Robinhood is trading at ~36.7× earnings while markets are bleeding.

All the core metrics are still moving up and to the right — valuation isn’t reacting to macro the way you’d expect. That disconnect is doing the talking.

DeFi never really cracked options beyond prediction markets.

If Hyperliquid can bring options on-chain without eating its own perps flow, that’s a meaningful unlock. Pulling a real options market on-chain would be a step-change, not an iteration.

Maple now sits on $2B+ in stablecoin deposits.

That capital is earning yield directly from institutional borrowers.

Sky printed roughly $340M in revenue in 2025, putting the DAO in the top tier of crypto earners.

At the same time, USDS transfer volume jumped ~400% YoY, hitting ~$260B in Q4. That’s usage scaling, not just fees.

Uniswap web traffic just hit a multi-year low, down ~60% YoY.

Retail attention has drifted, but usage hasn’t vanished — Curve DAUs are sitting at ATHs. Frontends fade, rails keep running.

Ethena’s FDV-to-fees ratio compressed to ~5.8 in January, while fees hit $29M (+32% MoM).

With ENA trading near ATL, the playbook is clear: push USDe into TradFi and CeFi, embed it deeper as collateral, and optimize duration and yield as rates roll over. If execution lands, Ethena likely looks very different in a lower-rate regime.

Tether keeps climbing as stablecoins absorb more capital, while ETH chops in a risk-off market.

The gap is narrowing fast — if the stablecoin trend holds, USDT flipping ETH for #2 by market cap stops sounding impossible.

SparkLend held $5.29B in supplied assets, almost entirely on Ethereum.

The protocol stays conservative by design — ETH, BTC derivatives, and USD stables only. It’s less about yield chasing, more about capital staying put.

EtherFi’s monetization profile looks nothing like a retail fintech.

ARPU sits around $256 — higher than Wise or Revolut and in the Chime/SoFi range — with only ~21K funded accounts. Small surface area, institutional-grade economics.

ETH-heavy markets on Aave are feeling the drawdown, with aggregate ETH exposure down over a third from January highs.

But Plasma is bucking the trend, running the highest utilization among $1B+ markets thanks to stablecoins and yield-bearing wraps. As risk-off sets in, capital keeps clustering around stables — Base saw it too with fresh syrupUSDC collateral.

DATs are mostly accumulating, not distributing.

Only one of the top SOL DATs stands out as a net seller — the rest are still leaning long.

Crypto cards have processed at least $6.8B since 2023, and that’s a lowball without CEX cards.

RedotPay leads with $4.2B, Rain follows at $1.7B with the fastest MoM growth, while Cypher Card and EtherFi Cash are quietly onboarding the next wave. Payments adoption doesn’t need hype to compound.

MegaETH reached new heights.

Deployed smart contracts crossed 62K, while ERC-20 transfer volume hit an ATH at ~$5.9M and keeps climbing. Early infra traction is starting to compound.

Some new research insights for you ↓

General
➖ 4pillars: Monthly EIP - Jan 2026 (ft. Spotlight on the Institutional ETH Yield Pipeline)
➖ The Defiant: Crypto Exploit Losses Hit $370 Million in January: CertiK
➖ Cointelegraph: Crypto VC Funding Doubled in 2025 as RWA Tokenization Took the Lead
➖ Galaxy: Weekly Top Stories - 02/06/26

Market
➖ CoinShares: Equities update | February 6th 2026
➖ CoinShares: Market update - February 6th, 2026
➖ CoinShares: Digital asset fund flows | February 9th, 2026
➖ CoinShares: Digital asset bi-weekly digest - February 10th 2026
➖ Coinbase: Crypto Market Positioning (February 2026)
➖ Binance: Weekly: Crypto Deleveraging, QT Fears May Be Overdone
➖ Binance: Monthly Market Insights - February 2026
➖ Glassnode: BTC Market Pulse: Week 7
➖ Galaxy: The Subtle Tension Between Staking and Onchain Credit Markets

Blockchains & networks
➖ 4pillars: $PUMP Thesis: The Casino in January
➖ CoinShares: Quantum vulnerability in Bitcoin: a manageable risk
➖ DL Research: Katana: Bringing ve(3,3) to the Chain Level
➖ Galaxy: Solana Q4 2025 Update: Weathering the Downturn

Sentora flipped the switch on real monetization.

Its PYUSD v2 Morpho vault introduced a 1% management fee in late December — while still paying incentives to grow AUM. Looks like a clean way to monetize PayPal’s distribution without fighting for users.

Solana remains one of the cheapest major chains to transact on.

Median fees sit second-lowest across large ecosystems — more than 3× cheaper than Base.

Looks like perps are where crypto’s real economics live.

The sector accounts for roughly 20% of total crypto revenue, with actual competition and consumer surplus — not just narratives. Attention will drift, cash flow won’t.

Watching USDT supply more than price right now, and the 60-day growth flipped negative for the first time since Q3 2023.

When stables start shrinking, that’s liquidity actually leaving the system, and BTC rarely sustains upside in that regime. The last few times this happened, we got 1–2 months of chop before a local bottom formed.

So either we’re heading into a fragile sideways grind, or we’re in the early innings of a deeper reset before the liquidity switch flips back on.

I didn’t expect to see this so soon, but Base flipped Ethereum in monthly stablecoin transfer volume for January — ~$5.86T vs ~$2.49T.

Tron and Solana aren’t even close.

ETH is being elevated to settlement. Execution and stablecoin velocity are migrating up the stack.