📉 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.

Want funding? Show the MVP 😎

VCs are no longer backing ideas.

Last week, a demo day showcased 15 projects supported by three major ecosystems: TON, Solana, and Avalanche. Officially, these were grants. In reality, it was a very clear signal to the market.

All the projects were different, but they shared one thing.

Every single one already had an MVP.

▪️Ideas used to be fundable. Now they’re just a starting point.
▪️What used to take 6-9 months from idea to MVP now has to happen in days ⏱️
▪️Backing an idea early used to be a plus. Now it’s a lag.

Why the shift?

AI compressed the entire build cycle. The definition of “early stage” moved up. An idea on its own doesn’t cut it anymore. And a product alone often isn’t enough either.

The edge now belongs to teams that show an MVP backed by real demand and real revenue metrics.

The market no longer funds “someday.” It funds what already works 😏

🪄 What if it is not random?

People love taking risks. And they love being right even more.

That is why the market is full of similar yet very different business models built around one thing – letting people test their luck 🎲

Prediction platforms, unlike casinos or loot boxes, promise equal rules for everyone. The idea sounds simple. Predict an outcome. But in reality, things turned out far more complicated 👀

Even market leaders have repeatedly faced situations where the outcome of a bet changed because information was replaced, deadlines shifted, or conditions were suddenly interpreted differently.

On Polymarket, battle maps unexpectedly changed, election outcomes sparked disputes. Wording, timing, and tiny details suddenly decided who won.

At the same time, prediction markets moved far beyond Web3. Bets now include wars, changes of power, movie awards, real estate in specific cities, and other real world events.

On one hand, this scale attracts attention. On the other, it opens the door to insiders. When someone can influence an event and then place a bet on its outcome, the market stops being neutral. Insiders make money and avoid responsibility.
️
☹️ But there is another problem.

A growing number of markets spreads liquidity too thin. Payouts get smaller, interest fades, and users begin to leave.

If participants can create events they are able to influence themselves, prediction markets start looking dirtier than casinos. So does this market have a future or will it simply be banned?

Some countries and several US states have already classified prediction markets as unlicensed gambling and banned them. To clean up their reputation, platforms would need to:

🔸strictly limit the types of events;
🔸fully eliminate insider influence;
🔸clearly lock down conditions and wording.

Otherwise the outcome is familiar. Just like binary options, prediction markets risk being labeled as gambling and shut down across most of the world 🌎

🪙 Stablecoins are becoming core infrastructure for UN humanitarian payments

With support from Circle, the UN is building digital financial infrastructure for humanitarian aid.

Using stablecoins can cut costs by up to 20% compared to traditional banking systems, which currently process around $38 billion in humanitarian payments every year 💸

And this is not an experiment. $USDC has already been used for direct payments to refugees, and now this approach is being scaled across the entire UN ecosystem. Stablecoins are increasingly seen not as crypto exotica, but as payment rails for cross border transfers.

Crypto feels almost purpose built for aid. You can’t donate one cent through the banking system, but you can send 0.000001 $USDC. The only question is network fees.

Remove gas costs, and crypto payments make aid targeted, almost instant, and genuinely effective.

And at that point, this is no longer about technology. It is about millions of lives that are still lost today because of inefficient financial infrastructure.