This year wasn’t something we went through alone ✨

We shared it with our clients, our partners, and everyone who cares about Web3. What made 2025 special wasn’t just the work itself, but the people around it ❤️

The trust, the support, the conversations, the feedback – all of that pushed us forward and shaped what we built this year.

Here’s a snapshot of what we’ve been up to:

▪️ welcomed 11 new people to the team
▪️ ran 15 tokenomics audits for leading Web3 projects
▪️ designed 3 token circulation mechanisms that didn’t exist on the market before
▪️ showed up at Blockchain Life in Moscow
▪️ and at Token2049 in Singapore
▪️ launched a new website and completed a full rebrand
▪️ expanded our product lineup
▪️ grew our partner network by 87 companies
▪️ took part in dozens of industry events
▪️ identified some of the market’s biggest pain points and built solutions for them

And we’re far from done. In 2026, we’re preparing something genuinely big 🚀

The first announcement of what we’re building for Web3 will happen at Blockchain Life in Moscow, April 14-15.

Until then, thank you for being part of this journey with us ❤️‍🔥

Wishing you a Happy New Year! 🎄🎄

🔴 The New Year is one of those rare moments when you can pause and finally take a breath.

No need to analyze, plan, or optimize anything. Just take a second to notice how far you’ve come ✨

This year had its ups and downs. But above all, it was full.

Wishing you a year ahead filled with inspiration, strong ideas, and work you’ll feel proud of.

More wins – big and small 🏆🥇

And more moments that make you think, “Yeah, this was worth it” ❤️

Here’s to everything beautiful and exciting the New Year has in store for us! 🎉

Here’s to all of you! 💞🎉

💸BTC’s price at the start of the year is always its own story.

Let’s see how it’s evolved over time.

January 3, 2009 — Bitcoin network launch and the mining of Satoshi Nakamoto’s first block
2010 – ~$0.00
2011 – $0.29
2012 – $5
2013 – $13
2014 – $754.22
2015 – $315
2016 – $434
2017 – $998
2018 – $13,445
2019 – $3,880
2020 – $7,190
2021 – $29,389
2022 – $47,737
2023 – $16,615
2024 – $44,162
2025 – $94,419
2026 – $87,512

Lighter is launching its $LIT token. The direction is clear, but the model deserves a closer look 🔍

Lighter, an Ethereum-based L2 DEX for perpetual futures, has introduced its native token $LIT. 25% of the supply will be distributed via an airdrop at TGE, another 25% is allocated to ecosystem growth. The remaining 50% goes to the team (26%) and investors (24%), with a one-year cliff followed by linear vesting over three years.

🎯 The key point here is how the team approaches token value.

According to Lighter, all economic value generated by the protocol’s products and services is meant to accrue directly to $LIT.

In practice, the token is used as:
✔️ a staking asset within execution and validation infrastructure,
✔️ a fee token,
✔️ an asset used for market data and price validation.

📈 This setup reflects a more mature market trend: moving away from purely governance tokens toward tokens that are deeply embedded in a protocol’s business model. That said, the combination of airdrop + staking + multi-layer utility almost always calls for a deeper tokenomics review.

Especially when it comes to:
▫️ revenue sources,
▫️ incentive sustainability,
▫️ long-term balance between ecosystem participants.

⚙️ We’re already digging deeper into $LIT’s model and will share our take on how sustainable this economy really is.

🔥 Token burning doesn’t make a token deflationary.

It’s just a tool, not a standalone solution.

A token has to work as a means of payment. In practice, that means functioning as a currency. Users should spend it on real value. For example:

▪️launching an AI agent (VIRTUAL)
▪️paying protocol fees (HYPE)
▪️using the network (ETH)
▪️paying for due diligence (8Lends)

But even that isn’t enough. You also need to define upfront how tokens are taken out of circulation. That can include:

▫️burning a portion of tokens earned as fees (BNB)
▫️buyback mechanisms that encourage long-term locking inside the protocol (HYPE)

And there’s one more factor that can’t be ignored: market demand 📈

If you have a product users genuinely want, you can skip most of the mechanics above and control supply through cliffs and vesting instead.

Here’s a simple example👇

Imagine users want to buy 10 tokens a day, while only 5 are being sold. If just 3 new tokens unlock daily, the market runs into a steady shortage of 2 tokens per day.

⚠️ That’s where everything comes together:

Real deflation comes from balancing supply and demand. When the market wants to buy and use more tokens than it can get, price moves up.

And this is the most important point in the entire series:
If there’s no real product backing the token, there’s no demand.
And without demand, deflation won’t save it.

According to data from CryptoRank, only 12% of tokens launched in 2025 are still trading above their sale price. In other words, 88% failed as long-term investments 📉

At first glance, that makes Web3 look like a casino 🎰

But a closer look points to a structural issue, not randomness.

Most launches blur the line between investment assets and speculative instruments. When everything is positioned as “investable,” nothing really is.

Separating tokens by intent changes the picture:

🔸Investment tokens – designed for long-term value capture
🔸Speculative tokens – built for liquidity, volatility, and narrative

This isn’t a broken market. It’s one with misaligned expectations.

And the question here isn’t why 88% failed. It’s how to spot which tokens were never meant to be held in the first place.

🎁 Telegram gifts: a new chapter for NFTs or Durov’s money vacuum?

Back in late 2024, Telegram rolled out gifts you could buy and send inside the app.

At first, they were just cute visuals. No real purpose. No utility. And honestly, many users were still trying to figure out Stars, so gifts felt… extra.

Interest was low, which made sense. But that didn’t last 👀

By summer 2025, Telegram dropped its first major collaboration, teaming up with Snoop Dogg. A few months later, gifts started showing up at auctions. And throughout 2025, simple gifts slowly began to gain “meaning”: staking, liquidity pools, gated community access, and other mechanics the Web3 crowd knows well.

In other words, gifts started turning into something more than digital souvenirs.

The numbers tell the story:

⭐️ By the end of 2025, total Telegram gifts sales crossed $296M
⭐️ Market cap reached $128M
⭐️ More than 2M users now hold nearly 9M gifts
⭐️ 118 out of 137 gift types are in circulation, with 86 already fully onchain

At first glance, it all looks pretty impressive. So why does the NFT gifts market still feel bearish?

The answer is simple. When users buy gifts, that money doesn’t really flow back into the market. It flows to Durov.
Today, Telegram gifts function as a capitalization tool for a single company, not as a living ecosystem where value circulates between participants.

⚠️ And that’s the real risk.

If Telegram doesn’t find a way to bring user money back into the market, demand for NFT-style speculation will slowly dry up. Along with the balances in users’ wallets.

🍀 2026 is starting surprisingly well for the United States

And it’s not just about access to some of the world’s largest proven oil reserves. There’s a far more interesting asset on the radar right now: Bitcoin linked to the Venezuelan regime.

If the rumors turn out to be true, the US Department of Justice could gain access to up to 660,000 BTC. According to sources, these coins were allegedly used by Maduro’s regime to settle sanctioned oil deals.

Context matters here.

The US has been very clear: it doesn’t plan to buy Bitcoin for its strategic reserve. Instead, that reserve is being built exclusively from confiscated assets. Every BTC currently under US control came from seizures, not market purchases. And that’s what makes the Venezuela story especially telling.

Based on confirmed onchain data, Venezuela officially holds only around 240 BTC. But that’s not what the market is focused on. The real attention is on a potential shadow reserve, mentioned by analysts and sources.

And if even a fraction of those estimates turns out to be accurate, the old question comes back into play:

🏎 Who wins the race to become the largest BTC holder?

Because suddenly, the US Department of Justice has a real chance to overtake BlackRock as early as the beginning of 2026.

💰Telegram thought in platforms. Base thinks in creators.

Telegram gave Web3 its first wave of mini apps. Some of them pulled in millions of users in just weeks. Then the hype faded fast.

Weak project economics turned those mini apps into hate magnets. Most were abandoned.

And the problem wasn’t the format. It was who made money and how.

Base doesn’t have a messenger with hundreds of millions of users. So instead of squeezing attention out of an audience, they chose a different path:

financial incentives for creators and users.

⚙️ First came the “super app” – Base App. On top of it, creators started launching their own mini apps and monetizing in a few ways:

• earning rewards based on engagement with apps and posts
• selling apps, posts, games, and other content
• joining airdrops or running their own

Base’s core focus is content and creators. And creators can go even further by turning posts into ERC-20 tokens anyone can buy.

⚖️ That’s where the real line is drawn.

Telegram tried to make money from creators. Base is trying to create conditions where creators make money. That’s why mini apps on Base aren’t just another format. They’re an attempt to finally close the missing link between

created → ??? → earned

Let’s see if it works this time 😏

🤨 Everyone’s asking why Telegram is selling $TON. The more interesting question is how TON got here in the first place.

The story starts back in 2018.

That’s when Pavel Durov launched the $GRAM token ICO and raised $1.8B from major investors. At the time, it was one of the biggest and loudest rounds the industry had ever seen.

Then 2019 happened.

U.S. regulators stepped in. The GRAM launch was blocked. The ICO was ruled unlawful, largely because U.S. citizens had participated in the sale. That’s where the rollback began.

Telegram had to return the money to investors. The only problem was that Durov had already spent it 🤷‍♂️

To deal with the fallout, Telegram raised $1B through eurobonds to cover part of the refunds. Not long after, a “non-affiliated” nonprofit showed up in Switzerland – the TON Foundation. That’s where $TON came from.

Years pass. But debts don’t disappear. And this is where things get interesting.

In March 2026, Telegram has to repay that same $1B in bonds. That leaves one obvious question. If not from TON, where exactly is that money supposed to come from? 😈

🥊 ETF vs RWA. Who has more upside?

Right now the market is being shaped by two powerful money flows. One moves from traditional finance into crypto. The other goes the opposite way, from crypto into traditional assets.

Each flow relies on its own instrument. And it feels like the right moment to compare their real growth potential.

📊 ETF (Exchange-Traded Fund) is the way traditional markets bring real dollars into crypto. Funds collect capital, buy crypto via OTC desks or through stablecoin conversion, and then those assets simply sit on fund wallets.

This model comes with clear trade-offs:

➕ Fresh capital enters the market and token prices move higher
➖ Tokens leave circulation, volatility increases, and liquidity gets thinner

🏗 RWA (Real-World Assets) work differently.

Here, money flows into tokenized real-world assets that are sold for crypto. The assets get locked, while crypto markets receive something else, a cash flow generated by real economic activity.

So which approach has more room to grow?

ETF growth is limited by the size of the Web3 market itself. Today that market is around $3.1 trillion, with $1.8 trillion coming from BTC alone.

RWA look at the entire global financial market. And that is a completely different scale:

• Commercial real estate at $32 trillion
• Securities markets at $128.1 trillion

From a market-size perspective, RWA clearly have more upside than ETFs. But size alone doesn’t create demand. What really matters is the problem an instrument solves.

ETFs have already found their role. They act as a bridge for institutions moving from traditional markets into crypto. But RWA face a tougher question:

if real estate and other assets can already be bought with crypto without RWA, what is their actual mission?

That’s the question this market will have to answer🤔

📣 Media outlets quote Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong pointing to interest paid on China’s digital yuan as a competitive advantage. But this is exactly where the discussion goes wrong.

CBDCs are not stablecoins. And confusing the two leads to false conclusions.

Armstrong uses the digital yuan as an example when talking about yield and “benefits for ordinary people.”

The problem is that a CBDC and a stablecoin are fundamentally different instruments.

A CBDC can only be issued by a central bank. A stablecoin, on the other hand, can be issued by any company that holds bank deposits and proper reserves.

💰 Interest on the digital yuan is not a sign of a strong monetary model. It’s a demand incentive. Essentially, a subsidy from the banking system to push users into a new form of money.

If we’re talking specifically about yield-bearing stablecoins, those already exist. USDL, for example, distributes income from its reserves on a daily basis.

And against that backdrop, one more fact stands out. In 2024, Tether earned around $13 billion in interest income and paid USDT holders… $0.

Not because it couldn’t. But because it never promised to 🤷‍♂️

The stablecoin market won’t change because of CBDCs. The real turning point will come when a mass-market crypto dollar appears that:

▪️ shares yield transparently
▪️ remains competitive on liquidity
▪️ and is easy for regular users to understand

When that happens, Tether’s leadership will no longer look untouchable.