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TEMPO LAUNCHES PUBLIC TESTNET

Tempo, the Stripe and Paradigm-backed payments chain, has launched a testnet.

STRATEGY BUYS $963 MILLION MORE BITCOIN

Strategy purchased an additional 10,624 BTC for approximately $962.7 million at an average price of $90,615 per bitcoin between December 1 and 7, bringing its total holdings to 660,624 BTC, worth around $60 billion and representing over 3% of Bitcoin's total 21 million supply with approximately $10.6 billion in unrealized gains. The acquisition, funded through at-the-market sales of MSTR shares ($928.1m) and STRD perpetual preferred stock ($34.9m), is part of Strategy's "42/42" plan targeting $84 billion in capital raises through 2027, while the company also established a $1.44 billion USD Reserve to cover dividend payments and debt obligations for approximately 18 months. Despite the continued accumulation, Strategy's stock has declined 61% from summer peaks and trades at a market cap-to-net asset value ratio of 0.86, prompting CoinShares to warn that the digital asset treasury model is being re-evaluated as "the bubble deflates" amid concerns about shareholder dilution and token-per-share growth strategies.

CFTC LAUNCHES DIGITAL ASSETS PILOT

CFTC Acting Chair Caroline Pham launched a pilot program allowing Bitcoin, Ether, and USDC as collateral in US derivatives markets for approved futures commission merchants with strict weekly disclosure requirements for the first three months and enhanced custody oversight. The agency withdrew 2020 guidance that blocked crypto collateral and issued a no-action letter permitting FCMs to hold digital assets in segregated customer accounts. Coinbase Chief Legal Officer Paul Grewal called it "precisely what the Administration and Congress intended the GENIUS Act to enable." The program extends to tokenized real-world assets like US Treasuries that meet enforceability, custody, and valuation standards under technology-neutral rules.

TETHER EXPANDING TO NINE NEW CHAINS

Tether's USDT received regulatory recognition as an accepted fiat-referenced token across nine blockchains in Abu Dhabi Global Market, including Aptos, Celo, Cosmos, Kaia, Near, Polkadot, Tezos, TON, and TRON, adding to earlier approvals for Ethereum, Solana, and Avalanche. ADGM-licensed institutions can now conduct regulated activities involving USDT across nearly all networks where the token circulates, forming a multi-chain foundation enhancing liquidity and interoperability for trading, settlement, and decentralized applications. The announcement coincides with Binance securing full ADGM authorization to operate Binance.com starting January 5, through three separately licensed entities mirroring traditional financial-market architecture for exchange, clearinghouse, and broker-dealer functions.

VITALIK BUTERIN PUSHES FOR TRUSTLESS GAS FUTURES MARKET

Vitalik Buterin has proposed a trustless onchain gas futures market that allows users to prepay for specific gas quantities in defined time intervals, but Flashbots strategist Hasu argued the market lacks a natural short side as many want to hedge gas exposure, but no one is long gas at scale. Buterin suggested the protocol itself could auction basefee claiming rights to move from long to neutral while users shift from short to neutral, though Gnosis co-founder Martin Koppelmann countered that Ethereum's burn mechanism eliminates validators as natural sellers who would otherwise hedge without significant risk premiums.

SOLANA AND BASE “TWIN CONTRACT” BRIDGE

The new Solana, Base bridge actually works. Tokens move by a standard lock/mint model on the origin chain, while native tokens are locked (or foreign tokens burned). On the destination chain, native tokens are unlocked (or foreign tokens minted). Any SPL token can get its own deterministic ERC-20 on Base via a factory contract, and Base tokens can likewise be deployed on Solana.

THE THIRD PILLAR OF DIGITAL GOLD

Privacy represents the third pillar of digital gold alongside Bitcoin's sovereignty and Ethereum's programmability, and Zcash is positioned as the underpriced rallying point for private money that could activate self-reinforcing incentive mechanisms virally spreading cypherpunk ideals. ZEC pioneers created foundational ZK innovations like Sonic and Halo that enabled Ethereum's first rollup prototype, Ignis, built on Zcash's Bellman code seven years ago. Naval's thesis frames Bitcoin as "insurance against fiat" and ZCash as "insurance against Bitcoin."

A WORLD OF 1,000 STABLECOIN NEOBANKS

The current explosion of “stablecoin neobanks” isn't happening because we suddenly got brilliant product ideas, but because infrastructure has gotten good enough that anyone can stitch together a bank-like app. These apps lean on a tiny set of centralized providers and optimize for perks instead of reliability. When any of those infra providers fail, the neobank breaks, trust evaporates, and users retreat back to CEXs and TradFi. We don't need 1,000 flashy stablecoin banks that “usually” work, we need one built on rock-solid, redundant infra that always works.

TOKENIZED DEPOSITS VS STABLECOINS

The Tokenized deposits vs. stablecoins debate is a false fight as banks create credit, stablecoins move money, and the future system needs both. Tokenized deposits keep corporate funds inside banks so they can borrow cheaply against them, while stablecoins are fully reserved, cash-like dollars that can move permissionlessly, 24/7, across borders. The real unlock is on-chain interoperability. Instant swaps between bank deposits and stablecoins so a company can tap cheap bank credit and pay anyone globally in seconds. In this framing, deposits = regulated credit rails, and stablecoins = universal settlement rails.

BITMINE PUSHES TOWARD 5% OF ETH SUPPLY

BitMine now holds 3.86M ETH (~3.2% of total supply) plus ~$1B cash.

BINANCE POST CONFIRMS INSIDER TRADING SCANDAL, SENDS MEMECOIN HIGHER

Binance says an employee abused access to official social media accounts to shill a just-launched meme coin seconds after it was created on BNB Chain.

MESSARI & THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF CRYPTO DATA

Messari started in 2018 to make crypto projects more transparent through standardized reporting and analytics.

YIELD BASIS ACTIVATES FEE SHARING

Yield Basis activated its fee switch and distributed 17 Bitcoin worth $1.6 million to tokenholders over four weeks after accumulating $130 million in deposits since September.

CANADA'S CRYPTO TAX CRACKDOWN

Canada's tax agency (CRA) has pulled in over $100M CAD (~$72M) from crypto audits in the last three years, but hasn't brought a criminal case to court since 2020. Although it estimates ~40% of users on platforms that it sees are non-compliant or high-risk, the CRA admits it still can't reliably identify most crypto users. As part of only its second-ever crypto data dragnet, the CRA forced Dapper Labs to hand over info on 2,500 users, following an earlier order against Coinsquare. The gap between money collected and cases prosecuted stems from cross-border complexity, scarce evidence, and slow international cooperation, even as Canada gears up a new financial-crimes agency and continues big AML fines via FINTRAC.

POLAND LEFT AS MICA OUTLIER IN THE EU

Poland's parliament failed to override the president's veto of its MiCA-alignment bill, leaving the country as the only EU member without a domestic MiCA framework. Germany, Malta, the Netherlands, and Lithuania are already issuing MiCA licenses. However, Poland's crypto market is booming anyway. It ranks 8th in Europe by on-chain value, with >50% YoY volume growth and ~7.9M people using crypto. Meanwhile, Italy is warning firms they must be fully MiCA-compliant or shut down by December 30, and Brussels is exploring a future model where a single EU-level supervisor regulates exchanges across the bloc, which could eventually reduce the impact of national holdouts like Poland.

METAMASK INTEGRATES POLYMARKET

MetaMask has integrated Polymarket into its mobile app, enabling one-tap funding with any token on any EVM chain and MetaMask Rewards points toward a potential MASK airdrop as Consensys reportedly plans an IPO. The integration provides a new access point for Polymarket, which recently secured CFTC approval to re-enter the US and is courting a $15 billion valuation after receiving $2 billion in strategic funding from NYSE parent ICE at a $9 billion valuation.

KRAKEN LAUNCHES HIGH-TOUCH VIP PROGRAM

Kraken launched an invitation-only VIP program that requires $10 million average balances or $80 million annual trading volume, pairing ultra-high-net-worth clients with dedicated relationship managers that provide 24/7 support, subject-matter expert access, and exclusive Formula 1, football, and cultural experiences ahead of its early 2026 US IPO. The high-touch service competes with Binance's recent "prestige" offering for clients up to $10 million net worth as exchanges fill the wealth management gap for family offices and sophisticated traders.

BITCOIN FACES JAPAN RATE HIKE: DEBUNKING THE YEN CARRY TRADE

Fears of a yen carry trade unwind from the Bank of Japan's expected 0.75% rate hike are overblown as the move is already priced into Japanese government bond yields near multi-decade highs, and speculators hold net long yen positions, limiting panic buying potential, contrasting with August 2024's bearish positioning that triggered market chaos. The yield differential between Japan's 0.75% and the US' 3.75% remains wide enough to favor American assets and discourage mass carry trade unwinding, with BOJ staying the most dovish major central bank. The real risk lies in Japanese tightening sustaining elevated US Treasury yields that counter Fed rate cuts, dampening global risk appetite by raising borrowing costs, rather than a sudden yen surge, while Trump's fiscal expansion push could stoke debt fears, lifting bond yields further.

MARKET ECHOES EARLY 2022 AS ONCHAIN STRESS MOUNTS

NYT'S “BANK DEPOSIT VS STABLECOIN WALLET” GRAPHIC BACKLASH

A New York Times infographic contrasts bank deposits (insured, interest-bearing, with legal rights) against stablecoin balances (uninsured, issuer keeps yield, weaker legal claims). However, this is a stacked comparison as banks historically share very little of the yield they earn, many countries have weak or no deposit insurance, and large depositors are just unsecured creditors of leveraged banks. In crypto, users can move stablecoins into DeFi or tokenized T-bill products to capture much higher yields directly, and self-custody avoids many of the freezes and capital controls that can hit bank accounts.

CRYPTO IS GOING MAINSTREAM

Crypto is quietly integrating as a secure communication layer between applications rather than through dominant L1s like Ethereum or Solana. Stablecoins already process $9 trillion adjusted annual volume, rivaling Visa and PayPal by representing fiat balances on interoperable blockchain transport. Apps like PayPal and LINE Pay are operating as independent L2s posting ordered transactions to L1s using erasure coding, where each validator handles constant data loads regardless of scale. Monad excitement reflects outdated mental models, as fast finality became table stakes and developer lock-in to monolithic VMs contradicts a decade of experience showing easy EVM portability, while unified liquidity emerges from universal base layers enabling secure communication across chains rather than single blockchains attempting everything.

ETHEREUM ‘KILLER' VS ETHEREUM L2 REALITY

From 2019 to 2024, Solana marketed itself as the scalable, monolithic alternative to “band-aid” L2s, but by 2024 to 2025, Base was leading L2s in TVL growth, daily active users, and meme/creator activity, even overtaking Solana in new token launches and associated DEX volume in August.

ETHEREUM FEES & STABLECOIN LIQUIDITY

Median transaction fees on Ethereum are at all-time lows, even as dollar stablecoin supply on Ethereum hits all-time highs.

ZKSYNC LITE DEPRECATION IN 2026

ZKsync is planning to shut down ZKsync Lite (its original 2020-era ZK rollup) sometime in 2026, calling it a completed “proof-of-concept” that paved the way for newer products like ZKsync Era, ZK Stack chains, and Prividiums.

RAINBOW'S UNIQUE TOKEN MODEL

Rainbow is giving 20% of Rainbow Company's equity to the Rainbow Foundation so that RNBW token holders and employees can be better aligned.

CRYPTO MARKETS HOLD GAINS AS BITCOIN TRADES ABOVE $92K

Bitcoin stabilized above $92,000 as Ethereum led top-20 gains at 3.4%. $732 billion in new capital was added this cycle. 1-year realized volatility nearly halved, suggesting a "calmer, larger and more institutional" environment. Over 25% of BTC supply remains underwater as spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded $14.9 million outflows, breaking a five-day streak. Liquidations totaled $282 million, with shorts accounting for $201 million as traders position ahead of the Fed's expected December 10 rate cut and digest jobless claims falling to 191,000.

MONEYGRAM TEAMS UP WITH FIREBLOCKS TO EXPAND STABLECOIN PAYMENTS

MoneyGram partnered with Fireblocks to power stablecoin payments and cross-border settlements across its 200+ country network, reducing pre-funding requirements and enabling real-time treasury operations through multi-blockchain stablecoin transfers. The integration allows near-instant digital wallet arrivals for recipients using USDC while MoneyGram reconciles payments faster on the backend, reducing friction from local banking systems and capital requirements. Fireblocks, which has secured over $5 trillion in annual digital asset transfers, will act as the programmable layer routing value across chains and jurisdictions.

ETHVAL V0.4.3: TRACKING FUSAKA'S SUPPLY EXPERIMENT

ETHval just shipped a “Supply Dynamics” dashboard to watch what Fusaka does to ETH inflation/deflation in real time. Fusaka boosts Ethereum's gas limit from 36M to 60M and massively expands blob capacity, so fees per transaction should fall at first. It is still debated whether cheaper blockspace makes ETH inflationary (because burn drops), or whether it pulls in so much extra activity that total burn still beats issuance, and ETH stays scarce. ETHval now surfaces gas utilization, daily burn/issuance, net supply, base fee, blob activity, and TVL so you can see which way the experiment goes.

BASE LAUNCHES BRIDGE TO SOLANA

Base launched a bridge to Solana, powered by Chainlink's Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol, enabling native SPL token support in Base apps and bidirectional asset transfers verified by Coinbase and Chainlink node operators. The integration advances Base's goal to serve as a hub for the "everything economy" where users can trade and use assets across chains regardless of their starting network.

TETHER IN 2025: A CAPITAL ANALYSIS

Tether is like an unregulated bank rather than a simple money transmitter. Depending mostly on how harshly you treat BTC, Tether's total capital ratio ranges from ~10.9% (OK vs minimal regulatory standards) down to ~3.9% (bad vs market norms). Group-level profits and equity look big, but most sit outside the actual reserve entity and aren't legally committed to back USDT redemptions, so they can't be counted as true regulatory capital.

WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENS WHEN YOU SUBMIT A TRANSACTION

Ethereum transaction processing moved from validators building their own blocks to specialized block builders dominating the process through MEV-Boost relays that auction optimally-ordered blocks to validators selecting the most profitable bids. Transactions propagate through decentralized mempools where each node maintains local versions and compete on fees rather than arrival time, with wallets signing and broadcasting via RPC nodes like Alchemy before builders bundle transactions to capture MEV opportunities. Confirmation arrives after one 12-second slot when the majority attests the block, while finalization requires 12.8 minutes, providing cryptographic permanence that requires one-third of staked ETH to reverse.

PEERDAS: HOW FUSAKA MAKES L2S CHEAPER

Fusaka's main feature, PeerDAS, changes how Ethereum stores blob data. Instead of every node keeping full copies of each blob, nodes only store a small slice of every blob while still being able to verify that the full data exists. That means the network can safely handle many more blobs per block, which lowers data-availability costs for rollups. More blobs per block means cheaper L2 data and cheaper L2 transactions for users.

CAN L1S COMPETE WITH BTC AS MONEY?

Most of crypto's value is really a bet on “cryptomoney”, BTC plus L1 tokens that the market hopes can act like money one day. When you strip out TRON/Hyperliquid, L1 revenues have fallen, while their price-to-sales multiples have exploded (40x to 500x+), meaning valuations are being driven far more by monetary premium than by cash flows. Against that standard, almost all major L1s have underperformed BTC since late 2022. Even Solana, whose fundamentals went from 20 to 30x, only managed an 87% outperformance (at one point) versus BTC. BTC's claim as cryptomoney is strengthening while the “maybe we'll be money later” story for most L1s is quietly breaking.

ARBITRUM'S BRIEF POST-FUSAKA FEE SPIKE SHOWS WHY CLIENTS MATTER

Right after Ethereum's Fusaka upgrade, median fees on Arbitrum One briefly spiked to about $0.99 before dropping back to the usual ~$0.005.

FUSAKA BLOB FEES & ETH BURN

Fusaka is now live, and EIP-7918 changes how “blob” data fees work on Ethereum.

EF PROTOCOL TEAM'S PRIORITIES

The Ethereum Foundation protocol team shipped production-ready Open Intents Framework, EIL trustless crosschain infrastructure, interoperable chain-specific addresses, and Fast Confirmation Rule, reducing confirmation times to one slot while targeting sub-10-second economic finality and optimistic rollup withdrawal windows shortened from seven days to 1-2 days, then one hour.

BINANCE JUNIOR

Binance has released a new account type for kids, allowing parents to set up specific permissions and monitoring while giving their children access to the platform's features.

FUSAKA & ETHEREUM'S NEW UPGRADE CADENCE

Fusaka, Ethereum's 17th major upgrade, just went live, marking the start of a planned twice-a-year hard-fork schedule. The main change is PeerDAS, plus two “blob parameter only” follow-ups (into January), which together can boost blob capacity by up to 8x, making rollups cheaper and more scalable. Fusaka also adds a blob fee floor, higher and safer gas limits, and native secp256r1/passkey support, while quietly laying groundwork for future ZK and quantum-resilience improvements.

UK RECOGNIZES CRYPTO AS NEW ASSET CLASS

The UK's Property Act 2025 has received Royal Assent from King Charles III, establishing crypto as a third property category distinct from physical objects and contractual rights after passing both houses without amendment. The Law Commission recommended the reform in 2023 to provide clearer legal pathways for proving ownership, recovering stolen assets, and handling digital holdings in insolvency or estate cases beyond existing case-by-case court judgments. It is potentially the biggest change in English property law since the Middle Ages. The UK aims to match US stablecoin regulation speed with new rules operational on comparable timelines.

PEERDAS MEANS REAL SHARDING FINALLY LIVE ON ETHEREUM

Fusaka's PeerDAS is sharding. Ethereum now reaches consensus on blocks without any single node having to see all the data, using client-side sampling instead of validator voting. That means L2s can scale to far more data and transactions while keeping Ethereum's security guarantees, and this is even robust to 51% attacks. The L1, however, still doesn't benefit fully without mature zkEVMs, block building is still centralized in builders, and there's no sharded mempool yet. Over the next two years, the plan is to scale up PeerDAS for L2s, then point it inward to increase L1 gas capacity once zkEVMs are ready.

TAIWAN'S FIRST REGULATED STABLECOIN DEBUTING NEXT YEAR

Taiwan's Financial Supervisory Commission confirmed the island's first regulated stablecoin could launch late 2026 after the Virtual Assets Service Act cleared cabinet reviews with stablecoin-specific regulations following within six months, though the critical decision between USD or Taiwan dollar backing remains unresolved. A USD-pegged token bypasses strict currency export controls, keeping the Taiwan dollar onshore, while a TWD stablecoin enabling cross-border settlement would directly challenge decades of central bank policy preventing unofficial offshore pricing. Financial institutions will lead initial issuance under rules requiring full reserve backing, strict asset segregation, and domestic custody requirements.

IN DEFENSE OF EXPONIENTALS

New blockchain launches like Monad face unprecedented hate instead of the historical indifference or enthusiasm, with critics applying P/E ratios and revenue multiples that represent abandoning exponential thinking for linear growth assumptions, capping crypto at 30 million DAUs and under 1% of M2. Amazon took 22 years to turn profitable after 10 years of stock chop, while critics called it a VC-subsidized charity, yet Ethereum is only 10 years old as crypto's center of gravity shifted from Silicon Valley's exponential mindset to Wall Street's linear regime focused on metrics like Solana's REV. Crypto transforms financial assets into open file formats, making everything 24/7, global, and interconnected, positioning blockchains to gobble up all finance with adoption, rendering current valuations cheap if you believe the exponential rather than applying traditional valuation frameworks to an industry still in its growth phase.

WELCOME TO POST-CT

Crypto Twitter (CT) as a coordination mechanism is failing as the monoculture era ends. CT once compressed narrative discovery, trust routing, and reflexive allocation into one interface that synchronized ecosystems around dominant metas, producing visible winners at scale. The regime degraded as playbooks industrialized, closing inefficiency windows faster, extraction layers harvested median participants as exit liquidity, and attention fragmented across niches rather than converging on shared focal points that generated common knowledge. Post-CT means CT shifts from upstream engine determining flows to downstream interface layer broadcasting reputational signals while actual allocation occurs inside higher-trust subgraphs like operator circles, sector communities, and private institutional rooms.

A MIS-PRICING OF "OWNERSHIP" COINS

Ownership coins with futarchy-controlled DAOs offer robust treasury claims, creating asymmetric opportunities as tokens trading below treasury value provide liquidation floors demonstrated by MTN Capital's successful dissolution, while those with treasury representing the majority of market cap should be valued on discounted enterprise value. SOLO appears most mispriced with $13 million treasury against $15 million market cap, implying $2 million enterprise value versus an estimated $10-20 million pre-money valuation for a post-product stablecoin team, offering 2-4x upside with limited downside. Projects like LOYAL and PAYS trading below treasury represent free call options where worst-case liquidation generates profit while maintaining team execution upside, contrasting traditional startup equity's illiquidity and long horizons. The framework applies when tokens meet three criteria: high liquidity, treasury exceeding 75% of valuation, and short liquidation timelines with robust asset rights, fundamentally changing risk-reward calculations as downside floors compress while preserving asymmetric upside, unlike governance tokens with zero liquidation value.

BLACKROCK AND COINBASE CEO CHAT

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong declared 2025 the year crypto regulation became real, citing the GENIUS Act and bipartisan House market structure bill advancing to the Senate, while defending Fairshake's $78 million election spending as transparent advocacy for 52 million American crypto users. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink evolved from calling Bitcoin "money laundering" to viewing it as an "asset of fear" held against deficits and currency debasement after thousands of client conversations influenced his thinking. Armstrong dismissed bank anxiety over stablecoin deposit flight as regulatory capture protecting profit margins and predicted banks will embrace paying interest on stablecoins within two years as the best institutions lean into the opportunity per the Innovator's Dilemma.

POLYAAVE: YIELD ON POLYMARKET OUTCOME TOKENS

PolyAave is a vault that lets Polymarket traders earn Aave yield on their “Yes/No” outcome tokens.

ETHEREUM GAS ATH ON FUSAKA DAY

Ethereum just hit a new all-time high in daily gas usage, topping 200 billion gas on the same day the Fusaka upgrade went live.

WHERE ARE WE IN THE CRYPTO ADOPTION CURVE?

There's a 75% chance the industry is about to finish crossing the gap from early adopters to “early majority,” which would kill the simple 4-year boom-bust cycle and make crypto trade more like a normal macro asset class.

FRANKLIN TEMPLETON LAUNCHES SOLANA ETF

Franklin Templeton has launched the Franklin Solana ETF (ticker SOEZ) on NYSE Arca, adding Solana to its lineup of crypto products alongside BTC, ETH, XRP, and a broader crypto index.