🟪 Macro verses
Readings on the economy, crypto VC and more
📚 0xResearch: Big-picture readings
2025 cryptocurrency and Web3 fundraising market raised $50.6 billion. But is it that the full story?
The Crypto Fundraising team argues the $50.6 billion headline is misleading, because almost half the capital came from a small number of M&A deals — meaning consolidation drove the year more than fresh venture risk-taking. VC did rebound, but it got far more selective, with fewer deals and much larger check sizes as early-stage funding tightened and capital concentrated into proven winners.
Public markets also reopened, and funding flowed most into finance, payments, infrastructure and prediction markets, signaling a market that’s maturing toward regulated rails and real distribution rather than broad speculative experimentation.
Citrini Research argues 2026 could deliver a better macro tape than consensus as productivity accelerates even with a cooling labor market, with AI-driven efficiency acting as the primary growth engine. It sees US policy turning increasingly pro-growth into midterms, with housing as the key lever through MBS support and affordability initiatives that could restart activity and lift cyclicals. On liquidity, they highlight improving Fed dynamics via a new reserve program that eases funding stress and reintroduces a tailwind for risk assets.
Geopolitically, they frame instability as opportunity, staying constructive on oil and especially on tankers, where sanctions and shipping constraints create upside asymmetry. Globally, they favor LatAm materials and select ASEAN supply chain markets, while remaining cautiously bullish on China as reflation and capital markets activity improve.
Umberto published a blog post examining Multiple Concurrent Proposers (MCP), the consensus mechanism designed to eliminate proposer power rather than auction it.
The post explains how MCP replaces single-leader block proposals with multiple simultaneous proposers whose batches are deterministically merged, removing discretion over transaction inclusion and ordering. Unlike PBS, which creates markets around block construction, MCP embeds proposer duties into existing consensus incentives.
The analysis emphasizes that MCP eliminates consensus-layer MEV (reordering, selective inclusion, information asymmetry) but requires encryption to fully close informational channels, and notes trade-offs including coordination overhead and liveness degradation tolerance.
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ERC 8004 introduces a new trust layer for AI agents by standardizing onchain identity, reputation, and validation. As agents begin handling capital and coordinating autonomously, trust becomes the key constraint to broader adoption. The rollout mirrors the early x402 narrative, where adoption lagged the initial launch until major integrations and a viral use case pulled attention into the ecosystem. If ERC 8004 follows a similar path, downstream infrastructure tied to the standard could see outsized benefit as the narrative gains traction. The primary beneficiaries are likely to be agent frameworks and launchpads at the distribution layer, agent to agent coordination platforms that enable delegation and payments, and validation providers that offer stronger security and execution guarantees.
by Kunal Doshi
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