because they have to be perfect.

As a result, it now costs as much as $20 billion to build a single semiconductor fab.

Thompson compares the process of making semiconductors with hyper-complex ASML machines with the process of making rockets at SpaceX, where Elon Musk chooses to “blow up a bunch of Starships because you don’t want to be wasting anything on complexity that actually isn’t necessary.”

Repeatedly blowing up rockets helps SpaceX find the “exact line where you want to be,” as Thompson puts it — the line between complexity and usefulness that allows them to avoid the astronomical upfront costs required by perfection.

In other words, failure can be a feature, not a bug, of complex systems.

It’s about the journey…

Failure is a core feature of crypto systems, too: Every blockchain is designed around the assumption that some percentage of its nodes will be malicious or faulty.

This makes blockchains resilient — like Google’s data centers, they continue to produce valid blocks despite individual failures. But that fault tolerance doesn’t extend to the code running on the blockchain.

Smart contract code, written by fallible humans, will inevitably have bugs or design flaws. This can be costly, because unlike traditional finance, there’s no reversing a crypto transaction once a flawed contract or protocol is exploited.

Code eliminates intermediaries, but at the cost of zero fault tolerance.

This makes code-is-law crypto a system that philosophically embraces decentralized fault tolerance but architecturally demands perfection.

There is no way to design your way around that.

In traditional finance, where systems are permissioned and transactions are reversible, banks can aim for near-perfection by implementing ever-stricter KYC/AML rules and hiring ever more compliance officers.

In crypto finance, where systems are permissionless and transactions are irreversible, we can only aim to learn from our mistakes.

There have been a lot of them: from The DAO exploit that nearly sank Ethereum in 2016 to the record-setting $1.5 billion Bybit hack in 2025.

With luck, though, these could come to look in hindsight like Elon Musk’s exploding rockets. Each exploit reveals an attack vector — reentrancy, oracle manipulation, protocol design flaws — that can be fixed in future iterations.

Like Starship explosions, the failures show what actually needs hardening vs. what was unnecessary caution — each an opportunity to find the right balance of complexity and usefulness in a new kind of financial system.

Crypto is often judged by its failures, which is fair enough, given their frequency and size.

But the failures aren’t bugs in the process of building a new financial system. They are the process.

To enjoy crypto, then, you’ll have to enjoy failure, too.

Happy new year.

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Yield Basis is making native BTC yield a reality

Marc Arjoon — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 19:20:49 GMT

Yield Basis (YB) is a novel DeFi mechanism that uses leverage to eliminate impermanent loss (IL) from AMMs. The founder of Yield Basis is the same founder as Curve, and synergies exist between the two. The mechanics of how this mechanism works can be found here.

After years of witnessing failed attempts, YB strikes me as the first solution with legs, but you don’t need to take my word for it. YB already accounts for the three-largest BTC DEX pools in DeFi ($400 million+).

Moreover, this means that (wrapped) BTC token holders can now earn yield while supplying liquidity. Historically, the seven-day moving average for this (supply) yield has ranged between 4% and 40%.

And since many of us don’t LP into AMMs (unless we’re farming something), you might have forgotten that yields are earned in the pool tokens. So yes, that means native BTC yields.

Source: Valueverse

As for the token itself, it’s not just a ~~meme~~ governance token — there’s actual value. The fee switch was turned on earlier this month. YieldBasis LPs have two options for generating yield from provided liquidity: (a) hold the ybBTC LP token and receive BTC-denominated trading fees, or (b) stake ybBTC, forgo BTC-denominated trading fees and participate in YB emissions.

Corporate Finance 201 agrees with me when I say, “Don’t buy back the token, give me the earnings from the protocol, and I can decide for myself if and when I want to buy the token.” What I mean is, dividends give optionality, especially when you can choose which type of yield to receive. For perspective, for the week ending Dec. 25, roughly $450,000 was distributed (and this figure is despite caps on the LP pools).

Source: Valueverse

If you’ve read this and think there’s finally a way to earn native yield on BTC without IL and without the risks, effort and costs of hedging, then you’d be right — but there could be more. YB is positioned as more than just an IL-free AMM: It is a yield and liquidity infrastructure designed to make otherwise non-productive assets yield-bearing while establishing secondary markets. By targeting wrapped native assets and tokenized RWAs, YB can theoretically make any sufficiently liquid and volatile asset productive, allowing issuers to earn from liquidity rather than subsidize market making, while also enabling holders to access yield and downstream DeFi use cases such as collateralization.

This model extends beyond crypto majors like BTC and ETH to tokenized commodities and equities such as Gold, Silver, and NVDA, whose onchain adoption is currently constrained by IL, shallow liquidity, and the absence of yield or liquidation pathways. Yield Basis could unlock these markets by offering a unique, superior yield option with an attractive risk-reward profile, deep liquidity and strong network effects.

YB is not without risk. I encourage you to read the paper (or get AI to explain it) and understand the potential downsides, but also the potential unlocks that YB has to offer.

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Users are the best investors to have

Byron Gilliam — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 17:13:32 GMT

“Corporations are legal entities that own themselves.”

— Lynn Stout

The idea that companies should be run for the benefit of shareholders is a relatively new one.

For most of the 20th century, American corporations were instead operated according to the principle of managerial capitalism: “a form of capital accumulation and organizational control in which managers are the central agents of power.”

This was the era of the “Organization Man,” when control of a company was decoupled from ownership and professional administrators considered themselves stewards of a permanent institution, responsible for balancing the interests of a broad array of stakeholders rather than serving shareholders alone.

Often, the most favored stakeholders were the executives themselves.

In Barbarians at the Gate, the tendency for corporate self-dealing was vividly illustrated by the “RJR Air Force” — a fleet of private planes the CEO of R.J. Reynolds used for weekend golf outings and personal trips to his vacation home.

In one memorable instance, the only passenger on a corporate flight was the CEO’s German Shepherd (sent home early from a weekend trip to avoid the consequences of biting someone).

The excesses of managerial capitalism were also dramatized in the movie Wall Street, when Gordon Gekko tells the shareholders of Teldar Paper they’re being exploited by the company’s management: “You are all being royally screwed over by these bureaucrats, with their steak lunches, their hunting and fishing trips, their corporate jets, and golden parachutes.”

Gekko’s message to Teldar’s shareholders — that they owned the company and executives should therefore work for them — was rooted in the thinking of Milton Friedman, who argued in a 1970 New York Times op-ed that “in his capacity as a corporate executive, the manager is the agent of the individuals who own the corporation.”

“In a free‐enterprise, private‐property system,” Friedman added, “a corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business. He has direct responsibility to his employers. That responsibility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires.”

In the case of publicly traded companies, he reasoned, shareholders owned the business, so that’s who executives worked for.

Intuitive as that seems, Lynn Stout says it’s all wrong: “Corporations own themselves,” the legal scholar argues, “just as human entities own themselves.”

What shareholders actually own, she explains, are, well, shares: “a type of contract between the shareholder and the legal entity that gives shareholders limited legal rights.”

Nowhere in that contract does it stipulate that executives work for shareholders. Or that they should favor investors over any other stakeholders, be it employees, customers, suppliers, society at large or the environment.

“The idea that corporations should be managed to maximize shareholder value,” Stout says, “is based on factually mistaken claims about the law.”

Nevertheless, that’s exactly how US corporations have been run, almost universally, for the past three or four decades (since Gordon Gekko, basically).

Stout laments the short-termism she believes that’s led to, arguing that a cult of “shareholder primacy” has caused corporations to aim for near-term profits at the expense of long-term investing.

(I’d counter, however, that the current boom in AI investment probably disproves that.)

Stout advocates instead for a return to the kind of managerial capitalism that, in her telling, successfully built infrastructure like railroads and canals with less regard for the profits they’d produce and more regard for how useful they’d be.

“Investors in these early corporations were usually also customers,” she reasoned. “They structured their companies to make sure the business would provide good service at a reasonable price – not to maximize investment returns.”

Is that how crypto protocols should be structured, too?

The current debate in crypto is how to grant token holders the kind of rights that shareholders think they have in traditional finance.

But if Stout is right, that may be the wrong goal.

Without formal ownership rights, tokens might attract investors less like Gordon Gekko and more like the 19th-century shareholders who so eagerly funded societally beneficial railroads and canals.

Railroads and canals were networks, after all — networks that may never have been built if 19th-century companies were run strictly to maximize profits for their shareholders.

And protocols are networks, too.

Even if those protocols are often run like companies, Stout’s work shows that there’s more than one way to think about what kind of rights investors should have.

If crypto protocols are only about maximizing returns for investors, then, yes, token holders should be granted rights that more formally make them Gordon Gekko-like owners.

But if crypto finance is meant to be a new kind of participatory capital, it might be more productive to grant token holders fewer rights.

Or maybe even none at all.

Rather than offering the kind of legal protections likely to attract profit-maximizing investors, protocols could instead rely on their users to fund their development.

This might allow them to evolve into something fundamentally different from profit-maximizing corporations.

Conceivably, that could turn out to be the most useful guarantee for token holders, too: Investors that are also users may be treated better than investors that are only owners.

When the customer and the capitalist are one and the same, the only way to maximize value for both investors and users is to build something that actually works.

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A sleeper in the perps category

Carlos — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 17:50:45 GMT

The headline in crypto today is Lighter’s LIT token finally going live, marking a key moment in the ongoing battle for perps market share. In today’s coverage, we break down one of the most overlooked beneficiaries of perps growth (Pendle via Boros), and take a closer look at the evolving dynamics within the Solana liquid-staking landscape.

Indices

Markets kicked off the final week of the year on a softer note. Bitcoin (-0.81%) underperformed its US equity benchmarks, with the Nasdaq (-0.59%) and S&P 500 (-0.39%) posting modest pullbacks after tech stocks drove the S&P 500 to all-time highs last week. Meanwhile, Gold (-4.04%) and other precious metals saw a sharp selloff amid profit-taking, after having been standout performers in the past few weeks.

Back on the crypto front, Perps (+1.3%) was the only index to finish the day in the green, with HYPE leading gains ahead of Lighter’s TGE today. Competition for perps market share has heated up in recent months. Lighter has shown that verifiable execution and zero retail fees can drive market-leading volume, leading perps trading with just over $200 billion in volume over the past 30 days, followed by Aster ($172 billion) and Hyperliquid ($161 billion). That said, Hyperliquid remains the only one of the three operating without active incentives and is the clear revenue leader, generating ~$47 million over the same period.

The real test will be whether Lighter can hold its volume lead after TGE, especially with many attributing its recent surge to points farming. In an announcement thread last night, the team outlined the token structure and airdrop details, noting that “the value created by all Lighter products and services will fully accrue to LIT holders” and that the labs entity will operate at cost. Token distribution is split between ecosystem (50% of total supply) and team/investors (remaining 50%), with 25% of total supply airdropped to points holders from Seasons 1 and 2.

As of writing, LIT is trading at a circulating market cap of $695 million and an FDV of $2.8 billion. Per DeFiLlama, the protocol has generated $8.76 million in revenue over the past 30 days ($105 million annualized), implying LIT trades at a P/S of ~7x and an FDV/Sales of ~27x.

Market update

While everyone is busy debating who will win the perps race (mostly Hyperliquid vs. Lighter chatter after Lighter’s TGE), the most interesting beneficiary might be hiding in plain sight: Pendle, via Boros. In my view, Pendle stands to gain from the structural growth and adoption of perpetual futures, regardless of who ultimately dominates, on either CEX or DEX rails.

Pendle launched Boros in early August 2025, bringing to DeFi a new onchain financial primitive: interest rate swaps. One can think of Boros as a perps exchange itself, but with two key twists. First, instead of betting on the price movements of assets, one is betting on the movements of yield. Second, while perpetuals (as the name suggests) have no expiry, Boros markets have a maturity date.

Although Boros has rolled out gradually, early traction has been strong. As shown in the chart below, daily open interest (OI) by maturity peaked at $245 million on Dec. 26, 2025, when eight markets with a combined $177 million in OI expired. The growth pattern in OI is highly cyclical, much like Pendle v2, reflecting the natural peaks and troughs around the maturities and redemptions inherent to yield markets.

Regarding its underlying mechanics, Boros enables trading of funding rates by creating something called a Yield Unit (YU). For those familiar with Pendle v2 markets, YU is similar to the Yield Token (YT), and represents the future yield of an underlying asset until its maturity. Traders can either go long or short the YU.

Long position: If a trader is long 2 YU-BTCUSDC-Hyperliquid at 10% implied APR, they are committed to paying a 10% fixed rate, while receiving the underlying APR (funding rate payments) equivalent to a 2 BTC position in Hyperliquid BTCUSDC.
Short position: In a short position, the trader would commit to paying the floating underlying APR in return for a fixed APR, determined by the average implied APR at the time they entered the position (10% in this example).

On Boros, rates are settled periodically at the same time as the underlying exchange’s funding rate settlement. For example, funding rates on Binance are settled every eight hours, so rates on Boros for the Binance pools are also settled every eight hours. Similarly, Hyperliquid funding rates are settled hourly, and Boros rates for these pools follow the same hourly settlement schedule. At maturity (or when the position is closed), if the average Underlying APR > average implied APR upon entry, a long position will profit and vice versa.

Beyond OI, which currently sits at ~$88 million, another key metric for Boros is notional trading volume. As shown in the chart below, Boros has processed roughly $6.8 billion in cumulative volume since launch, with a median monthly volume of around $1.5 billion over the past four months.

Boros has two main fee sources: (1) a flat fee on top of the implied APR for every swap, which varies by market, and (2) a flat fee of 0.2% of the fixed APR side of every YU during settlement. The chart below shows that Boros has generated ~$300,000 in cumulative revenue since inception, averaging ~$67,000 in monthly revenue over the past four months. Of note, liquidation fees remain insignificant, amounting to ~$1,300 since inception.

Swap fees correlate with notional trading volume. In a market with a swap fee tier of 0.05%, traders will profit if implied APR changes by more than 0.1% in their favor (assuming no yield settlement), as traders will have to open and close the position, thus incurring 2x the swap fee. On the other hand, OI fees (0.2% of the fixed APR during settlement) follow the cyclical growth patterns of Boros’ OI.

While the bull case for Boros is that it becomes DeFi’s default interest rate derivatives venue (extending beyond funding rates to stablecoin yields, money market rates, LST yields and more), its largest opportunity over the next six to twelve months is squarely in the perpetuals vertical. Boros launched with only BTCUSDT and ETHUSDT perps markets on Binance in August, but has since expanded to additional venues (Hyperliquid and OKX) and assets (HYPE). The chart below shows that OI was dominated by Binance early on, but is now almost evenly distributed across venues as of Dec. 29: Binance (37%), Hyperliquid (35%), and OKX (29%).

Regarding asset dominance, the ETH-USD market remains the largest on Boros by OI, followed by BTC-USD and HYPE-USD.

A key advantage of Boros is that it benefits from the maturation of perpetuals without being tied to any single venue, since it can support multiple exchanges and assets. As more sophisticated participants enter the perps space, they’re likely to demand strategies that Boros uniquely enables: hedging funding payments on a long position, hedging funding receivables on a short position, or implementing cash-and-carry trades. Looking ahead, as perps gain regulatory acceptance and more traditional firms trade RWA perps like equities and commodities, these players will want to trade YUs of TSLA, gold and hundreds of other assets on Boros.

Today, Boros represents less than 5% of Pendle v2 revenue, but it is well-positioned to be the most important growth vector for the protocol and may eventually rival or exceed v2 over time.

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The old story of investing in new technology

Byron Gilliam — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 15:24:59 GMT

“It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel.”

— Susan B. Anthony on bicycles

The 1880s saw bicycle riders shift from sitting directly — and precariously — above the comically giant front wheel of a Victorian penny-farthing to the far safer position between the two normal-sized wheels of a modern bicycle.

The change was enabled by the innovation of chains that transferred pedal power to a bicycle’s rear wheel, leaving the front wheel just for steering. Further innovations like diamond-shaped frames, weldless steel tubes, and pneumatic tires soon completed the bicycle’s transformation from a dangerous novelty into the practical mode of transport and exercise we know today.

The safer, smoother and more comfortable ride was an immediate hit. Within a few years, bicycle manufacturing became a booming industry, with the number of manufacturers in Birmingham alone rising from 72 in 1889 to 177 by 1895.

This set off a mania among investors that the authors of Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles describe as “a particularly clear illustration of the usefulness of bubbles.”

Manic investors drove an index of cycle shares 258% higher in the first five months of 1896, which attracted a boom of new stock market listings: In the two years to 1897, 670 cycle, tube or tyre firms floated shares on England’s regional stock markets.

Many of these were of the lowest quality, such as Accles Ltd., which sold £135,000 of shares but reported just £71 in revenue before filing for bankruptcy less than two years later.

Predictably, cycle shares lost 73% of their value from the peak of Bicycle Mania in the early months of 1896 to the end of 1898.

As painful as it must have been for investors, the bust was probably worth it: The investment bubble accelerated improvements in tire quality that later enabled the automobile industry and spurred advances in machine tools and ball bearings that spread throughout English manufacturing and beyond.

Better yet, the flood of affordable bicycles the bubble produced had a modernizing effect on society that no one could have predicted.

The Victorian social expectation that women be chaperoned when traveling was shattered when bicycles became widely available — chaperoning a woman on a bicycle was impractical, and there were simply too many riders for Victorian men to police.

This also sparked a “rational clothing” movement, as the impossibility of cycling in restrictive corsets and skirts led to the development of more practical dresses.

It’s hard to overstate what a radical change that was.

“Let me tell you what I think of bicycling,” Susan B. Anthony told the New York World in 1896. “I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.”

Such was the popular association between feminism and cycling that the bicycle became the symbol of the suffrage movement — women rode free from Victorian social norms on a booming supply of modern bicycles.

For that, we have the overenthusiastic investors of the 1890s to thank.

Invest like it’s 1999?

In 1999, Warren Buffett warned that world-changing technologies are often ruinous for the investors that correctly predict them.

The auto industry was one example: “If you had seen at the time of the first cars how this country would develop in connection with autos,” he told the annual gathering of VIPs at Sun Valley, ID, “you would have said, ‘This is the place I must be.’ But [out of] two thousand [auto] companies, as of a few years ago, only three survived…so autos had an enormous impact on America, but in the opposite direction for investors.”

Airlines were another: “Imagine if you could have seen the future of the airline industry back there at Kitty Hawk. You [would] have decided, this is the place to be.”

But “as of a couple of years ago,” he noted, “there had been zero money made from the aggregate of all stock market investments in the airline industry in history.”

That was Buffett’s way of warning his VIP audience they could be right that the internet would change everything — and wrong that investors would profit from it.

The dotcom bubble popped eight months later.

Today, artificial intelligence is the obvious candidate for the next world-changing technology to ultimately disappoint investors: It probably will revolutionize everything; but which companies, if any, will capture the value it creates remains anyone’s guess.

Crypto is another.

The news this year was shockingly good — the SEC flipped from anti- to pro-crypto, the GENIUS Act legalized stablecoins, prediction markets went mainstream, TradFi institutions scrambled to get involved — but token prices have been shockingly bad.

That might just be because expectations got ahead of reality.

But it might also be a sign that, however much value crypto ultimately creates, little of it will accrue to the investors that funded it.

People are excited about the tokenization of real-world assets, for example. But if most of those assets are tokenized by Robinhood, BlackRock and the DTCC, the crypto investors who financed the infrastructure that made tokenization possible won’t capture much of the value it creates.

Similarly, the crypto industry has devoted billions of dollars to developing zero-knowledge proofs, and it’s easy to imagine how these could be great for the world — they may be humanity’s last line of defense against AI slop.

But they may also be terrible for investors: ZK proving is math that doesn’t need a tradeable token to function.

There are many more such examples — likely because the value that crypto set out to create was not meant to be captured.

Just the opposite: Composable, open-source, decentralized crypto was meant to disintermediate the rent seekers of technology and tear down the toll booths of finance.

At the end of a disappointing year for token prices, it’s tempting to conclude that crypto is progressing too slowly toward those goals.

But if crypto turns out to be as good for the world as bicycles, no one should complain if it’s also as bad for investors.

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2025 Reflections

Michael Ippolito — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 14:31:28 GMT

2025 was a line in the sand moment for crypto.

Decades from now, we will look back at these years as 2009 – 2024. Then 2025. Then everything after.

It’s worth taking a moment to reflect on exactly why that is and what it means for the next decade.

Until this point, crypto could fairly be categorized as “the Wild West” with all the good and bad that entails.

We’ve had a decade of unprecedented innovation in computer science, cryptography, and finance, leading to innovations like 24/7 markets, permissionless financial products, and zero-cost global dollar payments.

Concepts and products that crypto introduced are now changing the world.

But throughout that same decade, frauds, speculation, and a lack of regulatory clarity damaged the optics of crypto and put a ceiling on the industry’s growth.

That all changed in 2025 with the administration’s regulatory embrace of crypto. In a complete reversal, the SEC went from fighting crypto to announcing “Project Crypto” and pledging to bring the world’s financial infrastructure onchain.

We also got our first major piece of positive crypto legislation (GENIUS). Several crypto companies went public. Stablecoins went mainstream. Prediction markets are the fastest growing product outside of AI. Billion-dollar M&A is finally happening. DEXs are eating market share from CEXs. RWAs grew 4x. The list goes on…

For the first time ever, banks, payments providers, startups, and enterprises have an incentive to build onchain.

Everyone loves to compare crypto to the internet, so here is our analogy: We believe we just experienced the equivalent of 2002 for the internet.

The age of speculative capital driving crypto is over, and the slow grind up where innovations truly scale has only just begun.

This has profound implications for investors, builders, and society as a whole.

From our perspective, here’s what it means for Blockworks.

We’re making our next big bet.

The theme of the last decade can be described as “assets moving onchain.” $300B moved into stablecoins. $100B moved into DeFi. Another $50B flowed into perps and related markets.

Now, we’ve entered a new era.

We believe the theme of the next decade will be real businesses building onchain.

If you squint, you can see what it looks like. Startups like Hyperliquid, Pump, and Aave generate hundreds of millions of revenue with just dozens of employees. Fintechs like Robinhood, Stripe, and Klarna launched their own chains and stablecoins. Institutions like BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, JPMorgan all transact on open, public blockchains.

The world is moving onchain. Slowly at first, then all at once.

In the next decade, we will go from $10 billion in onchain revenue today to more than $1 trillion.

Combined with AI, that shift onchain will create an explosion of opportunity and entirely new types of companies that have never existed before.

We’ve spent this past year positioning ourselves to win what we believe is the biggest opportunity we have ever seen since starting Blockworks.

The problem as we see it today: Even the most talented teams have to run multibillion-dollar protocols and onchain businesses on a patchwork of block explorers, internally built dashboards, and broken spreadsheets.

There is no single operating system and software platform for teams to run their business on.

Blockworks is going to solve that.

Our next phase is about turning the data platform we have built into a true operating system for onchain businesses.

We are building for a world where Blockworks is running the core data and workflows for millions of onchain businesses.

2025 by the numbers

Thanks to our team, 2025 was our strongest year in our history. A few highlights:

Sales: We grew ARR by more than 10x this year. Data and analytics ARR is now growing faster than any other line of business.
Profitability: We remained profitable, with positive net operating income and more cash on our balance sheet than the start of the year.
Massively scaled our data platform: Our data warehouse now contains more than 2.1 trillion rows of data flowing through 100+ pipelines that ingest data from 82 distinct sources. This data powers nearly 2,600 visualizations and 280 dashboards for 145 different companies.
Shipped 4 major analytics products: We launched Analytics 2.0, with a custom data warehouse, frontend, and studio product, and used that backbone to ship a dashboard builder, chart builder, and the first version of our API (which already has 378 metrics available).
Expanded data beyond just onchain data: We added offchain datasets for ETFs, fundraising, M&A, centralized exchanges, and more. This will be important as we add more offchain data for companies in 2026.
Token transparency framework: After presenting to the SEC and receiving their support, we introduced the Token Transparency Framework, an open disclosure standard for crypto projects. TTF is already being used to rate leading protocols and we’re now in active discussion with exchanges, financial institutions, and other data providers to integrate the framework across the industry.
Podcasts: Our podcast network is by far the most listened to network in crypto. Our creator-led shows now reach several million professionals and investors across finance, crypto, and tech.
Social: We’ve built a community of 800,000+ followers across our creators and brands.
Events: DAS New York was our best conference ever: It was the first time a sitting US president has addressed a crypto conference.

Day after day

When we started Blockworks in December 2017, the mission was simple: Build the best source of crypto insights and information for investors and professionals.

Since then, we’ve built a global team of nearly 100 people. Millions of people listen to our podcasts. Tens of thousands have attended our events. Hundreds of institutions read our research and consume our data.

If you zoom out, the story of Blockworks is not a string of funding rounds, product launches, or headline hires. We are a company that has survived multiple bear markets, stayed default alive, and quietly compounded into something much more ambitious than we ever believed possible.

As we head into 2026, we are more convinced than ever that crypto will improve the world by broadening access to assets, increasing transparency, and reducing financial friction. Blockworks will play an instrumental role in that world.

For those that want it, the crypto opportunity has truly never been bigger or more important to humanity.

See you in the trenches,

Jason and Mike

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The perps wars are heating up

Boccaccio — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 16:13:32 GMT

Happy Monday, and hope you all had a merry Christmas! We’re back with updates on recent crypto performance as we move into the New Year.

Gold led traditional benchmarks higher this week while BTC slipped nearly 1%, diverging from the broader risk-on mood. Solana ecosystem tokens outperformed, with JTO and DRIFT posting double-digit gains as L2s and Ethereum-linked sectors bled. Aave still dominates DeFi lending with 86% of protocol revenue, but its grip has loosened from 91% in January as Fluid and newer entrants chip away. Meanwhile, Lighter continues to beat out Hyperliquid on weekly volume, though the looming airdrop may be inflating those numbers.

Indices

Benchmarks drifted up slowly over the past week: Gold led gains (+3.57%) while the S&P 500 (+1.15%) and Nasdaq 100 (+0.84%) also posted modest advances. BTC bucked the trend, slipping 0.90% despite the broader environment.

Crypto sector indices showed mixed results over the week. On the upside, Solana Ecosystem (+4.4%) led gains, followed by Launchpads (+3.23%), DePIN (+2.23%), Perps (+2.17%), and Modular (+1.7%). DEXs (+1.42%) and AI (+1.07%) also posted modest advances. On the downside, L2s (-8.27%) and Lending (-6.82%) saw the steepest declines, with Ethereum Ecosystem (-6.57%) and Crypto Miners (-5.97%) also under pressure.

JTO led the Solana Eco index with a +10.30% move, followed closely by DRIFT (+8.10%) as liquid staking and perps narratives found renewed interest. JUP (+4.14%), ORCA (+3.81%), and RAY (+3.40%) also posted solid gains, reflecting strength across the DEX sector. On the lagging end, MPLX (-2.68%) struggled to find footing, and PUMP was the clear underperformer at -5.11%, continuing to bleed as memecoin-launchpad fatigue set in.

Charts for the week

Aave has dominated the DeFi lending space in 2025, capturing 86% of protocol revenue and generating $120.9 million YTD. That said, Aave’s grip has loosened slightly over the year, dropping from 91% market share in January to 86% in December. New entrants HyperLend (launched March) and Jupiter Lend (launched July) now account for a combined 3.4% of the market, while Fluid more than doubled its share from 2.4% to 4.9%, making it the fastest growing competitor among established protocols.

Outstanding loans tell a similar story. Aave holds $21.3 billion in loans, representing 74.7% of the market, a share that has remained relatively flat since January. The real movement has been among challengers: Morpho grew from 10.6% to 12.8% of outstanding loans, while Spark collapsed from 11.5% to just 4.7%. Fluid nearly doubled its share from 3.6% to 5.0%, and newer entrants Jupiter Lend (2.1%) and HyperLend (0.7%) have carved out small but growing positions.

The downtrend in network revenues has continued, with total weekly revenue dropping 21% to $26.4 million, the lowest in at least a month. Hyperliquid saw the sharpest decline among major chains, falling 40% from $11.8 million to $7.1 million, while Ethereum dropped 38% to $2.2 million. Solana held up better, slipping just 2% to $4.7 million. Tron remained the top revenue generator after Hyperliquid at $6.1 million despite an 11% decline. The only notable gainers were smaller players: Arbitrum (+37%), Polygon (+50%), and BSC (+2%), though these moves represent relatively small absolute amounts.

In August 2025, Hyperliquid saw $396 billion in volume and $121 million in revenue, with trailing 30-day volume peaking at $395 billion and the protocol dominating 80%+ of DeFi perps market share.

Lighter has done $30.9 billion in perp volume over the past seven days and $203.7 billion over the past month, with $1.48 billion in open interest. Aster has seen $26 billion in seven-day volume and $160.6 billion over 30 days, with a larger $7.4 billion in OI. Hyperliquid has fallen behind on weekly volume at $21.5 billion, though it still holds more than double their combined OI at $2.4 billion. With a Lighter airdrop incoming, we’ll see how the landscape shapes up if volumes drop drastically once the points program ends.

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Gold and silver won 2025

Carlos — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 15:42:48 GMT

It’s been a slow week with Christmas, and traditional markets were closed yesterday. BTC slipped slightly (-0.4%) on muted volumes across the board, reflecting the broader holiday lull. With price action quiet, it’s a good moment to step back, reflect on 2025, and think about 2026 positioning.

Bitcoin has underperformed stock benchmarks this year, but its performance vs. gold and silver is even more striking. In hindsight, those two will likely be remembered as the standout assets of 2025, a surprising outcome if you’d predicted it at the start of the year. Gold is having its best year since 1979, up around 72% year to date and recently breaking out to new all-time highs above $4,500 an ounce. Silver has done even better, rallying nearly 160% year to date and about 45% in the past month alone, reaching a record ~$75 an ounce yesterday.

Looking ahead, 2026 could present compelling opportunities in liquid tokens. Many quality DeFi names are trading near multi-year lows, even as fundamentals and forward-looking growth remain strong. Crucially, value capture has flipped from infrastructure to applications: On Solana, for example, apps now generate roughly 3x the revenue of the network. The key question for investors is whether, and when, valuations will start to reflect this new reality.

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Maple’s fundamentals are driving outperformance

Carlos — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 19:54:37 GMT

Maple (SYRUP) is up 26% over the past week, outperforming all other money markets in our lending index. Alongside Sky, it is the only asset in the index with a positive year-to-date performance, and by a broad margin, up 112% vs. Sky’s 7%. What’s driving Maple’s strength, and how has it remained resilient despite challenging market conditions?

Maple, as one of DeFi’s longest-standing lending protocols, was able to come back from the 2022 credit crisis by pivoting away from undercollateralized lending toward a fully secured, overcollateralized model, with an institutional approach: Permissionless Syrup pools accept USDC or USDT deposits (syrupUSDC, syrupUSDT), while permissioned pools accept only USDC. Capital from these pools is then deployed OTC to institutional borrowers, collateralized by BTC or other highly liquid cryptoassets.

As seen below, Maple has surpassed $4 billion in deposits, with about 63% of deposits coming from the syrupUSDC pool, 27% from the syrupUSDT pool, and 10% from Maple Institutional (its permissioned secured lending pool).

How does Maple stack up against other money markets? Among protocols with more than $3 billion in deposits, Maple has been the fastest-growing in every quarter this year except Q3, when it ranked second behind Fluid. Q2 marked Maple’s strongest quarter, with deposits up 225% and borrows rising more than 250%. Year-to-date, deposits have grown an exceptional 701%, while outstanding loans are up 1,118%. Notably, loan origination has outpaced growth in deposits, underscoring increasingly high utilization.

Maple’s growth has largely been driven by syrupUSDC, which as we mentioned accounts for 63% of Maple’s deposits ($2.66 billion) as of Dec. 21. One of the attractive selling points of syrupUSDC is the sustained high yield, linked to stable demand from Maple’s institutional client base. syrupUSDC has outperformed all other benchmark yields in the cohort year-to-date, with an average APY of ~8%. However, it’s worth noting that in recent months the yield has been declining, with Morpho’s USDC yield remaining competitive since August and outperforming sharply during November.

Regarding the methodology, we use market-weighted USDC supply rates across competing protocols, based on base interest paid by borrowers (excluding any incentives). We then compute trailing 30-day annualized rates and compare them to the benchmark yield, syrupUSDC.

Another growth catalyst for syrupUSDC and syrupUSDT has been deep DeFi integrations. Maple’s yield-bearing stablecoins have been integrated into Pendle’s PT markets and onboarded as collateral across several money markets (Aave, Fluid, Jup Lend, Spark, and Kamino), enabling looping strategies against non-yield-bearing stables. This kind of distribution can further accelerate Maple’s growth, particularly during periods when syrupUSDC outperforms benchmark yields, including Ethena’s sUSDe.

Putting it all together, Maple has outpaced competing money markets year-to-date in both deposit and borrow growth, as well as USDC supply yields. How has that performance translated into revenue? The table below compares Maple against its peers on quarterly revenue and price-to-sales multiples.

Based on Q4 2025 revenue figures, Maple (SYRUP) is trading at the most attractive valuation of the cohort on a growth and FDV/Sales basis. Maple’s annualized revenue run rate has increased 533% YoY, from $1.0 million in Q4 2024 to a forecasted $6.6 million in Q4 2025.

Regarding token distribution, all initial team, advisor, seed investor, and public sale allocations were fully vested as of 2023, eliminating supply overhang concerns. Of note, SYRUP scored 37 on the Token Transparency Framework, indicating that the project has fully disclosed its revenue streams, equity to token holder rights, advisory service providers, and executive team personnel.

Given Maple’s fundamentals, alongside a favorable token structure (limited supply overhang and clear disclosures around value accrual), it’s unsurprising that SYRUP is the best-performing lending token year-to-date and has continued to show notable relative strength in recent days.

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The incredible, incomprehensible, possibly impossible world of trillion-dollar tech valuations

Byron Gilliam — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 18:49:43 GMT

“There’s a belief that the world’s GDP is somehow limited at $100 trillion. AI is going to cause that $100 trillion to become $500 trillion.”

— Jensen Huang

In 1901, US Steel became the first $1 billion company — “an almost unthinkable sum,” a history of the company marveled just 20 years later.

“Hundreds of millions commanded respect,” it added. “But a billion, a thousand million — that seemed merely a row of figures, something that could hardly be computed.”

Today, the number investors must try to compute is a trillion: There are now 11 publicly traded companies worth more than $1 trillion.

For a sense of scale, consider that if you earned $1 every second of the day, every day (and never spent any of them), you wouldn’t be a trillionaire until the year 33,168.

Investors — unlikely to live that long — will have to hope their trillion-dollar companies earn dollars much faster than that.

More scientifically, Aswath Damodaran does a kind of reverse DCF to calculate how much annual revenue the biggest companies will have to bring in to justify current valuations.

To invest in Tesla now, he calculates, you have to believe the company will earn annual revenue of at least $2.2 trillion by the year 2030 — an assumption that’s “pushing the limits of possibility,” he opines.

Nvidia shareholders are not quite as ambitious: They only need the company to do about $590 billion in annual revenue by 2030. “While that is a reach,” Damodaran advises, “it is both possible and plausible.”

Still, $590 billion is a gargantuan number.

For perspective, US Steel in 1901 was worth only about $46 billion in inflation-adjusted terms.

Now, OpenAI is reportedly raising more than double that amount — $100 billion — in a single cash call to investors.

SpaceX was also reported this week to be raising money at an $800 billion valuation, with plans to IPO at $1.5 trillion.

Anthropic, a public benefit corporation that doesn’t aim to maximize profits, might IPO at $300 billion.

Incredible.

It was only 12 years ago that the term “unicorn” was coined to refer to the new phenomenon of startups valued at $1 billion.

Now we have “centicorns” — privately held startups worth 100x more than a unicorn.

Perhaps most incredible, however, is the AI startup — Thinking Machines — that raised $2 billion from investors in a seed round earlier this year.

Seed rounds the size of US Steel (admittedly unadjusted for inflation) is a measure of how dramatically financial markets have expanded over the past century.

Will these companies collectively earn the trillions of dollars of revenue required to justify these valuations?

Thought of in dollars per second, it’s hard to imagine.

But we probably need to think bigger than that, as the head of ChatGPT recently encouraged us to do: “I think there is near-infinite demand for intelligence.”

If so, I guess there should be near-infinite demand for stocks, too.

Let’s check the charts.

Land of the unicorn:

The US has 712 unicorns, worth a collective $2.9 trillion, vs. just 157 for second-place China. 80 of those were founded in 2025 alone.

Big companies are good to have:

An unofficial tally finds that, in 2024, the EU made more from fining US tech companies than it collected from all public European internet companies. A related stat (attributed to Goldman Sachs): In the past 50 years, just 14 companies with a market cap greater than $10 billion were founded in Europe vs. 241 in the US.

AI credit worries:

Bloomberg reports that Oracle debt now trades at junk-bond levels.

Jobs are the new prices:

Greg IP writes that with US unemployment up and wage growth down, jobs will soon replace prices as the focus of our economic anxiety.

Where the jobs are being lost:

Bloomberg reports that tariffs have hit small firms the hardest, causing them to shed jobs.

The good and bad news on tariffs:

A new study reports good news: Effective US tariff rates have so far been about half the headline number due to time lags, exceptions and enforcement gaps. The bad news, however, is that “nearly 100%” of tariffs are being passed through to consumers via higher prices.

Just getting started?

Joe Brusuelas reports that “The gap between US productivity and the hourly wage paid to non-supervisory employees continues to widen. If anything, the gap is accelerating as the American economy continues to be transformed by the global supply chain and technological advances.”

Read on:

The FT reported earlier this year on the decline of reading: The percentage of Americans reading for personal interest is down 10 percentage points since 2005, although the percentage reading to children remains steady. Do newsletters count as personal interest? If so, please consider reading this one to a child.

Fewer kids to read to:

Torsten Slok notes that the percentage of US families with children has been falling.

The YouTube generation:

Nearly 50% of US teens say they “hardly ever” read in their spare time, up from 20% in 1990. Seems worrying, but you really can learn a lot on YouTube.

Land of the rising yield:

The yield on 10-year Japanese government bonds is about 2% for the first time since 1999. Higher yields typically mean Japanese savers will sell US investments to reinvest at home, but the opposite seems to be happening, likely because of the appeal of US AI stocks.

Prices by weight:

Measuring everything in price per pound, Andrew McCalip finds that a Tesla Model 3 costs less than Camembert. “We pull sand, oil, and ore from the earth and transmute them into machines cheaper than aged milk.”

Perhaps that is the kind of thinking we need to make sense of trillion-dollar valuations.

Have a great weekend, trillionaire readers.

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The year new tokens died

Shaunda Devens — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 16:27:50 GMT

Today’s coverage takes stock of where capital actually went as we move through the end of the year. First, we start with index readings that show a continued rotation into large, proven crypto infrastructure while speculative sectors continue to unwind. Then we quantify the damage across 2025 token launches.

Indices

Bitcoin was essentially flat over the past week (+0.3%), underperforming traditional benchmarks — NASDAQ (+1.7%), Gold (+1.1%), and S&P 500 (+0.9%). The divergence accelerated mid-week around Dec. 18, when most crypto sectors sold off sharply while equities held steady, suggesting a crypto-specific risk-off move rather than broader macro weakness.

DEXs (+11%) led all indices, followed by Crypto Miners (+9.5%) and the 2025 Crypto Equity Cohort (+9.2%). DEX outperformance was driven by UNI up +15.4%, following the UNIfication vote live onchain, with 69M UNI (40M quorum) voting yes. L1s (-2%) and Exchange Tokens (-2.2%) posted modest losses.

AI was the worst-performing sector (-21%), driven largely by TAO (-21%). TAO weakness likely reflects a sell-the-news unwind around Bittensor’s first halving (around Dec. 14), which cut daily issuance in half but did not immediately translate into incremental demand, alongside broader de-risking across the AI token complex.

Negative returns on new tokens

With year-end approaching, it’s worth zooming out on 2025’s worst tape: new token launches. A recent post by Ahboyash put hard numbers behind what many felt intuitively. Across 117 tokens launched in 2025, returns are overwhelmingly negative. The median token is down ~71% versus its listing fully diluted valuation (FDV). Only 17/117 (15%) trade above launch valuation, while roughly 40% are down more than 80%.

The downside is both broad and severe: 100/117 tokens (85%) are underwater. Losses cluster most heavily in the 50–90% drawdown range, which represents the largest share of launches.

At the extreme tail, 15 tokens have declined more than 90%, including high-profile launches such as Berachain (-93%), Animecoin (-94%), and Bio Protocol (-93%).

In aggregate, the cohort’s total FDV has compressed from $139 billion at listing to $54 billion today, implying roughly $87 billion (59%) of “paper” FDV destruction, excluding any projects that effectively went to zero.

The dispersion on the right tail is real, but concentrated. The worst performers skew toward infrastructure and gaming, with Syndicate (-93.6%) and Animecoin (-93.6%) among the laggards. Meanwhile, the standout winners are largely later-stage, H2 launches with lower starting valuations, including Aster (+745%), Yooldo Games (+538%), and Humanity (+323%).

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Grinch rally: Crypto indices track lower through the week

Luke Leasure — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 18:50:02 GMT

Crypto and risk assets continue to show weakness heading into year-end, not adding to the holiday spirit. Risk assets are in search of a floor, driven by fundamental flows supported by ETFs or protocol buybacks.

Indices

This week closes out with continued weakness across the board, and in crypto risk in particular. Both the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq 100 moved over a -1% lower this week, with gold being the one instrument showing strength. Concurrently, every crypto index we track has traded lower throughout the week. Notably, exchange tokens, buyback leaders, and the 2025 crypto equity cohort outperformed BTC intra-week, while everything else underperformed.

The AI sector was the top loser on the week, trading down -26%. The downside was led by TAO, which notched new multi-month lows after being a top performer in October.

Broadly, crypto continues its downtrend, with majors like BTC, ETH and SOL showing weakness while longer tail alts make larger moves to the downside. Risk is in search of a fundamental floor, which still may remain lower until price/buybacks becomes too compelling, and buyback flows from these protocol cashflows can set a low. Similarly, majors may need an uptick in ETF inflows to set their low, while the support provided by these vehicles has been anemic in the weeks past.

Weekend Reading

Taking a Step Back to Step Forward

Michael W. Green published a blog post titled “Taking a Step Back to Step Forward” that reframes US economic precarity through a structural and mathematical lens. Drawing on Ole Peters’ “Equation of Life,” Green argues that wealth naturally concentrates without redistribution (τ < 0), leading to systemic inequality. He critiques distorted CPI measures, technocratic complacency, and housing scarcity as mechanisms of economic extraction. With credit spreads artificially tight despite rising defaults, he warns of financial fragility. Green calls for civic engagement and institutional accountability, setting the stage for further essays and political interviews focused on systemic reform. Read more

Annual State of Sky Ecosystem

Sky Frontier Foundation published a research report titled “Annual State of Sky Ecosystem” outlining the protocol’s major achievements and financial growth in 2025. The Sky Ecosystem saw an 86% increase in USDS supply (to $9.86B), outpacing the broader stablecoin market. Sky Protocol generated $435M in revenue and $168M in profits, with substantial SKY token buybacks and staking rewards. With new regulatory clarity via the GENIUS Act and multiple Sky Agent launches, the report projects strong institutional adoption and protocol expansion in 2026, positioning Sky as a leader in decentralized, yield-bearing stablecoins. Read more

Beware the Lofty Promises of TradFi Firms Embracing Tokenization

Omid Malekan published a blog post titled “Beware the Lofty Promises of TradFi Firms Embracing Tokenization” that critiques traditional financial institutions (DTCC, Visa, SWIFT, Stripe, PayPal) for selectively embracing blockchain benefits while ignoring its existential threats to their legacy business models. Malekan argues these firms tout tokenization, but avoid decentralization, risking co-opting crypto’s core values. He warns that permissioned chains and regulatory lobbying may dilute crypto’s foundational principles. While he advocates engagement with TradFi, he urges the crypto community to defend public, permissionless networks and resist compromising decentralization for mainstream adoption.

Not ‘No One Wants Non‑USD Stables’ — It’s ‘No Banks Want Non‑USD Inventory’

@DeFi_Cheetah on X published an article post titled “It’s Not ‘No One Wants Non‑USD Stables’ — It’s ‘No Banks Want Non‑USD Inventory’” arguing that the real barrier to non-USD stablecoin adoption is not demand, but structural limitations in the global banking system. The piece dissects how Basel III regulations, liquidity constraints, and G-SIB penalties discourage banks from holding non-USD inventories or servicing emerging market corridors. The result is a liquidity vacuum in non-USD FX markets. The author calls for DeFi-native solutions to bootstrap non-USD stable liquidity, warning that relying on traditional FX infrastructure will fail by design. Read more

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