Release Date: December 16, 2025
Author: BlockBeats Editorial Team
In the past 24 hours, the cryptocurrency market has witnessed a multifaceted dynamic ranging from macroeconomic discussions to specific ecosystem developments. Mainstream topics have focused on the token versus equity rights disputes triggered by mergers and acquisitions, as well as discussions on the evolution of the market towards specialized trading tools. In terms of ecosystem development, the Solana ecosystem continues to expand around prediction markets and cross-chain infrastructure, Ethereum is advancing its layout between institutional entry and protocol upgrades, and the Perp DEX track is further aligning with institutional-level financial infrastructure.
I. Mainstream Topics
1. Circle Merges with Axelar Network Team, Abandoning AXL Token, Triggering Token vs Equity Rights Dispute
Circle announced the acquisition of the Interop Labs team (the initial developers of Axelar Network) to accelerate the development of its multi-chain infrastructure Arc and CCTP. However, it clearly stated that the Axelar network, foundation, and AXL token will continue to operate independently, with development work being taken over by CommonPrefix. The core of this transaction lies in the "team merging into Circle" to promote the application of USDC in privacy computing and compliant payments, rather than an overall acquisition of the Axelar network or its token system.
This arrangement quickly sparked intense discussions in the community regarding "token vs equity." Several investors questioned that Circle, through the acquisition of the team and intellectual property, has substantially acquired core assets while bypassing the rights of AXL token holders. Some community members claimed that Circle's attitude towards AXL investors during negotiations was extremely tough, further exacerbating dissatisfaction.
Community opinions on this event are clearly divided. A more calm perspective believes that this reflects a long-standing structural reality in the crypto industry: tokens are at the bottom of the capital structure and are naturally at a disadvantage in mergers or reorganizations, similar to the situation of equity in traditional companies during bankruptcy liquidation. Another faction strongly condemns Circle's actions as "predatory," arguing that this model systematically erodes the trust of token holders and calls for clearer rights protection for holders through tokenized equity or legal and governance tools (such as MetaDAO, LaunchOnSoar, etc.).
This event once again highlights the core pain points in mergers and acquisitions within the crypto industry and may accelerate discussions on the legal positioning of token rights among the market and regulators, influencing investors' risk perception of similar protocol-based projects.
2. Kalshi Launches Combo Orders Feature, Prediction Market Moves Towards Specialization
Prediction market platform Kalshi has officially launched the Combos (combo orders) feature for all users, allowing traders to bundle multiple related contracts for ordering, achieving price optimization similar to options combinations or arbitrage strategies in traditional finance.
Kalshi disclosed that the trading volume for this feature exceeded $100 million within a week of its testing phase, driving a roughly 50% increase in its app user base in November. The platform's total trading volume even set a new high of $340 million yesterday. Unlike traditional betting or centralized matching, the Combos mechanism does not rely on bookmaker pricing but forms quotes through open market competition, aiming to reduce retail trading costs and enhance overall liquidity.
The community's overall response has been positive, with many users viewing it as an important milestone in the evolution of prediction markets from "single event betting" to specialized trading tools, even calling it an industry-first innovation. However, there are also cautious voices pointing out that the mechanism bears similarities to parlays in sports betting, raising concerns that it may lead to execution deviations or manipulation risks in cases of insufficient liquidity or distorted quotes, and calling for Kalshi to further strengthen transparency and risk control mechanisms.
Overall, the Combos feature is expected to further bridge the gap between prediction markets and TradFi, attracting more professional traders and institutions, but its operational effectiveness still highly depends on market-making depth.
3. Paradigm Members Depart in Succession, Sparking Discussion on Crypto VC Cycle
The well-known crypto investment firm Paradigm has recently experienced multiple high-level personnel changes. Its GTM head Nick Martitsch announced his departure, ending a three-year term, and highly praised Paradigm's engineering and research-driven culture in his farewell post while completing handover arrangements. Previously, partner Charlie Noyes had also resigned from his GP position but retained his role as a board observer for Kalshi.
The community's overall feedback has been primarily supportive, with several industry founders acknowledging Paradigm's historical achievements, such as Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong calling it a "huge success." At the same time, some slightly sarcastic comments have compared Paradigm to "island warriors holding the fort after World War II," implying that it may face adaptation pressures under the AI wave and new market structures.
These departures have not released any clear negative signals, but in the current context of overall pressure on crypto VCs, they are still seen by some market participants as a reflection of accelerated industry liquidity and talent movement, and may indicate a strategic shift for Paradigm, such as placing greater emphasis on the intersection of AI and crypto.
4. pump.fun Did Not Hold Side Event at Breakpoint, Facing Community Backlash
During Solana's annual conference Breakpoint, the popular meme coin launch platform pump.fun did not hold any side events, despite the platform's cumulative revenue nearing $2 billion. This choice sparked widespread criticism in the community.
Some Solana community members criticized pump.fun as "stingy and arrogant," believing that it only needed to allocate a very small proportion of its revenue to host a symbolic event to give back to the ecosystem, yet chose to be completely absent, exposing a typical cultural rift between "value-extracting" projects and the developer community. Some vehement comments even described its founder as having a "nouveau riche mentality," ignoring the community spirit emphasized by Web3.
There are also a few voices defending pump.fun, arguing that its focus on product and cash flow is justifiable, but the overall public sentiment remains notably negative. This incident is seen by many as one of the inevitable frictions in Solana's transition from a highly degen culture to one that emphasizes practicality and long-term construction.
5. Sam Altman Publicly Responds to Worldcoin, Sparking New Round of Attention
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman rarely publicly responded to a related post from the Worldcoin team, expressing excitement about the progress of World Chain supporting multiple currencies and stating that this is a "long-awaited feature" for him. This statement quickly sparked discussions within the community.
Fundstrat CIO Tom Lee subsequently took the opportunity to reiterate that Worldcoin possesses "the strongest human verification technology currently available," viewing $WLD as a strategically significant crypto project in the AI era, emphasizing the importance of human verification in the context of the proliferation of generative AI.
Altman's public endorsement has been interpreted by many market participants as a positive signal, further reinforcing Worldcoin's core position in the AI × Crypto narrative. However, the discussion also accompanied concerns regarding $WLD token inflation, price performance, and regulatory and privacy controversies.
Overall, this interaction has brought Worldcoin back to the center of public opinion, potentially attracting more institutional attention, but its long-term development still needs to strike a balance between technology, ethics, and regulation.
II. Mainstream Ecosystem Dynamics
- Solana Ecosystem: Prediction Markets and Cross-Chain Infrastructure Progressing Together
The Solana ecosystem continues to advance in financial products. The leveraged prediction market platform Space announced the completion of a $3 million seed and strategic round of financing, led by institutions such as Morningstar Ventures, Arctic Digital, and Impossible Finance. The project plans to launch the first prediction market on Solana with up to 10x leverage, attempting to enhance the capital efficiency and trading attractiveness of prediction markets by introducing leverage mechanisms.
Space's core narrative is "truth is about to be tradable," and the community's overall feedback has been positive, with many participants viewing it as a practical extension of Solana in the prediction market track. However, there are also voices reminding that introducing leverage in inherently volatile prediction markets may amplify risk exposure, raising higher demands for risk control and clearing mechanisms.
Meanwhile, the cross-chain liquidity aggregation protocol LI.FI announced the completion of a $29 million Series A extension financing, led by Multicoin Capital and CoinFund, bringing its total financing scale to $52 million. LI.FI stated that the funds will be used to advance its long-term vision of a "universal market for digital assets." Currently, the protocol has processed approximately $60 billion in transaction volume and established integration relationships with over 1,000 B2B partners.
The community and developers hold an overall optimistic attitude towards this financing, viewing it as an important signal of the maturity of cross-chain infrastructure, but some users question when its token or incentive mechanisms will be implemented to ensure the community receives clear returns during the protocol's expansion. This development further highlights Solana's potential attractiveness in multi-chain interoperability and infrastructure layers.
- Ethereum Ecosystem: Institutional Entry and Protocol Upgrades Progressing in Parallel
The Ethereum ecosystem has seen significant progress in both institutional adoption and underlying protocol layers.
JPMorgan announced that it will launch its first tokenized money market fund MONY on Ethereum, using $100 million of its own funds as startup capital, with plans to open to external investors on Tuesday. As one of the largest banks by market capitalization globally, this move is widely seen as a landmark case of further integration between traditional finance and blockchain. The community's overall response has been positive, believing this will strengthen Ethereum's position as institutional-grade financial infrastructure, although discussions still accompany concerns about market volatility, macroeconomic environment, and ETH price correlation.
At the protocol level, Ethereum has confirmed that it will implement its next major upgrade, Glamsterdam, in 2026. This upgrade plans to introduce enshrined proposer-builder separation (ePBS) and block-level access lists to enhance network scalability and execution efficiency. Among them, ePBS aims to improve slot utilization to nearly 100% by separating consensus blocks from execution loads and supporting larger-scale Blob expansion on L1; block-level access lists aim to reduce gas costs for state-intensive applications, making the fee structure more predictable.
The upgrade goals include higher throughput, lower fees, and adjusting the minimum transaction inclusion time from "instant" to approximately 2 seconds. The community has participated in relevant design discussions through EIP priority discussions and developer meetings, but the upgrade still requires adaptation from client teams (such as Geth and Besu). Overall, Glamsterdam is seen as a key node for improving user experience and further optimizing L2 and DeFi applications.
In addition, the Ethereum payment L2 closed-loop stablecoin network Colossus Pay, led by the former CTO of SushiSwap, has officially launched. This project attempts to directly convert the cryptographic signatures generated during EMV credit card transactions into Ethereum private keys, allowing each swipe to generate a valid ERC-4337 transaction signature, thereby transforming traditional credit cards into on-chain wallets.
Colossus Pay emphasizes non-custodial settlement, approximately 100 milliseconds of pre-confirmation time, and a 92%–96% reduction in fees, claiming compliance with the "no KYC minting" framework under the GENIUS Act. It currently supports issuers such as Frax Finance, Solayer Labs, and Kraken. Community evaluations are notably divided: supporters view it as a "Visa 2.0" payment model, believing it could bypass traditional banking infrastructure; skeptics point out that many current crypto neo-banks are still in the re-packaging phase of Web2 and lack truly irreplaceable advantages.
- Perp DEX Track: Evolving Towards Institutional-Level Infrastructure
The perpetual contracts and trading infrastructure track continues to be active. The neo-brokerage platform Cascade, backed by Polychain, has launched its first 24/7 perpetual market, supporting trading of crypto assets, stocks, and private equity assets, and facilitating USD deposits and withdrawals through a unified account. The platform emphasizes the capital efficiency of perpetual contracts, and the community has responded enthusiastically, with many users viewing it as a new trading structure with "no market maker intervention," though there are also cautious concerns about its reliance on liquidity providers and potential manipulation risks.
Within the Hyperliquid ecosystem, the actions of well-known trader 0xRay have drawn widespread attention. He sold approximately 303,000 HYPE tokens (about $8.4 million) in a short period, with an average transaction price of $27.689, recording a loss of about 6%; he then opened and closed a short position of about 204,000 HYPE tokens and withdrew all funds from the platform. This behavior temporarily exerted about 4.5% downward pressure on market prices, eliciting mixed reactions from the community, with some calling it a "master move" and others viewing it as a real-world example of how large trader actions impact Perp DEX liquidity.
On a more macro level, there are rumors that Nasdaq plans to extend stock trading hours to 23 hours on business days. Although there is no official document confirming this, it has sparked heated discussions in the community. Many crypto practitioners interpret it as a symbol of TradFi moving towards a 24/7 trading model, while others express concerns about potential trading fatigue and regulatory risks that may arise.
Additionally, the Hyperliquid ETF is expected to launch by the end of the year. Bitwise has submitted a revised document disclosing a management fee rate of 67bps and the BHYP code, which is typically seen as a signal that the product is nearing launch. Overall, community sentiment is optimistic, but there are still differences regarding the long-term impact of the ETF on HYPE prices.
On the product level, Hyperliquid has also announced the HIP-3 exchange deployment plan and is working in conjunction with its portfolio margin mechanism, attempting to build an algorithmic clearing and hedging system similar to traditional hedge fund prime brokerage. Supporters view it as a "DeFi holy grail" that addresses issues of risk netting and capital efficiency, believing it could drive Perp DEX to evolve from a single exchange into a broader financial infrastructure.
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