I’d usually open with some snarky commentary on price action and how we’re trapped in this specific range, but honestly? It’s still just playing out.
The Sunday Pump into Monday offered a brief hit of dopamine, with $BTC teasing us just shy of $95k. If you’ve been paying attention over the last month, you know the script: the $96,500 wall remains undefeated, and the coil is only getting tighter as we grind toward the January 30th options expiry.
On the macro front, the Supreme Court decided to blue-ball the market by kicking the tariff decision down the road until this week. Between that and the ongoing battles over CLARITY, we have plenty of catalysts with the power to move markets…eventually.
For now, I’m sticking to the DCA and chill approach. No need to make a hero bet when the market is clearly still deciding which way it wants to break.
Price Movements on the Week
$BTC - Down 0.78%
$SOL - Up 2.99%
$ETH - Down 1%
$ZEC - Down 24.5%
$BNB - Up 0.66%
Total Crypto Market Cap - Down 0.74% (3 Trillion)
It looks like the CLARITY act is gearing up to get its first version pushed through for voting, but it’s bringing about tons of conflict and some concerns. The previously passed GENIUS Act bans issuers (like Circle/Tether) from paying interest. But, there is a loophole that allows third parties like @coinbase and DeFi protocols to pass that yield to users.
The problem? The big banks want that yield and don’t want to compete or evolve. They want that to themselves to keep, like they currently do. In a post from Paul Barron (@paulbarron), he cited the following:
The Banking Lobby's Demand: They want this loophole closed. They fear that if users can passively earn ~5% risk-free on stablecoins, customers will withdraw billions from low-interest checking accounts ("deposit flight"), destabilizing community banks.
The Alsobrooks Proposal (High Probability)
The Mechanism: This proposal allows crypto platforms to offer yield, but only if the customer takes a specific action (e.g., staking, locking for a term, or using it for payments). It bans "passive" yield just for holding funds in a wallet.
If you use coinbase or kraken, you can currently earn yield by just holding $USDC or $USDG (Kraken) without having to take any extra actions, like deploying into defi. If you use robinhood, you may also be familiar with your held currency earning yield, but that's done by sweeping accounts and getting yield that I guess is different somehow?
Some kind of decision should be pushed forward this week by Thursday. They need 60 votes to pass and bi-partisan support. Same old bullshit of banks wanting to control the yield and sticking it to regular people.
Meanwhile, as @EleanorTerrett showed us, a new advocacy group, ‘Investors For Transparency,’(gotta love the name) is running prime-time ads on @FoxNews, urging viewers to oppose DeFi provisions in the upcoming crypto market structure bill.
Interesting things are happening in Uganda and Iran. If you aren’t familiar with Jack Dorsey’s (@jack) app bitchat, it’s causing some serious ire and providing ways for the people to fight back and communicate while wifi is disabled or down. bitchat is a decentralized peer-to-peer messaging application (iOS/Android) that operates over bluetooth mesh networks that don’t need wifi or internet to function. In Uganda. The country goes to the polls on the 15th. Museveni has been in power since 1986. In every election, he cuts the internet.
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2016: total blackout
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2021: 4 days offline during voting
The opposition can't coordinate, verify votes, document anything. 400,000 Ugandans downloaded the app in one week. Bluetooth mesh allows messages hop from phone to phone. No internet. No server. No tower. Nothing you can “shut off” without confiscating everyone’s phones.
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The telecom regulator went on TV to say they have "the highest concentration of software engineers in the country" to block the app.
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The developer responded on X: "You can't stop Bitchat. You can't stop us. Free and open source. Unstoppable."
ZCash (@zcash) had some drama and FUD this week. Up until this past year, when crypto companies would set up their organizations, they’d split them up into a non-profit, labs, and whatever other things they had to do. We can see a similar case with the recent changes at @aave and @uniswap.
tl;dr: The non-profit ECC and the devs were not in agreement on how the future looks and being a non-profit organization also comes with not being able to act like a growth company. The devs all left to start a new company that isn’t held back by the same restrictions. There are still legal things to iron out, but imo this is bullish for $ZEC. The market fell for all of the FUD and prices fell back into my own personal accelerated stacking zone (sub $400). If you want to filter out the noise, I suggest following @ebfull and @feministPLT
ZEC unofficial spokesperson and megabull @mert went on the @fomohour to give a pretty simple breakdown.
In other ZCash news, if you needed to hear a clear reason on the "why" behind it, just listen to Chamath who all but said the words "ZCash" out loud on this week's All In Podcast. this reminds me of when people just wanted Brian Arstrong to say "eth". Just say ZCash, Chamath!
The current big boss enemy of CT, Nikita Bier (@nikitabier) came out this week and told us all what we’ve been noticing…we are being throttled hard. You have a specific amount of reach that decreases based on how much you post, so all of your reply guy gm’s are weakening the reach of better content. We all know bots have been a major issue, but real content is also being crushed by the algo.
Then, he announces X is building Smart Cashtags that allow you to specify the exact asset (or smart contract) when posting a ticker. From the Timeline, users will be able to tap them to see its real-time price along with all mentions of that asset. Set for initial launch next month.
@MorganStanley entered the fray this week and filed their first crypto ETFs for $BTC and $SOL
Parcl (@Parcl) teamed up to add prediction markets on @Polymarket this week. I hadn’t personally checked in on Parcl since the Saga days, but am glad to see them still pushing. They are all currently based around predicting the median home prices in different areas.
https://polymarket.com/search?_q=parcl-home-value
I’ve been following along with some drama over in the Cosmos sphere (I will have my bags from last cycle) and it’s been interesting seeing so many companies there flee. This week’s addition was Dymension (@dymension). I honestly never knew what they did, but staked my airdrop for too long before swapping it all last year. They are now on @Solana with $DYM. I checked in on their portal and they appear to be a meme launchpad that can potentially graduate into its own chain?
The Ranger (@ranger_finance) ICO went live on @MetaDAOProject this week. It was off to a pretty slow start, but like most of these ICO’s, it oversubscribed in the final hours and the token is now live. Ranger does perps on Solana and some people have raised concerns over their lack of activity on the platform and fees. One perps dex will eventually gain traction on Solana, but will it be Ranger? They capped the ICO at $8M, setting an initial token price of $0.8 and an initial FDV of $20.5M after $86.39M in total commitments. $RNGR is live now and currently down 11%
After months of silence, @Pumpfun comes out and doesn’t mention the airdrop, they talk about how cabals can now group together properly on a coin to share in its wealth without having to dump on each other. Up to ten people can now extract fees. If you have any doubts, just listen to how soothing the music in this video is….ahhhh, coordinated extraction feels so much better now.
Are you ready for another @Solana token? $SKR is set to launch on Jan 21st. Seeker (@solanamobile) has been running a campaign for the past few months to track activity for this drop. Honestly, closing those rings was so confusing and seemingly illogical that I gave up and just did my normal stuff on the phone. No idea how $SKR will do, or really what its ultimate function will be, or if I’ll get any allocation. But, it’s coming down the pike.
Ore (@OREsupply) made some moves this week. After announcing private pools with Privacy Cash (@theprivacycash), they also introduced stORE. It’s a liquid staked version of $ORE that is currently getting around 14% APR and can also be put into a privacy pool. Pretty interesting to see Ore keep pushing new ideas. I didn’t get wrapped up in the Ore mining rush, but I do have some as a just in case it does really well long term token.
Also related to Ore, Carrot (@DeFiCarrot) launched “Turbo” in beta for low risk, leveraged liquid tokens, ala the @hylo_so approach for $ZEC, $BTC, $SOL, $ORE and $WET (not sure why this one). Dynamic leverage that is protected from liquidation and sits in your wallet like any other token. https://turbo.deficarrot.com/
Infinex (@infinex) had their ICO this week for $INX as and it came with its own set of drama and changes in the moment to shift the max allocations and make sure they could fill it no matter what. They’ve also been working hard on their extension, which is live now. Imported wallets get gas handled, passkeys and swidging. I’ve been using Infinex for over a year and although I have my gripes, I did go for the min allocation ($200). Infinex have always geared themselves towards a small sect of whales, so I hope to see that change this year.
If the weather was better, maybe we’d all be moving to Wyoming. The Wyoming Stable Token Commission (@wyostable) $FRNT, which is the first stablecoin issued by a U.S. State, is now live on @Solana. The Wyoming Stable Token Commission deployed FRNT on mainnet in August 2025 across seven networks: Solana, Ethereum, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Base, Optimism, and Polygon.
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More recent updates from January 2026 confirm that FRNT is now fully publicly available on Solana, marking the official trading launch of this first U.S. state-backed dollar-pegged stablecoin.
The token is overcollateralized (102% backed by U.S. dollars and short-term Treasuries), with interest from reserves benefiting Wyoming's public schools. This multi-chain approach uses LayerZero for interoperability.
Jito (@jito_sol) launched the IBRL explorer. Want to check to see if your validator is slot lagging and late packing, hurting the network? Now you can. The IBRL Explorer introduces the IBRL Score to quantify validator block building performance for users and applications. https://ibrl.wtf/
Are we seeing a legit meme hark back to the $BONK and $WIF days with@TheWhiteWhaleV2 @WhiteWhaleMeme? I'm not a meme person typically (as you can see by my entry), but it has turned out pretty good so far from the initial swaps on Dec 7th.
Thanks for reading this week,
Stay Free
• Ebullition
Ps. I have a closed beta app on the Android Store for DeFi the System. If you'd like to be part of the beta and provide feedback, please let me know.
If you missed it, I published an article this week based around a return to conviction investing.
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