Crypto's capital formation process is finally undergoing a major regime shift for the better.
What I mean by this is we've really undergone a shift away from the excessively high seed round valuation games, beta chasing VC copycat tactics to hit a "management fee" and create illiquid paper profits on their books that don't actually exist in reality.
That gig is up.
Why does that affect the capital formation process in this industry?
Well, because now there is a new cohort of really strong founders from legacy finance coming in and raising at sensible valuations with much clearer business models. This is neo finance.
In addition to the new cohort, there are some large businesses and brands that cannot be named that are coming onchain this year and will have tokens that will become the most investable assets in our space and likely enter the top ten.
This year will be marked as a year of coming of age, maturity, and investing in real onchain businesses and neobanks.
It will be also the mark of one of the greatest multi-decade long bull runs for this asset class. However the power law will be in great effect.
For investors this means more precision in your allocation strategy and more due diligence at early stages with new founders and getting access to a new set of deal flow.
For founders this means no more easy VC money, no more garbage business models, and your competition has gotten a lot more serious and cutthroat.
This is a net positive for our space and I believe it will continue to accelerate the sophistication and general adoption of our technology.
Couple this with regulatory clarity and the path to mainstream is clear. Stay the course.
After reviewing the Senate Banking draft text over the last 48hrs, Coinbase unfortunately can’t support the bill as written.
There are too many issues, including:
- A defacto ban on tokenized equities
- DeFi prohibitions, giving the government unlimited access to your financial records and removing your right to privacy
- Erosion of the CFTC’s authority, stifling innovation and making it subservient to the SEC
- Draft amendments that would kill rewards on stablecoins, allowing banks to ban their competition
We appreciate all the hard work by members of the Senate to reach a bi-partisan outcome, but this version would be materially worse than the current status quo. We’d rather have no bill than a bad bill. Hopefully we can all get to a better draft.
We'll keep fighting for all Americans and for economic freedom. Crypto needs to be treated on a level playing field with the rest of financial services so we can build this industry in a safe and trusted way in America.
Crypto builders need clear rules of the road.
Over the past five years, Republicans, Democrats, and the Trump Administration have worked closely with members across the crypto industry to protect decentralization, support developers, and give entrepreneurs a fair shot.
At its core, this bill does that.
It’s not perfect, and changes are needed before it becomes law. But now is the time to move the CLARITY Act forward if we want the U.S. to remain the best place in the world to build the future of crypto.
My forecast for 2026:
• Many crypto-native VCs will put investments on hold.
• Many startups from 2024-2025 will be wiped out.
• Many emerging creators will give up and stop posting.
• Many users will exit.
And this is good.
The last few years inflated this space with low-value, mercenary capital.
VCs invested to sell early.
Projects were built to raise and launch tokens.
Users were testing things to win an airdrop.
Bloggers were posting to get farm yaps/snaps/xeets.
The life cycle of a protocol shortened from years to months.
We've built a factory of hidden exit liquidity and legal scams where real value simply could not find its way through the noise.
We're in the era of disillusionment now.
And after disillusionment comes efficiency.
And it is good.
In 2014, there was a vision: you can have permissionless, decentralized applications that could support finance, social media, ride sharing, governing organizations, crowdfunding, potentially create an entire alternative web, all on the backs of a suite of technologies.
Ethereum: the blockchain. The world computer that could give any application its shared memory.
Whisper: the data layer. Messages too expensive for a blockchain, that do no need consensus.
Swarm: the storage layer. Store files for long-term access.
Over the last five years, this core vision has at times become obscured, with various "metas" and "narratives" at various times taking center stage. But the core vision has never died. And in fact, the core technologies behind it are only growing stronger.
Ethereum is now proof of stake. Ethereum is now scaling, it is now cheap, and it is on track to get more scalable and cheaper thanks to the power of ZK-EVMs. Thanks to ZK-EVM + PeerDAS, the "sharding" vision is effectively being realized. And L2s can give additional and different kinds of gains in speed on top.
Whisper is now Waku ( https://t.co/uj5h9iSpIL ), and already powers many applications (eg. https://t.co/owlo5yoS68, https://t.co/hDizYCFjuq just to name two I use). Even outside of Waku, the quality of decentralized messaging has increased. Fileverse (decentralized Google Docs and Sheets alternative: https://t.co/ZIKj4U5pQe ) has seen massive gains in usability over the past year.
IPFS is now highly performant and robust as a decentralized way of retrieving files, though IPFS alone does not solve the storage problem. Hence, there is still room to improve there.
All of the prerequisites for the original web3 vision are here, in full force, and are continuing to get stronger over the next few years. Hence, it's time to buidl, and buidl decentralized.
Fileverse is an excellent example of the right way to do things:
* It uses Ethereum and Gnosis Chain for what they are good for: names, accounts and permissioning, document registration
* It uses decentralized messaging and file storage to store documents and propagate changes to documents
* The application passes the walkaway test: https://t.co/xO1dNLlnhf (even if Fileverse disappears, you can still retrieve them and even keep editing them with the open source UI)
This is what we mean by "build a hammer that is a tool you buy once and it's yours, not a corposlop AI dishwasher that requires you to register for a google account and charges a subscription fee per month for extra washing modes, and probably spies on you and stops working if you get politically disfavored by a foreign country".
If you think this criticism of corposlop is hyperbolic, well turns out, it's literally a concatenation of these three:
* https://t.co/GBNaXOa454
* https://t.co/saD3cNp4Ae
* https://t.co/skoJ58vbqz
In 2014, decentralized applications were toys, hundreds of times more difficult to use in web2. In 2026, fileverse is now usable enough that I regularly write documents in it and send them to other people to collaborate. The decentralized renaissance is coming, and you can be part of making it happen.
Here are simple rules which will let you avoid 99% of problems in Crypto:
1. Only buy a coin which already made a Critical Mass of Poor people Rich (AND THEY ARE STILL HOLDING) -> Resulting in an Insanely Strong Community
2. Survived 3+ 70% drops
3. Has a Big Inspiring Mission
Three things ruined CT
1. Kaito/yaps/incentivized posting.
You create a financial incentive for someone to post, it creates more of it. Combine this with AI you get tons of slop. Now the median CT post is kaito slop. Much more noise. X may have taken this into account in their efforts to suppress CT. I don’t blame them.
2. Market maturity.
The “fun” of CT was trenching and talking about 100x coins and so on. Now the growth in the industry is stablecoins and financial infra. Fun for VCs but not for ordinary trenchers. Less of a feeling that the common man is on a level playing field and can win if they just get the right alfa.
3. De-niche-ification at X.
X has deliberately chosen to disincentivize through UX design silos like CT. They did this by de emphasizing the “following” page and defaulting you into the for you page which steers you away from the people you actually follow and towards normie slop (maybe slightly tailored to your interests by Grok). I don’t know why they did this but it’s obvious that they did. I used to post to my own community which I spent a decade cultivating. Now posts are default dead, with a small chance they get blessed by Grok and go onto everyone’s FYP so they go megaviral. They’re no in between. Either total silence or a mega hit. This incentivizes big accounts to post normie slop rather than content tailored to their audience. As you have probably noticed, crypto specific content doesn’t perform well, because the average person that sees your post first is a normie and they don’t care about it, so it doesn’t get blessed by the algorithm.
This completely ruins the “deal”. People that put time and effort into their accounts and generated years of HQ content are no longer rewarded with access to their niche. This is why all major CT people including myself are trying to recapture their audience elsewhere (for me, on substack). There I can guarantee I get the actual eyeballs I want to reach. I care more about my 3k substack followers than my 400k+ Twitter followers now.
RIP CT 2017-2025 it’s been real
$ETH could outperform BTC this year:
1. Quantum FUD will continue in 2026. Ethereum has a clear roadmap to prepare. BTC is stuck
2. Ethereum is ACTUALLY scaling: Gas limits keep raised and zkEVM will make Ethereum cheap and fast(er). Enough for high value transactions while L2s will do the trading
These upgrades are incremental so there's no "BREAKING NEWS" moment for Ethereum. But progress is happening fast.
3. Degens loaded up on ETH before this bull run. But got disilusioned and sold for BTC. It would be fun seeing the playbook reverse
Higher.
现在说2026最大的风口是Crypto和TradFi的大融合应该没争议了吧？
过去一个月已有很多例证：Coinbase大推全能型交易平台战略、纳斯达克启动5*23小时交易机制、a16z募资$15B 放眼于大AI + Crypto融合赛道、 Solana生态和X Smart Cashtags产品深度整合....等等
在一场场Crypto和TradFi融合大戏中，目前个人仅看到了两点确定性：
1） $ETH 依然是当之无愧的“结算层”霸主，凭借稳定币TVL的规模以及受机构信任的RWA试验田稳坐龙头，这里是Old Money最放心的链上金库；
2） $SOL 则在全新“ICM基础设施层”的定位下，偏向了“产品消费级”的融合路线，PayFi支付叙事也好，RWA资产代币化也罢，Solana主打的是高频、低成本的流动性效率，这也是TradFi触达大众的最佳管道。
Financial advisors manage $140T+ in wealth. That’s why, for the eighth year in a row, we partnered with @Vetta_Fi to ask hundreds of them what they think of crypto.
Here’s what they said.
(TL;DR: Good things.)
Top 10 takeaways ⬇️
CT contained valuable resources - enthusiasm, a social graph, content, entertainment etc
socialfi hijacked the intrinsic motivation to post by explicitly rewarding posting either through yaps/points or indirectly through airdrop qualification. produced torrents of slop. no other community did this
nikita was clumsy in his description but he's basically right. socialfi siphoned off a bunch of the platform value and privatized it. most of these companies failed anyway
CT financialized itself and ruined the commons. no wonder X is annoyed with us.
IMO it's time to retire the term "vibe coding."
At this point it is not vibes-based at all. Managing agents, steering them in the right direction, giving accurate feedback, helping them get unstuck. We should call it "piloting" an LLM. Yes, there are pilots who just press the cruise control button and handle an easy flight, but there are pilots who can get so much more out of the same machine—subagents, skills, planning, coordinating multiple agents in the same codebase, merging conflicts, overseeing multiple projects simultaneously, etc.
When you say "I vibe coded this," it implies that all of the agency was in the LLM—it erases your own authorship. The term itself was created to give license to un-seriousness, to justify an ignorance of craft. "I know it's naughty to program that way, but if we just embrace it?" But that's no more true than it is for a pilot who used their complex instrumentation to land a plane. That's not "vibe flying."
Almost everything will now be "vibe coded," but the agency of the programmer simply rises to a higher level of abstraction. In Karpathy's terms, we've moved from programming in assembly, to programming in higher-level languages, to now programming in natural language. But authorship as a concept will survive.
That's why I think we should say "I piloted Claude to build this." This is what the future of software engineering looks like. Our language for it needs to adapt.
@karpathy
DePIN is dying and i don't see it coming back
the tokenomics of DePIN deny the physics of finance - these teams are trying to build perpetual motion machines (a violation of the laws of thermodynamics)
https://t.co/pfhtQLTs41
Ethereum itself must pass the walkaway test.
Ethereum is meant to be a home for trustless and trust-minimized applications, whether in finance, governance or elsewhere. It must support applications that are more like tools - the hammer that once you buy it's yours - than like services that lose all functionality once the vendor loses interest in maintaining them (or worse, gets hacked or becomes value-extractive). Even when applications do have functionality that depends on a vendor, Ethereum can help reduce those dependencies as much as possible, and protect the user as much as possible in those cases where the dependencies fail.
But building such applications is not possible on a base layer which itself depends on ongoing updates from a vendor in order to continue being usable - even if that "vendor" is the all core devs process. Ethereum the blockchain must have the traits that we strive for in Ethereum's applications. Hence, Ethereum itself must pass the walkaway test.
This means that Ethereum must get to a place where we _can ossify if we want to_. We do not have to stop making changes to the protocol, but we must get to a place where Ethereum's value proposition does not strictly depend on any features that are not in the protocol already.
This includes the following:
* Full quantum-resistance. We should resist the trap of saying "let's delay quantum-resistance until the last possible moment in the name of ekeing out more efficiencies for a while longer". Individual users have that right, but the protocol should not. Being able to say "Ethereum's protocol, as it stands today, is cryptographically safe for a hundred years" is something we should strive to get to as soon as possible, and insist on as a point of pride.
* An architecture that can expand to sufficient scalability. The protocol needs to have the properties that allow it to expand to many thousands of TPS over time, most notably ZK-EVM validation and data sampling through PeerDAS. Ideally, we get to a point where further scaling is done through "parameter only" changes - and ideally _those_ changes are not BPO-style forks, but rather are made with the same validator voting mechanism we use for the gas limit.
* A state architecture that can last decades. This means deciding, and implementing, whatever form of partial statelessness and state expiry will let us feel comfortable letting Ethereum run with thousands of TPS for decades, without breaking sync or hard disk or I/O requirements. It also means future-proofing the tree and storage types to work well with this long-term environment.
* An account model that is general-purpose (this is "full account abstraction": move away from enshrined ECDSA for signature validation)
* A gas schedule that we are confident is free of DoS vulnerabilities, both for execution and for ZK-proving
* A PoS economic model that, with all we have learned over the past half decade of proof of stake in Ethereum and full decade beyond, we are confident can last and remain decentralized for decades, and supports the usefulness of ETH as trustless collateral (eg. in governance-minimized ETH-backed stablecoins)
* A block building model that we are confident will resist centralization pressure and guarantee censorship resistance even in unknown future environments
Ideally, we do the hard work over the next few years, to get to a point where in the future almost all future innovation can happen through client optimization, and get reflected in the protocol through parameter changes. Every year, we should tick off at least one of these boxes, and ideally multiple. Do the right thing once, based on knowledge of what is truly the right thing (and not compromise halfway fixes), and maximize Ethereum's technological and social robustness for the long term.
Ethereum goes hard.
This is the gwei.
The next $1 trillion of capital to flow into crypto won’t come from retail, but from TradFi institutions and funds
That may be a cliché thing to say, but I don’t think people fully appreciate the implications
Retail is tapped out and have written off crypto writ large
Every normie-centric trend turned into a massive value extraction scheme, from ICOs to NFTs to memecoins
You can only throw your money into the casino incinerator so many times until you question why you’re doing that
Crypto-native VCs largely only invest pre-TGE and use retail as exit liquidity when a project without PMF launches a token with predatory tokenomics, leading to down only charts
Retail won’t jump back in until they see external signals of legitimacy and trust
And even if/when they do, their capital is unlikely to push crypto that many multiplies higher
On the other hand, we are seeing a clear acceleration in institutional interest in crypto
The BTC ETF was the most successful and fastest growing ETF launch ever, with tens of billions in inflow so far, creating a new type of systemic passive bid as more crypto ETFs launch each week (crypto index funds will be another)
Stablecoin legislation (GENIUS) and the upcoming market structure legislation (CLARITY) provides much-needed regulatory clarity, while (the now pro-crypto) regulatory agencies give institutions the greenlight for crypto-related initiatives
Ironically, institutions have become far more bullish on crypto than crypto-natives and retail, who have become jaded by years of value extraction by bad actors
That said, I think it’s extremely unlikely we’re going to see a tide rises all boats situation as institutions are more selective / sophisticated about how capital is deployed
This isn’t a coincidence as we are starting to see real PMF with select crypto use cases (stablecoins, perps, prediction markets, tokenization)
The projects, protocols, infra, and teams behind these mega-trends will likely attract institutional capital while projects still focused on PvP zero-sum crypto games start are increasingly required to squeeze blood from a rock
The crypto casino will never go away completely, but it will increasingly become a side story, not the main show
This thesis will play out over a number of years, and break many people’s world view about crypto in the process (healthy)
But it’s worth considering if you believe you’re well positioned for this inevitable shift or not, only you can make that determination
Ceteris explains how buybacks became popular in crypto.
"Since tokens don't have any real rights on protocol revenue, the only way you could trust that it was valuable is if they did buybacks. That's why Hyperliquid did so well. If you launch a token today, you need a pretty clear strategy for why your token isn't worthless."
I’m bullish BTC late Jan through Feb but presently bearish for 2026.
This is a data informed opinion which I hold lightly.
Our internal models of investor flows put in a bottom on 24th December and has steadily strengthened. Typically it takes around 2-3 weeks for this to express itself in price, arguably this is taking place now (only held back by very short term overbuying on technical oscillators).
Also promising is that paper based liquidity (futures markets) is coming back in after dying for months, just like it did mid 2021 which lead to a second top in the last cycle.
So 98-100k needs contesting. Then if we get past that it’s a wait and see how ATH resistance fairs.
But I remain bearish 2026 because in the broader picture liquidity flows have been waning relative to price momentum since Jan 2025. We are in the hot zone right now for the final stages when momentum has insufficient supporting liquidity.
What would change my mind would be a massive influx of spot (I.e. longer term) liquidity in coming months to break the waning down trend.
Worth keeping in mind a confirmed a bear market is not yet in place, which would be seen as increasingly negative flows out of BTC (a laggy indicator to a cycle top).
Most people are terrified of doing anything where there isn’t a guaranteed outcome. Eg. 9-5 job —> you get a fixed guaranteed salary at the end of the month. We can also make this analogy with taking risks in crypto.
A relevant Degenspartan quote:
"Hey man, that's a lot of money, what happens if you are wrong and the trade goes down? ...I lose money?
Life is all risk and then you die. Normies have this perverted deep sexual obsession to have no drawdowns EVER.
They will massively overpay to clip tail risk".
Even if you win by taking the safe route… are you really winning? You just get the expected result of a relatively low upside.
You may lose less, but you often lose by default as a byproduct of never even giving yourself a chance to win the game.
At Andreessen Horowitz, we just raised over $15B. With these new funds including American Dynamism ($1.176B), Apps ($1.7B), Bio + Health ($700M), Infrastructure ($1.7B), Growth ($6.75B), and other venture strategies ($3B), we raised over 18% of all venture capital dollars allocated in the United States in 2025. Why did we raise the money and how do we plan to invest it?
1/ The revolt of US banks: the never ending debate over stablecoin interest payments
According to the GENIUS Act, issuers are not allowed to pay interest to stablecoin holders.
But right now, @coinbase is paying a 3.35% reward to users who hold USDC on the exchange. This is possible because the GENIUS Act does not prohibit distributors from paying interest, only issuers.
However, ahead of the Senate committee markup on Jan 15 for the Market Structure Bill, which aims to systematize crypto regulation, a debate has broken out.
The key question is whether stablecoin rewards should also be banned at the distributor level.
🧵
日历
1 月 16 日
数据请求中
在 App 打开
