CoinPhoton

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, believes the network has “solved” one of the most challenging problems in crypto: the blockchain trilemma.

In a post on X over the weekend, Buterin highlighted the role of two key upgrades, Peer Data Availability Sampling (PeerDAS) and Zero-Knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machines (ZK-EVMs), saying they are transforming Ethereum into “an entirely new and more powerful type of decentralized network.”

According to him, with PeerDAS (implemented in 2025) and ZK-EVMs (expected to be partially adopted across the network starting in 2026), Ethereum can simultaneously achieve decentralization, consensus, and high bandwidth. “The trilemma has been solved – not on paper, but with live, running code,” Buterin emphasized.

PeerDAS and ZK-EVM: Ethereum’s new technical foundation

PeerDAS is a scalability improvement introduced in the Fusaka upgrade in December, enabling Ethereum to handle significantly larger volumes of data.

Meanwhile, ZK-EVMs are virtual machines compatible with both zero-knowledge proofs and the existing Ethereum Virtual Machine. This technology has been around for some time, but according to Buterin, it is still in the “alpha” stage: performance is ready, but security improvements are still needed.

He outlined a roughly four-year roadmap for ZK-EVMs to be fully utilized within Ethereum. Once achieved, the vision of fully solving the blockchain trilemma will be officially realized.

Roadmap 2026–2030

Buterin outlined key development milestones:

– 2026: Significant gas limit increases independent of ZK-EVM, thanks to BALs and ePBS; first opportunities to run a ZK-EVM node emerge.

– 2026–2028: Adjustments to gas pricing, state structure, execution payload integration into blobs, and other technical changes to ensure safe higher gas limits.

– 2027–2030: Further large gas limit increases as ZK-EVM becomes the primary method for block validation on the network.

Bitcoin whale inflows to Binance surge

According to CryptoQuant data, Bitcoin inflows to Binance are increasingly dominated by whale-sized transactions.

The monthly average inflow per transaction to Binance reached 21.7 BTC in December 2025, up sharply from just 0.86 BTC in early January 2024—an increase of roughly 34x. This metric measures the average BTC per deposit, signaling that larger holders are becoming far more active on the exchange.

Notably, this trend began accelerating in early 2024, around the time spot Bitcoin ETFs were approved. While this may be coincidental, the timing suggests that larger entities may have started using Binance alongside growing institutional adoption.

Binance is gradually positioning itself as a key venue for Bitcoin whale flows.

CZ: Don’t chase “10x bets,” watch where I put my time and effort

Changpeng Zhao (CZ), founder of Binance, recently shared a blunt yet thought-provoking view on the “get-rich-quick” mindset that has become widespread in the crypto market. In a Jan. 5 statement, CZ said he is frequently asked by the community what the “next big opportunity” will be — in other words, which bet could deliver 10x returns in a short period of time. His answer, however, is far simpler than most people expect.

According to CZ, when asked about opportunities, he has often replied: “Look at where I spend my time and effort. That’s the most important signal.” Still, most people ignore this and continue chasing overnight 10x gains. CZ stressed that this kind of blind pursuit carries a failure rate of 99.99999%, making losses almost inevitable.

His comments clearly reflect a long-standing reality of the crypto market, especially after repeated boom cycles driven by memecoins, trend-based tokens, and projects heavily hyped on social media. Many new investors are drawn in by stories of quick profits, while overlooking core fundamentals such as technology, team quality, business models, and long-term sustainability. The familiar outcome is that after sharp rallies, most assets collapse, leaving heavy losses for latecomers.

CZ himself is a textbook example of the opposite approach to short-term speculation. Long before Binance became the world’s largest crypto exchange, he spent years building expertise in financial technology, trading systems, and blockchain infrastructure. Rather than searching for “10x bets,” CZ focused on developing long-term foundations — from infrastructure and products to entire ecosystems. In his view, it is this commitment to real value, technology, and long-term vision that creates sustainable success, not the relentless chase for short-lived hype.

Washington is advancing the CLARITY Act, a major crypto market structure bill aimed at resolving long-standing regulatory confusion between the SEC and the CFTC. The legislation seeks to clearly distinguish when digital assets are securities versus commodities, establish registration pathways for crypto trading venues, and reduce overlapping oversight.
A central feature of the bill is a DeFi carve-out that prevents regulators from treating blockchain infrastructure, software, wallets, front ends, and liquidity pools as regulated intermediaries solely for operating code or providing access. While this limits registration and compliance obligations for DeFi participants, the bill preserves federal authority to pursue fraud and market manipulation.
The CLARITY Act also includes a federal preemption clause that curtails state-level securities oversight by classifying “digital commodities” as covered securities, replacing fragmented state rules with a unified federal framework. Supporters argue this creates regulatory clarity and market efficiency, while critics warn it weakens investor protection and enables front-end manipulation.
Ultimately, the bill represents Congress’s attempt to end the SEC–CFTC turf war and replace a decade of ad-hoc crypto enforcement with a coherent regulatory map. Its impact will depend on how the Senate revises key definitions and how regulators implement the rules once enacted.

On-chain data shows that Wintermute transferred large amounts of Bitcoin to Binance during year-end periods of thin liquidity, supporting accusations that the firm added selling pressure as prices weakened on Dec. 31. Over three consecutive days, Wintermute consistently deposited more BTC to Binance than it withdrew, aligning with a distribution pattern during vulnerable market conditions.

However, claims that Wintermute urgently accumulated Bitcoin ahead of the Fed announcement on Jan. 2 are not supported by the same data. On that day, Wintermute’s net BTC balance declined by 418 BTC, indicating net distribution rather than accumulation. The transaction patterns reflect active market-making and inventory rotation across exchanges, not panic buying.

While blockchain data confirms the timing and scale of Wintermute’s transfers to Binance, it cannot reveal execution details inside exchange order books. The evidence supports scrutiny of the Dec. 31 selling narrative but clearly refutes the Jan. 2 accumulation thesis.

Crypto venture funding in 2025 recovered in total dollars but became highly concentrated, with most capital flowing into a small number of companies—especially digital asset treasury (DAT) firms—while early-stage startups faced one of the toughest fundraising environments in years. Although traditional venture investment increased year over year, the number of deals fell sharply as investors favored proven business models over early risk.

The pullback in early-stage funding was driven by reduced venture capital supply, underperforming funds, and investor focus on AI. Clearer regulation and growing institutional adoption further pushed capital toward scalable businesses such as stablecoins, exchanges, and market infrastructure. Many investors viewed 2025 as a healthier reset rather than a downturn.

Looking to 2026, VCs expect a modest recovery in early-stage funding, with higher standards around traction and fundamentals. Stablecoins, payments, institutional infrastructure, and real-world asset tokenization are seen as the most promising areas, while token sales are likely to play a selective, complementary role alongside traditional venture capital rather than replacing it.

As Ethereum wraps up a pivotal institutional year, ether.fi CEO and co-founder Mike Silagadze is already looking toward 2026, arguing that the network’s next phase will be driven less by speculation and more by financial products that feel familiar to everyday users.

Speaking to CoinDesk, Silagadze described 2025 as a turning point marked by a wave of institutional onboarding. While staking remains constrained within ETFs, he said other vehicles — particularly digital asset treasuries (DATs) — have moved much faster. Several DATs have already deployed capital into ether.fi, a move he said put them “on the bleeding edge” and had a tangible impact on ether’s price, which rose from a 2025 low of $1,472 in April to a peak of $4,832 during the height of the DAT trend.

Looking ahead, Silagadze said his optimism for 2026 centers on the maturation of Ethereum’s financial ecosystem, especially the rapid rise of crypto-native neobanks. These platforms, which combine stablecoins, self-custody and onchain yield, are in his view better positioned than ETFs to drive sustained adoption and expose users to real onchain activity.

Ultimately, Silagadze believes Ethereum’s success in 2026 will hinge on delivering practical utility at scale. Adoption, he argued, will come from neobank-style players offering real-world use cases — from tokenized stocks to accessible banking services — as the ecosystem moves beyond an overreliance on gambling-driven applications.

In 2025, dormant Bitcoin wallets moved a total of nearly 124,000 BTC, worth more than $11 billion, as over 1,000 long-inactive addresses became active again. The activity was heavily concentrated among early-era wallets created between 2011 and 2014, highlighting the continued influence of Bitcoin’s earliest adopters.

July stood out as an extreme outlier, accounting for roughly two-thirds of the year’s dormant Bitcoin spending after a single early holder transferred more than 80,000 BTC, reportedly facilitated by Galaxy Digital. Outside of this event, monthly dormant spending generally ranged between 1,500 BTC and 6,000 BTC.

While many wallets reactivated throughout the year, spending was highly uneven, with a small number of legacy addresses driving the majority of volume. The data shows that a significant portion of long-dormant Bitcoin supply remains intact and capable of materially impacting on-chain activity when it re-enters circulation.

Maduro’s arrest turns long-shot Polymarket bets into overnight wins

The sudden arrest of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro transformed long-shot prediction bets on Polymarket into rapid wins. U.S. President Donald Trump announced that elite Delta Force units carried out an overnight raid near Caracas, capturing Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, at a Venezuelan military complex before flying them out of the country. The operation abruptly ended Maduro’s grip on power and closed one of the most closely watched political prediction markets of the past year.

The development sent shockwaves through prediction markets, particularly Polymarket, where traders had been wagering on whether and when Maduro would leave office. According to Bitcoin.com News, odds on his removal began climbing in mid-December 2025. A flagship contract predicting Maduro’s removal by Jan. 31, 2026, officially resolved as “Yes” on Jan. 3, following confirmation of his capture.

Bitcoin Core development activity rebounds in 2025

Bitcoin Core saw a notable resurgence in development activity during 2025, with mailing list traffic up 60% year over year, 135 unique code contributors, and roughly 285,000 lines of code changed, according to data compiled by Casa Chief Security Officer Jameson Lopp. The increase in contributors marked a reversal of a multi-year decline, signaling renewed engagement from the developer community.

The uptick in raw metrics coincided with a busy technical year for Bitcoin Core. The project completed its first public third-party security audit, which found no critical or high-severity vulnerabilities, and navigated intense debates over mempool policy changes, including the controversial removal of the long-standing OP_RETURN data limit in the v30 release. Together, these developments underscored a year of heightened activity in both code contributions and protocol-level discussion.

Euro stablecoins surge after MiCA

Since MiCA came into force in June 2024, euro-pegged stablecoins have entered a clear growth phase and moved beyond being a niche DeFi product. Under MiCA, euro stablecoins are classified as “e-money tokens,” subject to licensing, reserve, and disclosure requirements, forcing issuers and exchanges to realign their listings.

According to DECTA’s “Euro Stablecoin Trends Report 2025,” the market capitalization of major euro stablecoins rose by 102% in the 12 months following MiCA, reversing a 48% decline in the prior year. Combined market cap reached around $500 million in May 2025, while aggregated monthly transaction volume jumped from $383 million to $3.832 billion, led by EURC and EURCV.

However, Kaiko data suggests much of the early growth was driven by compliance-related reshuffling rather than fresh trading demand. Effective euro liquidity remains heavily concentrated on a few large venues such as Bitvavo and Kraken, where spreads are tighter and order books are deeper. This indicates that euro stablecoins serve as an important settlement rail, but execution quality is still largely determined by where liquidity concentrates.

Bitcoin ended 2025 with a record-low realized daily volatility of 2.24%, the lowest since 2012. Despite major price swings, including a -36% drop in October, the market absorbed these moves without triggering systemic collapses, thanks to deeper liquidity and institutional participation. ETFs, corporate treasuries, and regulated custodians now anchor liquidity, while long-term holders are redistributing supply, reducing concentration and dampening reflexive feedback loops.

Lower volatility has shifted Bitcoin’s profile: it now behaves more like a macro asset with equity-like risk rather than a speculative instrument. Options markets, ETF flows, and institutional holdings dominate price dynamics, making hedging cheaper and portfolio allocations more viable.

Structural changes, regulatory clarity, and institutional adoption suggest volatility may remain compressed in 2026, allowing Bitcoin to handle large-scale capital flows without the extreme swings that characterized earlier cycles. Low realized volatility signals market maturity, not stagnation, as the asset continues to digest major structural and regulatory changes.

The Ethereum Foundation’s Stateless Consensus team has warned that Ethereum’s ever-growing “state” — which includes account balances, smart contract storage, and application code — is becoming a major scalability and decentralization challenge. As the state only grows and never shrinks, running a full node is becoming more expensive and fragile, especially as recent scaling upgrades increase network activity and accelerate data growth.

To address this, the team outlined three possible approaches: State Expiry, which removes inactive data from the active state; State Archive, which separates frequently used “hot” data from historical “cold” data; and Partial Statelessness, which allows nodes to store only parts of the state while relying on wallets and light clients for the rest. These ideas aim to reduce storage costs, improve node performance, and preserve Ethereum’s censorship resistance.

The Foundation emphasized that these proposals are still exploratory and invited developers, node operators, and infrastructure providers to participate in testing and discussion, as it continues to refine Ethereum’s long-term roadmap toward a more scalable and resilient network.

Crypto index fund manager Bitwise is seeking regulatory approval to launch an exchange-traded fund (ETF) that tracks the SUI token.
On Thursday, the firm filed a registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for the Bitwise SUI ETF. According to the filing, the trust aims to provide investors with exposure to the value of SUI held by the fund, net of operating expenses and other liabilities.
Coinbase Custody Company, LLC has been named as the custodian for the ETF. Details such as the ticker symbol and sponsor fee have not yet been disclosed.
Bitwise is not alone in pursuing a SUI-based ETF. In March, Canary Capital became the first firm to file for a SUI ETF, followed shortly by 21Shares. While none of these products have received SEC approval so far, 21Shares recently launched the first exchange-traded product linked to SUI with its leveraged 21Shares 2x SUI ETF earlier this month.
SUI currently ranks 31st by market capitalization, according to data from The Block. The token is the native asset of the Sui Layer 1 blockchain, a project that originated from Meta’s now-defunct Diem initiative.
The broader crypto ETF market has expanded rapidly in recent months, with new products tracking assets such as XRP, DOGE, and SOL. Under the Biden administration, the SEC maintained a cautious approach toward digital assets, pursuing several high-profile enforcement actions against major industry players.
Under SEC Chair Paul Atkins, however, the agency has shifted toward greater regulatory clarity for digital assets. This includes approving listing standards for certain crypto ETFs, a move designed to streamline the path to market for eligible products.

XRP spot ETFs have surpassed $1 billion in assets under management, yet the token’s price has remained largely flat. This disconnect highlights a common misconception: rising ETF AUM does not automatically translate into upward price pressure. What matters most for price discovery is not the headline AUM figure, but the pace and persistence of net creations—the process that forces authorized participants to buy XRP and lock it inside ETF structures.

A significant portion of current AUM reflects early seeding, market appreciation, and secondary-market trading rather than fresh capital. At roughly $1.14 billion in AUM, XRP ETFs hold about 600 million XRP, or around 1% of circulating supply—meaningful, but far from large enough to drive a sustained squeeze on its own, especially compared with Bitcoin ETFs, which control more than 6% of BTC’s total supply.

ETF inflows have also been steady rather than dominant, averaging roughly $12 million per day since mid-November, a modest figure relative to XRP’s typical spot trading volume. At the same time, structural factors continue to absorb demand, including Ripple’s predictable escrow release schedule, active hedging by market makers through futures and perpetuals, and fragmented liquidity across offshore venues.

Together, these dynamics explain why XRP’s price has not responded sharply to ETF growth. The ETF infrastructure is now firmly in place and has moved beyond novelty, but it has not yet become a relentless source of supply absorption. For ETF growth to translate into stronger price action, net creations would need to accelerate, hedging pressure would need to unwind, and onshore liquidity would need to deepen. Until then, ETF inflows are supporting the market, not forcing a breakout.

SoFi launches SoFiUSD, a bank-issued U.S. dollar stablecoin

SoFi Technologies has launched SoFiUSD, a fully reserved U.S. dollar stablecoin issued by SoFi Bank, marking what the company says is the first time a nationally chartered bank has issued a stablecoin on a public, permissionless blockchain. The stablecoin is designed to enable 24/7, near-instant settlement for banks, fintechs and enterprise partners.

Initially deployed on Ethereum, SoFiUSD is backed 1:1 by cash reserves held at the Federal Reserve, according to the company. SoFi said the stablecoin can be integrated into payment and settlement flows at low cost, and will eventually be made available to SoFi members, expanding its use beyond institutional applications.

The launch reflects a broader push by traditional financial firms into blockchain-based payments and settlement, and builds on SoFi’s recent expansion into crypto services, including becoming the first national bank to offer direct crypto trading to consumers in the U.S.

SEC charges VBit founder with misappropriating $48.5 million

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has charged Danh C. Vo, founder and CEO of bitcoin mining firm VBit, accusing him of misappropriating $48.5 million from investors and spending part of the funds on gambling and gifts for family members.

According to the SEC, Vo and VBit raised more than $95.6 million from about 6,400 investors while misleading them about how the mining business operated and how investor funds would be used. The agency said VBit sold hosting agreements for far more mining rigs than it was actually operating, leading investors to expect passive profits that never materialized.

The SEC also alleged that Vo sent $5 million to family members and his ex-wife, then left the U.S. in 2021. Vo faces charges related to fraud and the unregistered offer and sale of securities, and VBit is now defunct.

Kalshi denies plans to allow bets on college athlete transfers

Prediction market Kalshi said it has no plans to let users wager on whether top college athletes will enter the transfer portal, despite having sought regulatory certification for such contracts. The company said certification only grants permission to potentially list a market, and many approved markets are never launched.

The prospect of bets tied to athlete transfer decisions drew sharp criticism from the NCAA, with President Charlie Baker calling such markets unacceptable and harmful to student-athletes and the integrity of college sports. Kalshi pushed back, saying it is a federally regulated exchange overseen by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Both Kalshi and rival Polymarket currently offer event contracts that allow users to bet on the outcomes of college sports games, particularly football and basketball.

Forward Industries brings its shares onchain on Solana, opening DeFi use cases

Forward Industries (FWDI), the largest SOL treasury firm, has officially issued its SEC-registered shares on the Solana blockchain via Superstate’s Opening Bell platform. The move marks the first time a public company’s equity can be used directly within decentralized finance.

FWDI holds about 6.8 million SOL, with a net asset value of roughly $832 million, exceeding the combined holdings of the next three largest SOL digital asset treasuries. As an SPL token, the tokenized shares can be integrated across Solana’s DeFi ecosystem, including use as collateral on lending protocol Kamino.

Forward said this represents the first instance of regulated public equity being deployed as collateral in a live DeFi market, creating a direct bridge between traditional financial markets and programmable onchain finance.

Prediction markets could become a more tax-advantageous alternative to traditional gambling starting in 2026, according to Coinbase. In its 2026 outlook report, the exchange cited a provision in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law in July 2025, that will limit the deduction of gambling losses against winnings.

Coinbase warned the change could result in taxpayers being taxed on “phantom” income, even if their winnings are small and they ultimately incur net losses. As a result, prediction markets — which use financial contracts similar to derivatives — may offer a more favorable tax treatment than sportsbooks and casinos.

The exchange’s stance aligns with its recent move into the sector through a partnership with Kalshi, giving customers access to prediction markets. Coinbase is also pushing back against state regulators, suing Michigan, Illinois and Connecticut to assert that prediction markets fall under the exclusive jurisdiction of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, not state gaming authorities.