TLDR CRYPTO 2026-01-13

UK COMMITTEE CHAIRS PUSH FOR CRYPTO POLITICAL DONATIONS BAN

Seven Labour MPs chairing parliamentary committees are pushing the UK government to ban cryptocurrency political donations in the forthcoming Elections Bill, citing concerns that crypto enables foreign interference and creates verification challenges for electoral integrity. The push intensified after the Electoral Commission revealed Reform UK accepted a £9 million crypto donation from Christopher Harborne, a Thailand-based investor holding approximately 12% of Tether. Despite the pressure, government sources indicate the ban won't be included due to implementation complexity, even as the UK advances its broader crypto regulatory framework with plans to regulate digital assets by 2027.

CFTC LAUNCHES INNOVATION COMMITTEE

New CFTC Chair Michael Selig unveiled an Innovation Advisory Committee, expanding the agency's focus on crypto, AI, and prediction markets as Congress debates legislation to broaden CFTC authority over digital assets. The committee will include industry leaders from firms like Polymarket, Kalshi, Gemini, and Nasdaq, signaling a more proactive regulatory posture as the agency weighs market structure rules and rising concerns around insider trading in prediction markets.

X INTRODUCES CRYPTO-AWARE SMART CASHTAGS

X's Smart Cashtags is an asset-aware tagging system that allows users to tag specific cryptocurrencies and smart contracts while displaying near real-time onchain prices directly on timelines. The feature addresses ticker confusion by distinguishing between similarly named tokens and will provide an API with almost real-time data for any onchain asset. Screenshots suggest a potential buy/sell trading integration through partnerships with platforms like Coinbase and Base. X plans to collect feedback during testing before a wider rollout in February.

POLYGON'S VISION FOR THE OPEN MONEY STACK

Polygon Labs' “Open Money Stack” is a comprehensive infrastructure framework designed to move all global money onchain through integrated services, including blockchain rails, orchestration layers, wallet infrastructure, compliance tools, stablecoin interoperability, and onchain yield mechanisms. The platform aims to solve inefficiencies in cross-border payments by enabling instant settlement without correspondent banks, leveraging Polygon's track record of facilitating over $2 trillion in onchain value transfers across six years. Polygon's Agglayer will provide cross-chain interoperability to make different blockchain networks invisible to end users. Category-defining companies in the global money movement space will be established within the next three years.

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WHERE DEFI GOES FROM HERE

DeFi TVL reached a new all-time high of $225 billion in October, but this represented only 10% growth from the 2021 peak of $204 billion, suggesting the crypto-native user base may be largely tapped out. The scale gap remains massive: current DeFi TVL sits around $164 billion, while mobile fintech and neobanks collectively manage over $4 trillion in assets. Bright spots include the stablecoin market exceeding $260 billion (surpassing DeFi TVL) and yield-bearing stablecoins crossing $20 billion, indicating growing demand for onchain yield products. Future growth will come from embedded DeFi integrations with traditional fintechs and simple, reliable products rather than increasingly complex financial instruments.

ETHEREUM MUST PASS THE WALKAWAY TEST

Ethereum itself must be walkaway-safe (work without consistent EVM updates). This requires full quantum resistance, ZK-EVM and PeerDAS scalability, a decades-lasting state model, full account abstraction, a DoS-resistant gas schedule, a durable PoS economic model, and a block-building design that guarantees long-term censorship resistance.

THE ONLY AIRDROP THAT MATTERS THIS YEAR

Despite most current airdrops offering minimal value due to oversaturated concepts and insufficient liquidity, prediction market platforms Kalshi and Polymarket represent a potentially significant opportunity, having each raised hundreds of millions at $10B+ valuations with mainstream adoption from figures like Elon Musk and JD Vance. Both platforms may reward users through either token airdrops or IPO share allocations based on trading activity, with the opportunity being compared to Solana's airdrop season and Hyperliquid in scale. The farming strategy centers on generating high trading volume in liquid markets, particularly exploiting high-probability outcomes for consistent returns, though user activity remains concentrated among the top 1% of participants. The primary risk is that neither platform may ultimately allocate tokens or shares to users, making the time investment potentially worthless.

JPMORGAN DISMISSES $6.6 TRILLION STABLECOIN RISK

ETHEREUM WIDENS STABLECOIN LEAD AS SOLANA LOSES GROUND

Solana lost nearly 10% of its stablecoin supply in a week, while BSC overtook it by more than $1B in stablecoin market cap.

ETHEREUM ACTIVITY INCREASES AS APPS AND THROUGHPUT HIT NEW HIGHS

The Ethereum ecosystem saw sharp week-over-week growth, with top apps like Ethereum Attestation Service (+3.6k%), Small Dapp (+801%), and Minteo (+776%) leading transaction gains, while network activity hit a new high of ~57.8k TPS.

88 YIELD-BEARING STABLECOINS LAUNCHED IN 2025

Stablewatch tracks 88 new major yield-bearing stablecoins launched in 2025.

ETHEREUM EXIT QUEUE DROPS TO ZERO AS STAKING DEMAND RE-ACCELERATES

The validator exit queue has fallen to 0 ETH while the entry queue sits at ~1.81M ETH waiting to stake.