Elliptic's investigation claims Iran's central bank purchased at least $507m of USDT last year via OTC routes (payments in UAE dirhams, linked to an entity called Modex), routed much of it through Nobitex and cross-chain bridges into DEXs and other exchanges to stabilize the rial and settle trade, and ultimately moved all identified USDT out of CBI-linked wallets. This demonstrates that stablecoins can facilitate sanctioned states' dollar access while also leaving an on-chain trail that enables freezes and enforcement actions.
Pendle Finance is replacing its vePENDLE vote-escrowed token with sPENDLE, a liquid staking token that eliminates multi-year lock requirements in favor of a 14-day withdrawal period. The new tokenomics model redirects protocol revenue toward PENDLE buybacks rather than direct distributions. This transition improves capital efficiency for token holders while maintaining governance participation, marking a shift from traditional ve-tokenomics to a more liquid staking architecture.
Noble is migrating its Cosmos SDK-based blockchain to a standalone EVM Layer 1, a notable change for the pioneering stablecoin-centric protocol that serves as critical USDC infrastructure in the Cosmos ecosystem. The move to EVM compatibility opens Noble to the broader Ethereum ecosystem while maintaining its focus on stablecoin issuance and cross-chain transfers. It also signals the lack of interest in the Cosmos ecosystem after poor adoption in the past several years.
The "capital chasm" is where US capital income surged 136% versus 57% labor income growth over 40 years, leaving 4 billion adults with zero equity or bond market access as the real divide separates the "unbrokered" from those able to invest beyond basic banking. Tokenization on public blockchains enables fractional ownership, reducing minimum thresholds from weeks of wages to mobile top-up amounts with near-instant settlement and cutting transaction costs over 30%, mirroring stablecoins' proof of cross-border value transfer. Policy recommendations include upholding blockchain neutrality, establishing clear tokenization pathways for traditional assets, allowing bank engagement with tokenization infrastructure, and recognizing self-custody rights.
This post outlines 11 use cases at the AI-crypto intersection. Blockchains offer a counterbalance to centralizing forces in AI by enabling decentralized, credibly neutral, and user-ownable networks. Compelling crossovers include persistent data/context portability across AI systems, universal identity passports for AI agents, forwards-compatible proof of personhood using protocols like World, and micropayments for AI services.
DeFi lending was restructured between 2022-2025 into a two-layer architecture where base protocols provide infrastructure while ERC-4626 vaults and third-party curators determine critical underwriting decisions. Aave maintains 45% market share with $34B TVL, while $7.27B in curated TVL is concentrated among top managers like Gauntlet (27.6%), Steakhouse (17.8%), and MEV Capital (12.6%). The research proposes minimal onchain disclosure standards for comparable risk assessment across vault strategies.
Kalshi estimates a US acquisition of Greenland during Trump's term at roughly 42-45% while Polymarket prices a 2026-specific outcome at ~15–23%. The apparent arbitrage is largely explained by different contract phrasing, settlement windows, and oracle/condition differences. This means a trader eligible to trade in both markets could narrow obvious gaps, but persistent spreads can remain rational once the markets are compared on identical terms.
Crypto lost its monopoly on moonshot returns as similar high-risk/high-reward profiles now exist across meme stocks, sports betting, and other speculative assets.
When tokens bridge between chains, someone must mint at the destination, and trust assumptions differ dramatically based on who controls minting authority.
Intent-based trading has moved from experimental to mainstream adoption across DeFi, with protocols like CoW Swap pioneering the architecture since 2022.
Anthropic's Claude Code going viral has triggered a speculative boom on Solana as developers and traders used Bags (Solana launchpad) to mint tokens tied to trending AI repos.
Consumers want to use crypto like cash, and earn rewards like they would on their other cards. That's where AMARA [4] begins: with a charge card built to turn crypto-linked value into real-world spend – not just something you hold.
Bermuda is partnering with Coinbase and Circle to pilot stablecoin payments across government agencies, accelerate USDC adoption among merchants and banks, and support tokenization and onchain tooling for local financial institutions while running nationwide digital-finance education and onboarding. The effort was unveiled at Davos and described as aspirational and non-exclusive. It builds on prior onchain pilots (including a USDC airdrop) and coincides with Coinbase's new Custom Stablecoins product, aiming to lower costs, speed settlement, and make dollar-denominated digital payments a practical part of everyday commerce on the island.
Portugal's gaming regulator told prediction market Polymarket to halt operations after more than €4 million flowed into presidential election markets in the hours before results, stoking fears that bets were placed on leaked exit polls. Regulators say Polymarket is unauthorized and political betting is banned, prompting potential network-level blocks as the episode adds to a growing list of jurisdictions (including France, Germany, and recent US state actions) moving against the platform.
Prediction markets are evolving from event speculation into financial primitives as DFlow tokenizes Kalshi on Solana for DeFi composability, Gondor enables borrowing against Polymarket ERC-1155 positions via Morpho vaults at 50% LTV, and Space delivers 10x leveraged exposure with multi-outcome liquidity unification. AI agents will price thin micro-markets where human attention is scarce and serve as interface layers translating plain-English views into optimal cross-platform exposure across Polymarket, Kalshi, leveraged venues, and perp DEXs. Impact Markets reveal conditional asset valuations like "BTC price if Fed cuts 75bp," while Decision Markets automate governance through futarchy and Opinion Markets trade subjective narratives. Liquidity remains the binding constraint as most order books are thin with wide spreads movable 10%+ with thousands of dollars.
Revolut has applied for a full banking license in Peru as part of its Latin American expansion strategy, targeting the country's $4.93 billion annual remittance market, where approximately 1 million people rely on money sent from abroad. The London-based neobank has seen its stablecoin payment volumes surge an estimated 156% year-over-year to approximately $10.5 billion in 2025 following its October 2025 introduction of 1:1 USD conversion for USDC and USDT. Revolut's move reflects a broader trend across Latin American fintech, with Mercado Libre launching its Meli Dollar stablecoin in Brazil in August 2024, Nubank developing dollar-pegged stablecoin credit card payments, and crypto wallet company Lemon raising $20 million to expand after issuing over 1 million wallets in Peru in under a year.
Ethereum daily transactions have surged to 2.1 million, surpassing 2021 cycle peaks with a 14% increase over two weeks, while average gas fees have dropped to multi-year lows driven by EIP-4844 and recent blob-capacity upgrades that reduced Layer 2 data posting costs. Stablecoin transfers make up the majority of network activity, with Tether's USDT volume roughly double that of Circle's USDC. Validator dynamics signal strong network confidence as the exit queue fell to zero from 2.67 million ETH in September. 2.6 million ETH awaits entry into staking – the highest queue since July 2023 – with approximately 30% of total ETH supply now staked.
Crypto card payment volumes have surged from $100 million monthly in early 2023 to over $1.5 billion by late 2025 – a 106% CAGR – reaching an $18 billion annualized run rate that now rivals peer-to-peer stablecoin transfers ($19 billion). Visa is leading with 90%+ of on-chain card volume through early infrastructure partnerships, with its stablecoin-linked card spending alone hitting a $3.5 billion annualized rate (460% YoY growth). India ($338 billion in crypto inflows) and Argentina (46.6% USDC share) emerge as global outliers, with cards serving distinct use cases like crypto-backed credit in India's UPI-saturated market and inflation hedging via stablecoin debit in Argentina.
2026.01.21·
research.artemisanalytics.com·4 min read·TLDR Crypto
The NYSE tokenization announcement is vaporware as it leaves out critical details like the chain, VM, stablecoins, jurisdictions, permissioning, and fees used to enable tokenization. The NYSE, a profit-driven TradFi incumbent backed by regulatory privilege, is unlikely to successfully execute the radically different, permissionless architectures tokenization requires.
Fish-to-Shark holders (10-1,000 BTC) accumulated approximately 110,000 BTC over the past 30 days, marking the fastest accumulation pace since Bitcoin dropped to $15,000 during the November 2022 FTX collapse. Bitcoin is trading roughly 25% below its October record high and 15% above its November low of around $80,000, indicating mid-to-large investors are using the range-bound market to build positions. Smaller Shrimp holders (under 1 BTC) simultaneously accumulated over 13,000 BTC, the largest increase since late November 2023, suggesting broad-based accumulation across multiple cohorts.
The Hong Kong Securities and Futures Professionals Association warned regulators that proposed virtual-asset management rules, notably removing the “de minimis” exemption that lets Type 9 managers hold small crypto allocations without a separate license, would force even tiny crypto exposures (eg. 1%) to trigger a full virtual-asset license, imposing heavy compliance costs and deterring traditional managers from experimenting with the asset class.
Ethereum is posting a rare efficiency milestone, with 7-day average transactions nearing 2.5 million, almost double year over year, while average gas fees have fallen to around $0.15, the lowest in modern ETH history.
Strategy announced it acquired 22,305 BTC for roughly $2.13 billion at an average price of about $95,284, bringing total holdings to 709,715 bitcoin as of January 19.
US spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded $1.42 billion in net inflows during the week of January 12-16, marking the strongest weekly performance since early October when funds attracted $2.7 billion.
The New York Stock Exchange is developing a platform for trading and onchain settlement of tokenized securities that will enable 24/7 operations, instant settlement, fractional share trading, and stablecoin-based funding. Subject to regulatory approvals, the platform will combine NYSE's Pillar matching engine with blockchain-based post-trade systems that support multiple chains, and will create a new NYSE venue for tokenized shares fungible with traditional securities as well as natively-issued digital securities. Tokenized shareholders will receive traditional dividends and governance rights. The initiative is part of parent company ICE's broader digital strategy to prepare its clearing infrastructure for 24/7 trading.
Bitcoin fell back toward $92,000, sparking over $750M in long liquidations, as Greenland-linked US-EU tariff-war headlines hit a market already weakened by delays to US crypto market structure legislation and broader crypto-specific underperformance. The NYSE is also developing a 24/7 platform for trading and onchain settlement of tokenized US equities and ETFs, targeting fractional trading, instant settlement, and stablecoin-funded flows pending regulatory approval.
Vitalik Buterin outlines an ambitious 2026 roadmap to reverse a decade of centralization drift in Ethereum's infrastructure and user experience. Core technical initiatives include ZK-EVM and BAL to reduce full node requirements, Helios for trustless RPC verification, ORAM/PIR for privacy-preserving data queries, and social recovery wallets with timelocks to eliminate seed phrase dependency without introducing custodial backdoors. The plan also addresses privacy censorship resistance through ERC-4337 mempool integration with native account abstraction (AA) and FOCIL, alongside IPFS-based decentralized application interfaces.
This post highlights 35 recent examples of global institutions building on Ethereum's stack, spanning tokenized stocks and ETFs, money market funds, deposit tokens, stablecoins, AI-driven payments, and 24/7 settlement across banks, asset managers, fintechs, and Big Tech. Ethereum is the preferred base layer and L2 ecosystem for regulated tokenization, staking products, and programmable capital. It is the settlement rail for institutions moving real-world assets and financial infrastructure onchain at scale.
There's plenty of cards that help you save crypto. AMARA [10] lets you spend it. Built on the $EMBR token, AMARA offers a charge-card-based spend layer funded by card receivables. Early investors can earn bonus shares and priority access to $EMBR. Invest
Morpho scaled from 67,000 to 1.4M+ users in 2025, with deposits growing from $5B to $13B and active loans reaching $4.5B, powered by major institutional integrations including Coinbase's crypto-backed loans (DeFi's largest integration to date), plus Crypto.com, Gemini, Societe Generale Forge, and Bitget. RWA deposits surged from near-zero to $400M by Q3 2025, signaling accelerating institutional adoption. Most large institutions now have active DeFi teams and research, with 2026 expected to convert this interest into concrete deployment.
Cantor Fitzgerald's initiation of coverage on single-token DATs like PURR and HYPD (both holding Hyperliquid's HYPE) represents the most detailed Wall Street sell-side research on an individual crypto asset to date, enabled by banks' ability to profit from trading DAT equities rather than tokens directly. The DAT structure solves a critical incentive misalignment by creating equity vehicles that attract institutional and retail capital more effectively than raw tokens. However, DATs face a fundamental conflict between their dual mandate of accumulating tokens at low prices while simultaneously driving token appreciation for NAV growth.
Tokenized gold products PAXG and XAUT suffer from exponential slippage, while CME Gold Futures maintain under 3 bps slippage at $20M – a liquidity gap of multiple orders of magnitude. Two Binance PAXG flash events in mid-October 2025 cascaded through oracle dependencies to liquidate $6.84M in longs and $2.37M in shorts on Hyperliquid. Market makers face structural barriers, including 10-50 bps minting fees, KYC/custodian requirements, and T+1 to T+5 redemption windows that make tokenized asset inventory effectively illiquid.
Vitalik Buterin argues today's token-holder voting DAOs are inefficient and vulnerable to capture, and says the ecosystem needs different and better DAO designs that actually address the weaknesses of human politics. He points to higher-stakes needs like better oracle architectures for stablecoins and prediction markets, onchain dispute resolution, curated security lists, fast funding for short-term efforts, and long-term maintenance, while calling out privacy and decision fatigue as the two biggest blockers that ZK (for private governance) and selectively used AI (to reduce fatigue without replacing human judgment) could help solve.
The Ethereum Foundation's Developer Acceleration Team announced winners from the recently concluded x402 Hackathon, showcasing projects building infrastructure and tooling on the x402 protocol to advance AI development on Ethereum.
Perpetuals trading volume is now roughly 3x spot DEX volume, with Hyperliquid leading 30-day perp volume and Solana only barely cracking the top 10 at about $31.3B.
Token Terminal data shows stablecoins ($307.7B), tokenized funds ($14.2B), tokenized commodities ($4.3B), and tokenized stocks ($456.5M) have all reached new all-time high market caps.
The White House is reportedly weighing whether to abandon the CLARITY Act after Coinbase pulled support ahead of a Senate Banking markup. The dispute centers on restrictions against paying yield for simply holding stablecoins, a key issue for Coinbase, given estimates that stablecoin-related revenue could exceed $1B in 2025.
Bitcoin slid about 3% in a few hours to roughly $92,474, dragging ETH, XRP, and SOL lower and triggering over $750M in long liquidations as markets reacted to escalating US-EU tariff-war fears tied to a Greenland dispute. Analysts said the geopolitical shock hit a market already on edge from the stalled US crypto market structure bill and weakening crypto-specific risk appetite. Technical breaks and ETF outflows provided additional pressure.
Open source AI founders are tapping into crypto for bootstrapping via BagsApp creator fees and launching memecoins that create a direct economic feedback loop where speculation generates royalties for development. Flagship example Ralph Wiggum (a Claude Code plugin) has gained adoption from Vercel, Cursor, and Claude founders, with the developer endorsing $RALPH on Solana. This trend hints at the potential for appcoins to trend as more end-users become developers thanks to AI coding.
True trustlessness, self-sovereignty, and the “walkaway test” depend less on decentralization metrics and more on protocol simplicity. Excessive complexity forces users to trust experts, weakens long-term resilience, and increases security risk. Ethereum should adopt explicit “simplification” and “garbage collection” mechanisms to reduce code size, minimize cryptographic dependencies, strengthen invariants, and demote complex legacy features to smart contracts so Ethereum can evolve into a durable, century-scale decentralized system.
Most tokenized assets trade in illiquid, fragile markets, creating a self-reinforcing cycle where shallow liquidity discourages participation. The first hidden cost appears in slippage, with tokenized gold showing striking differences versus traditional markets. Despite the promise to bring trillion-dollar TradFi markets onchain, liquidity as a prerequisite for composability has not been realized.
Crypto job postings plummeted 80% YoY in early January, dropping from ~38 jobs/day to ~6.5 jobs/day across major boards. Hiring is concentrated in infrastructure, stablecoins, and payment rails (60%), with growth-stage companies leading demand for senior talent. Solana captured 22% of new developers in 2024 vs Ethereum's 16%. It is the first ecosystem since 2016 to challenge ETH's talent dominance.
Kaito is shutting down Yaps, its permissionless incentivized engagement platform, and launching Kaito Studio as the company pivots away from high-volume airdrop distribution models. Despite experiments with tighter eligibility filters, social and onchain verification, and varied incentive designs, Yaps struggled with persistent spam and quality issues exacerbated by X algorithm changes and the proliferation of low-threshold InfoFi competitors. The decision reflects broader industry trends toward targeted user acquisition rather than global, volume-based reward programs.
$GWEI is the governance token for ETHGas' "Realtime Ethereum" infrastructure. It transforms Ethereum blockspace into a structured, tradable asset enabling instant execution, budgetable costs, and gasless user experiences through blockspace commitments, pre-confirmations, and real-time settlement. The token operates on a vote-escrow model where staking $GWEI for periods ranging from one week to four years grants $veGWEI voting power proportional to lock duration, allowing holders to govern protocol parameters, treasury allocation, smart contract upgrades, and emergency actions with voting influence deliberately weighted toward long-term participants over short-term speculators. ETHGas aims to solve Ethereum's blockspace allocation inefficiencies that haven't evolved alongside application development.