🥃 Bloomberg reports that major alcohol companies have lost around $830 billion in market value over the past four years as drinking habits shift.

I love this trend. More people are rethinking their relationship with alcohol, especially around mental health and depression.

And part of that $830B reflects fewer people self-medicating stress with a bottle, that sounds less like a crisis and more like progress.

Day 1 on a prediction market: “I’m just testing it.”
Day 30: “I have a thesis on rainfall patterns in Brazil.”

⏳ Bring back 2016 when BTC was $430 and “crypto influencer” wasn’t a job title.

💒 Not the headline I expected today. The Pope warned priests not to use AI for sermons.

I mean, fair enough! Confession by GPT would probably ask you to accept cookies before forgiveness.

🤖 AI agents are basically interns that never sleep. They read data, make decisions, click buttons, pay for APIs, trade tokens, book services. Now imagine millions of them with wallets, happily transacting 24/7.

That’s why they say future blockchains might need up to 1B transactions per second.

🎮 This is the most crypto thing I’ve read in a while. Polymarket listed a contract on which company ZachXBT would accuse of insider trading.

Before the name went public, a few brand new wallets bet big on Axiom.

12 wallets made over $1M, and one turned $0.14 shares into $411K.

So someone was investigating insider trading, and someone might have used inside info to bet on that investigation.

🕊 This Monday, let’s focus on something that rarely makes the front page. Since 1990, more than 1.5 billion people have moved out of extreme poverty.

That’s the equivalent of entire continents improving their living standards.

The world has problems, but it also makes progress.

🇹🇷 Turkey’s ruling party proposed a 10% tax on crypto income. If that sounds negative, look closer.

A defined rate allows companies and investors to plan instead of guessing regulatory intent.

The real impact sits in the details: what counts as taxable income, how losses are treated, and whether staking or DeFi fall under the rule.

🤖 So, apparently, a single partnership can move users faster than any product update.

After news of OpenAI working with the U.S. defense department, the number of U.S. users who uninstalled ChatGPT jumped 295% in one day.

Meanwhile, Claude downloads surged and briefly took the No.1 spot in the App Store.

That's how fast sentiment flips.

💔 Markets love drama, but they also love reminding everyone how quickly narratives flip.

Bitcoin just pushed above $71K, gaining over 6% in a day, even while tensions in the Middle East escalate and oil supply fears shake traditional markets.

Gold pulled back, asian equities slipped. Meanwhile BTC held support around $65K through the whole news cycle and then moved higher.

Another small reminder that markets are sensitive, cyclical creatures.

💰 Crypto hacks are down big in February: only about $49M lost. No miracle security breakthrough though.

Attackers realized it is easier to trick users into signing approvals than to break smart contracts.

Social engineering remains the best exploit in the industry.

🧠 Everyone on the internet is very confident about what will happen next. But give us a chance to put money on our prediction and suddenly the confidence becomes… more precise.

100% certainty goes to 63%, and turns out forecasts look very different once there’s something at stake.

🫠 Every time technology makes work more efficient, companies discover a new miracle: more work.

A new analysis of 443 million hours of workplace activity found that AI tools are NOT reducing workloads. People send more messages, switch between more apps, and spend less time on focused work.

Anyway, happy weekend. Hope your notifications take a day off.

💥 When Bloomberg strategist said Bitcoin could fall to $10K, other analysts responded that it would take something like a nuclear war to get there.

Apparently, the Geopolitical Apocalypse Index is a thing now.

💸 Someone swapped $50.4M in USDT and received about $36K worth of AAVE.

This is what happens when a huge order goes through a thin liquidity pool. The algorithm keeps filling the trade at worse and worse prices until the swap finishes.

In other words, the market happily sells you the most expensive tokens on Earth.

Small reminder for anyone using DEXs: set a slippage limit.

🤖 Have you heard about China’s “cyber confession rooms”?

They’re posts or livestreams built around an empty room, where people anonymously share everything from procrastination to debt and personal struggles.

Apparently, the most relatable content on the internet is everyone struggling at the same time.

🤦‍♂️ Apparently someone “finally” figured out who Banksy is, again.

At this point just tell kids about Santa too and get it over with.

🔍 The case of the vanishing keys. In 2014, Clifton Collins lost 6,000 BTC. Private keys written on paper were thrown out during a house clearance.

$423M were gone... Or so the story goes.

Last week, after 10 years of complete silence, the wallet labeled "Clifton Collins: Lost Keys" moved. 500 BTC straight to Coinbase.

Someone has those keys.

The question is — did they just find them? Or did they never lose them? 👀

☺️ Work from home might be the most effective population policy.

Stanford says remote work is linked to higher fertility. Turns out cutting the commute leaves people with better ways to spend their time.

🦘 Crypto payments are rising in Australia while banks keep blocking transfers.

Nothing makes people question the system faster than being told they can’t use their own money.

💳 Mastercard is launching a system to turn crypto payments into fiat instantly for businesses.

I wouldn't call it disruption, more like integration. Which is usually how things win.