War All the Time

War, what is it good for?  Keeping on theme for the admin, it’s chaotic and chaos = uncertainty.  Markets like predictability.  Tariff’s changing, then fighting to add more back on, war with Iran (I mean, the “Iran Conflict”…not war because that takes Congressional approval…like tariffs are supposed to).

The administration is blacklisting Anthropic because the company refuses to green light its tech for mass surveillance or autonomous lethality.  Despite Trump’s public rattle-throwing, the military reportedly used Claude for target identification and battle simulations in this weekend's strikes.  In keeping with their contradictory actions, after banning Anthropic and threatening to classify them as a Supply Chain Risk (serious implications), they proved Claude is too effective for them to actually stop using.

It’s getting harder to not talk about Ai every week because it has completely changed everything and when we are in what appears to be a bear market, not a lot of crypto news happens. DeFi news has hit a bit of a wall.  Is this maturation or stagnation?  My hope is that teams are cooking in silence, moving away from simple DEX pairs toward agentic protocols that can function in this high-chaos environment.

This past week was either Ai + crypto or scams being exposed, theorized and general, continued negativity.  

The charts reflect a market that is paralyzed by uncertainty.

• Open Interest: Aggregated OI on $BTC sits at $97 billion, with a nearly perfect 51/49 long-short split. Nobody is willing to lead the charge.
  
  

• Sentiment: We’re stuck in Extreme Fear (16). While that’s an improvement from the "5" we saw in early February, it shows that retail and institutions alike are waiting for a catalyst.

We have an early casualty from a mix of being hacked and a bear market that took out 3 projects at once on Solana. Step (@StepFinance_) hit us with the sad news. 

“Today we are announcing that Step Finance, SolanaFloor, and Remora Markets will be winding down all operations. Following the hack at the end of January we explored every possible path forward, including financing and acquisition opportunities. Unfortunately, we were unable to secure a viable outcome and have made the difficult decision to end all operations effective immediately.”

Yep, already into Ai x Crypto news.  
Phantom (@phantom) created a Claude Code skill with @dflow One prompt gives you a full-stack Solana app with wallets, swaps, predictions, and more built in.  You seriously have nothing holding you back from making an app.  With $20 (one month of Claude), patience and an idea, you can make and launch an app on @solanamobile.  Seriously, wtf?  I’m going to be rebuilding DeFi the System’s app from the ground up and adding features and trading tools.  Get off your ass and experiment.  

Full article - https://x.com/dflow/status/2027094731801424271?s=20

• The DFlow & Phantom Claude Code skill gives your agent the missing structure needed to build full-stack Solana applications, with the wallet and liquidity layers designed as a single system from a single prompt.
  

Download the skill: https://github.com/DFlowProtocol/dflow_phantom-connect-skill

A first of its kind! SoFi (@sofi) bank now supports @Solana network deposits! They are the first national chartered bank where individuals can buy, sell and hold crypto, and manage your SOL in the SoFi app.  Pretty cool.  I don’t feel compelled to move my $SOL there, but I think it’s really cool.  KYC of course.  They are a bank.

Someone dropped some $$ on this URL - https://payments.org/ Solana launched a website catered towards payments, TPS and information for TradFi to view, compare and learn about how payments on Solana can benefit them. $2T in stablecoin transfers per quarter.  That’s a lot of money changing hands.

Magic Eden (@MagicEden) is dumping Bitcoin and EVM NFT’s to focus exclusively on Solana and Packs going forward.  Another casualty?  The Magic Eden wallet, but lets be honest, no one used it except for probably some people staking the $ME token.  Export your keys and bring them into another wallet before April 1st, because it's being depreciated.  

Can your DeFi holdings actually become your functioning bank account?  MacBrennan (@macbrennan_cc) from Project0 (@project0) was on Lightspeed (@Lightspeedpodhq) this week talking about their new Pay product that lets users pay rent or buy coffee without selling their crypto holdings.  Sounds pretty rad. https://app.0.xyz/pay

Don’t know how to create agents?  No problem.  SeekerClaw (@SeekerClaw) is the first AI agent fully running on your @solanamobile.  Does it have access to your seed vault?  I haven’t checked it out yet, but if it does, I’d be really careful and instead try to make a new wallet in Phantom/Solflare, etc to use it for.

Near (@NEARProtocol) introduced Confidential Intents in their wallet.  You can use Near Intents to get pretty much any token these days, but I don’t know many people specifically using Near directly.  In the http://near.com app, you can toggle between your Main Account and Confidential Account.  Honestly, I need to spend time digging more into using Near directly, because this all looks pretty nice.

It was impossible to miss this pattern if you paid attention, and I’d been talking about it for months in these roll-ups, but it seems people are pointing the finger at Jane Street.  A recent lawsuit allegedly claims they pushed the Luna crash by having insider information as well.  Worth checking out this article to see how Jane Street allegedly manipulated Bitcoin prices. 

The article exposes allegations against Jane Street claiming they (and possibly others) used massive, potentially manipulative derivatives positions to create effectively unlimited "phantom" Bitcoin exposure without ever touching actual BTC on-chain. This would heavily suppress the spot price and render Bitcoin's 21 million hard cap meaningless in practice, since infinite paper BTC can be generated off-chain via futures/options/etc.

The 10am Drop: How Jane Street Broke Bitcoin's Price - https://x.com/1914ad/status/2026757796390449382?s=20

Zach XBT (@zachxbt) pulled a page from the corporate playbook, by doing an announcement that he’d announce a big bust and the speculation began.  No shock to anyone, people made prediction markets. Zach was hired to do this investigation and the people who hired them also knew who it was, making the Polymarket an easy target to make some money and say it would be Meteora (busted last year already). 

It was Axiom.  @WheresBroox (Broox Bauer), was one of multiple @AxiomExchange employees abusing the lack of access controls for internal tools to lookup sensitive user details to insider trade by tracking private wallet activity since early 2025.  So it goes.  Crypto bros using their insider information to trade against others?  That’s a random Tuesday around here.

Metaplex (@metaplex) is trying to get ahead of the agentic movement.  Where will agents trade?  Most likely Solana or Base.  Metaplex proposed a framework for an agent registry program on @solana.  If it passes, it will allow agents to have a permanent, verifiable onchain identity tied to a Metaplex Core NFT. Onchain agents with wallets and DeFi capabilities built in, all while taking advantage of the existing usability of NFTs across Solana.

They also launched the Metaplex app this week, jumping into the launchpad realm, claiming you can launch tokens that aren’t bundled to oblivion.  Their launch pools are time-based token sales to attempt for organic onchain price discovery.  Instead of a fixed token price, creators allocate tokens to the launch pool. Participants deposit during a defined window and once the pool closes, tokens are distributed pro-rata based on each participant's share of the pool.  This purportedly prevents insiders and front-runners from sniping and bundling the supply immediately, giving everyone the same price and chance at participation.

Stay Free

• Ebullition