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INVEST BEFORE THE PRICE INCREASES AT MIDNIGHT.

AI AGENTS POSE IMMEDIATE THREAT TO SMART CONTRACT SECURITY

Anthropic tested AI “attack agents” using Claude 4.5 and GPT-5 against real-world smart contracts in a sandbox and found they could autonomously exploit 17 of 34 recent hacks, stealing $4.5M in simulated funds, and 207 of 405 historical targets for $550M. Even more worrying, when pointed at ~2,800 fresh contracts with no known bugs, the agents found two new vulnerabilities that would have enabled them to steal more funds. The vulnerabilities were mostly classic issues, but AI made finding and chaining them cheap and fast.

BOFA GREENLIGHTS WEALTH ADVISERS TO 4% BITCOIN ALLOCATION

Bank of America will allow wealth management advisers to recommend 1-4% crypto allocations starting January, reversing its prior policy that permitted client investment but prohibited adviser recommendations. The announcement came hours after Vanguard reversed its longtime crypto ETF ban, aligning BofA with BlackRock and Morgan Stanley while intensifying pressure on holdouts Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and UBS. CIO Chris Hyzy positioned 1% for conservative risk profiles and 4% for higher volatility tolerance among investors with a strong interest in thematic innovation.

PRIVATE MARKETS ON ETHEREUM L1

Railworld is the first privacy-enabled launchpad on Ethereum Layer 1 that uses Railgun ZK proofs to enable anonymous token deployments from zk-addresses with anti-snipe protections and fair vesting mechanics. Users create private accounts to deposit and shield ETH for trading through Cypher's v4 AMM or launching tokens that seed directly into dynamic fee pools with immediate liquidity and price discovery. The platform, launching in the coming weeks, combines Railgun's zero-knowledge infrastructure with Cypher's custom v4 plugins to deliver permissionless private swaps and token creation. Railworld positions itself as bringing liquid, efficient privacy to Ethereum versus isolated privacy solutions by integrating directly with Cypher's AMM infrastructure.

INTRODUCING FAN360

Backroom, a full-stack internet capital markets launchpad on Base, has launched Fan360, a sports prediction and gaming ecosystem with AI agents where 90% of fees fund buyback and burn with team lockups at 6 months full lock plus 2-year linear vesting. $ROOM stakers receive multipliers based on time and value weight to reduce dilution as Backroom positions itself as Base's gateway for onchain capital formation, combining curation, acceleration, liquidity, and distribution in a closed, aligned loop, contrasting with permissionless ICO/IDO chaos that drowned quality builders in speculation.

FUSAKA UPGRADE DEVELOPER READINESS

Fusaka, Ethereum's big scaling + UX upgrade, goes live on December 3. It introduces PeerDAS and blob-only forks (December 9 and January 7) so rollups can use up to ~8× more data bandwidth, cutting blob costs and speeding confirmations. On mainnet, there's a higher block gas limit (45M → 60M) plus a per-transaction gas cap and code-efficiency tweaks that lower fees while keeping blocks safe. Wallets get native R1/passkey support, enabling Apple/Google-style “tap to sign” flows built directly into Ethereum.

WHY GOLD IS WINNING OVER BITCOIN IN 2025

Gold outperformed Bitcoin by 58% versus a 12% decline since January 2024 spot ETF launches. Analysts attribute the gap to Bitcoin being "too young" for institutional trust. Central banks and sovereign wealth funds prefer gold's established infrastructure and trade utility. Gold's centuries of trust and financial channels versus Bitcoin's absence from international settlement systems created a slower path to reserve asset status than crypto proponents expected.

GLOBAL CRYPTO CARD LANDSCAPE IS GETTING CROWDED

Crypto debit and credit cards are increasing, with dozens of teams now issuing physical and virtual Visa/Mastercard products that let you spend stablecoins and crypto anywhere cards are accepted. Rewards are aggressive, and cards plug directly into wallets, DeFi positions, and on/off-ramp rails. Under the hood, new “card-as-a-service” providers like Rain, Bitnob, Qbit, and Zebec make it easy for any app to launch a branded card, so we're seeing rapid experimentation rather than a few dominant players.

WHAT HAPPENED TO RESTAKING

Restaking tried to let many new networks (“AVSs”) reuse staked ETH for security, but the target market was tiny, slow-moving infra teams, early AVS partners often weren't great fits, and EigenLayer over-engineered slashing while being muzzled by US regulatory risk. Even so, EigenLayer crushed competitors in restaking and data availability, shipped EigenDA as key Ethereum DA infra, helped keep Lido from dominating staking, and proved demand for “verifiable compute.” The next chapter is EigenCloud with EIGEN at the center, tools for verifiable applications (not just AVSs), and a big push into verifiable AI agents using EigenAI, EigenCompute, and EigenDA.

PREDICTION MARKETS ON BASE ARE HEATING UP

Base now has a full stack of onchain prediction apps doing real volume.

ETHER.FI CASH CARD HITS RECORD REVENUE

Ether.fi's credit card product just hit a record $453K in weekly revenue, or about $23.6M annualized.

THE CIRCLE FOUNDATION: BUILDING FINANCIAL RESILIENCE FOR ALL

The Circle Foundation is a philanthropic initiative seeded by its Pledge 1% equity commitment.

STRATEGY'S ACCUMULATION PLAN

Strategy's company structure has flexibility for BTC purchases thanks to long-dated convertible notes with first debt maturity in December and the ability to raise via both at-the-market equity programs and zero/low-coupon convertibles, depending on market conditions.

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CHINA TO INTENSIFY CRACKDOWN ON VIRTUAL CURRENCIES

China's inter-agency meeting reiterated that virtual currencies lack legal fiat status, with all related activities constituting illegal financial operations. Vowing intensified crackdowns on speculative trading, the meeting specifically warned that stablecoins lack proper KYC and AML protections, enabling money laundering, illicit cross-border financing, and fraud, contrasting sharply with the US' favorable stablecoin regulatory environment under the recent GENIUS Act framework. The announcement comes despite China reemerging as the world's third-largest Bitcoin mining hub while Hong Kong operates under a separate autonomous jurisdiction with government-supported crypto initiatives.

KALSHI HIT WITH CLASS-ACTION

Kalshi is facing a nationwide class action lawsuit alleging it operates an illegal sports betting platform by positioning institutional market makers, including Kalshi Trading and Susquehanna, as "the house" with zero fees, enhanced access, and position limit advantages while misleading customers that they're betting peer-to-peer. The complaint claims 90% of September's $2 billion volume came from sports betting despite running ads falsely stating "legal sports betting in all 50 states" and targeting college campuses through KalshiU partnerships with a 15-year-old gaming influencer. Plaintiffs seek treble damages, restitution, and injunctive relief across a nationwide class and 30 state subclasses, including California and Florida, where Kalshi allegedly violates Penal Code 337a, which bans pool selling and bookmaking. The lawsuit argues Kalshi disguises gambling as "sports trading" and "build your combo" parlays while enabling addictive behavior without the safeguards required by regulated sportsbooks.

BASTION NAMED SOLE ISSUANCE PROVIDER FOR SONY BANK STABLECOIN

Bastion will act as the sole issuance provider for Sony Bank's new USD-backed stablecoin initiative, handling token issuance, reserve management, and custody for Sony affiliates. The deal marks Sony Bank's entry into the US stablecoin and digital-asset market, using Bastion's regulated infrastructure to support wallets, on/off ramps, cards, and yield products. Backing from Sony Innovation Fund, Coinbase Ventures, a16z crypto, and others demonstrates that large enterprises increasingly want white-label, compliant stablecoin rails rather than building everything in-house.

SHIFT: SILICON THAT SAYS YES OR NO

Shift is building a validator-free payment system where tamper-resistant secure elements confine private keys inside hardware that tracks balances, prevents double-spends, and signs transactions internally without ever exposing key material, even under physical attack. Remote attestation using factory-provisioned keypairs proves each device is legitimate, unmodified hardware following protocol rules, with one-time addresses generated and consumed atomically alongside cryptographic proofs verified by recipient hardware. Transactions settle device-to-device with the finality of cash exchange but cryptographic guarantees, as secure elements consume UTXOs irreversibly, sign with confined keys, and generate change addresses while attaching attestations that trace to manufacturer root certificates. The architecture eliminates validators, ledgers, and seed phrases by moving trust from consensus to tamper-resistant silicon, enforcing strict state transitions where balance accounting and signing happen as single atomic operations, preventing intermediate or inconsistent states.

BITCOIN AND THE QUANTUM PROBLEM

Quantum computing poses an existential risk to Bitcoin as Shor's algorithm running on 2,000 logical qubits could reverse-engineer private keys from public keys, with 6.7 million BTC vulnerable, including 1.7 million in Satoshi's exposed p2pk addresses and 4.8 million in reused addresses. Evidence suggests CRQCs will arrive by 2035. Threat scenarios range from North Korea monetizing exploits to China weaponizing quantum breaks against US-associated Bitcoin to lawful seizure by American entities protecting the strategic reserve.

SOLIDITY IS GETTING A REAL TYPE SYSTEM

Ethereum's main programming language, Solidity, is being upgraded to look and behave more like modern, safer languages. The goal is to make smart contracts easier to write, reuse, and much harder to break. If Ethereum pairs this with scaling, privacy, and better L2 integration, competitors won't be able to keep up.

MAKING SOLANA COMPOSABLE

Solana's 1,232-byte transaction limit and accounts model make complex multi-hop swaps impossible compared to Ethereum, where 50-hop swaps across 37 tokens work trivially, with Account Lookup Tables providing cumbersome workarounds requiring V0 transactions and prior construction. There are three solutions: validator-side account lookups allowing automatic derivation instead of payload inclusion, top-level return value passing eliminating scratch accounts for instruction composition, and native bundling with instruction-level signatures removing round-trip bottlenecks between parties. Widespread bundling adoption, massive instructions, and core infrastructure's ALT reliance signal the network wants composability as markets mature toward more expressive applications. Proposed changes enable high-frequency off-chain apps using Solana for atomic settlement.

CASH APP + SQUARE CLOSE THE DOOR ON STABLECOIN POS STARTUPS

Cash App and Square are now offering in-app payments with just a 1% processing fee, powered by a pooled stored balance that already sees ~$300B flow through Cash App annually. The combo of low fees, huge user base, and tight merchant integration likely kills the window for crypto-native POS startups to gain serious distribution as Block's network effect and UX moat make it extremely hard to compete.

BEST MONAD FARMS

Monad distributes $65,000 daily to $123 million TVL, yielding 19% average APR versus Plasma's 1.79% APR on $4.8 billion TVL.

ETHEREUM GROWS, BUT ETH DOESN'T

ETH is a poor investment above ~$4k because Ethereum's growth is now happening on L2s, where sequencers like Coinbase capture most fees and MEV.

TOKENIZATION KEEPS CHOOSING ETHEREUM

Amundi, Europe's largest asset manager with €2.2T AUM, quietly launched a tokenized money market fund on Ethereum on November 4 and only announced it weeks later.

PASSKEYS & SECURE ENCLAVE WALLETS ON ETHEREUM

EIP-7951 will add native support for the p-256 signature scheme to Ethereum, the same curve used by Apple, Google, and WebAuthn.

BITCOIN ETFS ARE BLACKROCK'S TOP REVENUE SOURCE

BlackRock's Bitcoin ETFs became the firm's top revenue source despite managing 1,400+ ETFs with $13.4 trillion in total assets. Allocations are nearing $100 billion. IBIT launched in January 2024 and reached $70 billion in assets in a record 341 days, currently sitting at $70.7 billion with net inflows exceeding $52 billion in its first year, while generating an estimated $245 million in annual fees by October. The ETF now holds over 3% of Bitcoin's total supply as BlackRock's own Strategic Income Opportunities Portfolio increased its IBIT stake by 14%. Recent outflows are attributed to expected retail behavior during price drops rather than fundamental weakness.

UK CONFIRMS NEW CRYPTO REPORTING RULES

The UK's 2025 Budget confirms Cryptoasset Reporting Framework implementation from January 1, requiring UK-registered exchanges to collect customer cryptocurrency transactions and tax reference numbers, with HMRC forecasting £315 million ($417.3 million) in additional tax revenue by April 2030. Investors failing to provide details face £300 fines, while exchanges risk £300 per unreported customer, and information collected in 2026 will be reported to HMRC in 2027 to verify capital gains tax compliance. Experts warn compliance costs will be passed to customers as exchanges struggle to collect tax details from wary users, potentially driving some traders toward noncompliant platforms until international alignment creates a crypto equivalent to Common Reporting Standard and FATCA. Separately, HMRC published a summary indicating the government leans toward recognizing DeFi lending and staking as taxable only when gains are realized through fiat conversion, though no final decision or timeline has been set.

VISA EXPANDING STABLECOIN SETTLEMENT ACROSS EMEA

Visa partnered with crypto infrastructure provider Aquanow to expand stablecoin settlement across Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, enabling 365-day settlement for issuers and acquirers using approved stablecoins like USDC. The integration eliminates weekend and holiday delays from traditional banking rails as Visa's stablecoin settlement volume reached a $2.5 billion annualized run rate, with plans to add four stablecoins across four blockchains.

NON-CUSTODIAL USDT VISA CARD LAUNCHING IN EL SALVADOR

Truther will launch a non-custodial USDT Visa card in El Salvador on January 29, enabling real-time spending from self-custody wallets on Polygon without preloading funds, charging 2% currency conversion fees with no IOF tax for Brazilian users as it extends its $40 million daily PIX-connected infrastructure. The card draws funds at the point of purchase rather than requiring top-ups or custodial accounts. Truther plans to migrate to the Liquid network for enhanced privacy while expanding the Swapix API to Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, and Russia, targeting 24/7 QR code-based payment systems. Its wallet currently supports BTC, USDT, and Brazilian real stablecoins. Early 2025 integrations have been planned for tether gold and Argentine peso tokens.

TETHER'S INTEREST RATE TRADE

Tether is running an interest rate trade – buying gold and Bitcoin, anticipating Fed cuts that would crush their interest income. A 30% decline in these positions would wipe out equity and render USDT insolvent. However, its disclosed reserves operate under a "matching philosophy", showing only liability backing. A separate undisclosed equity balance sheet holds mining operations, equity investments, and corporate reserves funded by $10 billion annual profits from $120 billion treasuries at 4% yields. Tether's equity, valued at $50-100 billion, provides a buffer sellable to cover balance sheet gaps. The company operates at significantly higher collateralization than banks' 5-15% fractional reserves, despite lacking lender-of-last-resort protection.

THE STATE OF ETHEREUM: DIGITAL OIL, L2S, TPS, ETFS, DATS

Ethereum still dominates DeFi TVL and is rapidly integrating with TradFi via spot ETFs and ETH treasury companies, but ETH has underperformed BTC as investors debate how much value accrues to the base layer vs L2s. The upcoming Fusaka upgrade aims to massively increase throughput and data availability while making it cheaper to run nodes, reinforcing Ethereum's role as the modular settlement and Data availability (DA) layer for L2s and tokenized assets.

STABLECOIN YIELDS ON AAVE SLIDE BELOW T-BILLS

Stablecoin supply APYs on Aave v3 Ethereum have fallen from ~5% in late summer to just above 3%, with USDC/USDT/DAI topping the pool and newer stables like USDe, RLUSD, and USDS under 1.5%. Yields are slightly better on some L2s, but in general, onchain stable rates now sit below the 3-month US Treasury yield (~3.8%), signaling cooling DeFi borrowing demand.

MONAD VS. “JUST ANOTHER L1” – KEONE RESPONDS TO HAYES

Monad is meaningfully different from other L1s as it has sub-2s finality with ~170 global validators, a from-scratch C++/Rust codebase, and new consensus and execution designs. It aims to prove that high throughput and decentralization are compatible. Furthermore, MON's Coinbase sale was structured to favor broad distribution over whales.

POLYGON'S PAYMENTS ECOSYSTEM REACHES ESCAPE VELOCITY

Payment apps on Polygon processed $1B in volume in November (up ~3x from January), while local-currency stablecoins like XSGD, BRZ, and JPYC have now done $10B+ lifetime onchain.

X HIRING MONEY TECHNICAL LEAD

X is hiring a Technical Lead for its Money division.

SPOT ETFS SEE FIRST POSITIVE INFLOWS SINCE OCTOBER

The Bitcoin and Ether ETFs broke four and three-week streaks of outflows on Thanksgiving week.

ETH BURN AND FUSAKA'S BLOB ECONOMICS

$12B worth of ETH has been burned since EIP-1559 went live.

ETHEREUM LIFTS BLOCK GAS LIMIT TO 60M AHEAD OF FUSAKA

Ethereum validators have collectively raised the L1 block gas limit from 45M to 60M, roughly doubling base-layer transaction capacity versus a year ago. The change was enabled by protocol safeguards (EIP-7623), client optimizations, and testnet evidence that the network can safely handle larger blocks. It lands just days before the Fusaka hard fork, which introduces PeerDAS and further rollup throughput gains.

UPBIT HIT BY $37M SOLANA HOT-WALLET HACK

South Korea's largest exchange, Upbit, detected about 54B KRW (~$37M) in “abnormal withdrawals” of Solana-ecosystem tokens to an unknown external wallet and has halted all deposits and withdrawals on Solana. The exchange says it moved remaining funds to cold storage. It has already frozen ~$8.2M of LAYER. Upbit will fully compensate affected users from its own reserves.

POLYMARKET SECURES CFTC APPROVAL FOR RETURN

Polymarket has received a CFTC Amended Order of Designation, enabling US users to trade through futures commission merchants and traditional brokerages under a full federal regulatory framework. The approval follows Polymarket's 2022 decision to block US access amid regulatory pressure. It reflects growing regulatory acceptance of prediction markets as a mature financial product and positions the platform alongside other federally supervised exchanges with intermediated access rather than direct retail participation. The company previously signaled November relaunch plans.

FROM CHAINS TO NETWORK ECONOMIES: ZKSYNC INTEROP & ZK TOKEN UTILITY

The real crypto opportunity is a shared cryptographic messaging fabric connecting L2s. Today, global finance runs on siloed messaging rails that can't verify each other, creating huge coordination costs. ZKsync Interop + “Prividium” private L2s aim to replace that fragmentation with verifiable cross-chain messages anchored to Ethereum, creating a base for ZK token utility via interop fees.

POST-TGE SCORECARD FOR 2025'S BIG TOKEN LAUNCHES

Across 2025's major TGEs, only a handful of tokens (AVICI, YieldBasis, SAHARA, and LMTS) are still within ~20–60% of their ATHs and count as clear “winners.” Most launches have retraced 70–90%, making them headline flops for anyone who didn't sell early. This thread ranks projects from S to D tier based on drawdown from ATH, time since peak, and liquidity. Post-launch PnL has been brutal for typical buyers.

S&P DOWNGRADES TETHER'S USDT STABILITY

S&P Global Ratings downgraded Tether's USDT stability assessment to 5, the weakest level, warning that bitcoin's 5.6% share of reserves exceeds the 3.9% reserve buffer from Q3 attestations, meaning a material BTC drawdown could leave USDT undercollateralized. Riskier assets, including bitcoin, gold, secured loans, and corporate bonds, climbed to 24% of reserves from 17% a year earlier, with S&P flagging persistent gaps in transparency around custodians, counterparties, and asset composition despite short-term treasuries comprising the majority of holdings. CEO Paolo Ardoino rejected the assessment, claiming Tether is "overcapitalized" and "extremely profitable" while criticizing legacy rating models, as the agency applies similar bitcoin-linked liquidity risk concerns. Strategy received a B-minus speculative-grade rating last month.

FINALITY IS IN THE EYE OF THE BEHODLER

Finality is conditional on beliefs about the future rather than Bayesian certainty accumulation, with social finality emerging from community consensus that radical protocol changes or deep reverts will be rejected. Protocol finality divides into honest threshold finality relying on Byzantine Agreement safety properties, cryptoeconomic finality adding slashing accountability where rational coalitions avoid attacks costing more in stake than rewards, and representative finality using randomly-sampled committees with stronger assumptions about honest majorities and adaptive corruption resistance. Finality strengthens temporally as transactions progress from single-validator proposals to chain depth to committee endorsement to majority confirmation and eventually social immutability, with categorical notions capturing qualitative shifts in protective assumptions despite feedback loops between confidence and user behavior affecting reversion risk.

THE VOLUME MAP OF PREDICTION MARKETS

Polymarket and Kalshi captured 88% of prediction markets' $41.8 billion 2025 volume with $18.7 billion and $18.0 billion respectively. Q3 volumes hit $3 billion, representing 5x growth from 2024, with October crossing $7.4 billion industry-wide as binary and categorical outcomes dominate over sports and scalar formats, with Base and Polygon gaining share for smoother, cheaper trading experiences. Smaller platforms matter for next-wave innovation, including new market formats, liquidity mechanisms, and UX models, despite current volume disparities, comparing the trajectory to early crypto exchanges. PredictionIndex.xyz launched public dashboards tracking total volume, 30-day volume, and 24-hour volume for each platform as the sector accelerates toward potential trillion-dollar annual industry status before the decade's end.

POLYGON PAYMENTS HIT $1B MONTHLY VOLUME

Payment apps on Polygon PoS processed about $1 billion of transfer volume in November, a new all-time high.

NEOBANKS GET “ONE-BUTTON” LENDING VIA PORTOLA

Portola is a company that lets neobanks embed consumer lending with a single button.

VITALIK DONATES TO PRIVATE MESSAGING APPS

Vitalik Buterin donated over $700,000 to two messaging apps – Session and SimpleX – to promote digital privacy as the crypto market aligns around privacy as an important building block.