Triggered by a routine macro shock, crypto once again unraveled faster than any other market. Not because of sentiment alone, but because CEX risk engines, DEX liquidation incentives, and always-on leverage turn small moves into cascading stress.
Alex Harutunian
From Polymarket’s stripped-down design to Kalshi’s regulatory breakthrough, prediction markets are turning collective opinion into a financial asset class — and a new battleground over who defines truth
Alex Harutunian
While crypto remains banned, China’s state-backed blockchain ecosystem — led by Conflux — is expanding across Asia and into global finance. Conflux Network bridges China’s academic research, state strategy, and open blockchain innovation.
Alex Harutunian
DeFi is moving from standalone apps into the backend of exchanges, with Coinbase and Crypto.com leading by embedding Morpho’s lending vaults. This “embedded DeFi” model raises a key question: are exchanges becoming banks, or just UIs? The answer will define DeFi’s role in future banking.
Alex Harutunian
After years of development, blockchain games still capture only a sliver of the gaming industry. The promise of true asset ownership, stable economies, and transferability remains unmet. Recent trends suggest blockchain was more hype feature than genuine necessity
Alex Harutunian
Triggered by a routine macro shock, crypto once again unraveled faster than any other market. Not because of sentiment alone, but because CEX risk engines, DEX liquidation incentives, and always-on leverage turn small moves into cascading stress.
Alex Harutunian07.01.2026 US Senate Banking and Commerce committees to work on comprehensive crypto legislation this month. 07.01.2026 Polymarket to supply its market data and indicators to Barron’s, The Wall Street Journal, and other Dow Jones publications. 07.01.2026 Chen Zhi, founder and chairman of Prince
01.01.2026 EU crypto tax transparency directive DAC8 takes effect, requiring crypto-asset service providers to report user data to national tax authorities. 01.01.2026 MiCA comes into force in Spain. 31.12.2025 Ethereum smart contract deployments hit a record high in Q4. 2026 OUTLOOK Haseeb Qureshi (Dragonfly
Balancer Protocol was exploited through a tiny rounding bug in its code. As losses neared $100 million, projects froze pools, rolled back blockchains, and clawed back funds—revealing the centralized and still untamed side of decentralized finance
01.12.2025 Telegram’s Pavel Durov announces Cocoon, a decentralized confidential AI compute network. 01.12.2025 SushiSwap CEO steps down as Synthesis invests $3.3M in the struggling DEX. 01.12.2025 Grayscale to launch the first Chainlink ETF in the US. 01.12.2025 Germany and Switzerland
29.10.25 Ondo Finance launches Ondo Global Markets on BNB Chain. 29.10.25 Ethereum Foundation launches portal to guide institutional adoption. 29.10.25 Securitize goes public via SPAC merger with Cantor Fitzgerald’s CF Acquisition Corp VIII. 28.10.25 Trump Media & Technology Group to launch
Kazakhstan launched a state-backed crypto reserve, Alem Crypto Fund, partnering with Binance Kazakhstan and starting with an investment in $BNB. SWIFT is building a blockchain ledger with 30+ banks using Consensys. Polish lawmakers passed a Crypto-Asset Market Act, aligning rules with the EU’s MiCAR. Vitalik Buterin opposes EU’s
Uniswap’s Unichain has boosted L2 volumes past $40B, but liquidity tells a different story. TVL has halved since July, exposing the limits of incentive-driven growth. Despite cheaper fees, users remain on Ethereum—where Uniswap continues to be one of the network’s largest revenue engines.
TON Strategy Company, formerly Verb Technology, has rebranded as a Toncoin treasury, holding $713M in TON and targeting over 5% of supply. By staking its holdings and adopting financial engineering akin to Strategy’s playbook, it aims to turn crypto reserves into shareholder returns
From $GOAT to $FART, memecoins show how hype burns fast and budgets vanish faster. Market caps in the tens of millions may look like real businesses, but behind the joke lies sunk marketing spend, fragile communities, and the math of attention that always runs out of breath
Blockchain developers don't always agree on the best way to improve the networks. Several Ethereum developers have questioned Vitalik Buterin's proposed gas limit raise, and Bitcoin developer Luke Dashjr's Ordinals inscriptions blocking upgrade has itself been blocked.
Sasha Markevich
The U.K. government has found itself in the middle of a(nother) political firestorm this week... and all thanks to a TV drama. Mr Bates vs the Post Office told the story of hundreds of sub-postmasters who were prosecuted for false accounting and theft between 1999 and 2015, due
Jack Martin
For all the key details of new blockchain projects in the banking world, real-world asset (RWA) tokenization, and central bank digital currency (CBDC) updates, the Observers 'Banking and CBDC Roundup' has you covered. This week it has been difficult to avoid the SEC's approval of 11
Jack Martin
Coinbase has entered a partnership with Yellow Card to promote the exchange and USDC across 20 African countries. Meanwhile, USDC issuer Circle has applied for an IPO in the U.S.
Sasha Markevich
Anyone hoping that the SEC’s approval of several spot bitcoin ETFs this week might lead to a brief respite in the topic’s domination of the crypto news cycle is sadly out of luck. If anything, reporting seems instead to have kicked into overdrive. We sift through the noise to give the full picture.
Jack Martin
The latest report by the Solana Foundation accounts for a prolific network in regards to developer activity.
Eva Senzaj Pauram
Clients who withdrew over $100,000 in the 90 days prior to bankruptcy must pay back the creditor 27.5% of this amount to receive distribution payments under the settlement plan.
Sasha Markevich07.01.2026 US Senate Banking and Commerce committees to work on comprehensive crypto legislation this month. 07.01.2026 Polymarket to supply its market data and indicators to Barron’s, The Wall Street Journal, and other Dow Jones publications. 07.01.2026 Chen Zhi, founder and chairman of Prince
01.01.2026 EU crypto tax transparency directive DAC8 takes effect, requiring crypto-asset service providers to report user data to national tax authorities. 01.01.2026 MiCA comes into force in Spain. 31.12.2025 Ethereum smart contract deployments hit a record high in Q4. 2026 OUTLOOK Haseeb Qureshi (Dragonfly
Balancer Protocol was exploited through a tiny rounding bug in its code. As losses neared $100 million, projects froze pools, rolled back blockchains, and clawed back funds—revealing the centralized and still untamed side of decentralized finance
01.12.2025 Telegram’s Pavel Durov announces Cocoon, a decentralized confidential AI compute network. 01.12.2025 SushiSwap CEO steps down as Synthesis invests $3.3M in the struggling DEX. 01.12.2025 Grayscale to launch the first Chainlink ETF in the US. 01.12.2025 Germany and Switzerland
29.10.25 Ondo Finance launches Ondo Global Markets on BNB Chain. 29.10.25 Ethereum Foundation launches portal to guide institutional adoption. 29.10.25 Securitize goes public via SPAC merger with Cantor Fitzgerald’s CF Acquisition Corp VIII. 28.10.25 Trump Media & Technology Group to launch
Kazakhstan launched a state-backed crypto reserve, Alem Crypto Fund, partnering with Binance Kazakhstan and starting with an investment in $BNB. SWIFT is building a blockchain ledger with 30+ banks using Consensys. Polish lawmakers passed a Crypto-Asset Market Act, aligning rules with the EU’s MiCAR. Vitalik Buterin opposes EU’s
Uniswap’s Unichain has boosted L2 volumes past $40B, but liquidity tells a different story. TVL has halved since July, exposing the limits of incentive-driven growth. Despite cheaper fees, users remain on Ethereum—where Uniswap continues to be one of the network’s largest revenue engines.
TON Strategy Company, formerly Verb Technology, has rebranded as a Toncoin treasury, holding $713M in TON and targeting over 5% of supply. By staking its holdings and adopting financial engineering akin to Strategy’s playbook, it aims to turn crypto reserves into shareholder returns