On the upside, we found out that $BTC had some solid support lined up at $60k, so even though we hit it, it bounced back a bit. Honestly, we are just in a bear right now. My feeling is that until CLARITY passes, which could be in March, or in a few months, there aren’t a lot of positive catalysts. We aren’t in a spot where a headline about improved tech is enough to push the price. What am I doing? Continuing my DCA’s on my conviction plays that I’m fine holding a long time. Can you go shopping on alts? Yeah, there’s a lot on sale right now, but for me in times of crisis, I just hold the line, but my time horizon is long. I’m not a “trader”.
I’ve been spending all week messing with Claude and Claude Cowork and honestly, it’s amazing and has been a nice distraction from staring at the charts.
Max Pain Price for $BTC/$SOL
For the upcoming expiry on February 16, 2026:
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Bitcoin (BTC): $70,000. (Current BTC price is around $70,262, so near this level could see pinning or volatility.)
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Solana (SOL): $88. (Current SOL price is around $89.14, suggesting potential downward pressure toward expiry.)
Max pain acts as a "gravity" point in the short term. Prices often drift toward it as market makers hedge and option holders adjust, especially in the final days/hours before settlement.
Internet Capital Markets on Solana. That’s the headline. @0xbrw from @anza_xyz says that Aplenglow will reduce finality from ~12 seconds → under 150ms. How do they do it? Moving vote transactions off-chain and removing proof of history. They’ve been running it for a few months internally and looking for early q3 for the new Agave client.
Toly (@toly) goes to Washington! He joined the @CFTC Innovation Advisory Committee. Go Toly! It’s a pretty wild list of top people within crypto and it’s nice to see an admin that embraces dialogue and tries to understand the needs of our industry instead of lawsuiting everyone into oblivion by draining their funds in lawyer fees.
Kamino (@kamino announced off-chain collateral with custodial integration through @Anchorage, piloting with @Solana_Company. Ok, so what does that mean? It’s a play towards institutions and enables them to:
• Collect rewards and access borrowing power
• Keep assets in qualified custody
• Access 24/7 LTV monitoring, margining, and rules-based liquidations via Anchorage Digital’s Atlas.
Titan (@Titan_Exchange) announced Titan Private Swaps, using Vanish (@vanishTrade) with built-in compliance rails. By baking in compliance, they're waiving the flag to capture flows that need both confidentiality and regulatory cover. It means better execution privacy if you're moving size and titan could see deeper liquidity as funds and larger players who couldn't touch privacy tools can now use it. Why is this important? Not everyone, especially businesses want everything easily visible onchain and if they can trade in size privately, the pool can increase, which helps everyone.
Proph3t (@metaproph3t), co-founder of @MetaDAOProject shared his opinion on the current state of things with token buybacks. Hurupay (@HurupayApp) recently didn’t hit their funding goal, which could be a sign of the market right now, or a lack of interest in the project, but it’s bringing up good conversations. He self-reflected on improving MetaDAO's futarchy model for early projects without killing founder control or the market-for-governance vision. Is it the growing pains of a new paradigm? Or does it scare away serious builders?. He’s sparking the debate on balancing investor protection vs. founder flexibility in decentralized funding and the role of buybacks in all of this. https://x.com/metaproph3t/status/2021426384799993939?s=20
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve seen the explosion of agents and since an agent can’t get a bank account, they will be using crypto. Full stop. Where will they do it? I agree with @LucaNetz, who said, “In a world where AI agents are gonna be sending a quadrillion transactions a week, nothing outside of Solana, at least from a production perspective, can meet that demand.”
That being said, everyone will vie for it. Coinbase Developer Platform (@CoinbaseDev) introduced Agentic Wallets, the first wallet infrastructure built specifically for autonomous agents. It gives your agent the power of a wallet to manage funds, hold identity, and transact onchain without human intervention.
Nikita Bier (@nikitabier), who once praised ideas like @BagsApp now says, nope, ain’t happening anymore. Let’s be honest. Two things suck in crypto twitter. InfoFi and the bot army trench armies that swarm people. He said “I genuinely want crypto to proliferate on X, but applications that create incentives to spam, raid, and harass random users is not the way. It meaningfully degrades the experience for millions of people — only to enrich a few people”.
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This comes off the back of @lexfridman having Openclaw creator Peter Steinberger on and they talked about the tench swarm. I can’t imagine how bad it got. When I launched a token on @orca_so wavebreak, it was one of the first to run a bit and I had probably 100 bots leaving comments, my DMs got so full that I turned them off and this was a small token. It was a total nightmare and I love this space for its good sides.
The meme trenchers are absolutely ruthless and looking to get you to pump their bags. I had a low cap token and people were aggressive, mean, threatening and it’s just not worth it.
CZ (@cz_binance) was on @theallinpod, talking about his story with Chamath (@chamath) and they brought up a current, fundamental issue limiting crypto. There are no native privacy protections. The industry is moving into this direction lately and you can use $ZEC or $XMR for some privacy, but those tools, or mixers are still in earlier stages or too complex for most businesses. It’s a long interview, but I found it really interesting to hear more of CZ’s journey, his time in jail and disposition in a long form interview.
Privacy was in the spotlight again this week with Arcium (@Arcium) CEO, Yannik (@yrschrade) on The Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson). He’s only 25, but embraces the cypherpunk ethos and Arcium is working to bring more privacy onchain. Another solid listen that puts serious crypto into the mainstream news feeds.
Jupiter (@JupiterExchange) is out here throwing out ideas for a DAO vote and doing their usual thing, which is pissing people off left and right. Their DAO process has been a disaster. It doesn’t help with so many people investing in $JUP and watching it bomb this past year. Jupiter is bringing forward a proposal to effectively bring net emissions to zero for the foreseeable future. Honestly, I have been staked since day one and it’s been a master class in what not to do with a DAO.
This vote involves:
1. Pausing emissions from the Team Reserve indefinitely
2. Absorbing any team sales of vesting tokens in the Jupiter treasury
3. Postponing Jupuary indefinitely
4. Accelerating and offsetting Mercurial vesting
Are we finally getting real perps on @solana? @Bulletxyz is rolling out their mainnet for a perps DEX on , claiming ~250µs order execution latency at 30k orders/sec. It’s in private beta for whitelisted traders. Currently geo-blocked for the USA, so you may need to take a trip outside the country on your VPN to get on the whitelist - https://t.co/IPvvnFTaev
The Base app (@baseapp) finally admitted defeat on shoving creator coins down everyone’s throats forcefully. Now I can turn off Base mode. They said “Starting today, the feed will focus entirely on tradable assets. This means we're removing the Talk feed in favor of a feed of onchain activity. As part of this shift, we're also sunsetting Creator Rewards.” Not that I used evm much these days, but it was dreadful to open that app for a few months. A crypto wallet focused on….social? No thanks. How about a wallet focused on, I don’t know, finance, defi, anything else but social?
LayerZero (@LayerZero_Core) announced Zero and came out swinging, slamming Ethereum and throwing some shade at Solana. “The Last Blockchain” is their tagline. Pretty ambitious. Zero wants to be the blockchain where speed, low cost, and decentralization coalesce using ZK tech. DeFi, trading, payments, and even big institutions could run on-chain at internet scale, without choking or costing a fortune. It's ambitious, backed by serious players, and trying to solve the "blockchains are too slow/expensive" problem once and for all. We will see how it goes. Their main competition here is clearly @solana, not current L2s. $ZRO jumped on the news up to $2.58, but has retraced to $1.80.
Stay Free
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