DeFi’s log-scale chart shows three big step functions, one brutal reset, and now a slow rebuild.

The next real breakout probably won’t come from hype — it’ll need a new capital sink.

Here's your ultra guide to analytics on Polymarket.

What tools exist and which ones do you actually need?
How much do they cost?
What data do they show you?
How do you interpret that data to make better trades?

Read it here!

Yield-bearing stablecoins quietly went parabolic.

$sUSDS, $sUSDe, $BUIDL, $USYC, $syrupUSDC now sit north of $13B in supply after just ~18 months. Stablecoins that actually pay are turning idle cash into infrastructure.

Pure BTC mining stopped being alpha.

Post-halving, companies without revenue beyond hashprice drifted sideways or bled out 40–70%, while the green names were the ones selling AI compute, hosting, or fixed-demand capacity. BTC beta isn’t a strategy anymore.

Tokenized assets quietly became the fastest-growing sector in crypto.

Stablecoin market cap just cleared $307B, and most of the growth is structural, not speculative. Rails keep scaling even when narratives rotate.

Only ~$500K of STRK actually bridged to Solana.

Solana got some extra volume and visibility, Starknet mostly got headlines and friction. Still an interesting cross-chain experiment between two direct competitors.

Nexo saw sustained $2B+ monthly stablecoin inflows back in 2021–22, cooled during 2023, but never really lost usage.

As of January 2026, cumulative inflows crossed $30B, pointing to steady demand for borrowing against assets without forced selling. Old-school CeFi lending, packaged with DeFi instincts, still has a bid.

Winter is getting shorter, but there are still plenty of insights. Let's see what interesting things happened this week ↓

General
➖ Cryptorank: 2025 Crypto Fundraising Recap: Structural Shifts in Web3 Venture Capital
➖ Crypto.com: Alpha Navigator: Quest for Alpha [December 2025]
➖ CoinGecko: 2025 Annual Crypto Industry Report
➖ The Defiant: It’s Not Just Crypto Twitter That’s Dead — Experts Say Broader Retail Interest Is Waning
➖ Galaxy: Do We Have Enough Power?
➖ Galaxy: Weekly Top Stories - 01/16/26
➖ Galaxy: The Shape of Prediction Markets to Come
➖ Galaxy: CLARITY Act Hiccups as Bitmine Goes Beast Mode

Market
➖ Glassnode: Bouncing Into Supply
➖ Glassnode: BTC Market Pulse: Week 4
➖ Galaxy: Markets, Macro, and a Cautious Bitcoin Rally
➖ CoinShares: 2024 Global Bitcoin Ownership Overview
➖ CoinShares: The Talk - January 15, 2026
➖ CoinShares: Market update - January 16th, 2026
➖ CoinShares: Digital asset fund flows | January 19th, 2026

DeFi
➖ DL Research: State of DeFi: An interview with kpk

Tokens & currencies
➖ The Defiant: Most Crypto Holders Want to Pay with Bitcoin but Rarely Do, Survey Show

Kalshi just hit a new spot ATH.

$474.2M traded on Saturday alone — liquidity keeps showing up when outcomes actually matter.

Bitmine is doing most of the heavy lifting in the ETH staking queue, accounting for roughly half of all inflows over the past month.

If staking APY starts to compress, LST/LRT loops lose their edge and ETH borrow demand shifts — especially with Aave rates already sitting around 2–2.3%.

Prediction markets are crossing the line from niche products into core financial infrastructure.

Polymarket and Kalshi still absorb most of the flow — with Kalshi owning regulated U.S. volume and Opinion starting to post real weekly scale. Liquidity is clustering early, and that usually decides the winners.

Quiet fee leaderboard shift on Solana.

Protocols like Meteora, Jupiter, and pump.fun keep climbing on revenue. Fee gravity usually shows up before narratives do.

Lazy Summer is showing what “automated risk management” actually looks like.

When Stream Finance blew up, the vault rebalanced out of risk and rotated into blue-chip strategies without users touching anything. Yield is optional — capital preservation isn’t.

Rough stat: nearly 80% of hacked crypto projects never make it back.

The exploit hurts, but the trust death is what actually kills them.

Pendle’s fee efficiency is doing all the work with a small subset of pools — over 60% are still unprofitable.

As the protocol stated, the new sPENDLE rollout replaces vePENDLE with a liquid staking model, aiming to remove governance and liquidity friction in one move.

Solana hit a 70% staking ratio — a new ATH.

Roughly $60B in SOL is now securing the network, which says more about holder conviction than any marketing slide.

Tokenized funds just printed a new ATH at ~$14.4B, with Maple Finance leading at ~14.8% market share.

As capital consolidates around trusted issuers — alongside names like BlackRock and Circle — Maple isn’t just participating, it’s compounding with the flow. Tokenized funds are becoming onchain treasuries, and defaults matter.

Tokenized RWAs just crossed $21B in TVL.

Long-term forecasts vary — $2–4T by McKinsey, up to $16T per Boston Consulting Group, but directionally, the slope is clear.

Bitget’s on-chain Earn relaunch — now running through Morpho on Arbitrum — pushed vault deposits back above $200M.

SteakhouseFi (52%) and Gauntlet (26%) dominate curation, which is where trust keeps clustering.

Options flow at Wintermute more than doubled in 2025.

Counterparties stopped using options as punts and started using them as tools — yield structuring, hedging, and balance-sheet management. Directional trading gave way to systems.

TRON keeps cementing itself as a payments rail.

By the end of Q4, the network hosted $81.8B in stablecoins — $80.9B of that in USDT.