An economy built for good times 🫧

One of the oldest patterns in DeFi hasn’t really changed. Tokens get launched first. Demand is expected to catch up later.

In 2025, Hyperliquid decided not to play that game. Instead, they built a very tight liquidity support system. One that directly ties the token to the exchange itself.

The idea is simple and, honestly, elegant:

When the exchange earns, the token benefits

99% of all fees go straight into buying back HYPE. Every trader opening a position is indirectly supporting the token’s price.

🔥 The recent one billion dollar burn takes this even further. This is no longer just about mechanics. It’s a clear signal. The team is willing to give up short-term revenue to reinforce long-term stability.

But this design comes with a condition:

It works beautifully while trading activity stays high.

If volumes drop, say by three times, something the crypto market has seen more than once, the buyback mechanism naturally loses strength. The unlock schedule for the team and funds, meanwhile, doesn’t pause. It simply continues.

There’s another delicate layer here.

Twenty-one validators and a relatively small group of large holders control a meaningful share of the supply. Any sharp move from that group could pressure liquidity faster than automated systems can adjust.

Taken together, HYPE’s token model looks like a system optimized for performance during strong market conditions. It’s efficient. It’s aligned. But it doesn’t leave much room for stress.

There’s no built-in buffer for a real slowdown.

If volumes fall, the system doesn’t break overnight. But it does start carrying the full weight of its own emissions.

No room for mistakes.

🏦 Morgan Stanley plans crypto ETFs for $BTC and $SOL

A Bitcoin ETF is already a baseline instrument for institutional portfolio construction. $SOL, however, represents a more deliberate and forward-looking choice by the bank’s analysts.

Morgan Stanley will acquire $SOL via third-party custodians and stake the assets to generate yield. This approach supports not only $SOL price, but also TVL across the Solana DeFi ecosystem.

Institutions are no longer just buying the asset.

They’re optimizing for yield from day one 📈

📊 According to CoinGecko, around 5.3 million tokens were launched in 2024 on Pump.fun alone. Not listings. Actual deployed tokens.

In 2025, the picture became even clearer. On Solana launchpads, the average number of new tokens per day ranged from 56,400 in January to 26,200 in September. Even using rough averages, that’s 10-15 million tokens a year in just one slice of the market.

⚠️ And here’s the part that matters.

The majority of these tokens can’t have a product by definition.

Not because teams “didn’t try hard enough,” but because it’s economically impossible. Product development and distribution simply don’t scale at the same speed as token deployment.

When we talk about tokens with real business utility, we mean tokens that:

🔸are used to pay fees,
🔸grant access to a service,
🔸secure a network,
🔸connect directly to real cash flows.

Those launches aren’t measured in millions. They’re measured in hundreds per year.

📌 If you aggregate data from multiple sources, the picture looks like this:

~50–200 tokens per year have real, working utility.
~200–600 tokens have partial utility: something exists, but demand is propped up by incentives, or the product hasn’t proven itself yet.

The result is a sharply divided market.

There’s a small layer of projects where the token is deeply embedded into the product and actually needed. They’re rare because they require serious engineering, thoughtful token design, and a solid economic model.

And then there’s a massive layer of tokens with no product at all. Simply because today, launching a token is cheaper and faster than building a landing page for it.

In sheer numbers, the gap between tokens with real utility and tokens without a product is measured in tens of thousands.

And that explains a lot 👀

📉 CoinGecko analyst Shaun Paul Lee points out that memecoin prices fell sharply after the events of October 10.

But the problem is not October. And it is not crises or Black Swans either. Meme coins, like many other tokens, fall for a much simpler reason. They have no utility.

They are simply not needed.

Demand for meme coins is driven by marketing budgets and market makers. As soon as the cost of keeping a meme alive exceeds the revenue from its trading, teams don’t improve the product. They launch a new meme.

Crises can accelerate the fall to zero. But tokens stay there not because of macro events, but because of their irrelevance. We have already covered this earlier.

Now look at the scale.

🤯 11.6 million tokens launched in a single year. That is 31,780 tokens every day. No weekends. No holidays.

At that pace, you barely have time to come up with a name, let alone build real tokenomics.

🚨 Dubai’s financial regulator (DFSA) has banned the use of privacy tokens and services within the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC), citing AML risks and sanctions compliance concerns.

The restrictions cover privacy-focused cryptocurrencies such as Zcash (ZEC) and Monero (XMR), along with all related activity. Under the new rules, companies must be able to identify every participant involved in a crypto transaction.

The timing is hard to ignore. The ban comes just as interest in privacy coins is picking up. In 2025, Zcash traded as high as $540, and Monero has now set a new all-time high at $565.

🌎 Price action may be strong, but regulatory pressure on anonymous tokens continues to tighten worldwide.

Why isn’t DeFi making money where the money already is? 💸🤔

Many traders have already noticed how much U.S. macro data now drives crypto price action. Scroll through any crypto trading feed and you’ll see entire strategies built around specific macro indicators.

Today, crypto traders watch the same things traditional market traders do: Federal Funds Rate, PCE Price Index, Non Farm Payrolls, even oil inventory data. So why?

Because the real drivers of token prices are large, professional investors with serious capital. And those investors always have a choice of where and when to allocate. Crypto is just one tool in their portfolio. Most crypto projects, however, are still ignoring this shift.

Here’s a simple example 👇

The Federal Reserve cuts rates. The dollar gets cheaper and more accessible. Deposits and bonds start yielding less. Credit becomes cheaper.

At that point, investors go looking for alternatives and start paying attention to crypto.

And they usually have two basic options:

➡️ buy tokens,
➡️ or park capital in DeFi.

And this is where DeFi should shine.

For an investor rotating out of bonds, DeFi offers passive yield with relatively low risk. Exactly what they want. But there’s a catch.

Today, crypto is leaving money on the table.

An investor buys $USDT, goes into Aave, locks the stablecoins and that’s it. The $AAVE token is not required in this flow. No buying pressure. No demand or price growth 📉

The economics could have been designed differently. DeFi could be capturing far more value from rate cut cycles.

But for now, it’s simply letting that opportunity slip away 🤷‍♂️

🇬🇧 Ripple secured an EMI license from the UK FCA. The market barely reacted – and that’s a mistake.

This license allows Ripple to legally process fiat payments and run full payment flows within the UK. Ripple’s payment infrastructure is built on XRPL, where XRP functions as a native settlement asset, not a currency and not a speculative token.

Ripple didn’t wait for regulators to label $XRP as money. Instead, the token is structured as a native accounting asset inside a licensed payment system. This is the part the market keeps missing.

💡 This is exactly the model we recommend to clients when they need to legalize transactions through their own token.

The structure is straightforward:
1) users buy the token for fiat from a licensed partner,
2) pay for services on the platform using the token,
3) and the platform sells the tokens back to the partner for fiat.

From a regulatory perspective, this is treated as a fiat payment. The token is only an internal accounting tool within the partner’s digital money system. The only real requirement is a licensed partner authorized to operate with digital money.

⏳ Price action is secondary. The real impact comes when actual payment flows start moving through the system.

👑 EOS had everything. So what went wrong?

At the very dawn of Web3, every new project was chasing one thing: a record-breaking ICO. Raising tens of millions felt normal. Almost boring.

💰 But when EOS pulled in more than $4 billion, the market saw it as a real contender. “An Ethereum killer”, they’d even say.

Eight years passed. Everyone knows Ethereum. But what happened to EOS?

The idea was ambitious. A Layer 1 built for decentralized apps. Fast dApp launches through smart contract builders. Near-zero fees thanks to cheap gas. On paper, it looked perfect.

In reality, EOS managed to step on several rakes at once:

▫️a poorly thought-out token model
▫️painfully slow development
▫️capital spent with little accountability

⚖️ Governance issues and misuse of funds eventually had to be handled by regulators. The SEC stepped in. In 2024, the team tried to “fix” the tokenomics, but by then it was already too late.

The idea itself had gone stale.

EOS, much like many AI projects later on, tried to charge money for something the market would soon offer for free. DeFi expanded across every network. Apps became available on TON and Base. And cheap gas stopped being an advantage.

💅 In 2025, the team went for a rebrand.

EOS became Vaulta, with a new focus: crypto lending, RWA, payments.

The problem was that those markets had already been occupied and evolving for years. The $EOS token was swapped for $A at a 1:1 ratio. The expected growth never came, and the price started falling even faster.

The EOS story shows the importance of responsible capital management. In the end, it is a story about responsibility and trust.

That record-breaking $4B ICO was, above all, the community believing in an idea. And today’s $0.17 price for token $A shows just how easily that belief was thrown away 💔

When our expert finishes tokenomics with the token integrated into the product and hands it over to the client 😅

🚰 Is sewage tokenization the new oil for RWA?

When someone says “RWA,” the first images that come to mind are usually Dubai skyscrapers and tokenized Nasdaq stocks. But the real economy tends to move in a very different direction. In Indonesia, a pilot project is launching to tokenize water treatment facilities, with plans to scale to $200 million across Southeast Asia within a year.

These assets are some of the most logical candidates for tokenization: water networks, heating systems, warehouses, roads. Infrastructure with constant demand and predictable cash flows. With the right structure, they fit naturally into a subscription-based monetization model.

Not glamorous, but scalable.

These are the kinds of RWA that can actually move global GDP

8Blocks approves 🙂

Why is it so hard to predict a Black Swan? 🦢

We’re used to cycles in crypto. At some point, we even start waiting for them. Sometimes we make money on them. The market goes up, then it goes down, liquidity builds. And the loop starts again.

😟 But on October 10, something happened that Web3 hadn’t seen before. Something we now call a Black Swan. For thousands of years, scholars were convinced all swans were white. Until Australia was discovered. Until the first black swan was seen on the Swan River.

That’s the core of the idea.

We mistake what’s familiar for what’s inevitable. And we don’t believe in what we haven’t seen yet.

That’s why Black Swans are so dangerous. They arrive suddenly. And their impact can be unlimited.

They can’t be predicted because no one knows what the next Black Swan will look like. Or what, exactly, it will affect.

Unless someone does? 🤔

P.S. Highly recommend reading The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb.

❓ What does the market lack to grow?

Spoiler: liquidity.

Liquidity means new money. Money that buys tokens. But where does it come from, and what can bring it into the market?

Historically, fresh money entered the market during Bitcoin rallies. But let’s be honest: BTC is no longer a multiple-upon-multiple asset. It has grown into a large, mature market with limited upside. And without the promise of outsized returns, traditional capital has little reason to move into Web3.

That’s why the market can only grow through ideas with a low entry threshold. Products you can step into immediately, without long explanations or heavy onboarding.

And we’ve already seen this pattern before.

🎨 NFTs – tokens that could be launched by a street musician or a real estate owner alike. Simple mechanics, clear value, and visible upside pulled in both builders and investors. As a result, millions of new users followed.

🎮 Play-to-earn games – hard to build, easy to play. From Stepn to Axie Infinity, simple token farming attracted huge audiences looking for online income.

Yes, these models had flaws. And yes, many tokens eventually collapsed and people lost money. But they scaled the crypto audience fast. Very fast.

So what’s next?

The market needs ideas with a simple entry point. No blockchain lectures or loud promises.

People want simplicity and scale. Here and now ⏳

What do you think still doesn’t exist – but if it did, people would gladly pay for it? 🤔

🏦 State Street and deposit tokenization: banks move into on-chain defense

State Street is launching an institutional tokenization platform focused on money market funds, ETFs, and tokenized assets. The bank manages over $5.4 trillion in AUM.

At first glance, this looks like another step toward tokenizing liquid instruments that already have no shortage of demand.

👀 But that’s not the most important part.

Among all directions, State Street explicitly highlights the tokenization of bank deposits.

This is where tension starts to build. If stablecoins and DeFi continue offering higher yields, capital will begin flowing out of traditional bank deposits and into Web3. For banks, losing deposits isn’t about product competition. It means reduced lending and, at scale, a risk to economic growth itself.

In this context, tokenized banking products don’t look like experiments. They look like a necessity.

If a traditional deposit yields 3% annually, while an on-chain product from the same bank offers 7% annually, the question is no longer about technology.

❓ The real question is how banks plan to pull liquidity back into their own ecosystems.

💰Bitcoin is on the balance sheet, but the money isn’t: Strategy’s new reality

Michael Saylor is hinting at another Bitcoin purchase, just days after the $1.25B buy that pushed Strategy’s balance to 687,000 $BTC.

On paper, everything still looks perfect. The company is profitable, Bitcoin trades above $90,000, and the balance sheet keeps growing. But the market isn’t reacting the way it used to.

Since January 8, MSCI, one of the largest global index providers followed by ETFs and institutional funds, has paused the automatic inclusion of Strategy shares into its indices.

That pause matters. It temporarily shuts off passive capital flows.

So even if Strategy buys more $BTC, increases its holdings, and issues new shares, the next round of inflows may take time. Shares now need to be placed manually, instead of being absorbed automatically through index demand.

In this setup, Saylor’s public hints don’t function as a growth strategy anymore. They function as a way to hold the market’s attention.

There’s no shortage of discussion in the market right now (as always). But it’s way more interesting to look at where capital is moving.

Fund activity for January 12-18:

💰 Over the week, funds invested $420M across just 10 deals. Among the participants were Tier-1 funds Coinbase and Paradigm.

Largest checks this week:

Alpaca: $150M
LMAX Group: $150M

By sector, the picture looks like this:

DeFi: $12.1M
CeFi: $193M
Blockchain infrastructure and services: $215M

What stands out here is fairly clear ☝️

Funds are still allocating most of their capital to infrastructure and centralized solutions. Early-stage projects received less than 3% of total investment, with the bulk of capital going into Strategy rounds and later.

Let’s see how this week closes 👀

🎼 Cointelegraph says that memecoin trading volume has jumped to $5.6B. At the same time, total market cap is down 6%. Traders are taking profits, and the speculative impulse is cooling off.

And every time we read news like this, there’s a classic joke we can’t help thinking about 👇

A guy sees a stock priced at $0.01 and thinks, “It can’t go any lower. Risk is minimal.” So he buys. The price goes up, he buys more. Then more.

On paper, it’s thousands of Xs, so he decides to sell. But… to whom?

That’s exactly what’s happening with memecoins right now.

Rising volume without new capital isn’t a bullish signal. It’s an exit signal. Everyone sees the gains. And then, at some point, the buyer just disappears.

🏦 Banks vs yield-bearing stablecoins: why the CLARITY Act is stuck

The CLARITY Act in the US is stalling for one simple reason – banks want stablecoins stripped of passive yield.

Their position is pretty straightforward: investors should only earn through staking, farming, or liquidity provision. In other words, the same mechanics as a bank deposit, just without any real alternative 🔒

Crypto companies, on the other hand, want to issue stablecoins with yield built in by default. Coins that generate returns simply by sitting in your wallet. That is a direct analogue of savings accounts.

If banks accept staking as a deposit equivalent, then rebasing should be accepted as the equivalent of savings accounts too.

🚫 Otherwise, this doesn’t look like regulation. It looks like protecting banks from competition and limiting investor choice.