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Recently, Pharos and GCL New Energy Technology Co., Ltd. reached a new financing agreement, with GCL investing $24.73 million at a valuation of $950 million. The deal involves a complex earn-out structure linked to Pharos's token listing performance. Although the partnership has strategic importance, the market has questioned the reasonableness of this high-risk investment and valuation. The true purpose of both parties may be to use this opportunity to increase their market value, while leaving the risks to future investors.

Title: [Issue] No Free Lunch: Reflections on Arbitrum and Optimism
Author: Four Pillars
Compiled by: Ken, ChainCatcher
Key Highlights
Base announces a transition from Optimism's OP stack to a proprietary unified architecture, delivering a strong shock to the market and significantly impacting $OP price.
Optimism's code is fully open source under the MIT license and implements a revenue-sharing model for chains joining the "Super Chain." Arbitrum adopts a "community source" model, requiring chains built on Orbit to contribute 10% of protocol revenue if they settle outside the Arbitrum ecosystem.

Author: Danny @IOSG
The Explosion of Curator Mode
DeFi activity intensity has returned to levels close to DeFi Summer, but the on-chain stablecoin supply continues to expand. This means there is more and more money on the chain, while DeFi product forms are temporarily difficult for a broader user base to understand, use, and distribute.
▲ DeFi TVL, Source: Defillama
▲ Stablecoin MC, Source: Defillama
In the past few years, DeFi

In 2025, Bitcoin prices soared, and crypto billionaires increasingly invested in traditional real estate to hedge risks. DeFi founder Kulechov purchased a luxury home in London for £22 million, reflecting market weakness and changes in luxury property transactions. Meanwhile, Tether is also actively buying gold, indicating that the trend of digital asset holders shifting to physical assets is becoming more evident.

The crypto market experienced a sharp pullback, with Bitcoin dropping from approximately $89,000 to $82,000 in a short period, a decline of about 7-8%. The main reasons are the decline in tech stocks, escalating geopolitical risks, and liquidity drying up. Microsoft's earnings report raised concerns about AI benefits, and the overall decline in tech stocks directly impacted the crypto market. Large-scale liquidation events intensified selling pressure, causing prices to continue falling. The market structure is fragile, lacking strong buying support, and may face greater adjustment risks in the future.

The Crypto Market was Much Healthier 5 Years Ago
Author: Jeff Dorman (Arca CIO)
Compiled by: Deep Tide TechFlow
Introduction:
Is the crypto market becoming increasingly dull? Arca Chief Investment Officer Jeff Dorman points out that despite infrastructure and regulatory environments never being stronger, the current investment climate is the "worst in history."
He sharply criticizes industry leaders' failed attempts to force cryptocurrencies into "macro trading tools," leading to extreme asset correlation. Dorman calls for a return to the essence of "tokens as securities packaging," focusing

Author: Zhou, ChainCatcher
By the end of 2025, Hong Kong-based crypto payment company RedotPay completed a Series B funding round of $107 million led by Goodwater Capital, with top institutions such as Sequoia China, Pantera Capital, and Circle Ventures also participating in the follow-on investments.
Image from RootData
Why has it become a dark horse in the payment track?
RedotPay's story began in early 2023. Its co-founder and CEO Michael Gao previously worked at top banks such as HSBC and DBS, and was also a core member of the crypto technology service provider ChainUp. Additionally, the company's COO Troy

Mask Network announces the takeover of the decentralized social protocol Lens Protocol, reflecting the development challenges of decentralized social projects. Lens, launched by Aave's founder, aims to challenge data monopolies, but has fewer active users than expected. Mask Network plans to enhance the decentralized social experience; however, the grand narrative of the entire field has been shattered by reality.

Author: Chloe, ChainCatcher
In the world of traditional finance, stock buybacks are often seen as a "confidence booster" for the market. When a company announces a share repurchase, it usually indicates that management believes the stock is undervalued or that the company has ample cash flow. However, applying similar strategies to Web3 projects does not yield positive results.
Recently, Jupiter co-founder SIONG initiated a discussion on X, proposing to halt the $JUP token buyback plan. He stated that Jupiter has invested over $70 million in token repurchases over the past year, but the token's performance has been lackluster; meanwhile, Helium founder Amir

Author: Zhou, ChainCatcher
At the beginning of 2026, the sharp fluctuations in Bitcoin prices once again put the crypto market maker Wintermute in the spotlight.
During the weakest liquidity window of the global markets on New Year's Day, Wintermute frequently made large deposits into Binance, sparking strong community suspicions of "institutional secret dumping."
On December 31, New Year's Eve, Bitcoin's price hovered around $92,000. On-chain monitoring data shows that Wintermute deposited a net of 1,213 Bitcoins into Binance on that day, worth approximately $107 million.
The transfer occurred precisely during the period when European and American traders entered late-night rest and the Asian trading session was ending, a widely recognized vacuum period with the most scarce liquidity. Possibly due to this selling pressure, Bitcoin's price quickly lost ground, falling below $90,000.

Source: a16zcrypto
Compiled by: Zhou, ChainCatcher
1. This year, we will see better and more sophisticated stablecoin gateways
Last year, the trading volume of stablecoins was estimated to reach up to $4.6 trillion, continuously breaking records. To put this number into perspective: it is more than 20 times the transaction volume of PayPal; nearly three times that of Visa (one of the largest payment networks in the world); and is rapidly approaching the transaction volume of the US electronic financial transaction network ACH.
Today, you can send stablecoins in less than a second for less than a cent. However, the unresolved issue is how to connect these digital currencies with the financial systems people use daily—in other words, how to provide entry and exit channels for stablecoins.
New generation startups are filling this gap,

DeFi is gradually losing its sense of exploration, with participant behaviors becoming highly similar. Returns are seen as basic expectations, and lending has turned into short-term financing. Trust crises are intensifying, making the ecosystem more closed. To reshape its attractiveness in the future, it is necessary to promote the structuring of different user behaviors and avoid further optimizing the existing models.

Original Title: Crypto is going mainstream—just not in the way you might think
Original Author: @binafisch
Translated by: Peggy, BlockBeats
Editor's Note:
Cryptocurrency is going mainstream, but in a way that might be completely different from what you imagine. It won’t appear in the form of Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Solana, nor will it be dominated by NFT art or meme coins. Instead, it will quietly integrate into the underlying layers of digital finance and the internet, becoming a secure communication layer between applications, much like the transition from HTTP to HTTPS.
Today, stablecoin trading volumes are approaching those of Visa and PayPal, and Web3 is “invisibly” entering everyday life. In the future...

Source: Greenfield
Translation: Zhou, ChainCatcher
The digital asset ecosystem is evolving in unexpected ways: new fundamental elements, new behavior patterns, and new coordination tools are constantly emerging. What was considered experimental a year ago may have already become foundational today. As investors, our duty is to closely monitor these changes and understand which emerging ideas can develop into lasting infrastructure and truly gain market recognition.
Last year, we shared our predictions for the trends in the coming year. This year, we are taking a different approach. We no longer claim to foresee the future; instead, we want to share our vision: a wish list of ten ideas, questions, and products that we hope founders will begin to address by 2026.
Through these reflections, we can gain a deeper understanding of the next batch of significant opportunities.

This article explores the principles of natural selection in financial markets and DeFi, revealing the vulnerabilities of the isolated vault + custodian model through the analysis of Stream Finance's collapse. Stream's failure highlights design flaws driven by blind pursuit of returns and market share, emphasizing the importance of risk management and transparency. Only protocols that can effectively respond to market pressures can survive in competition. The article concludes that future success depends on adhering to stricter design principles rather than simply chasing profits.

The DeFi market has experienced the largest capital outflow since the Terra UST collapse in 2022, totaling $1 billion. Stream Finance froze deposits and withdrawals after losing $93 million, causing its stablecoin xUSD to plummet significantly and triggering a chain liquidation. This incident exposed the fragility and lack of transparency of DeFi protocols, serving as a market warning about the importance of risk management for users.

The MMT short squeeze event revealed market manipulation and a trust crisis. KOLs and speculators faced huge losses due to high leverage short positions, with the price plummeting almost erasing all evaporated capital. This incident serves as a reminder for investors to exercise caution and control risks in uncertain markets to avoid repeating the same mistakes.

The biggest issue in the cryptocurrency space is rarely discussed. To create permissionless markets, we replace the natural price discovery mechanism with formulas. This makes trading continuous and accessible but also removes the elements that maintain fair pricing.
Price discovery has always been a natural part of market operation. Buyers and sellers trade openly, and prices are formed during these transactions. It doesn’t require any formulas or fixed curves; it’s simply how markets reach consensus.
With the development of decentralized finance (DeFi), this process has started to change. Automated market makers (AMMs) open trading pairs to everyone, replacing traditional buy and sell quotes with curves. Liquidity becomes more stable, and markets no longer need counterparties to operate. This undoubtedly improves trading convenience and speed, but some important factors also shift in the process. Prices are no longer...

Author: zhou, ChainCatcher

Retail investors fear being cut off the most, and even more so, they fear missing out. CZ stands at the intersection of these two emotions; a single sentence can double someone's investment overnight or lead to a complete loss. The dramatic fluctuations in price are evident in assets related to CZ, as if once they are connected to him, the price action deviates from the fundamentals and responds instead to the emotional aspect.
CZ actively favors and publicly buys only a few cryptocurrencies, yet each time he can stir up the market. On November 2, CZ posted that he used personal funds to buy on Binance.