: : [Issue] Why Circle Is Expanding Its Stablecoin Stack
Written by Ponyo

- Issuer premium in stablecoins is compressing as value shifts toward distribution and usage control rather than issuance scale.

- Circle’s margins no longer scale with USDC circulation, reflecting growing economic capture at the distribution layer.

- CPN and Arc represent a strategic move up the stack to regain leverage over usage, routing, and settlement.

- For $CRCL, the upside is stabilization of long-term economics rather than explosive growth.

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: : The DApp Survival Formula: Insights from Solana’s Rent Recovery Market
Written by Jun

- The value capture narrative in blockchain has moved from protocols to applications, and more recently to wallets that have absorbed functions such as swaps and bridges and now sit directly on the user touchpoint. This evolution has even produced the Fat Wallet thesis, which argues that wallets will lead ecosystem value capture. However, DApps can still build defenses that wallets cannot easily breach by leveraging temporal depth, meaning inertia rooted in user experience, and functional depth, meaning capabilities that cut to the essence of the market. These two forms of depth can give DApps durable, independent competitive advantages.

- Solana uses a rent model in which accounts deposit a refundable reserve to cover data storage costs at creation. Even after users sell their tokens, accounts whose token balance is zero are not automatically closed, which has led to the accumulation of about 607 million potentially stranded accounts. Liquidity locked inside truly abandoned "zombie ATAs" is estimated at at least 110,000 SOL, creating a large rent recovery market

- Sol Incinerator captured this market by offering a utility that finds and returns rent users did not realize they had locked up. As of November 2025, it had returned more than 470,000 SOL in total and recorded a reuse rate close to 80%, establishing clear category leadership. This shows that even when later entrants introduced additional incentives such as referrals or gamification, users still chose an intuitive workflow focused on the core outcome, asset recovery, along with trust that had already been validated in the market.

- Wallets, leveraging their advantage as the starting point for user transactions and often promoting a zero fee policy, embedded rent recovery features directly into the wallet. However, due to inherent constraints around security risk management and maintaining a general purpose UX, they could not implement DApp level sophisticated filtering or mass burn logic. As a result, they were unable to surpass the DApp's functional depth, which maximizes both expertise and convenience.

- While Anza's announced plan to reduce rent suggests the market's size may change, the value capture battle that played out inside this niche is still instructive. Even if wallets control the Web3 "on-ramp," DApps can survive independently in the Fat Wallet era if they differentiate themselves as the "destination" that solves user problems completely and with specialized expertise.

▫️ Value Capture Wars Among DApps, and Wallets Enter the Fray
▫️ The Structure and Size of Solana's Rent Recovery Market
▫️ The War Between DApps and Wallets Inside the Rent Recovery Market
▫️ The Survival Equation for DApps, Seen Through Rent Recovery

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: : [Comment] How Will the Spread of Vibe Coding Impact the Crypto Ecosystem?
Written by c4lvin

Recently, community contributions have largely taken the form of yapping. Opinions vary on whether yapping holds meaningful value, but it's clear that promoting projects through written content is currently recognized as a form of contribution worthy of financial rewards.

I predict that the spread of vibe coding will significantly diminish the value of these existing contribution methods.

This is because the barrier to implementing ideas as functional PoCs will drop dramatically. This approach can introduce projects to the public in a more intuitive and engaging way, while also enabling community members to make genuinely meaningful contributions to projects. Put simply, we might see UX improvement proposals or new dApp ideas being posted on social media. As substantive contributions increase, traditional yapping will find it much harder to be recognized as valuable.

If this is the case, projects where vibe coding is relatively easy will likely capture more mindshare going forward. Which projects stand to gain a comparative advantage in the vibe coding trend? In my view, the conditions are as follows:

- Intuitive Fun: Areas where outcomes can be immediately experienced, such as AI agents or games, are natural applications for vibe coding.

- Highly Scalable Infrastructure: The community must be able to actually deploy experimental projects created through vibe coding and drive interaction. Infrastructure offering high scalability, good UX, and low gas fees will likely gain an edge in the vibe coding ecosystem.

- Developer-Friendliness: Projects that are developer-friendly (or LLM-friendly) in multiple senses will have an advantage. This includes having documentation structured in an LLM-friendly way, allowing development in general-purpose languages, or providing infrastructure that facilitates interaction with Web2.

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: : [Comment] The $400k Bet: Unmasking the 'Maduro Insider' on Polymarket
Written by Jun

The core reason attention exploded was that, just hours before the announcement, an unusual betting pattern was spotted on Polymarket’s market related to the likelihood of Maduro being removed from power. In particular, a newly created anonymous account reportedly made a concentrated purchase of about $30K when the implied probability of Maduro’s removal was only around 5% to 8%. After the operation was announced, the position surged, and reports circulated that it swelled to over $436K. In other words, the account appears to have made roughly $400K in profit, igniting insider trading suspicions.

What further fueled the suspicion was the account’s behavior pattern. The account reportedly had almost no prior activity, repeatedly participated only in Venezuela-related bets, and withdrew profits immediately after realizing gains. As a result, speculation that “classified information may have leaked” gained traction, and analysis posts arguing for an insider based on transaction flows, domain information, and betting timing have been widely shared.

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: : [Issue] The Case for Selling $OP Before $BASE
Written by Ponyo

- Base generated ~71% of all Superchain sequencer revenue in 2025. The revenue concentration has only intensified, but Coinbase's payments to Optimism remain capped at 2.5%.

- OP token has collapsed 93% from ATH ($4.84 → $0.32) while Base's TVL grew 48% ($3.1B → $5B) in 2025. The market is pricing in that Base's growth doesn't accrue to OP holders, but hasn't yet priced in the exit risk.

- The OP Stack is MIT-licensed. The only thing keeping Base in the Superchain is a governance relationship that a BASE token with independent scope would dissolve. Coinbase can fork tomorrow, and they're building the political infrastructure to do so.

- Optimism gave Base 118M OP tokens to ensure long-term alignment, but capped their voting power at 9% of supply. This isn't alignment; it's a minority stake with an exit option. If OP price dumps post-renegotiation, Coinbase's grant losses are dwarfed by eliminating the revenue share.

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: : [Comment] Tokenization vs. Perpification is Wrong
Written by Eren

The Venezuelan episode makes it clear that equity tokenization and equity perps are building fundamentally different markets.

- Equity tokenization: focuses on high quality assets such as the Magnificent Seven. Its purpose is to provide full ownership onchain, including voting rights and dividend streaming. Onchain money market lending using tokenized equities as collateral is a good example.

- Equity perpification: focus on event driven long tail equities, enabling exchanges to launch perpetual markets quickly. This mirrors how platforms like Hyperliquid or Bybit rapidly open perpetual markets for micro scale crypto assets such as meme coins or newly listed tokens to capture short term trading demand. The key difference is that equity perps are not limited to crypto native assets, but extend coverage to global events and traditional financial assets.

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: : [Comment] AAVE Horizon Borrow Reached $200M, and Would RWA Lending Boom?
Written by Heechang

Access to on-chain RWA lending remains limited today, but even in its early form, it is already beginning to pull meaningful capital onchain. Most current activity is concentrated around tokenized U.S. Treasuries, which serve as a low-risk entry point for institutions experimenting with onchain.

As the universe of tokenized assets expands beyond treasuries, into tokenized equities, non-USD stablecoins, and other financial instruments, lending is likely to become the primary mechanism through which traditional capital migrates onchain.

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: : [Comment] Optimism's Buyback Isn't a Magic Wand
Written by Ponyo

Buybacks are a tool, not a strategy.
Hyperliquid proved that buybacks can be powerful when backed by massive, growing revenue. Optimism frankly has neither at the moment. The proposal is a step toward better tokenomics, but OP holders shouldn't expect it to change the fundamental picture.

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: : [Comment] Never ending debate over stablecoin rewards (feat. Market Structure Bill)
Written by 100y

Ahead of the Senate committee markup on Jan 15 for the Market Structure Bill, which aims to systematize crypto regulation, a debate has broken out.

The key question is whether stablecoin rewards should also be banned at the distributor level.

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: : [Comment] Why Trump’s 10% Interest Cap Misses the Point (And How On-Chain Lending Could Fix Credit)
Written by 100y

High interest rates are not the real problem. Interest rates simply reflect market forces. The real issue is a closed credit market that most people and capital cannot participate in.

On chain lending still has many hurdles to overcome, especially in unsecured credit. But as more data accumulates and better mechanisms are built, it has real potential to reshape and improve the traditional credit lending market.

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: : [Newsletter] Crypto Pulse: Vibe Coding, Stablecoin Wars, and RWA Horizons (Week 2, 2026)

[Article]
- The DApp Survival Formula: Insights from Solana’s Rent Recovery Market

[Issues]
- Why Circle Is Expanding Its Stablecoin Stack
- The Case for Selling $OP Before $BASE

[Comments]
- How Will the Spread of Vibe Coding Impact the Crypto Ecosystem?
- The $400k Bet: Unmasking the ‘Maduro Insider’ on Polymarket
- Tokenization vs. Perpification is Wrong
- AAVE Horizon Borrow Reached $200M, and Would RWA Lending Boom?
- Optimism’s Buyback Isn’t a Magic Wand
- Never ending debate over stablecoin rewards (feat. Market Structure Bill)

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: : [Issue] From Copy Trading to Strategy Copying — Thoughts on prompt to DeFi
Written by Steve

- The era of AI has truly arrived. No longer confined to tools like large language models that merely respond to user queries, AI is increasingly permeating everyday life as an active agent capable of performing a wide range of tasks autonomously. Finance is no exception to this shift. As blockchain technology has made financial systems more digitally native, the industry has become one in which AI can increasingly take over roles that were once performed by humans.

- In this context, INFINIT goes beyond simply automating a limited set of DeFi strategies. By building infrastructure that allows anyone to easily design and execute their own DeFi strategies, INFINIT seeks to lower barriers to entry and drive the democratization of DeFi. At the same time, it offers a concrete example of how AI agents can be applied to automate financial activity in practice.

- However, significant challenges remain. While AI systems are powerful, they are far from infallible, and finance is directly tied to users’ assets, making legal considerations and questions of responsibility unavoidable. These issues require careful examination and the development of appropriate safeguards. That said, such challenges are ultimately a matter of time. A future in which agents move beyond DeFi to replace a broad range of financial activities is increasingly plausible—and it naturally raises the question of what role INFINIT will play at the center of that transition.

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: : [Comment] Governance Frameworks Will Matter Even More
Written by Jay

At a time when a diverse set of actors—including institutions—are rapidly entering multiple protocols, it remains an open question whether individual participants can effectively manage their assets without friction or conflict on top of governance frameworks that are insufficiently structured.

As the proportion of crypto assets that are actively utilized—rather than simply held—continues to grow, the importance of the governance frameworks structurally embedded within those assets will only become more pronounced going forward.

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: : [Comment] Where you at, x402?
Written by Jun

According to Artemis, the share of artificial activity such as wash trading and other gamed transactions has dropped from around 90% in the early days to the 20% range today.

Today, the ecosystem looks very different. Dexter and PayAI now account for an overwhelming share of activity.

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: : [Comment] What's Behind Polygon's Surging Metrics?
Written by c4lvin

Recently, especially since November this year, Polygon's metrics have been surging. According to Token Terminal, network fees on Polygon have increased by over 200% in the past 30 days alone, now exceeding $2 million.

So where exactly is the recent surge in Polygon's metrics, particularly in transaction fees, coming from?

To find out, I examined the on-chain data.

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: : [Issue] Buybacks Are Defense, Not Offense
Written by Ponyo

- $1.4B spent. One flat. Twenty-seven underwater. This isn't cherry-picking — this is the entire dataset. CoinGecko tracked 28 buyback programs in 2025. Combined spend exceeded all prior DeFi buybacks in history. Result: HYPE flat, everyone else down 65-89%.

- Coverage ratio <1x failure. JUP (0.17x), PUMP (0.15x), and ZRO (0.32x) all dropped 76-89%. PUMP looked like a high-coverage success story until you account for the $1.4B ICO unlock in July.

- Coverage ratio >1x is necessary but not sufficient. RAY had infinite coverage (fully unlocked) and dropped 75% when PumpSwap collapsed its revenue. SKY had ~4x coverage and dropped 65% on sector rotation. HYPE had ~1.6x coverage and was flat. High coverage sets a ceiling on outcomes, not a floor.

- Buybacks in crypto operate under opposite conditions to TradFi. Traditional buybacks signal undervaluation and return excess cash to shareholders who own future earnings. Crypto buybacks signal desperation — price down 80%, still emitting heavily. Same mechanism, opposite context, divergent results.

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: : [Comment] Hyperion's Shareholder Letter: From Treasury to Operator
Written by Ponyo

Hyperion DeFi put out its first shareholder letter under new CEO Hyunsu Jung on January 12. The company is explicitly positioning itself as an on-chain operating business built around its treasury.

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: : [Comment] Collector Crypt ($CARDS): Distorted Growth Drivers and the Absence of the Real Card Market
Written by Steve

From the author’s perspective, today’s Collector Crypt is not fundamentally different from a new form of casino disguised as a TCG platform. Most users follow a repetitive behavioral loop—paying to purchase gacha packs, opening cards, immediately selling them back at a discount if the outcome falls short of expectations, and using the proceeds to buy another gacha pack. This cycle is repeated continuously.

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: : [Comment] The Korean RWA Bill Passed Today. What Comes Next?
Written by Heechang

So what does STO implementation in 2026 mean for the crypto industry?

In the short term, these will likely remain separate worlds. Direct interaction between security tokens operating on private chains and the public blockchain crypto ecosystem will be limited.

But the medium to long-term picture is different. Private chains will also see attempts to build on-chain services based on smart contracts. In this process, protocols and mechanisms proven on public chains will inevitably be referenced. Korean versions of Ethena or AAVE should be able to operate on private blockchains, and for complex structures, implementation should occur through partnerships with existing public protocols.

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: : [Comment] Stablecoin Treasury Management Is Underrated
Written by Eren

86% of global cross-border payments are B2B. P2P remittances account for about 2%, while retail payments such as B2C and C2B make up roughly 12%.

Enterprise money flows dominate the global payments landscape. Yet in stablecoin discussions, corporate treasury management remains underexplored, compared to retail push payments or P2P remittances.

Stablecoin adoption will be top-down. When corporate treasuries, the hub of payment flows, adopt stablecoins as a default asset, that’s where stablecoin adoption really accelerates.

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