🏦 Fidelity is entering stablecoins, and the yield still stays with the issuer

Fidelity, one of the largest asset managers in the world, with nearly $6T under management and $15T under administration, is planning to launch its own stablecoin as early as next month.

The project will comply with the GENIUS Act and is designed to plug directly into institutional payment and settlement infrastructure.

But technology isn’t the point here. The economics are.

The GENIUS Act quietly opens a massive opportunity for large asset managers. Fidelity is a perfect example. Today, Fidelity manages trillions, invests those funds, passes the yield back to clients, and earns money through management fees.

Now imagine a different setup.

Fidelity issues, say, $1T worth of FIDD stablecoins. That capital gets parked in US Treasuries. Investors receive payouts, Fidelity takes its management cut, and the yield effectively stays inside the firm 💰

Why does this work? Because the GENIUS Act explicitly allows banks and asset managers to:

▪️ raise capital via stablecoins;
▪️ invest it in US Treasuries;
▪️ avoid paying yield to stablecoin holders.

In other words, it’s the same financial playbook as before, just without the need to share profits.

Stablecoins are no longer just a payment tool. They’re becoming a powerful mechanism for reallocating yield toward the largest players in the system.

And Fidelity is likely just the first move. Not the last ⏳

🫥 $TON is NOT the crypto the world was waiting for. It’s a short-term solution, held together with workarounds

Back in 2018, Telegram raised over $1.8B to launch its own cryptocurrency, $GRAM. The project was ambitious, carefully structured, and economically thought through. Then the SEC stepped in. GRAM was shut down.

The problem was that a large part of the ICO funds had already been spent. Telegram had no choice but to move forward, under a new name, on a tight timeline, and with limited resources. That’s how TON Foundation appeared, along with the $TON token.

To fund the launch, Telegram turned to debt. It issued €1B+ in eurobonds at 7%, with maturity set for March 22, 2026. To make that repayment manageable, the company raised another €1.7B in 2025, this time at 9%, extending maturities to June 5, 2030.

As of today, Telegram already has the funds to repay the first bond issue. The money is sitting on the balance sheet, waiting for March 22. There’s no need for the company to sell $TON to raise fiat liquidity. But that doesn’t mean $TON isn’t being sold by others.

Think back to the $GRAM ICO. Everything was structured in advance: logic, economics, distribution.

$TON sales followed a very different path 🧐

The token was sold over a long period of time, including after exchange listings. Large investors bought $TON at market prices, but with lockups and vesting.

❗️Those allocations are exactly what’s creating pressure today.

Investors who entered in summer 2024 receive 25% of their allocation per year and, judging by behavior, are selling into the market rather than waiting for upside in the current geopolitical environment.

Many funds bought $TON at discounts of up to 40%, around $3-4, and still ended up over 50% underwater.

So yes, in March 2026, TON will handle the bond repayment without drama. But the price is unlikely to benefit. At the same time, another wave of allocations unlocks. Many of those investors have waited long enough and are now looking to sell.

The countdown is already on ☹️

🗓 Weekly crypto recap: stablecoins, tokenomics, and a disappointed market

It was a busy week, but market sentiment clearly tilted negative.

The main storyline was the fight over stablecoin yield.

Tether insists that returns generated from reserves should stay with the issuer, just like they always have. Coinbase, on the other hand, is pushing the idea of sharing that yield with stablecoin holders.

What’s really being decided here is who ends up controlling the returns on trillions of dollars in liquidity: issuers or users.

The outcome of this standoff should become clear soon ⏳

Overall, the week revolved around stablecoins:
▪️ Fidelity is preparing to launch its own digital dollar
▪️ Coinbase is expanding infrastructure and partnerships for new stablecoin issuance
▪️ Tether is rolling out a “Made in America” stablecoin under the GENIUS Act
▪️ The UAE central bank has approved the issuance of the dollar-backed USDU
▪️ Standard Chartered forecasts up to $500 billion in bank deposits shifting into stablecoins by 2028

🔧 At the same time, major projects started revisiting their tokenomics:
▪️ HYPE cut team token unlocks by nearly 90%
▪️ Optimism is launching OP buybacks funded by Superchain revenue

The market is increasingly asking for discipline and balance instead of endless issuance.

Against the backdrop of all these debates and adjustments, investor sentiment stayed heavy. While large players argued over regulation and frameworks, retail watched gold and silver rally from the sidelines. By the end of the week, metals corrected sharply as traders took profits, but liquidity never found its way back into crypto.

📉 Bitcoin moved lower alongside metals. Gold pulled back, and “digital gold” followed right after.

Funds didn’t try to reinvent the wheel again. Last week’s capital flows were calm, structured, and fairly predictable.

🗓 Here’s how the period from January 26 to February 1 played out:

A total of $303.5M was deployed across 8 deals.

The lineup included Tier-1 names: Pantera Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Galaxy, a16z, Dragonfly, and Paradigm. The largest ticket went to Propy: $100M raised (debt financing).

📊 By sector, the split looked like this:

CeFi: $155M
Infrastructure & services: $100M
DeFi: $48.5M


At the Seed stage, activity stayed muted: just 3 deals totaling $23M.

Most capital flowed into projects where the product already exists and the focus is no longer PMF, but scaling mature ecosystems.

Propy stands out here.

The company secured $100M in debt from Metropolitan Partners Group to expand a platform that automates specific stages of real estate transactions using blockchain and AI.

😐 The market, however, wasn’t impressed. Following the announcement, the PRO token dropped by roughly 12%.

Once again, the week highlighted a clear pattern. Funds continue to favor growth through infrastructure and scale – even when the deal structure isn’t classic equity, but debt.

📉 $BTC drawdown exposed Strategy’s weak spot: up to $1B in paper losses

Bitcoin slipping below $75,000 briefly pushed Strategy into nearly $1 billion in unrealized losses. The company holds 712,647 $BTC, and some analysts are now openly discussing a deeper pullback toward $58-55K.

But Strategy’s problem isn’t just the price of Bitcoin.

In the past, whenever $BTC dipped, Michael Saylor could move fast. Issue shares, raise fresh dollars, buy more $BTC. That playbook no longer works.

Today, Strategy can’t instantly tap the market. New share placements require finding buyers manually and negotiating prices behind closed doors.

That comes with consequences:
▪️different prices and discounts within the same issuance;
▪️ slower execution;
▪️ growing pressure from dividends on preferred shares.

Strategy’s average $BTC entry sits at $76,037, while the current price is around $77,692. If Bitcoin drops below that level and stays there, dividend payments quickly become a problem.

🔻 From there, the path is uncomfortable but clear: investor pressure builds, financial stress escalates, and BTC sales start locking in losses.

🌎 The e-rupee is ready to go global. Is the world?

India clearly sees the e-rupee as more than a domestic payment tool. The ambition goes further. Cross border transfers, trade, tourism. All the areas where today’s system is still clogged with intermediaries and fees.

Sovereign digital money cuts through that. Direct settlement. Faster. Cheaper.

Technically, India is already there. The global system is not. Much of the world’s banking infrastructure still runs on outdated foundations and will take years to modernize.

📍 Right now:
∙ only 5 countries have fully launched a CBDC
∙ another 7 are still testing
∙ the US and the EU have paused CBDC plans and focused on stablecoin regulation instead

So taking the e-rupee beyond India is not limited by India’s tech. The bottleneck is the rest of the world. At this stage, real partners are mostly limited to a few BRICS countries.

✨ Still, the e-rupee matters. It shows that digital currencies are not a hype cycle or an experiment anymore. They are the next step in how money works. India just moved first.

And the world will catch up.
Just not overnight.

🚀 Solana is back on top for DEX volume. But $SOL is telling a different story.

Once again, Solana took the lead in DEX trading. According to CryptoRank, the network processed $117.7B in January. That’s +20% MoM and nearly 35% of total onchain volume.

And just to be clear, this isn’t empty volume. These are real users, real demand, and real activity happening on the network.

From a product perspective, Solana looks genuinely healthy. The ecosystem keeps expanding, scaling, and attracting new projects, partnerships, and use cases. The network is alive and doing its job.

😠 But there’s still one unresolved issue.

$SOL’s tokenomics are clearly lagging behind the growth of the ecosystem itself. The link between network usage and token value remains weak. So yes, reading headlines about Solana feels good. Watching $SOL in your trading terminal… not so much.

At some point, the product has to start sharing its success with the token.

Solana needs a real bridge between ecosystem growth and $SOL’s value. The token should play a role in the network’s progress, not just sit on the sidelines and watch.

While $BTC is sliding and dragging Strategy down with it, the MSDD ETF is doing just fine and printing new all time highs.

💥 This is a simple setup (and also a very risky one). MSDD delivers double exposure to downside in Strategy shares. When MSTR drops by $1, MSDD moves up by $2.

Since May 2025, MSDD has generated over 420% annualized returns.

So while crypto natives are sitting tight waiting for a “BTC bounce” and riding out the drawdown, equity traders are quietly turning that same volatility into cash ☺️

📉 Outflows from spot Bitcoin ETFs reached $2.9 billion as $BTC hit a new low in 2026

Chart: Daily net flows for Bitcoin spot ETFs (USD). Source: CoinGlass

Bitcoin tested the $70,000 level. Over the past 30 days, open interest in Bitcoin ETFs has declined by $55 billion, while rising demand for put options has pushed their delta coefficient up to 13%.

This is the exact risk we warned about as far back as 2018 ☝️

While ETFs have increased market transparency and expanded institutional access to Bitcoin, during periods of sharp spot price declines they tend to amplify downside pressure.

The mechanism is straightforward: $BTC falls → investors sell ETFs → funds liquidate $BTC from reserves to meet redemptions → $BTC prices decline further.

We refer to this process as the “pressure carousel.”

Bitcoin broke below $70,000 for the first time since November 2024.

Looking at the chart now, it’s hard not to think that in 2020 Saylor could’ve started buying gold… 🤔

Weekly crypto recap: pressure on BTC and stablecoins pushing forward

It was a genuinely hot week 🔥

📉 Bitcoin’s drop hit the institutional layer hard. Spot Bitcoin ETFs slipped into negative territory, with BlackRock’s IBIT now showing an overall loss.

Trading volumes in the fund spiked to a record $10B, driven by redemptions and a clear tilt toward put options. More and more, the market reads this as institutional capitulation.

Strategy felt the pressure too: a $12.4B quarterly loss and a 17% drop in its stock.

Meanwhile, stablecoins are doing the exact opposite and keep expanding.

💵 $USDC dominated January in a $10T market, even as Circle’s stock struggled. Tether crossed 500M users, continues to build reserves, and put $150M into Gold.com. Hong Kong is set to start issuing stablecoin licenses as early as March.

🔮 On a separate front, prediction markets are heating up. Polymarket and Kalshi are going head to head while simultaneously picking fights with US regulators.

😬 If Bitcoin right now feels like a drama, prediction markets have already turned into a full-on political and financial thriller.

YC has drawn a clear line for 2026. Mass-market apps are yesterday’s story. Now it’s all about building ecosystems that rewire how industries work 😎

Tried to calculate the market. Didn’t really work out…🤷‍♂️

A bonding curve (also called a price curve) is a mathematical concept that describes the relationship between an asset’s price and its supply.

Inside DeFi, it did make sense. Everything is closed, automated, and governed by protocol rules. Outside DeFi, not so much. Why?

Because math is about science. Markets are about people.

The moment you try to keep price inside a formula, the market disappears. What you get instead is a plan. And plans don’t survive emotions, panic, greed, or FOMO.

Once the human factor breaks loose, the peg snaps. Sometimes in hours. Sometimes overnight.

We’ve seen it before 👀

November 10, 2025 is a textbook case of what happens when someone tries to “calculate” a market and ends up with trillions wiped out 💸💸💸

💵 Funds made their choice again last week.

And once again, money went where things already feel safe and obvious.

📊 $413M entered the market across 7 deals. From Tier-1 names, Blockchain Capital was in.

Where the capital went:

▪️CeFi: $250M
▪️Infrastructure & services: $107M
▪️DeFi: $35M
▪️GameFi: $21M

🌱 Seed rounds? None.

Almost all the capital landed at the strategic stage, where the product already works and the only real question is scale.

The biggest checks went to Anchorage Digital and Gold.com. Which makes the picture pretty clear. Funds are leaning into custody, settlement, and real-world asset tokenization.

Capital is still moving into RWA infrastructure, where institutional demand is already there and needs no convincing.

🕊️ According to Polymarket traders, the Second Coming of Christ could happen before the end of 2026.

Over the weekend, traders betting “yes” pushed the implied probability to 4%, with the contract priced at $0.04. By the time of publishing this post, that probability had already climbed to 5%, and the “yes” side was trading at $0.05.

This is Polymarket we’re talking about here, a platform where markets and public attention can sometimes do miracles. Under the contract terms, confirmation of the Second Coming doesn’t come from the event itself, but from broad, coordinated coverage by major, authoritative media outlets.

🔮 And this is where the real nature of prediction markets shows up.

Outcomes often depend less on reality and more on information consensus.

At that point, the bet turns into a simple economic equation:
potential payout minus PR costs equals profit.

Polymarket increasingly reflects not the probability of events, but the dynamics of online attention at the intersection of politics, pop culture, and religion. Sometimes these contracts end up saying far more about the market than about the events they reference.

🎯 Backpack is preparing a token launch and tying unlocks to an IPO

New exchange token launches almost always pull traders in. Backpack is no exception.

But this time, the setup is very different. Backpack has already disclosed the core mechanics of its tokenomics and made a move you rarely see in this market:

neither the team nor investors receive tokens at launch.

The emission is split into three stages and tightly linked to actual business progress:

▪️ 25% via an airdrop before the pre-IPO stage
▪️ 37.5% once specific business milestones are reached
▪️ 37.5% only after an IPO on a public stock exchange

⏳ The team and the exchange itself intentionally stay out of the token at the start.

This way, Backpack is trying to protect the token from early sell pressure and tie its fate not to insider liquidity, but to the company’s real operational progress.

One key piece is still missing: the token’s utility hasn’t been revealed yet.

From here on, the product will be what matters most.