As we close out the books on 2025, let’s be real: this year has been a masterclass in CUD—”Chaos, Uncertainty, and Delusion”. Living through the Trump era of crypto is like riding a rollercoaster in the dark. We've had more pro-crypto announcements than we can count, yet every gain felt like it was being siphoned off by the next extraction scheme.
We started the year redlining the engine, only for the Tariff Terror to slam on the brakes. Then came the 10/10 liquidation event that left the market with a black eye we’re still nursing. Just look at the 17th: Bitcoin pulled a $3,300 pump to incinerate $106 million in shorts, only to pivot 30 minutes later and dump $3,400 to wipe out $52 million in longs. We are being controlled, plain and simple.
We’re currently trapped in a cage of our own making. While the Fed is readying the QE firehose to drown the banks in cash, the real question is: Is crypto becoming boring now?
The spotlight is shifting, and it’s shining directly on AI. As we head into 2026, the market is bracing for "The Great Attention Theft." Huge potential IPOs are looming:
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SpaceX (The $1.5 Trillion orbital AI play)
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Anthropic & OpenAI
These aren't just listings; they are liquidity vacuums. They will suck the life and capital out of crypto faster than a perp liquidation. People are calling for $200k BTC, others are bracing for a retreat to the $50k range. The honest truth? Nobody knows anything. This year proved that volatility is the only certainty, and the "Perps Explosion" has turned the market into a casino where the house always seems to win.
My Strategy: The "Survival of the Fittest" PortfolioWe’ve moved into the "Bet on Everything" era of prediction markets, and already it’s exhausting. Personally, I’m cutting through the noise and sticking to a battle-hardened DCA strategy: BTC, ETH, SOL, and ZEC. I’ve also made a tactical swap: BNB is in, HYPE is out. While Hyperliquid has been the darling of the decentralized perp world, I’m not sold on it keeping the crown. With the SEC potentially opening the door for domestic perps, Binance could look to mirror its international exchange here in the US in 2026, the landscape is shifting. |
Price Movements on the Week$BTC - Down 1.48% (+6.97% 30 days) $SOL - Down 5.55% (-0.89% 30 days) $ETH - Down 4.16% (+10.99% 30 days) $ZEC - Up 4.33% (-29.73% 30 days) $HYPE - Down 18.46% (-27.18% 30 days) |
The Bank of Japan just hiked rates to 0.75% – the highest in 30 years. Historically, every BOJ tightening has hit #Bitcoin hard via yen carry trade unwinds: We’ve seen ~25-30% drops after the first two hikes. Keep an eye on volatility. In the past, this has led to prices going down significantly. This time around, it may have been priced in and was expected, but it’s worth paying attention to. Yen Carry Trade = you could borrow money in Japan at 0 to very low interest rates and that led to investment in the US markets. The money is still cheap, but not as low as it has been.
I think I may have a crush on the SEC. This week, Paul Atkins said "Shielding the lawful activities of our citizens from bulk surveillance while still ensuring that our government can perform these essential functions is the best way to protect both national security and our basic civil liberties while also giving room for innovation to flourish".
Why choose an L1 instead of an L2? Rachel Mayer (@0xrachelita) of @arc gave a solid explanation that highlights what those of us deep in the weeds can take for granted. Trying to explain how an L2 works to an institution is a mind fuck of complexity. The ETH crowd was pretty miffed about Circle choosing to make their own L1. Magic Eden (@MagicEden) announced that starting in Feb, stakers of $ME will receive rewards in $USDC from protocol revenue. They kicked off buybacks with validator revenue, expanded to marketplace revenue and we’re rolling out buybacks across every product in 2026. Now, we’re adding USDC rewards and tightening the token farm. Address poisoning is a serious risk. You know those tiny deposits you get after you do anything? The addresses start and end in similar letters/numbers in hopes that when you go to do your next transaction, you copy it instead of the correct address. A victim lost $50 million in USDT this week. They ran a test transaction for $50, it went through, then they copied the wrong address (poison attack one) and sent the remaining of the $50 million. The money instantly started going through Tornado Cash and is gone. Use SNS or ENS names with your wallets, or save your addresses you send between in your wallet’s address book and make sure to always pick from those you know. In early December, Tom Lee was on stage calling for $300k Bitcoin and $20k Ethereum in 2026! But in an internal Fundstrat report, their head of crypto, Sean Farrell said his base case points to $BTC at $60K–$65K, $ETH at $1.8K–$2K, and $SOL at $50–$75 in the first half of the year. Will we see massive pain before we get a chance to rocket? The SEC (@SECGov) held their roundtable on privacy this week and @kkirkbos lays out strong reasoning for why privacy has come to the forefront in such a big way this year at around 2:20 in this video. Tether introduced Pear Pass (@Pears_p2p) this week. It’s a password manager that keeps your data on your device. No servers to hack. No cloud to leak. I haven’t had time to download and check it out, but I’m intrigued. An entire island nation coming onchain? Damn skippy they are. Crossmint (@crossmint) is helping The Marshall Islands launch blockchain-based UBI, giving their approx 36k citizens dollar-denominated tokens they can receive, store, and send peer-to-peer from their phones. Black is the new pink? One of my predictions for 2026 is sadly that more chains from last cycle will continue to bleed out. I do think one will emerge with a successful pivot (cosmos/polkadot/algorand/avalanche/polygon) and this past week we saw Polkadot (@Polkadot) rebranded with a minimalist look. There’s also been tons of news out of Cosmos, as they see chains fleeing or shutting their doors. It seems they are looking to switch to an institutional play in 2026. Both tokens are down bad this year. ATOM is down 69% and DOT is down 73%. If you have no clue who they are, it just means you weren’t around last cycle. Visa announced that all US card issuers (banks, fintechs, crypto firms) can now settle directly with Visa using USDC. Initial banking participants include Cross River Bank and Lead Bank, which have started settling with Visa in USDC over the @Solana blockchain. Broader availability in the U.S. is planned through 2026. The quantum BTC discussions continued on the timeline with Nic Carter (@nic_carter) and Adam Back (@adam3us) disagreeing on the immediacy of action needed. It’s hard to argue with Back, an OG Bitcoiner when it comes to the technicality of a quantum threat and BTC’s options, but Nic is making the argument that Bitcoin moves so slow and is so cautious (for good reasons), that the discussion needs to be taking place now. Other chains and the US government are starting to take measures for a post-quantum world. The timeline is only a guess at this point and knowing with certainty that what gets put into place is a bit of a shot in the dark and injects risk into the system. Nic is invested in a company working on this, so he’s being accused of promoting self interest, but with so much on the line, something will have to be done. Meanwhile, the Solana Foundation is prepping for quantum by teaming up with Project Eleven( @qdayclock). Their CEO said “ “Our mission is to protect the world’s digital assets from quantum risk”. “Solana didn’t wait for quantum computers to become a headline problem. They invested early, asked the hard questions, and took actionable steps today. The results show that post-quantum security on Solana is viable with today’s technology.” Coinbase (@coinbase) did their big announcement this week and the TLDR is that they are trying to become an everything app and leaning into the neobank territory ala Robinhood. Perps, Prediction markets, Stocks, direct deposit, etc. Meanwhile, the @base app is still pushing the social side of things, tokenizing everything. Basically, Robinhood is becoming more like Coinbase with crypto and Coinbase is becoming more like Robinhood with stocks. Both of them will eventually offer options to completely replace your traditional bank and I think it’ll happen in 2026. They are also introducing custom stablecoins and imo, this will be the new replacement for a points system/loyalty in the future. Hold “dtsUSDC” and get returns for holding it over some other stable. Move over synthetic wrappers and IOUs, Securitize (@Securitize) has launched real, regulated shares issued onchain, recorded directly on the issuer’s cap table. Real Stocks. Real Ownership. If you used RateX (@RateX_Dex), they did their TGE for $RTX and you can go check if you had an allocation. Check your airdrop here:https://claim.rate-x.io Link to the official tweet: https://x.com/RateX_Dex/status/2000092302245806118?s=20 Thanks for reading, Stay Free
• This led a lot of people to both cheer and suggest others should be doing the same, like Jupiter. It makes sense for Magic Eden because they are a multi-chain/token platform, to normalize it into USDC. If Jupiter (insert any other company) were to do that, they’d be constantly selling $SOL earned for USDC. Doing rewards back in $SOL like @DeFiTuna does would be more aligned. 
• Ebullition
