"Weekly Editor's Picks" is a "functional" column of Odaily Planet Daily. Based on the extensive coverage of real-time information each week, the Planet Daily also publishes many high-quality in-depth analysis articles, but they may be hidden among the information flow and trending news, passing you by.
Therefore, our editorial team will select some quality articles worth spending time reading and saving from the content published in the past 7 days every Saturday, providing you with new insights from the perspectives of data analysis, industry judgment, and opinion output, as you navigate the crypto world.
Now, let's read together:
Investment and Entrepreneurship
The Last Mega Cycle of BTC: The Value and Price Theory of BTC
The value of BTC in the macro field, analogous to bonds and stocks in financial history, is the "fuel" for a new round of human technological development; in the meso field, it is the currency of the digital world that humanity will inevitably enter in the future, and also an index; in the micro field, it is the new round of legal regulation landing, the compliance of token issuance, thus siphoning off global private investment demand.
This may be the last "grassroots" cycle belonging to the crypto industry, and also the last mega cycle where BTC has a huge beta increase. This means that after this cycle, BTC's beta will significantly decrease, but it does not mean that the broader token issuance market will lack opportunities for hundredfold alpha.
The peak of this bull market for BTC will occur in Q4 2025, with a high point of $160,000 to $220,000. Before that, excluding the "first wave" that has already occurred, there are still two significant mid-bull market trends.
Currently, it is the year 1999 of the internet era, which means that after the bull market peaks in the next 12-18 months, the crypto industry will face a long winter, similar to the bursting of the internet bubble in 2000-2001. Of course, this is also an opportunity for industry reshuffling and restructuring.
How to Operate with 11 New Coins in the Bull Market: Open and Run or Hold Long-Term?
In most cases, the opening is still the peak; if you can obtain tokens within 5 minutes, it is advisable to take profits at the opening.
Understanding the rules is crucial; just like studying law, you can only find loopholes by understanding all the clauses, and these loopholes often contain the best profit opportunities.
The current regulatory environment is more favorable for Memes. When screening Meme projects, consider narrative levels, chip structures, and community building.
Newcomers need to establish their own information channels but should be wary of information silos.
Also recommended: 《Coinbase Report: 2025 Outlook for the Entire Crypto Market》《BitMEX Alpha: Arbitrage Opportunities on Polymarket》。
Airdrop Opportunities and Interaction Guide
How to Layout the Abstract Airdrop Closely Related to Fat Penguin?
Meme
Interpreting Memecoin: A Product of Mockery, with a Market Value of Hundreds of Billions
Memecoin is a complex investment that requires a comprehensive consideration of narrative, community, marketing, risk, market performance, and smart money.
Also recommended: 《Binance: From Joke to Hundreds of Billions Market Value, The Rise of Meme》《The Collision of Culture and Capital: Meme Coins in This Cycle and Their Star Representatives》《This Week's Continued Focus on ai16z Series, MAX, WORM, New Attention on MOODENG》《The Meme Market Under Cold Conditions: UFD Soars, DAIGE Buff Stacked》。
Bitcoin Ecosystem
A Brief History of the Bitcoin Ecosystem: Written on the Eve of the Bitcoin Ecosystem Explosion
Also recommended: 《2024 Bitcoin Development Report: Global Regulatory Clarity, Dual-Drive of DeFi and Expansion》。
Multi-Ecosystem
Dialogue with Solana Nodes: Who is "Quietly Making a Fortune" Behind Memecoin?
Initially, Leo viewed Solana's user experience very positively from a newcomer’s perspective, so he has been following some of its Alpha projects. After the FTX incident, the core builders of the Solana ecosystem did not leave; instead, they encouraged each other. Most Solana developers are full-stack engineers from traditional Web2 industries, believing that the Rust language used by Solana has advantages in security.
Solana's MEV is different from Ethereum's, adopting a clock concept where the competition in transactions is actually about speed and low network latency. Solana scales through hardware, and while the operating costs of nodes are indeed high, they will decrease in the long run. Solana, Jito, and Raydium are almost always in the top five of DeFiLlama's revenue rankings, and often their revenue even exceeds the gas fee revenue of the Ethereum mainnet. These three can be said to be the main forces "quietly making a fortune," and their token performance is also quite good.
Solana's parallel network does have its advantages, but it also faces issues, especially the backlog of unprocessed transactions. Currently, about 90% of MEV revenue is distributed to stakers. This means that Solana's staking can yield about 7.6% base returns, while MEV revenue is an additional dividend. Simply put, the more active the network, the higher the MEV income. The income from JitoSOL is actually the largest source of revenue within the entire Jito protocol, and currently, this income is almost entirely distributed to JitoSOL holders.
Solana's innovative mechanisms, especially improvements in MEV and transaction processing, indeed constitute its competitive advantage. In Solana, you can earn fees through LP, and just relying on fees can be profitable, providing another profit model for the Memecoin ecosystem. Memecoin is the future trend combining social + esports.
On December 13, the Polygon community released the "Polygon PoS Cross-Chain Liquidity Plan" Pre-PIP improvement proposal. The main goal of this proposal is to suggest using the over $1 billion stablecoin reserves held on the PoS chain bridge to generate returns. On December 16, the Aave contributor team Aave Chan published a proposal in the community to withdraw its lending services from Polygon's Proof of Stake (PoS) chain. On the same day, the liquidity staking protocol Lido announced that it would officially cease operations on the Polygon network in the coming months. The Lido community stated that the reasons for ceasing operations on the Polygon network were a strategic refocus on Ethereum and the lack of scalability of Polygon PoS.
From AAVE's perspective, this proposal is essentially taking AAVE's money and putting it into other lending protocols to earn interest. As the largest application of funds on the Polygon PoS cross-chain bridge, AAVE cannot benefit from such a proposal and instead has to bear the risk of fund security. Lido's withdrawal may not be related to this proposal, as Lido's proposal and voting to reassess Polygon were published a month ago, just coincidentally at this time.
If AAVE's withdrawal proposal is officially passed, the TVL on Polygon will drop to $765 million, which will no longer achieve the $1 billion fund reserve mentioned in the Pre-PIP improvement proposal. The second-ranked Uniswap in the ecosystem has a TVL of about $390 million, and if Uniswap also follows suit with a proposal similar to AAVE's, the TVL on Polygon will plummet to around $370 million. Not only will the annual interest target of $70 million be unachievable, but all aspects of the ecosystem will be affected, such as governance token prices, active users, etc. The losses may far exceed $70 million.
What can truly attract users and maintain attention are often reward distributions or incentive programs, such as the recently popular Hyperliquid. However, Polygon has limited options for reform in this area; in terms of on-chain fees, Polygon generates only tens of thousands of dollars in fees daily, which does not pique user interest. This is a common dilemma faced by most older public chains today.
DeFi
2025 Main Theme Outlook: Making DeFi Great Again
The new interest rate cut cycle will attract more funds into DeFi, similar to the macro environment during the DeFi Summer of 2020-2021;
Many lending protocols like AAVE and Hyperliquid have sparked widespread market attention, showing strong recovery and explosive potential;
Binance and Coinbase's recent trend in listing new tokens is more inclined towards DeFi-related tokens.
The Rise of the Hyperliquid Ecosystem: A Quick Guide to the Pump Platform Hypurr
As an order book-based DEX, Hyperliquid's token listing process differs from the permissionless forms of platforms like Raydium, with Hyperliquid's listing process being a continuous 31-hour Dutch auction.
Currently, Hypurr Fun only supports purchases through a Telegram Bot. After entering the Bot, a pop-up message will provide a wallet address, and more information can be obtained through the Wallet module. Currently, it only supports deposits from Hyperliquid L1 or Arbitrum, and it is important to note that only native USDC deposits are supported (USDC.e is not supported).
Hypurr is still in its early stages and is continuously rising, so there may be many "gold mining" opportunities. However, the tools available are clearly very underdeveloped compared to other mature pump ecosystems. Additionally, the information available is currently incomplete.
After the airdrop was completed, the market was attracted by the rise of the HYPE "single token." Hyperliquid has already transitioned from PerpDEX to a high-performance trading public chain in the public eye. This is also why Hyperliquid's valuation ceiling continues to rise (shifting from DEX valuation logic to public chain valuation logic). Furthermore, blue-chip assets on Hyperliquid and newly listed tokens have also attracted the attention of top market funds.
Once HyperEVM goes live, Hyperliquid will no longer follow the current PerpDEX logic but will become an "application + trading platform." At that time, various EVM applications and ecosystems will flourish, and new financial gameplay generated around perp and HLP will inevitably continue to emerge.
In-Depth Analysis of Hyperliquid: Potential Market Opportunities and the Bullish Logic of HYPE
Hyperliquid dominates the perpetual decentralized trading platform space, accounting for over 50% of trading volume in the past month. With lower fees and stronger incentives than CEX competitors, Hyperliquid has a significant opportunity to attract more users and capital from CEX. The token generation event (TGE) and the rapid rise in HYPE prices have undoubtedly become the strongest marketing activities. Its spot market may also continue to grow. More trading tools are being developed based on Hyperliquid's open infrastructure and builder code.
Hyperliquid natively supports the creation of vaults. These strategies running on vaults can utilize advanced features similar to DEX, such as efficiently liquidating over-leveraged accounts and high-throughput market-making strategies. Anyone can deposit into the vault to earn profit sharing, including DAOs, protocols, institutions, or individuals. The vault owners can receive 10% of the total profits. This primitive provides an ideal competitive scenario for AI agents to attract capital.
Hyperliquid's revenue sources mainly include platform fees and token code (ticker) auctions.
It is estimated that the price range for HYPE is from $41.93 (base scenario, minimum multiple) to $651.48 (bull market scenario, maximum multiple).
The main risks for Hyperliquid include the concentration of mainnet validators, the unrealized nature of the EVM ecosystem, and regulatory risks.
Coinw Research Institute: In-Depth Research Report on HyperLiquid
This report introduces the basic information about HyperLiquid's products, advantages, data, and ecosystem.
NFT
Interview with Pudgy Penguins CEO: PENGU Will Fill the Last Gap in the Solana Ecosystem
Web3 & AI
Top Ten Crypto + AI Trends Worth Watching
Agent-to-Agent Interaction, Decentralized Agentic Organizations. Agentic Multimedia Entertainment, Generative/Agentic Content Marketing, Next-Gen Art Tools/Platforms, Data Markets, Decentralized Compute, Compute Accounting Standards, Probabilistic Privacy Primitives, Agentic Intents and Next-Gen User Trading Interfaces.
Also recommended: 《AI Agents from Technical Concepts to Scene Implementation, Opening New Narratives for Memecoin》《Comprehensive Comparison of the Eight Strongest AI Agent Frameworks, Who is the True Leader in the Field?》。
Weekly Hotspot Recap
In the past week, MicroStrategy (MSTR) was added to the Nasdaq 100 Index, with its stock price rising nearly 500% this year, possibly aiming to join the S&P 500 Index next year; the Financial Accounting Standards Board allowed companies to report BTC at fair value on their balance sheets; the PENGU token economic model was announced; Pudgy Penguins launched an airdrop feast; He Yi stated that BNB Chain ecosystem projects will be a key observation target for Binance Alpha (Binance Space Review: Binance Alpha is not equivalent to the main site, and selected projects are not limited to the BNB Chain ecosystem);
Additionally, in terms of policy and macro markets, Powell stated that the Federal Reserve is currently not allowed to hold Bitcoin and does not wish to change the law; Trump stated that Congress must remove the debt ceiling or extend the debt ceiling to 2029; a judge ruled that Coinbase can delist wBTC, rejecting a temporary restraining order application from Sun Yuchen's BiT Global; the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission issued licenses to virtual asset trading platforms under a fast-track licensing procedure;
In terms of opinions and statements, 10x Research predicted that BTC could rise to $120,000 by Trump's inauguration; VanEck's top ten predictions for 2025: the U.S. will adopt BTC as a strategic reserve, and the bull market will reach new highs by the end of next year; Spartan Group stated that the altcoin season is approaching, and the 12 months after the election will still be a golden period for the crypto bull market; Franklin Templeton Digital Assets called AI agents "interesting" in a statement; Elon Musk thanked CZ for contributing to the acquisition of Twitter; Marc Andreessen mentioned that 30 founders in the a16z portfolio had their bank accounts closed, and Solana ecosystem projects are focusing on de-banking narratives;
In terms of institutions, large companies, and leading projects, FTX customers will receive compensation within 60 days after the bankruptcy plan takes effect on January 3 next year; Binance will airdrop a total of 135 million PENGU tokens as compensation for the untimely update of its market cap and FDV data; OpenSea has reportedly registered the OpenSea Foundation in the Cayman Islands; Fuel Network has opened airdrops; Vana has launched its mainnet; the re-staking platform Kelp DAO has announced the KERNEL token economics;
In terms of data, Bitcoin's mining difficulty has increased by 4.43% to 108.52 T, setting a new record; pump.fun has become the first Solana protocol to have a monthly revenue exceeding $100 million;
In terms of security, Azoria's CEO confirmed that the account of the DOGE department head was hacked; Vivek Ramaswamy has deleted a tweet about a collaboration between DOGE and USUAL; phishing ads impersonating Virtuals Protocol have appeared in Google Chrome…… Well, it has been another eventful week.
Attached is the portal for the "Weekly Editor's Picks" series.
See you next time~
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