This is a segment from the Lightspeed newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.







Let’s take a moment to reflect on this year’s biggest memecoin highs and lows. 



Some coins delivered huge gains, stuffing stockings with profits, while others crashed and burned, earning lumps of coal. Let’s take a look at some of the biggest winners and losers in the space — no sugar-coating included.



Political tokens: Naughty or nice?



Jeo Boden, parodying US President Joe Biden, surged 1,548% from $0.06307 to $1.04 before crashing 99.74% to $0.00274. Meanwhile, the Donald Trump inspired MAGA skyrocketed 4,170% from $0.41 to $17.51 but dropped 91.7% to $1.45, following a similar fate.



The Parent Trap



Iggy Azalea's MOTHER sparkled with a 4,798% climb from $0.004709 to $0.2306, but dropped 79% to $0.04837. Unshaken, Azalea has doubled down on her token’s future with Motherland, an online casino project that could breathe new life into the MOTHER token in 2025.



Not to be outdone, Andrew Tate introduced the pseudo-affiliated DADDY, a memecoin designed to counter MOTHER’s success and “flip it for the patriarchy.” DADDY surged 487% from $0.04917 to $0.2886 before succumbing to a 76% loss to now sit at $0.0684.



A lot of hot air



Fartcoin blew onto the scene in late 2024, climbing 3,052% from $0.04067671 to $1.28 and holding steady at $1.25. 



Similarly, GOAT (Goatseus Maximus) paired edgy humor with viral AI marketing, surging 3,002% from $0.04354 to $1.35 before settling at $0.508.



It’s snowing cats and dogs



Popcat exploded 14,400% from $0.01413 to $2.05 before settling at $0.7912. Cat in a Dog's World (MEW) grew 1,312% from $0.0009121 to $0.01288 but fell 51% to $0.006353. MEW’s attempt to challenge the dominance of dog-themed tokens injected some friendly rivalry into the memecoin ecosystem.



Bonk, Solana’s first dog-themed coin, climbed a mere 210% from $0.0000188 to $0.00005825. In comparison, Dogwifhat (WIF) outperformed,

Memes and madness in 2024

This is a segment from the Forward Guidance newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.







As we approach what will undoubtedly be a new era for federal crypto regulation, this state watchdog head has some advice for companies: Start engaging now. 



“Never surprise your regulator,” New York Department of Financial Services Superintendent Adrienne Harris said at the Blockchain Association Policy Summit earlier this month. 



“We are by nature risk-adverse people," she added. "We don’t like to be surprised, so come in and talk to us proactively.” 



Waiting until there is already an enforcement action underway to meet with regulators is a mistake, Harris said. Companies should be having these conversations before they even file applications, she added. 



The comments come as New York continues to be a leader in state-level regulation. It was the first state to design a “BitLicense” program in 2014. The policy, which requires businesses conducting digital asset activities to register with the DFS, came into effect the following year. 



“Foreign jurisdictions and Congress have been for the last several years really borrowing from the New York framework as now it's the gold standard,” Harris said. 



New York’s BitLicense may have been received poorly by the industry at first (at least 10 companies initially left the state when the regulations were announced), but the regulatory framework shows the DFS is committed to allowing investors to access the markets they want, Harris said. 



“It's not our job as a regulator to decide what the market wants or doesn't want, right? These instruments are here,” she added. “This technology is here. It's our job to protect consumers, protect markets and ensure responsible growth in the industry.” 



While President-elect Donald Trump has not commented on whether he would grant more authority to states to oversee the crypto industry, his administration’s efforts to shrink the size of

New York continues to lead on state crypto regulations 

This is a segment from the Forward Guidance newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.







US spot ether products turned five months old yesterday. 



But consistent (and substantial) net inflows only started coming after the election. First, a look at the flows by month:  



Month Net Flows July 23-31 -$484 million August +$6 million September -$46 million October +$43 million November +$1.1 billion December 1-20 +$1.8 billion 



To summarize: A flood of net money exited Grayscale’s higher-priced Ethereum Trust (ETHE) in the first few days after it converted to an ETF. The other funds’ inflows could not fully offset those. 



Then there were three months of rather flat flows. Industry watchers attributed this in part to the need for more education about ETH — an asset with a value prop more difficult to grasp than BTC.



Donald Trump’s election win spurred crypto market euphoria. While bitcoin has hit several new all-time high price levels, ETH hasn’t. 



CoinShares research associate Luke Nolan previously told me he’s eyeing February or March for ETH to hit a new high — as long as ether ETF flows remain strong. 



BTC has gained more institutional attention than ETH because of its easier-to-understand digital gold narrative ($36 billion of net inflows for bitcoin ETFs vs. $2.3 billion for ETH products). 



Then there’s the fact that ETH also faces competition from other layer-1s like solana, Nolan added. Several fund groups have proposed ETFs that would hold SOL.  



“Ethereum developers have taken a long-term view as to improving the protocol whilst Solana has very much focused on capturing attention and demand now,” Nolan said. “They are both valid approaches that each attend to their own use cases and niches.”



Keeping an eye on crypto ETF flows will help us understand investor sentiment toward each asset — whether it be BTC, ETH or others that could soon make their way into an ETF wrapper.







Start your day with

An end-of-year ETH ETF check-in

This is a segment from the 0xResearch newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.







BOB (“Build on Bitcoin”), a hybrid layer-2 solution leveraging Bitcoin and Ethereum, has taken a significant step forward by successfully testing its first BitVM-powered Bitcoin bridge prototype. Developed in partnership with Fiamma, the prototype in production will deliver trust-minimized BTC bridging. Doing so marks a milestone in the chain’s scaling — with bitcoin, the asset, at the center.



BitVM bridges stand out from existing solutions like wBTC or cbBTC — which rely on centralized entities — and from semi-trusted models. By contrast, BitVM leverages a fraud-proof system, where BTC deposits and withdrawals are secured so long as one participant acts honestly. 



“Bitcoin security and trust-minimized BTC bridging are the two most important pillars of Bitcoin L2s,” said Alexei Zamyatin, BOB co-founder and BitVM2 contributor.



The bridge prototype is expected to be deployed on BOB’s testnet in early 2025, followed by a mainnet rollout after audits. Additionally, BOB announced plans to integrate with bitcoin staking service Babylon with an aim to establish itself as a Bitcoin-secured network with Bitcoin finality.



Signaling for Bitcoin scaling preferences



The open Wiki-style signaling forum on Bitcoin soft fork upgrades reflects the growing need for community consensus on covenants like OP_CAT and OP_CTV. Developers, including Zamyatin, have weighed in on proposals. For instance, Zamyatin has marked OP_CTV as “Weak,” while signaling “Evaluating” for OP_CAT, thus indicating areas where more discussion is required.



The forum is valuable because it collects rationales in one place, moving discussions away from social media fights, according to Zamyatin.“It makes it easier to evaluate proposals, summarize pros and cons, and have meaningful discussions,” he told Blockworks.



The signaling process has revealed divided opinions: While

Bitcoin’s $100K milestone reflections, what’s next

This is a segment from the Empire newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.







In the mid-16th century, Nostradamus made 942 predictions in eight years.



He’d supposedly dictated every one as a poem to his secretary. All while hallucinating on heroic doses of nutmeg. 



Sadly, I don’t have a secretary. But why should that stop me?



Here are five crypto prophecies that will totally come true in 2025. And if not, they can easily be rehashed for hundreds of years, just like Nostradamus’s.




AI chatbots will gamify flash loan attacks.




We rarely hear about flash loan attacks anymore. 



Apparently, the US Department of Justice largely put a stop to them after they nabbed Avi “it’s just a profitable trading strategy” Eisenberg last year.



That is until some diabolical edgelord trains an AI model to trawl the dingiest illiquid corners of DeFi for potential targets. 



After all, who’s to blame: The prompt engineer or the LLM with a crypto wallet?




Either a bitcoin ETF or a nation-state will be hacked




Never mind that most ETFs have abstracted the actual handling of coins far away from their own liability — presumably replaced by a WhatsApp chat with a Coinbase Custody support representative.



Next year will mark a return of monumental crypto hacks. 



It’s indeed been a while since we saw one. Maybe the Ronin hack was the last hack that really, really hurt. 



Be on the lookout for a nation-state or ETF issuer to fumble the bag, perhaps by falling for a North Korean phishing email for a phony Chick-fil-A coupon.




The FTC will sue a memecoin




You’ve probably heard that the next SEC chair should be more friendly to crypto. 



But that’s just the SEC. There are still more than a dozen US agencies that could probably still pull some real boomer moves next year.



Enter the Federal Trade Commission. They’ve gone after crypto companies in the past, including Celsius and Voyager, and also pushed federal cases

5 crypto predictions for 2025

This is a segment from the Lightspeed newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.







Marginfi co-founder Edgar Pavlovsky departed suddenly from the Solana DeFi project in April. 



The split wasn’t exactly amicable. “I don't agree with the way things have been done internally or externally,” Pavlovsky wrote on X at the time. 



Now, eight months later, Pavlovsky is a core contributor to Paladin, a Solana client meant to protect validators from so-called sandwich attacks while helping them “earn more in block rewards.” 



Around the same time, Temporal, a crypto research shop with multiple marginfi-linked members, began advertising “Nozomi,” a proprietary quic client partially meant to prevent sandwich attacks. 



Temporal is legally distinct from mrgn and marginfi. Temporal said most of its staff never worked at marginfi.



A Temporal researcher I spoke to was critical of the project being worked on by his former colleague. The two products aren’t the same, by both parties’ accounts, but they are both focused on the same niche. There’s one notable difference though — Pavlovsky’s Paladin has a token, while marginfi, controversially, has yet to debut a native coin. 



Temporal’s Nozomi infrastructure is built to land transactions as fast as possible. It also prevents sandwich attacks by only sending transactions to “whitelisted” Solana validators who are known not to attack users. The project pitches this as a way to democratize trading. 



“We have a ton of experience from our trading arm getting the best execution for what we want to do,” Jakob Povsic, a developer at Temporal, said. Temporal is “getting this level of sophistication for basically anyone.”



Paladin, on the other hand, is a fork of the Jito-Solana client that identifies and drops sandwich attacks from transaction bundles and helps Solana validators prioritize transactions with high priority fees attached, Pavlovsky told me. Access to Paladin

Mrgn’s co-founder built a new product. Some ex-colleagues aren't fans.

This is a segment from the Forward Guidance newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.







President-elect Donald Trump appears to be working down his crypto promises list via another personnel decision. 



Trump said Sunday that Bo Hines will serve as executive director of the Presidential Council of Advisers for Digital Assets. David Sacks, the PayPal co-founder who Trump tapped to be the US government’s AI and crypto czar earlier this month, will chair this group.



Hines will work with Sacks “to foster innovation and growth in the digital assets space, while ensuring industry leaders have the resources they need to succeed,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.



“Together, they will create an environment where this industry can flourish, and remain a cornerstone of our nation's technological advancement,” he added.



A former NC State (and Yale) football player, Hines sought to represent North Carolina’s 13th Congressional district in 2022, but lost that election to Democrat Wiley Nickel. He launched a campaign in December 2023 to represent the state’s 6th Congressional district — endorsing Trump that same month before posting this to X in January:




Cryptocurrency is the epitome of individual empowerment in finance.We don’t need the government stepping in and slapping burdensome regulations on financial innovation. This new sector needs the freedom to grow organically.Decentralized finance is the way of the future if…— Bo Hines (@BoHines) January 16, 2024




Trump had referenced a US crypto council in July during his address at the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville. He said it was something he would assemble “immediately” before asking for a show of hands who wanted to be on it. The crowd roared.



The then-presidential candidate said the council’s task of designing crypto regulatory guidance would get done in 100 days. We’ll have to monitor that. 



Reuters reported last month that people at crypto companies Ripple,

Trump crypto appointment spurs optimism 

This is a segment from the Forward Guidance newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.







President Biden over the weekend signed Congress’s bipartisan spending package, narrowly avoiding a government shutdown and keeping federal operations funded through mid-March. 



The bill, cut from 1,500 pages to around 100, does not raise the debt ceiling, a provision President-elect Trump requested. Also out: a 3.8% raise for members of Congress, a bipartisan provision included in the original bill. 



The eleventh-hour deal did little to calm markets, which have struggled to maintain their post-election momentum this month. The S&P 500 is down 1.7% since the start of December. The tech-heavy Nasdaq has fared better, gaining 1.4% month to date, but the index lost almost 3% last week alone. 



The dip, which Sevens Report Research founder Tom Essaye attributes to hawkish commentary from the Fed, political turmoil and disappointing initial jobless claims data last week, could be a “potential preview” for the new year. 



“Now, to be clear, while I say that, I’m also not saying I expect the market to decline next year,” Essaye added. 



“Instead, I think last week was a preview of 2025 because it was a realization of what I have been warning about: Namely that uncertainty around the key drivers of this bull market is going to rise and we saw that last week with two of the drivers of rally, expectations for Fed rate cuts and pro-growth policies.” 



The S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite were trading fairly flat midway through Monday’s session, up 0.6% and 1%, respectively, as of 2:15 pm ET. Market moves are expected to be relatively soft this week with a limited number of trading days. 



Meanwhile, bitcoin has also stalled. The largest digital currency is down around 13% from its all-time high of more than $108,000. 



Historically, cryptos deliver mixed returns in the final days of the year. When trying to predict what might happen this week,

Stocks trade sideways after Congress passes stopgap spending bill

This is a segment from the 0xResearch newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.







“You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” — Harvey Dent



For Hyperliquid, it took all of 25 days since its highly acclaimed airdrop to run into a bout of controversy.



It started when Taylor Monahan (@tayvano), a security researcher at MetaMask, sounded the alarm on a series of Hyperliquid transactions made from North Korea-tagged wallets. Based on Monahan’s data, the wallets have accrued a $701k loss from ETH perps positions.



It’s a meager amount for a state-sponsored hacker group. But what got people in an uproar was the revelation that North Korea hackers were actively familiarizing themselves with the Hyperliquid platform, presumably to launch an impending hack.



Hyperliquid chain’s highly centralized validator set of four made it extra vulnerable to a potential hack, Monahan claims.




There are no more than 4 validators and all run the same code, possibly collocated as well. Centralized infra, build systems, etc. maintained and accessed by unknown number of founders, c-levels, and engjneers who use the same devices to access said systems as they do to talk to…— Tay 💖 (@tayvano_) December 23, 2024




Hyperliquid’s liquidity is locked in a lock-and-mint style bridge from Arbitrum, where Hyperliquid used to exist as a perps DEX application.



When Hyperliquid migrated to its own Tendermint-consensus PoS L1 chain in March 2024, the team retained the lock-and-mint style bridge from Arbitrum, which remains the only way to onboard onto Hyperliquid today.



Based on Dune, the deposit bridge has seen a record high net outflow of $114.7m in USDC liquidity in the past day, though that is still a fraction of the remaining $2.22b in TVL.



Source: Dune



Talks of a Hyperliquid hack are merely speculative at this time, but if one happened, here’s a rough sketch of how it would play out.




Everyone

Hyperliquid under scrutiny amid signs of North Korean hacker activity

This is a segment from the Empire newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.







That seems to have been Robinhood’s approach to crypto this past year, from its Bitstamp acquisition (still expected to close in the first half of next year) to its response to the Wells notice it received from the SEC. The firm has shown an interest and, dare I say, commitment to crypto.



Johann Kerbrat told me that’s not changing anytime soon and, if anything, the “enthusiasm in crypto,” is serving to help the firm as it plots out the upcoming year.



But even before the bullishness really took off after Donald Trump won the presidential election, the firm reported $38 billion in crypto assets under custody as of November 2024. And while Kerbrat wasn’t able to provide a more updated number, he did note that the company’s seen an increase in engagement if you’re looking at customer behavior, echoing what he told Empire back in October.



“In November alone, we did more than $3 billion in volume, which is, I think, almost twice as much as Q3,” he added. “If you look at the activity onchain … we see people buying on Robinhood, transferring to their self-custody wallet or transferring to other places,” he noted. 



To put these figures in perspective, this is just a year after Robinhood’s trading revenues tanked in the same quarter back in 2023.



Kerbrat’s also noticed a tick up in NFT activity. While activity is still way down from 2022 (to no one’s surprise), it’s looking like sales will either match or fall just under last year’s total figure, according to data from CryptoSlam. 



As of right now, with a little over a week left in the year, NFT global sales volume sits at $8.69 billion. Last year, that figure totaled $8.71 billion. If we’re just looking at the average sale in US dollars, though, then this year outperformed last year at $122 on average in comparison to 2023’s $95. 



Source: CryptoSlam!



Europe has also been a big

Robinhood wants to be a tokenization 'pioneer'

This is a segment from the Lightspeed newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.







Sanctum, the Solana startup focused on growing the network’s liquid staking ecosystem, launched a new primitive today called creator coins. 



Creator coins are essentially Solana liquid staking tokens that Sanctum issues while giving the yield to creators. Fans can earn loyalty points for holding creator coins, and creators can use those points to dole out perks. It’s a new spin on an old concept in crypto, but Sanctum thinks launching with more crypto-native creators can help it pick up adoption where others have failed.



Sanctum is a newer startup that came up through the Solana Foundation’s startup incubator this spring and promised to create an “infinite LST future” on Solana. Its initial flagship product was called INF — a token that helps provide liquidity to a pool of Solana LSTs.



It then carried out a much-hyped airdrop focused on “earnestness” that ignited some controversy over the summer. Since then, Sanctum has been a bit quieter, most notably launching LSTs with Asia-based crypto exchanges including Binance in the early fall. 



Creator coins are a concept Sanctum has seemingly toyed with for a while as well — co-founder FP Lee created the fpSOL liquid staking token as a “personal LST” experiment in May. 



Creator coin holders forgo their SOL staking yield to support creators. Sanctum takes a small cut of this as well, Sanctum’s anonymous co-founder J told me. Sanctum’s Solana staking APY is around 10% on average, J added.



In exchange, users earn “seeds,” which are loyalty points that can track fans’ investment and let creators offer loyalty perks. 



When I asked why creator coins couldn’t just pass along some staking yield to users while charging a commission for the creators, J said giving creators all the rewards “makes economic sense for now,” but this could be changed in the future.



One obvious target

Solana liquid staking startup Sanctum trials ‘creator coins’

This is a segment from the Forward Guidance newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.







When examining crypto stocks, chatting with a co-portfolio manager of the long-running blockchain-focused Amplify Transformational Data Sharing ETF (BLOK) makes for a good convo.  



Dan Weiskopf told me he’s more optimistic about 2025 now than he was about this year at the end of 2023.



A main reason? The “crazy opportunity” for BLOK investors that’s set to come as more pure-play crypto companies go public. 



Some expect stablecoin issuer Circle could be among the next to do so. Weiskopf also has his eye on Figure Technologies.



While a few more bitcoin miners could also go public, that’s a crowded field, Weiskopf noted. But BLOK would consider holding cloud-computing firm CoreWeave — one of mining giant Core Scientific’s largest clients.



Speaking of Core Scientific, that stock — up ~320% year to date — is BLOK’s No. 1 holding (4.67%). Another interesting miner to Weiskopf is Hut 8 — the ETF’s sixth-largest holding, at 4.16%. 







“I think we did a really good job repositioning and recalibrating amongst the miners in capturing the diversification into the AI side of things,” the PM said.



Hut 8 is weighted slightly above MicroStrategy — a stock set to enter the Nasdaq 100 index next week (I’ll write more about that on Monday). BLOK started buying MSTR in August 2020 (when it was $14), Weiskopf and co-PM Mike Venuto noted. 



MSTR shares were trading around $350 this afternoon (up more than 400% YTD). Benchmark analysts on Monday upped their price target for the stock to $650 after MicroStrategy increased its bitcoin holdings to 439,000 BTC.



That said, Weiskopf and Venuto recently reduced BLOK’s exposure to MSTR and CORZ as the stocks “rallied past our weighting limits,” they added. In other words, they’re trimming the winners in hopes of moving into other successes.



On that diversification point: As the BLOK