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AAVE'S NEXT GROWTH WAVE: LENDING AGAINST MORE THAN ERC-20S

Aave's next leg of growth will come from supporting new collateral types beyond ERC-20s.

CME ADDS CARDANO, CHAINLINK, AND STELLAR FUTURES TO DERIVATIVES SUITE

CME Group will list futures (standard and micro contracts) for Cardano, Chainlink, and Stellar starting February 9 to broaden its regulated crypto derivatives offering beyond Bitcoin, Ether, XRP, and Solana. Clients are looking for trusted products to manage price risk, even as overall crypto derivatives volumes cooled into year-end. The move also ties into CME's longer-term push toward “always-on” continuous trading for round-the-clock global markets.

GENERIC LAUNCHES GUSD: A PRIVATE, YIELD-ROUTING META-STABLECOIN

GUSD is the first natively private stablecoin built on Morpho. It is a meta-stablecoin that aggregates dollar assets like USDC, USDT, and USDS, offers opt-in privacy, is non-custodial, and routes onchain yield back to the distribution layer (applications, networks, and end users) rather than to an issuer. GUSD will have risk and deployment support from Steakhouse Financial. Its early partners include LayerZero, Aragon, Status, and Tempo.

INGENICO PARTNERS WITH WALLETCONNECT PAY

Payment terminal giant Ingenico has integrated WalletConnect Pay to enable crypto payments at physical retail locations through its existing POS infrastructure. The partnership allows merchants using Ingenico terminals to accept stablecoin payments without additional hardware or significant integration work. This marks a significant expansion of crypto payment rails into traditional retail, leveraging Ingenico's global network of 40M+ payment terminals.

CELESTIA VISION 2.0: EVERY MARKET ONCHAIN

Celestia's Vision 2.0 pivots the data availability layer's mission toward enabling high-volume financial markets to operate entirely onchain. The roadmap targets blockspace products capable of supporting trading volumes comparable to traditional exchanges, requiring 10-100x improvements in throughput and latency. Celestia aims to become the settlement layer for a new generation of onchain order books and derivatives markets currently constrained by blockchain performance limitations.

THE DECENTRALIZED RENAISSANCE

The original 2014 Web3 vision of permissionless decentralized applications is now achievable due to infrastructure maturation. Fileverse, a decentralized Google Docs alternative, is evidence that dApps have reached usability parity with Web2 as it passes the “walkaway test,” where users can retrieve data even if the company disappears. 2026 will be an inflection point where the technical prerequisites for competing with centralized platforms are finally in place.

WHY OPEN NETWORKS WIN

History's greatest breakthroughs came not from new inventions but from removing friction, and open networks like blockchain represent the next major friction reduction. Permissionless systems lower barriers to participation and enable innovation at the edges without gatekeepers. Crypto's value proposition isn't speculation but fundamentally restructuring how economic coordination happens at scale.

INSIDE THE FIRST AUTONOMOUS AGENT ECONOMY ON SOLANA

t54.ai has launched what it claims is the first fully autonomous agent economy on Solana, where AI agents independently transact, negotiate, and allocate resources using the x402 protocol infrastructure. Drawing lessons from Microsoft Research's Magentic Marketplace and Stanford HAI's agent society experiments, the system enables agents to discover services, execute payments, and form emergent market structures without human intervention. The project explores economic coordination between AI systems using blockchain as the trust and settlement layer.

INTRODUCING $GWEI: ETHGAS GOVERNANCE TOKEN

$GWEI is the governance token for ETHGas' real-time Ethereum gas optimization protocol. It enables holders to vote on fee distribution mechanisms and protocol upgrades. The token captures value from the platform's gas prediction and bundling services. Stakers earn a portion of protocol fees. $GWEI is essential infrastructure for MEV protection and transaction cost optimization.

A YEAR IN BERA - BERACHAIN EOY UPDATE

Berachain's end-of-year retrospective highlights its mainnet launch, novel Proof of Liquidity consensus mechanism adoption, and ecosystem growth across DeFi protocols built on the chain.

BITMINE BETS $200M ON MRBEAST'S BEAST INDUSTRIES

ETHEREUM HITS NEW ALL-TIME HIGH IN DAILY TRANSACTIONS

Ethereum processed a record 2,595,176 transactions in a single day, marking a new all-time high and signaling accelerating onchain demand.

USDC SUPPLY GROWTH TILTS TOWARD POLYGON

Polygon recorded the largest percentage increase in USDC supply since late November, outpacing other major chains.

Build on Bridge

BITGO FILES FOR $2B IPO

Crypto custody provider BitGo filed for a US IPO seeking to raise up to $201 million at a $1.96 billion valuation, offering 11.8 million shares priced at $15-17 on the NYSE under ticker “BTGO” with Goldman Sachs and Citigroup as lead underwriters. The firm holds approximately $104 billion in assets under custody across 1,550+ digital assets for institutional clients. The IPO comes shortly after BitGo received conditional OCC approval in December to operate as a federally chartered national trust bank, representing one of the first major public offerings from a pure-play crypto custody provider.

COINBASE WITHDRAWS SUPPORT FOR SENATE CRYPTO LEGISLATION

Coinbase said it cannot support the Senate market-structure bill after the release of a more than 270-page text that raised unresolved issues around tokenized equities, DeFi treatment, provisions that would “kill rewards on stablecoins,” and the role of the SEC. Timing pressures, 70+ filed amendments, new illicit-finance language, and uncertainty that concerns would be addressed led Coinbase to withdraw backing, and the Senate Banking Committee postponed the scheduled markup while negotiators work to fix the problems.

BVNK TO DELIVER STABLECOIN INFRASTRUCTURE FOR VISA DIRECT PILOT PROGRAMS

BVNK will provide stablecoin infrastructure for Visa Direct pilot programs, enabling select business customers to pre-fund payouts in stablecoins and to pay recipients in stablecoins (with validators receiving their preferred stablecoin via a backend flow). This demonstrates a deeper Visa and BVNK integration after Visa Ventures' 2025 investment and signals a push to embed tokenized dollars into high-volume money-movement rails for faster, 24/7 global payments.

NOAH AND NALA LAUNCH INSTANT STABLECOIN SETTLEMENT NETWORK

Noah and NALA partnered to create a cross-border settlement network that converts global USD collections into stablecoins and routes real-time local-currency payouts via Rafiki, enabling instant USD settlement, 24/7 treasury, and rapid local distribution for businesses across Africa and Asia. This partnership targets payroll, merchant payouts, and treasury use cases while bypassing slow, fee-heavy legacy rails.

VITALIK BUTERIN PROPOSES QUANTUM-SAFE ETHEREUM FRAMEWORK

Vitalik Buterin has published a framework that outlines seven protocol requirements for Ethereum to achieve “ossification” - the ability to function independently without ongoing developer intervention. The first priority is implementing century-scale quantum resistance to prevent future quantum computing advances from compromising user funds and network consensus. Additional requirements include scaling to thousands of TPS through ZK-EVM validation and PeerDAS, implementing statelessness and state expiry, moving beyond ECDSA to fully abstracted accounts, and establishing censorship-resistant block-building mechanisms. Buterin proposed a staged rollout that completes at least one requirement per year.

ZAMA: BUILDING HTTPS FOR BLOCKCHAINS

Crypto's biggest barrier to mainstream adoption is that everything onchain is public by default - wallet balances, transaction history, DeFi positions, and payroll are all visible to anyone. While early crypto users valued this transparency, it's wildly unsafe for normal people, businesses, banks, and governments. Zama is building what it calls “HTTPS for blockchains” using Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) to enable confidential smart contracts, aiming to upgrade crypto from “everything is public” to “encrypted by default” - potentially the most important infrastructure shift since smart contracts.

2 NOTES FOR CRYPTO BUILDERS IN 2026

Excessive pivoting to trading platforms creates overcrowded markets and sacrifices long-term defensibility. Founders should prioritize genuine product development over speculation-driven token dynamics. Imminent crypto market structure regulation will eliminate industry distortions caused by legal uncertainty - such as avoiding transparency and designing economically valueless tokens - by replacing “enforcement roulette” with clear standards.

CHAOS LABS: AI AS OPERATIONAL INFRA FOR DEFI

AI is a foundational operational infrastructure that addresses DeFi's “attention tax” – the mounting cognitive burden of synthesizing fragmented data across 100+ chains and dozens of disjointed sources that creates asymmetric advantages for well-resourced institutions. General-purpose AI models fail crypto-specific analysis due to a lack of domain training, creating an opportunity for specialized infrastructure that operationalizes sophisticated risk assessment. Chaos AI, trained on four years of proprietary crypto data, democratizes institutional-grade risk intelligence by converting raw blockchain data into actionable analysis.

POLYGON LABS BOLSTERS STABLECOIN PAYMENTS PUSH

Polygon Labs spent $250 million to acquire two regulated payments companies as it intends to enter the US market and compete with Tempo/Stripe in the onchain payments space.

21SHARES LISTS ETP COMBINING BITCOIN AND GOLD ON LONDON EXCHANGE

This ETP is the first to combine a digital asset and a traditional asset for retail investors.

BANK OF AMERICA CEO WARNS STABLECOIN YIELD COULD DRAIN BANK DEPOSITS

Allowing stablecoins to pay interest would pull deposits out of the banking system, reduce banks' lending capacity, and force them to rely on more expensive wholesale funding, ultimately raising borrowing costs.

ETH SUPPLY STILL GROWING SLOWER THAN BTC POST-MERGE

Ethereum's net supply growth remains below Bitcoin's even with low gas fees around 0.1 gwei, reinforcing ETH's post-merge issuance advantage.

NIGHT IS NOW LISTED ON MAJOR EXCHANGES. LEARN MORE

SENATE UNVEILS UPDATED MARKET STRUCTURE BILL

A bipartisan market structure manager's amendment from Senate Banking Chair Tim Scott would ban paying interest or yield for holding payment stablecoins while allowing activity-based incentives tied to transacting, staking, liquidity provision, or posting collateral. The bill includes a Lummis-Wyden developer liability shield, drew threats from firms like Coinbase over tougher restrictions, omits a proposed ethics clause related to the Trump family's crypto ventures, and is heading to a committee markup as senators work to reconcile competing committee bills.

21SHARES LISTS BITCOIN-GOLD ETP ON LSE

21Shares' BOLD is a physically backed Bitcoin-plus-gold ETP on the London Stock Exchange that rebalances monthly by inverse historical volatility and charges a 0.65% annual fee. The ETP will give UK retail investors regulated exposure to bitcoin's growth and gold's stability now that the FCA has lifted its four-year retail ban and opened the market to wider crypto ETP access.

BNY MELLON'S TOKENIZED CASH: CUSTODIAL PATH TO TOKENIZED COLLATERAL

BNY Mellon is launching tokenized cash focused on collateral, margin, and intraday liquidity (not retail), enabling tokenized cash as collateral, real-time intraday settlement and reconciliation, and 24/7 availability with bank-deposit legal protections. This is a custodian-led route (joined by JPM and others and DTCC+Canton integrations) that could see capital markets in the US first adopt a tokenized collateral stack on semi-public networks like Canton before broader public-chain scaling.

ZKSYNC 2026 ROADMAP: NO SHORTCUTS

ZKsync's 2026 roadmap prioritizes institutional adoption through three core products: Prividium (privacy platform for regulated entities), ZK Stack (evolving into a unified appchain toolkit with cross-chain liquidity), and Airbender (universal zkVM proving standard). It is targeting the deployment of production systems with multiple regulated financial institutions serving “tens of millions rather than thousands” of users. Milestones include ZKsync Lite deprecation throughout 2026 and ZK token utility expansion in Q2 2026, transitioning from governance-only to economic utility via staking and burns.

3 WAYS CRYPTO GOES BEYOND CRYPTO IN 2026

a16z crypto outlines three ways cryptographic primitives will expand beyond traditional blockchain applications in 2026. Zero-knowledge proof technology is reaching a critical performance threshold, with zkVM provers dropping from 1,000,000X to approximately 10,000X overhead, enabling single GPUs to generate proofs of CPU execution in real-time by year-end and potentially unlocking verifiable cloud computing at scale. Prediction markets are expected to evolve through integration with LLM-based oracles for truth determination and AI agent traders that surface novel market signals. Crypto-native mechanisms like tokenized commitments and onchain verification histories are positioned to create new credibility.

VITALIK BUTERIN WARNS DECENTRALIZED STABLECOINS STILL HAVE DEEP FLAWS

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has publicly identified three fundamental technical challenges that remain unsolved in decentralized stablecoin design: price benchmarking mechanisms, oracle security vulnerabilities, and inadequate staking incentive models. Buterin characterized these as the “hardest problems” facing decentralized stablecoin infrastructure, suggesting they represent significant barriers to achieving the reliability required for mainstream adoption.

DISPELLING STABLECOIN BANKING MYTHS AS CONGRESS DEBATES REWARDS

Fears around stablecoins harming banks and credit are overstated. Stablecoin growth can increase bank deposits, lower borrowing costs, and benefit savers without meaningfully constraining lending. Competition from reward-bearing stablecoins would primarily pressure bank profitability rather than credit availability. Non-bank lenders already dominate US credit, meaning that restricting stablecoin rewards would unfairly favor bank shareholders over consumers as lawmakers revisit market structure legislation.

YC-BACKED KONTIGO VIOLATES VENEZUELA SANCTIONS

Y Combinator-backed fintech Kontigo allegedly violated US Venezuela sanctions by facilitating USDC-to-bolivar conversions through sanctioned banks, including Banco de Venezuela, exploiting JPMorgan Chase and Stripe/Bridge infrastructure to provide US banking rails for Venezuelan users. Following the allegations, JPMorgan froze Kontigo's accounts, Bridge began offboarding the company, and Binance blocked Kontigo-linked wallet transactions. There are significant compliance risks for stablecoin infrastructure providers. This case demonstrates how sanctioned jurisdictions can exploit legitimate US payment rails through intermediary fintech companies.

NON-USD STABLECOINS AND EQUITY/RWA PERPS

Builders should prioritize non-USD stablecoins to unlock on-chain FX liquidity and build equity and real-world-asset perpetuals, which are superior to options and futures and will become the most traded derivatives in tradfi.

GRAYSCALE ADDS 27 ASSETS TO Q1 2026 CONSIDERATION LIST

Grayscale added 27 digital assets to its Q1 2026 consideration list, with seven completely new to its sector framework.

CRYPTO YOUTUBE VIEWERSHIP HITS LOWEST SINCE JANUARY 2021

Viewership of cryptocurrency-related content on YouTube has dropped to its lowest level since January 2021, signaling continued retail disengagement despite recent price action.

ERIC ADAMS NYC TOKEN CRASHES 60% AMID LIQUIDITY CONCERNS

Former NYC Mayor Eric Adams launched NYC Token to purportedly fund social causes.

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.