I’ll try not to pour salt on any wounds, but what a terrible week for the markets...again. It’s estimated that about $7 billion was liquidated from the crypto market this week. We all felt the pain. I’m too much of an optimist to short, even though all of my own research showed that when we closed below $91.5k on Jan 31st that it meant max pain.
Was this a “healthy” shake out of leverage? It felt worse than the Luna/FTX crash because there was a clear catalyst for that movement. I think this kinda sums up how everyone felt this week.
More Than Words...we got Extreme
Arthur Hayes (@CryptoHayes) and others are saying this dump is possibly due to dealer hedging off the back of $IBIT structured products. There’s a lot of paper bitcoin being traded out there with options, products, perps, etc. When the fox gets invited into the hen house, you deal with the consequences.
Can we move away from claiming @Solana goes down a million times a year? It’s been 2 full years without a Solana outage (and technically 3 full years without a perf-related one). Doing just fine through the chaotic times.
Vitalik (@VitalikButerin) said the quiet part outloud that everyone has felt and known for the past few years. The L2 roadmap didn’t work as intended and they are scaling the Eth L1 and looking to transition to a zkEVM. If you were one of the people (myself included) that clearly saw the issue, you got attacked by $ETH maxis nonstop. Welcome to reality. His post caused a lot of ruffled panties within the ETH community.
• What happened? L2s' progress to stage 2 (and, secondarily, on interop) has been far slower and more difficult than originally expected. If the L2’s had actually cared about true interop, maybe it could have worked, but when Polygon tried, no one seemed interested.
• When new L2’s have launched, mercenary capital floods in to farm and quickly leaves. Does anyone really use anything beyond Base or Arbitrum?
Speaking of Vitalik, Shielded Labs (@ShieldedLabs) announced that @VitalikButerin made a donation to support the continued development of Crosslink. Vitalik said, “Zcash is one of the most honorable crypto projects with a steadfast focus on privacy. Shielded Labs' Crosslink work will allow Zcash to be more secure and on a lower security budget, supporting its long-term sustainability.” Crosslink isn’t what everyone wants though.
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CEO of all things, @Mert has been strongly against Crosslink, saying, “crosslink is a stupid idea and will not pass”. “If the chain can't attract miners, adding a validator set doesn't solve the core underlying problem and is moot anyway, it just moves trust from miners to an even smaller set of stakers (which btw, given zec's mcap, is not going to give anyone serious much confidence)”
Crosslink also introduces new liveness DoS attacks, splits security budget, and a bunch of cross-contamination loops that are hard to even reason about
Radiants (@RadiantsDAO) announced MONOLITH, the second @SolanaMobileHackathon with $125,000+ in prizes. $125k in total prizes.10 winners, $10k per. 5 honorable mentions, $5k per.
BONUS: $10,000 in $SKR for the best SKR integration. Get off your butt and make an app!
Whoops….Korean crypto exchange Bithumb (@BithumbOfficial) ran a promo meant to pay users ₩2,000 ($1.50), but winners instead received 2,000 $BTC each. You read that right. 2k BTC, not $2k in BTC. They managed to recover 93% of the 620,000 $BTC mistakenly sent to users. 125 $BTC remain unrecovered. Can you imagine getting 2000 BTC sent to you? It sounds like they didn't even have that much Bitcoin in their reserves, so how does one send it? Hmmmm.
No big deal..Charles Hoskinson got liquidated for $3 billion. Does he care? Nah, he says he’s rich. @Cardano crushing as always.
Michael Saylor (@saylor) is throwing some money at trying to prep $BTC for quantum resistance. Although he thinks it’s 10 years out, this feels a bit like him throwing his hat into the talk to try and calm investors a bit. Bottom line is if Bitcoin doesn’t manage this, its lights out and the Bitcoin boat moves very slowly. How many Bitcoiners does it take to change a lightbulb? One to change the lightbulb and thousands to claim they don’t need it.
Kyle Samani (@KyleSamani) says so long and thanks for the shoes. He’s stepping back from @multicoin. He will continue to serve on the board of @zama, and his role as Chairman at Forward Industries (@FWDind). What’s next for him? Kyle made waves in the industry and had an amazing run.
Do you need some time to meditate on what looks like the matrix? Visualize what 1000+ TPS looks like in real time on @Solana - http://beautifulmachine.xyz
The fact that democrats are all in opposition to a bill that provides rules of the road and clarity for the thing they hate continues to blow my mind. Finance isn’t partisan. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says the US has to get the crypto market structure bill "across the finish line" this year. "It's impossible to proceed without it." Why won’t dems move on it? Because Trump profits greatly personally from all of his direct involvements in the industry. Had he not launched that dumb coin, maybe the rest could have been workable.
Prepared to be yelled at, but for once I agree with Nick O’Neill (@chooserich) about what happened this week and that forced selling eventually hits a wall.
No, @SECPaulSAtkins didn't say the #CLARITY bill is done.
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He said about digital assets: "We are out to harmonize the rules between the SEC and the CFTC, giving clarity and certainty to the innovators and to investors...so that people can develop their products in the United States rather than feel that they have to go offshore."
Just watch the video if this stuff is over your head like it is mine. Malware was found in the top downloaded skill on clawhub, so be very careful and do your research. Openclaw/ Moltbot comes to Solana? @moltdotid is a “Free” (you need to mint a .molt name nft) AI Agent. Molt domains integrate OpenClaw, bringing personal AI agents to the Solana ecosystem. Each .molt domain is a Metaplex Core NFT that unlocks your own AI agent instance.
What you get:
Wallet-based access — No accounts, no passwords. Connect your Solana wallet, prove NFT ownership, instant access
Per-domain agents — Each domain NFT gets its own isolated AI agent with persistent memory
Configure your channels — Set up Telegram, Discord, or Slack bots directly from the UI. Enter your bot token, click save, restart your agent
Persistent storage — Your agent's memory and conversations persist in R2 storage, tied to your NFT
I think the next time someone (who never knows anything about crypto) says Bitcoin has no inherent value, I’ll just send them to this @mert tweet and save myself some annoyance.
Keeping it light this week.
Stay Free
• Ebullition
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