jfc

Alt season starts tomorrow 👍

Alternate cryptocurrency season starts tomorrow 👍

Alt season has started fyi 👍

Younger brother came into town for the holidays, we were talking about LINK yesterday.

Trying to figure out why it's been so weak, even with strong equity markets. He threw me a curveball.

"LINK isn't that cool anymore."

Blew my mind. The kid is 22.

"Prediction markets are better, and stocks too because they don't get rugged 24/7".

I looked much deeper last night...and what I'm observing under the surface is not technical or fundamental.

It's cultural. A social shift. Attention has relocated.

Starts on youtube. Views are down across anything related to LINK.

A LINK youtuber with 139K subscribers said that his viewership had dropped more in the last 2 weeks than anything he's seen in 5 years.

▶️Crypto News & Updates

The Uniswap governance voted to pass the UNIfication proposal
- activates "fee switch"
- fees will burn UNI tokens on an ongoing basis
- removes frontend fees collected from uniswap's interface, wallet & api
- burn 100 million UNI

Trust wallet browser extension vulnerability was exploited
- users lost $7 million
- Trust Wallet will cover the losses
- Team issued updated version with fix

Aave token alignment proposal failed its snapshot governance vote
- the final outcome was as follows:
NAY: 994.8k (55.29%)
ABSTAIN: 741.6k (41.21%)
YAE: 63.0k (3.50%)
- proposal would have stopped Aave Labs from redirecting cowswap revenue from Aave's frontend to Labs and would have let it flow to Aave DAO treasury
- proposal would also have started procedure for all things benefiting from using the "Aave" name to share at least a portion of revenue directly with the DAO

▶️Crypto News & Updates

Flow blockchain was hacked for $3.9 million
- Flow is a blockchain built by the team behind the hyped CryptoKitties project from 2017

Lighter announced Lighter Infrastructure Token (LIT)
- token is allocated between the ecosystem (50%) and team/investors (50%)
- 25% of total supply will be distributed to season 1 & 2 participants
- some users on X reporting that $LIT is hitting their addresses

Saylor's Strategy (fka MicroStrategy) has acquired 1,229 BTC for ~$108.8 million at ~$88,568 per bitcoin
- company now holds 672,497 $BTC acquired for ~$50.44 billion at ~$74,997 per bitcoin

Tom Lee's Bitmine added 44,463 ETH
- now holds 4,110,525 ETH at $2,948 per ETH

People dropping their 2026 predictions for crypto on X
- ignore all of those

▶️Crypto News & Updates

Metaplanet Acquires Additional 4,279 BTC
- Total Holdings Reach 35,102 BTC

Cypherpunk Technologies (DAT) adds $29 million in ZEC
- acquired 56,418 ZEC for approximately $29 million at an average price of $514 per coin
- total holdings to 290,062 ZEC, representing around 1.8% of Zcash’s circulating supply
- backed by Gemini co-founder Tyler Winklevoss

Trump Media Announces Plans to Distribute Digital Tokens to DJT Shareholders
- The distribution is expected to leverage Crypto.com’s technology, including the Cronos blockchain
- each ultimate beneficial owner will be eligible to receive one of the new digital tokens per whole share of DJT
- various rewards being made available to token holders periodically throughout the year
- rewards may include benefits or discounts tied to Trump Media products such as Truth Social, Truth+, and Truth Predict

▶️Crypto News & Updates

🔷Hundreds of wallets drained on various EVM chains for small amounts (<$2k total per victim) with a root cause not yet identified
- as per ZachXBT
- $107K drained with the theft total still increasing

🔷Since mid-December Dexter has gradually overtaken Coinbase to become the largest daily facilitator for x402 transactions, capturing about 50% of the market
- according to Hashed's Dune dashboard & Wu Blockchain News
- There are now four x402 facilitators that have each processed over 10 million transactions: Coinbase, Dexter, PayAI, and DayDreams

🔷Aave founder Stani Kulechov said Aave Labs is committed to sharing non-protocol revenue with token holders
- "we’ll follow up soon with a formal proposal that will include specific structures for how this works"
- this was as a follow-up to the heavily discussed Alignment proposal, which was voted upon during Christmas

🔷Helium's CEO, Amir Haleem, announced the halt of the HNT buyback program
- due to negligible market response
- despite the buys, HNT's price didn't move significantly
- Data Credits (DC) burns continue unchanged

▶️Crypto News & Updates

💠Michael Saylor's Strategy acquired 1,287 BTC
- to increase its BTC Reserve to ₿673,783
- and has increased its USD Reserve by $62 million to $2.25 billion

💠Bitmine Immersion Technologies added 32,977 ETH last week
- company now holds 4.1435 million ETH (about 3.43% of total ETH supply)

💠Ledger had another data breach via payment processor Global-e
- leaking the personal data of customers (name & other contact information)
- as reported by ZachXBT

💠Starknet has experienced a downtime of more than two hours
- team is actively investigating the issue and working to restore full functionality as quickly as possible

💠Binance announced Brevis (BREV) as its 60th HODLer Airdrops project
- Brevis (BREV) is a smart verifiable computing platform that provides the foundational infrastructure for scalable, trustless computation across blockchain, data and AI systems

💠American Bitcoin has increased its total Bitcoin reserve to ~5,427 BTC
- added 329 BTC since its last holdings update (16th December, 2025)

▶️Crypto News & Updates

💠AI agent launchpad Virtuals announced tiered system for launches on its platform
- "Pegasus" tier for early stage
- "Unicorn" for growth stage and
- "Titan" for large scale launches
- Different rules, criteria, graduation mechanics, tokenomics, etc. based on tiers

💠Jupiter's jupUSD stablecoin is live on solana mainnet
- built in partnership with Ethena
- jupUSD will be used across Jupiter ecosystem products such as Lend, collateral for perps, trading
- Initially, 90% of reserves will be held in USDtb, a licensed, GENIUS-compliant stablecoin, collateralized by BlackRock’s BUIDL Fund, with a 10% USDC liquidity buffer, paired with a secondary pool on Meteora.
- over time, they plan to transition a portion of reserves to USDe

💠Polymarket has launched prediction markets for housing prices
- users can bet on housing prices in NYC, Miami, SF, LA, Austin, and even the entire U.S. market
- all settling against published Parcl housing indices
- Parcl is an onchain real estate platform (RWA category, for context)

💠Morgan Stanley files with SEC for spot Bitcoin and Solana ETFs
- Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan noted, "Morgan Stanley manages 20 ETFs, but mostly under the Calvert/Parametric/Eaton Vance brands. These will be the 3rd and 4th ETFs to bear the "Morgan Stanley" brand. Pretty remarkable."
- surprisingly, no reports seen for an Ethereum ETF filing

💠MSCI confirmed Digital Asset Treasury Companies will remain in MSCI Indexes for the Feb 2026 review
- In May/June 2024, MicroStrategy was added to the MSCI World Index (and related indexes like ACWI), boosting its visibility and attracting passive inflows
- MSCI launched a consultation in late 2025 to potentially exclude "Digital Asset Treasury Companies" (DATs)
- On January 6, 2026, MSCI announced it would not proceed with the exclusion for now, citing the need for further research and broader consultation on classifying non-operating asset holders

▶️Crypto News & Updates

🔷Morgan Stanley filed with the U.S. SEC to launch a spot Ethereum ETF
- less than 24 hours after its Bitcoin and Solana ETF submissions
- also seeking to generate rewards from staking a portion of the fund's holdings

🔷Stripe's Tempo blockchain introduces TIP-20 native token standard
- designed for stablecoins and payments use cases

TIP-20 comes with features built for real-world payments:
• Transfer memos for payment reconciliation
• Policy registries for compliance controls
• Native reward distribution for yield-bearing tokens
• Gas fees paid in any stablecoin


🔷Nike has sold its stake in digital collectibles platform RTFKT
- which it acquired during peak NFT mania in 2021
- RTFKT will continue operations under a new, unnamed owner

🔷Fireblocks acquires crypto accounting platform TRES Finance for $130 million
- TRES Finance helps CFOs and accountants at these companies track and monitor how much cryptocurrency they hold, how many assets are flowing into their coffers, and how much is flowing out

🔷Tether and Rumble Launch Rumble Wallet
- Bringing Self-Custodial Crypto Payments to Millions of Creators and Users
- integrated directly into the Rumble platform
- Rumble Wallet supports Tether USD (USDT), Tether Gold (XAUT), and Bitcoin (BTC)
- Rumble is a Youtube competitor, for context

▶️Crypto News & Updates

🔷Ethereum-based DeFi protocol Truebit suffered a $26.6 million exploit
- exploit targeted a vulnerability in a smart contract deployed five years ago
- Truebit is an Ethereum-based verification and computation protocol
- the price of Truebit's TRU token plummeted 99.9%

🔷The entire staff of the Electric Coin Company, the developer behind the privacy-focused blockchain ZCash, resigned
- CEO Josh Swihart announced the mass departure on X, citing a governance clash with the majority of the Bootstrap board of directors, which governs ECC
- Bootstrap is a nonprofit created to govern ECC and support the Zcash ecosystem
- the protocol itself remains unaffected by the personnel changes
- the developers that quit are now building a new Zcash wallet

Don't forget to monitor the situation

▶️Crypto News & Updates

💠YZi Labs (fka Binance Labs) invests 'multi-8-figure' in Genius Trading
- with CZ joining as advisor
- Genius is building a privacy-focused, self-custodial trading terminal offering spot, perpetuals, and copy trading across more than 10 blockchains

💠Zama launching token sale at $55 million floor FDV
- via CoinList and own auction app
- The Zama Confidential Blockchain Protocol enables confidential smart contracts on top of any L1 or L2 using FHE
- Zama has previously raised $130 million in 2 funding rounds (as per cryptorank), though it is likely that the funding was not purely a token sale

💠Crypto Market Structure Bill Update
- U.S. Senate Banking Committee Chair Tim Scott released an updated bipartisan crypto market structure bill
- that would ban interest-like rewards for simply holding stablecoins while allowing incentives tied to user activity
- The new draft attempts to draw a clear policy line by permitting stablecoin rewards only when users transact, stake, provide liquidity, or post collateral rather than earn yield on idle balances
- Recommend you to dig into detail on this subject if it is of interest to you as headlines and even articles do not tell you all that you should know about topics of legislation

💠Polygon Labs buys two crypto startups for $250 million as it looks to compete with Stripe
- as per Fortune
- The deal for Coinme, its latest payments play, was for between $100 and $125 million
- which implies that the price for Sequence was somewhere between $125 and $150 million
- The Seattle-based Coinme, which specializes in converting cash into crypto and is known for its work with crypto ATMs, has a suite of money transmitter licenses in the U.S
- Toronto-based Sequence builds out blockchain infrastructure, including crypto wallets

I am a bit afk so not posting news & updates. Will be back soon-ish.

Meanwhile, remember...

Alt season starts tomorrow 👍

Crypto Market Structure Bill Updates

▶️Crypto News & Updates

🔷Bitmine Immersion Technologies (BMNR) Announces $200 Million Investment in Beast Industries
- BMNR is the top Ethereum Treasury Company with Tom Lee as Chairman
- "We look forward to exploring ways to further collaborate and incorporate DeFi into our upcoming financial services platform." said the CEO of Beast Industries

🔷Paradigm leads $7.1 million seed round for attention market Noise
- Noise is building a prediction market-style platform where users can wager on whether social media topics today will continue to be relevant tomorrow, similar to “a stock market for trends.”
- The team is now preparing for a mainstream launch on Base, the Ethereum Layer 2 incubated by Coinbase

🔷X is revising its developer API policies to no longer allow apps that reward users for posting on the social media platform
- InfoFi players Kaito and Cookie announced they will sunset their respective platforms and are seeking ways to pivot
- $KAITO & $COOKIE dumped 25%+ from their recent highs

🔷On January 10, a victim lost more than $282 million worth of LTC and BTC in a hardware wallet social engineering scam
- according to ZachXBT
- The attacker then converted the stolen LTC and BTC into Monero via multiple instant exchanges
- briefly driving a sharp spike in XMR’s price

🔷BNB Foundation announced the completion of the 34th quarterly burn
- A total of 1.37m BNB was burned
- the total circulating supply of BNB has decreased to 136.36m (started from 200m at TGE)

🔷Sui Network experienced a prolonged disruption for approximately six hours
- due to an internal divergence in validator consensus processing causing a network stall

🔷Binance Wallet (Web) launches perpetual futures trading
- powered by Aster

🔷Metamask Wallet launched support for Justin Sun's Tron Network

▶️Crypto News & Updates

🔷The New York Stock Exchange is developing a platform for trading and onchain settlement of tokenized U.S. equities and ETFs
- pending regulatory approval
- the platform will enable features including round-the-clock trading, fractional share purchases, orders sized in dollar amounts, immediate settlement using tokenized capital and stablecoin-based funding

🔷Paradex halted services after database tweaks triggered erroneous funding calculations, wiping out positions as prices glitched to zero
- announced rollback after the perp DEX users report mass liquidations
- team confirmed root cause identified; no funds lost

🔷Michael Saylor's Strategy has acquired 22,305 BTC for ~$2.13 billion at ~$95,284 per bitcoin
- now holds 709,715 $BTC acquired for ~$53.92 billion at ~$75,979 per bitcoin

🔷Tom Lee's BitMine acquired 35,268 ETH worth around ~$116M last week
- company now holds 4.203 million ETH valued at ~$13B

🔷Solana Mobile activated SKR airdrop today
- targeting over 100,000 Seeker users and 188 developers with 1.82 billion tokens based on engagement tiers
- SKR empowers holders to delegate for network security and elect "Guardians" to curate Seeker app store offerings, boosting Solana's mobile DeFi integration
- Total Supply of SKR: 10 billion, Current FDV: $110 million

🔷DeFi project Makina finance was exploited for $4-5 million