Analysis News

This week’s edition of In The Stables underscores a continued tightening in stablecoin supply alongside resilient, but shifting, onchain usage. Total stablecoin market cap declined 1.0% WoW to $305.1 billion, driven by renewed contractions in USDT and USDC and reinforced by $3.2 billion in net USD outflows that marked a further acceleration in capital drawdowns. Despite the supply pullback, onchain engagement strengthened, with average daily active addresses rising 7.8% WoW, even as transaction volume declined 4.4% WoW, signaling broader participation but smaller average transfers. Together, the data points to stablecoins remaining an active transactional layer amid a more defensive capital environment, as institutional launches and regulatory developments continue t...

Perpetual futures (perps) are crypto’s latest breakout product. In 2025, they processed over $64.1 trillion in volume across centralized and decentralized venues. Until recently, CEXs dominated, but DEXs expanded their share of perp activity from 5% to over 12%, driven by better execution and growing demand for self-custody. Hyperliquid emerged as the leading force behind the rise of DEXs in perpetual trading, with $2.9 trillion in volume and $896 million in fees accruing to tokenholders in 2025. Hyperliquid's success validated onchain order books as competitive venues and sparked a wave of new protocols vying for onchain derivatives market share.

Among these challengers, we believe Lighter (LIT) is a strong contender in the onchain derivatives market. By late 2025,...

Sai is a perpetual decentralized exchange designed to make leveraged trading more predictable, capital-efficient, and resilient across market conditions. Built on Nibiru, Sai combines oracle-anchored pricing with AMM-backed liquidity in the form of Sai Liquidity Position (SLP) vaults, allowing trades and liquidations to reference global market prices rather than local orderbooks or pool imbalances. The protocol pairs this execution model with explicit margin rules, responsive borrowing fees, and a protocol vault that absorbs losses when collateral is exhausted, reducing the risk of cascading failures during volatility. Alongside features such as yield on idle collateral, multichain USDC deposits, and a roadmap that includes real-world asset markets and gasless accoun...

Q4 2025 was filled with milestones for the XRPL, none greater than U.S. spot XRP ETFs launching in November 2025 following SEC approval, significantly expanding U.S. access to XRP for retail and institutional investors previously limited by custody and compliance barriers. As amendments to enable regulatory-compliant institutional DeFi on the network continue to be adopted, the XRPL is poised for exciting new use cases to drive both organic institutional adoption and new strategic partnerships alike in 2026.

22 projects raised $463 million this week, led by Gold.com ($150M), Anchorage Digital ($100M), and TRM Labs ($70M), while Strategy, DDC Enterprise, and TRON Inc. added roughly $84 million in digital asset treasury allocations. Pump.fun acquired Vyper, Bitwise Asset Management agreed to acquire Chorus One, and Bed Bath & Beyond announced plans to acquire Tokens.com to build a tokenized real asset finance platform. On Crypto Twitter, Kyle Samani outlined his transition away from Multicoin while remaining bullish on crypto and Solana, Ally Zach compared market structure and liquidity dynamics between Kalshi and Polymarket, and Simon Kim explored the rise of AI-native economies governed and coordinated onchain.

Reserve's CMC20 is a broad-market onchain crypto index provides diversified exposure to the top 20 cryptocurrencies through a single token. Unlike traditional index products, it supports permissionless minting and redemption, allowing any market participant to arbitrage price differences between the index token and its underlying assets without relying on authorized intermediaries. Early market data shows relatively high trading activity for its size, with turnover largely driven by arbitrage and price discovery, suggesting it functions more as an actively traded exposure tool than a passive buy-and-hold index.

Blockchain.com registers with UK FCA to offer crypto services, expanding its regulated footprint following MiCA approval in Europe.
The post Blockchain.com gains FCA approval to offer regulated crypto services in the UK appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

The EU's aggressive crypto crackdown could significantly disrupt global financial systems, impacting international trade and digital asset markets.
The post EU proposes crackdown on crypto transactions with Russia to curb sanctions evasion appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

What to Know: The Ethereum Foundation and Security Alliance are effectively standardizing threat intelligence to combat wallet drainers and front-end exploits in real time. ‘Harvest Now, Decrypt Later’ strategies pose a silent but existential risk to current ECDSA-based encryption methods used by most major blockchains. BMIC provides a solution via a quantum-secure wallet and finance stack, using ERC-4337 and zero public-key exposure to future-proof assets. Market focus is pivoting from high-yield speculative tokens toward infrastructure plays that offer genuine protection for high-value treasuries and enterprise data. The war against crypto theft has entered a new phase. In a decisive move to curb the rampant success of ‘wallet drainers,’ malicious scripts that tric...

What to Know: Sergey Nazarov argues the current market cycle is driven by fundamental utility and banking integration rather than retail speculation. The demand for high-performance rails is directing capital toward projects that solve latency and interoperability issues. Bitcoin Hyper uses the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) to bring high-speed smart contracts to the Bitcoin network. Whale wallets have begun accumulating infrastructure tokens, signaling a strategic bet on Bitcoin Layer 2s. According to Sergey Nazarov, Chainlink’s co-founder, the industry is transitioning away from speculative retail frenzies toward a cycle defined by fundamental utility and institutional integration. Nazarov emphasized on X, that the integration of Real World Assets (RWAs) and cross-ch...