"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
Will this crypto cycle be better without LIBRA and MELANIA?
Be mindful of limited liquidity, have a clear selling strategy, and closely follow the narrative during market rotations to avoid excessive FOMO. At the same time, always keep some profits in stablecoins and continue to accumulate long-term quality assets like BTC.
On-chain Data Interpretation: Current Cost-Effectiveness of Four Major Public Chains from RPC
Realized Market Cap RC (the sum of valuations based on the last moving price of all tokens) ÷ Current circulating supply = RPC. RPC is also seen as the average turnover cost.
From the stability of the chip structure, BTC is far better than other mainstream coins, while ETH is currently the only mainstream coin where investors holding for 12 months are still on average at a loss.
In a sluggish market, reviewing three profit models that do not rely on market trends
Airdrops and yield farming, short-selling arbitrage on high FDV new coins, funding rate arbitrage (Delta neutral strategy).
FTX compensation starts, what is the impact of the massive SOL unlock on the market?
On March 1, 11.2 million SOL from the FTX bankruptcy auction will be unlocked, worth $2.06 billion, accounting for about 2.29% of the current SOL circulating supply. However, the likelihood of triggering widespread panic is relatively low. Rational decision-making by institutional investors, the market's digestion capacity, and the resilience of the Solana ecosystem will be key factors in buffering this impact.
Recently, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has accepted and reviewed applications for several cryptocurrency spot ETFs, among which the progress of XRP, Litecoin (LTC), Dogecoin (DOGE), and Solana (SOL) ETFs is particularly noteworthy.
XRP Spot ETF: Active application, SEC's attitude is slightly open.
Litecoin (LTC) Spot ETF: Highest probability of approval.
Dogecoin (DOGE) Spot ETF: The first Meme ETF has a 75% probability of approval.
Solana (SOL) Spot ETF: SEC needs to overturn its own definition of securities.
Ethereum (ETH) ETF: May introduce a staking mechanism.
Tether's human efficiency ratio is about $83 million per person, Binance's human efficiency ratio exceeds $1 million per person.
Also recommended: Interpretation of Macroeconomic Policies in 2025: What is the Impact on the Crypto Market? Macroeconomic Research Report on the Crypto Market: A wave of institutional entry into crypto ETFs is coming, and the crypto industry may reach new highs in 2025 Index Thinking in Cryptocurrency: Leverage, Asymmetric Bets, and Personal Growth.
Meme
Are the outsiders attracted by TRUMP still making money?
Apart from conspiracy groups, the 24-hour online trading pioneers in the crypto space were the first to make money on $TRUMP.
Professor L, who shorted TRUMP using a hedging trading strategy, disagrees with many retail investors' gambling-style leveraged trading, stating, "The essence of contracts is to disperse risk, not to amplify returns." However, most people do not understand this principle. "Large funds that short do not sell at the peak; instead, they wait until the market has halved and retail investors start bottom-fishing, preferring to short at such positions."
The Dark Forest of MEME Coins: Retail Investors Struggle to Strike Gold with a 0.01% Retention Rate
While retail investors are still chasing the "thousandfold myth," professional teams have transformed the MEME track into a 24/7 harvesting machine using robots, multi-signature contracts, and public opinion engines.
With a retention rate of 0.01%, there is no place for retail investors in the MEME forest. As resources are depleted, many players are painfully exiting.
Why do 99% of people lose money in Memecoin trading?
The three main reasons for the widespread losses among Memecoin investors: trading fees (hidden dealer cuts), slippage (MEV costs), and market manipulation and insider trading.
Memecoins do not feel like gambling because they give a false sense of control—a delusion that one can make money through research, timing, and skill. Indeed, some traders can profit, but they are just a minority, like professional poker players. Most traders, like most gamblers, ultimately lose.
Reflecting on the Absurd End of the Memecoin Cycle
An overview of the development history of Memecoins.
Tiger Research: The Battle for Liquidity, Are Memecoins a Salvation or a Grave for CEX?
Platforms represented by Pump.fun have driven the rise of decentralized exchanges (DEX), attracting liquidity and active traders, thereby weakening the early price discovery capabilities of centralized exchanges (CEX).
Exchanges need to integrate on-chain functions and DeFi elements while ensuring platform stability and compliance.
Bitcoin
A Conversation with Michael Saylor: The Real $100 Billion Opportunity Lies in Three Layers
As the world's largest holder of Bitcoin, MicroStrategy will continue to acquire Bitcoin, akin to a digital "real estate development company." Even if Bitcoin plummets by 98%, the company will not face liquidation risk. The company possesses permanent capital. Issuing securities backed by Bitcoin is far more cost-effective than staking or lending Bitcoin.
Focusing too much on cycles can be distracting; over the next 21 years, Bitcoin is expected to rise by an average of 29% per year. Bitcoin has stabilized and is becoming increasingly decentralized. At the protocol level, most proposals resemble a "cancer," doing more harm than good to the Bitcoin ecosystem.
In the crypto space, the strongest assets will ultimately be monetized, while other assets will be demonetized.
People will gradually abandon 20th-century assets—real estate, stocks, collectibles, fiat currencies, and bonds—in exchange for future assets.
Ethereum
As the largest ETH staking custodian, Coinbase manages about 21% of staked ETH but has not disclosed staking ETH information for five consecutive quarters. Data shows its staking ratio has dropped from 15%, possibly related to address rotation. Although Coinbase emphasizes transparency, it has not disclosed the amount of staked ETH or the support for cbETH. Over 75% of the circulating supply of cbETH remains unused, reminding investors to focus on the underlying staked ETH rather than the circulating supply of LST. Coinbase has chosen to inflate cbETH through unused supply rather than through transparent operations.
Also recommended: Vitalik's Chinese AMA: In the internal reforms of EF, Ethereum needs new stories and new users.
Multi-Ecosystem
Getting Started with BSC Chain from Scratch: From Scanning Chains, Monitoring to Trading
Pump platform: four.meme.
Common on-chain tools: UniversalX, debot, gmgn, OKX Web3 wallet, ave.ai, dexscreener.
Common security check tools: goplus, honeypot.is, tokensniffer.
Raydium (RAY) has an optimistic outlook: deep liquidity and repurchase advantages; Jupiter (JUP) has an optimistic outlook: market-leading aggregator; Meteora has an optimistic outlook: rising liquidity aggregator; Orca has a pessimistic outlook: insufficient liquidity retention.
The article also highlights key catalysts and risks to watch.
Also recommended: 《In-Depth Interpretation of Messari Article: Sei Network Q4 Report》。
DeFi
Reviewing the Largest Liquidation Event in History—A "Stress Test" for the Derivatives Market
Last week, the open contracts for ETH suddenly decreased by $2.3 billion in a single day, with over $14 billion in total contract positions evaporating across the network, marking the largest single-day drop in history. While most leveraged players fell during the liquidation wave, Ethena's synthetic dollar stablecoin USDe managed to perform a counter-trend operation: its 24-hour redemption volume reached $50 million, with secondary market trading exceeding $350 million, and the price difference with USDT remained anchored within a ±0.1% range. The price curve shows that USDe's movement is highly synchronized with fiat stablecoins like USDC and DAI, and the collaboration between CEX market makers and on-chain arbitrageurs effectively offset the short-term liquidity shock.
The core mechanism supporting this stability lies in its unique "spot + perpetual contract short" hedging combination—hedging spot volatility through perpetual contracts, which may create a more capital-efficient anchoring mechanism than over-collateralization; while the dynamic collateral pool design attempts to find a balance between yield, liquidity, and security.
However, this stress test also revealed potential risks: liquidity coupling risk, dependence on yield sources, and black swan tolerance.
Also recommended: 《Decoding DeFi 2025: Ten Key Insights from Consumer Finance to Technological Innovation》。
Weekly Hot Topics Recap
In the past week, Bybit was hacked for over $1.5 billion in assets (special report); Argentina's president faced public outrage after supporting Meme coins and then denying involvement with LIBRA, with multiple parties clarifying that they did not participate in LIBRA, and the insider team fighting among themselves. The behind-the-scenes team gave their first interview, and Milei and his team unexpectedly changed their stance, considering using the entire $100 million control fund to buy back and destroy LIBRA. The Argentine president established a working group to investigate LIBRA-related parties and requested the anti-corruption office to intervene. Argentine lawyers and former officials filed a fraud lawsuit against President Milei, accusing him of promoting LIBRA on social media; KIP Protocol issued an official statement: they did not participate in the $Libra token issuance process and did not profit from the token issuance; President Milei spoke out for the first time regarding the Libra incident, denying any wrongdoing and claiming that at most 5,000 people were harmed, with the vast majority of investors being Chinese and Americans; FTX initiated the first round of compensation distribution; FTX creditor representatives stated that users from five regions, including China, are temporarily unable to participate in the compensation distribution; SBF changed his political stance in a recent interview and sought a Trump pardon; the Consensus conference was held in Hong Kong (conference compilation);
In addition, regarding policies and the macro market, Tether is actively communicating with U.S. lawmakers about the stablecoin regulatory bill, which may be signed into law by Trump in April; FOX reporters stated that the U.S. SEC is very interested in staking; Coinbase co-founder announced that they reached a settlement with the SEC, and the lawsuit is expected to be completely withdrawn; Musk released the AI model Grok 3; Trump is considering distributing 20% of the funds saved from DOGE to Americans, with 20% used to pay off debts; Hong Kong is considering promoting gold tokenization;
In terms of opinions and statements, Wintermute's founder stated that BTC and ETH will rise again, but there may not be a full bull market, and the market will focus on protocols with sustainable economic models; samczsun noted that the Memecoin sector has shown negative sums, and the industry needs to take action to avoid being "burned to ashes"; Vitalik mentioned that he has had a seat on the Ethereum Foundation's three-person board since 2017; ZhuSu stated that it is time to go all in on ETH; the president of the Solana Foundation expressed hope to make "boring" things interesting again by 2025, such as stablecoins; CZ stated that as a shareholder, Binance will not be sold; WLFI co-founder mentioned that WLFI is taking a non-VC development path and is not yet open for trading; Sonic Labs' founder stated that he refused to work on Base, so he cannot claim the Kaito airdrop; the head of research at Aptos accused Monad of plagiarism, while Monad's co-founder denied it, stating, "I was developing while you were still in diapers";
Regarding institutions, large companies, and leading projects, Tether's co-founder announced plans to launch yield-bearing stablecoins on Ethereum and Solana in the second half of the year; HashKey Capital launched the HashKey 20 Index Fund; BNB Chain released an optimization plan to cope with the surge in traffic, prioritizing Meme coin transactions; Monad launched its testnet (interaction guide); Kaito AI opened airdrops and announced the KAITO token economics: total supply of 1 billion tokens, with early supporters accounting for 8.3%; Andre Cronje announced four visions for Sonic in 25 years, including fee subsidies and dynamic fees; BinaryX rebranded to Four, and BNX tokens will be exchanged for FOUR at a 1:1 ratio;
In terms of data, on February 16, Ethereum gas fees dropped to 0.695 Gwei; on February 17, the correlation between Bitcoin and the S&P 500 index dropped to zero; on February 19, YZi Labs' EVM addresses held a total of $67.78 million in assets obtained through investment attribution unlocking; on February 20, PI's circulating market cap surpassed $10 billion, ranking 15th in crypto, surpassing SUI;
In terms of security, Shaw X account was hacked… well, it was another week of witnessing history.
Attached is the series of Weekly Editor's Picks portal.
See you next time~
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