web3bits

When the Howey test is no longer abused, innovation may finally be able to take root in the United States.
In November 2025, Paul S. Atkins, Chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), delivered a historic speech: for the first time, he explicitly proposed establishing a "four-category regulatory system for tokens" and emphasized that this would end the "one-size-fits-all" regulatory approach of the past decade. More importantly, he reinterpreted the Howey Test, which has been cited in countless regulatory actions, and clearly pointed out:
“Investment contracts can be terminated, and tokens will not remain securities forever just because they were once securities.”
what does that mean?

In the past five years, the narrative of the Ethereum ecosystem has evolved from 'mainnet expansion' to 'Rollup superchain'. However, it was not until EIP-4844 that Rollups truly entered the era of scaling. Now, the upcoming Fusaka upgrade for Ethereum may become a critical turning point that determines the industry's landscape for the next three years — it not only signifies a 20-fold expansion potential but also indicates profound changes in the business models, competitive logic, and technological routes of the entire L2 market.
The significance of this upgrade goes far beyond 'larger blocks and lower costs'. It points to:

In today's algorithm-driven world, we are almost overwhelmed by data. Models and AI are continuously generating predictions, yet lacking that kind of 'judgment' that comes from humans. The Prediction Market is being revived in this context—it is not merely a gambling game, but a place that gathers human cognition and beliefs.
When traders, programmers, scholars, and gamblers place bets on the same platform, they inadvertently generate a highly valuable asset: collective expectation signals. And this is the 'human data' that machines find difficult to simulate.

Vishal Kankani, the head of investments at Multicoin Capital, recently publicly stated that their liquidity fund has invested in the native token ENA of the Ethena Protocol.
The reason is simple:
USDe is currently the only 'synthetic dollar' in the crypto industry that has successfully achieved large-scale distribution and real liquidity beyond USDC and USDT.
And more importantly:
USDe is precisely at the intersection of three major trends: 'stablecoins, perpetualization, and asset tokenization (RWA).'
This not only makes USDe a new type of stablecoin, but also signifies that a new on-chain dollar system is taking shape.

Crypto New Bank: The next stop for on-chain wealth is the real world.
From storage to consumption, from digital wealth to real spending, the story of crypto finance is entering the 'landing phase.'
1. Financial Disconnection: The 'disconnection' between wealth and consumption.
On-chain finance has built a massive parallel world over the past decade.
DeFi, staking, re-staking, and yield aggregators have dramatically increased the efficiency of on-chain capital utilization.
But the problem is — this capital is too far from the real economy.
Most users' wealth has now accumulated in wallets and protocols.

The DAT industry, which once thrived on the narrative of 'public companies hoarding Bitcoin', is undergoing a brutal re-evaluation of its value.
DAT, short for Digital Asset Treasury, refers to publicly traded companies that hold cryptocurrencies and other digital assets as strategic reserve assets. This model was first pioneered by the business intelligence company MicroStrategy in 2020, with the core logic being that companies convert their traditional cash reserves on balance sheets into digital assets like Bitcoin to seek higher investment returns and hedge against inflation.
At the beginning of 2024, the approval and listing of the US Bitcoin spot ETF is like a double-edged sword; on one hand, it brings hundreds of billions of dollars in new funds to the cryptocurrency market, while on the other hand, it directly impacts the existence logic of DAT (Digital Asset Treasury) companies.

Subtitle: From Uniswap to BNB, crypto projects are moving towards a 'shareholder' governance era - but the logic of value capture is far more complex than it appears.
1. Introduction: The Awakening of Token Market Value Management
When Uniswap announced the launch of the 'buyback and burn' mechanism on November 11, the attention of the crypto world once again focused on a familiar yet tricky question: how can tokens achieve value capture?
This traditional financial capital operation method - buybacks, cancellations, and dividends - has now been rapidly 'transplanted' into the blockchain world. The difference is that in this open system, every token holder becomes a potential 'shareholder', and the token economic model becomes the project's 'corporate governance'.

[Summary] The well-known blockchain explorer Etherscan recently announced the cancellation of free API services for Avalanche C-Chain, Base, BNB Chain, and OP Mainnet, sparking controversy in the community over the centralized dependence on data infrastructure and the commercialization versus open-source spirit. This move exposes the vulnerability of the Ethereum ecosystem to centralized data providers.

💡 Core Events and Business Truths

Etherscan suddenly 'cuts supply': Etherscan announced during Devcon that it would cancel free API services for Avalanche, Base, BNB Chain, and OP Mainnet. The official reason is that chain performance improvements have led to a significant increase in data volume and operational costs.

Stablechains are not a technological upgrade of Web3, but a paradigm shift in global financial infrastructure. Their goal is not to replace Ethereum or Solana, but to replace traditional giants like SWIFT and Visa.
Next, we will analyze the impact on the three major traditional financial networks from a system perspective.
1. The impact of stablechains on SWIFT: A revolution in cross-border clearing speed
SWIFT's model is a 'messaging network' rather than a true clearing system. Cross-border payments seem to be completed, but behind the scenes, 2–5 institutions need to jump through, and final confirmation takes 1–3 days.

Author: kent
In recent years, the way cryptocurrencies issue tokens has been repeating the same problems:
Information asymmetry, bots racing to open, severe price fluctuations, project parties and a few players controlling pricing power, while the vast majority of users can never access a fair entry price.
The 'Continuous Clearing Auctions (CCA)' proposed by Uniswap is providing a new answer to all of this.
CCA is not an 'innovative gameplay' of a certain project, but a set of on-chain native token issuance and liquidity initiation protocols for the entire industry.

Restructuring of the Stablecoin Market: Distribution rights are becoming the new moat!
The moat of traditional issuers is becoming shallower, while platforms that have user access and traffic are quietly seizing industry dominance.
Beneath the surface of the stablecoin market seemingly dominated by Tether and Circle, a profound transformation is quietly taking place. The network effects built on first-mover advantage are weakening, and the focus of competition in the stablecoin market has shifted from 'issuance rights' to 'distribution rights.' Platforms with user bases and traffic are internalizing the value that originally flowed to issuers by launching their own stablecoins or adopting white-label solutions. This shift is not only reshaping the profit distribution model of the stablecoin market but may also redefine the power structure of the entire cryptocurrency industry.

$BTC
Inside Visa, Cuy Sheffield was once an 'outsider'.

A few years ago, during the day he immersed himself in researching Visa's payment architecture for decades, and at night he mingled at cryptocurrency parties in San Francisco. This split life made him realize a truth that most people overlook: traditional payments and the crypto world are colliding at high speed, and only by standing at the intersection can one see how money will flow in the future.
Recently, in a deep dialogue on (Money Code), Cuy Sheffield, the current head of Visa's crypto business, elaborated on Visa's stablecoin strategy. He not only revealed the profitability paradox of wallet service providers but also threw out a stunning prediction: the next killer application for stablecoins may not be humans buying coffee, but payments between AIs.

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Summary
The Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) recently announced two regulatory circulars concerning licensed virtual asset trading platforms (VATPs): (Circular on the sharing of liquidity by virtual asset trading platforms) and (Circular on expanding the products and services of virtual asset trading platforms). These two documents mark another upgrade of the regulatory framework for virtual assets in Hong Kong: on one hand, allowing licensed platforms to share global liquidity under strict regulation; on the other hand, supporting platforms to expand more virtual asset-related products and services under compliance. This article will provide a comprehensive interpretation from the perspectives of policy content, regulatory logic, industry impact, and developers.

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In the past week, the crypto industry witnessed a symbolically significant technological advancement: the zkSync Airbender team demonstrated that, using just two consumer-grade RTX 5090 GPUs, they could generate zero-knowledge proofs (ZK proofs) for every Ethereum L1 block on the mainnet. The total power consumption is about 1kW, which is no different from a toaster.
In today's continuously evolving narrative of expansion, such experimental results serve as both a milestone and a potential watershed for the next stage of policy, architecture, and even commercial competition.

The 'hard threshold' for blockchain expansion has been pried open.

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1. Core Definition: What is it?
x402 is an open, blockchain-based payment protocol standard, with the core goal of enabling machines (such as AI agents and automated programs) to autonomously and seamlessly discover and pay for digital services like humans do. It revives and redefines the almost forgotten HTTP status code 402 Payment Required, using it as a universal signal for initiating payment requests between machines. By integrating blockchain (especially stablecoin payments), x402 provides critical infrastructure for realizing the Machine-to-Machine Economy or Agentic Commerce.

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In 2025, DeFi is not losing on price, but on value.
Introduction: The era of prevalent buybacks, a crisis is quietly forming.

If 2020–2022 was the 'era of liquidity mining', then 2024–2025 is undoubtedly the 'era of buybacks'.
Almost all major DeFi protocols have launched buyback programs:
Aave's Treasury buyback
MakerDAO's surplus auction
PancakeSwap's burn mechanism
Curve's lending income buyback
Uniswap's fee switch has become an industry focus
But the reality is extremely ironic:
The more buybacks there are, the lower the price.

$ETH $BTC
From Tornado Cash to the insights of Ethereum Kohaku.

In the world of Web3, a topic that has long been overlooked but is now making a strong comeback has suddenly taken center stage: privacy.

In recent years, due to the regulatory crackdown on privacy tools and over-reliance on on-chain transparency, privacy technology has become a dangerous word in public discourse. However, starting in 2025, these narratives are clearly reversing.
Two landmark events became the starting point for deep dialogue between regulation and the industry:
(1) The U.S. Department of the Treasury officially lifted the comprehensive sanctions against Tornado Cash.

@Plasma $XPL #Plasma
For over a decade, the crypto industry has been answering a question:
Can money flow instantly like information on the internet?
Bitcoin brought 'digital cash', projects like Stellar, Ripple, and Celo made cross-border payments faster. But what truly changed the industry are USDT and USDC — they made 'on-chain dollars' a reality and became the absolute protagonists of global exchanges, DeFi, and cross-border remittances.
Today, a larger change is taking place:
The entire industry is beginning to reconstruct infrastructure around stablecoins.
The new generation of blockchains designed specifically for stablecoins, that is,