"Weekly Editor's Picks" is a 'functional' column of Odaily Planet Daily. Based on covering a large amount of real-time news weekly, Planet Daily also publishes many high-quality in-depth analysis pieces, but they may be hidden in the information flow and hot news, passing you by.
Therefore, our editorial department will every Saturday select some quality articles worth spending time reading and collecting from the content published in the past 7 days, bringing you new insights from the perspectives of data analysis, industry judgment, and viewpoint output.
Now, let's read together:
Investment and Entrepreneurship.
The last mega cycle of BTC: The value and price discussion of BTC.
The value of BTC in the macro field, compared 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 implementation of a new round of legal regulations, the compliance of token issuance, thereby attracting 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 hundredfold alpha opportunities.
The peak of this round of BTC bull market will occur in Q4 2025, with a high point of $160,000 to $220,000. Before that, excluding the already occurred 'first wave,' there are two significant mid-cycle trends in the bull market.
We are currently in the 1999 of the internet era, meaning that after the bull market peaks in the next 12-18 months, the crypto industry will experience a long winter just like the internet bubble burst in 2000-2001. Of course, this is also an opportunity for industry reshuffling.
How to operate with 11 new coins during the bull market: run away at the opening or hold long-term?
In most cases, the opening is still at its peak; if tokens can be obtained within 5 minutes, it is advisable to take profits at the opening.
Dialogue with Yuyue, starting from Alpha Hunter: Exploring the meme ecosystem, how Generation Z leads market narratives.
Research rules are important, just like studying law; only by understanding all the terms can you find loopholes, and those loopholes often hold the best profit opportunities.
The current regulatory environment is more favorable for memes. When selecting meme projects, consider narrative levels, chip structure, and community building.
Newcomers need to establish their information channels, but should be wary of information cocoons.
Also recommended: (Coinbase Report: Outlook for the Entire Crypto Market in 2025) (BitMEX Alpha: Arbitrage opportunities on Polymarket).
Airdrop opportunities and interaction guide.
How to layout the airdrop related to the 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, risks, market performance, and smart capital.
Also recommended: (Binance: From Joke to Billion-Dollar Market Value, The Rise of Memes) (The Collision of Culture and Capital: Meme Coins in this Cycle and Their Star Representatives) (This week continue to focus on ai16z series, MAX, WORM, and newly added focus on MOODENG) (Meme market under cold conditions: UFD surges while DAIGE buffs up).
Bitcoin Ecosystem.
A Brief History of the Bitcoin Ecosystem: Written on the Eve of Bitcoin's Ecological Explosion.
Also recommended: (2024 Bitcoin Development Report: Global Regulation Clarification, DeFi and Expansion Driving Forces).
Multi-ecosystem
Dialogue with Solana nodes: Who is quietly making a fortune behind Memecoin?
Initially, Leo saw from the perspective of a newcomer that Solana's user experience was very good, 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 and believe that the Rust language used by Solana has security advantages.
Solana's MEV is different from Ethereum’s, employing a clock concept; the competition in transactions is essentially speed, which means low latency in the network. Solana scales through hardware, and while the operating costs of nodes are indeed high, they will decrease in the long term. Solana, Jito, and Raydium are almost always in the top five of DeFiLlama's income rankings, and often their income exceeds the gas fee income of Ethereum's mainnet. These three can be said to be 'quietly making a fortune,' and their token performance has also been quite good.
Solana's parallel network does have its advantages, but it also has issues, especially the backlog of unprocessed transactions. Currently, about 90% of MEV income is distributed to stakers. This means that Solana's staking can achieve about 7.6% basic yield, while MEV income is additional dividends. In simple terms, the higher the network's activity, the higher the MEV income. The income from JitoSOL is actually the largest source of income in the entire Jito protocol. Currently, this portion of income is almost entirely allocated to JitoSOL holders.
Solana's innovative mechanisms, especially improvements in MEV and transaction processing, indeed constitute its competitive advantage. On Solana, you can earn fees through LP, and just relying on fees can make money, providing another profit model for the Memecoin ecosystem. Memecoin is the future trend that combines social + e-sports.
The predicament of the Polygon ecosystem: the 'borrow chicken to lay eggs' proposal raises concerns, AAVE and Lido collectively withdraw.
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 propose generating profits using the stablecoin reserves of over 1 billion USD held on the PoS bridge. On December 16, the Aave contributor team Aave Chan released a proposal in the community to withdraw its lending services from Polygon's Proof of Stake (PoS) chain. On the same day, the liquid staking protocol Lido announced that it would officially discontinue Lido on the Polygon network in the coming months. The Lido community stated that the strategic refocus on Ethereum and the lack of scalability in Polygon POS are the reasons for discontinuing Lido on the Polygon network.
From AAVE's perspective, this proposal is about taking AAVE's funds and putting them into other lending protocols for interest. As the largest application of capital on the Polygon POS cross-chain bridge, AAVE cannot benefit from such proposals and instead bears the risk of fund security. Lido's withdrawal may not be related to this proposal; after all, Lido's proposal and voting on re-evaluating Polygon were released over a month ago, just coinciding with this time.
If the proposal for AAVE's withdrawal is officially approved, the TVL on Polygon will drop to 765 million USD, which will no longer achieve the 1 billion USD fund reserve mentioned in the Pre-PIP improvement proposal. The second-ranking in the ecosystem, Uniswap, has a TVL of about 390 million USD. If Uniswap also follows up with a similar proposal to AAVE, the TVL on Polygon will plummet to around 370 million USD. Not only will the annual interest target of 70 million USD fail to be completed, but every link in the entire ecosystem will be affected, such as governance token prices, active users, etc. The losses may far exceed 70 million USD.
What can really attract users and maintain attention are often reward distribution or incentive programs, such as the recently trending Hyperliquid. However, Polygon has limited options for reform in this area; regarding on-chain fees, Polygon's daily fee generation is only a few tens of thousands of dollars, which does not spark user interest. This is also a common dilemma faced by most old 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 from 2020 to 2021.
AAVE, Hyperliquid, and many other lending protocols have attracted widespread market attention, showing strong recovery and explosive potential.
Binance and Coinbase's recent token listing trends are more inclined towards DeFi-related tokens.
The Hyperliquid ecosystem is rising: a quick overview of pump platforms like Hypurr.
As an order book-style DEX, Hyperliquid's token listing process is different from the permissionless forms of Raydium; Hyperliquid's listing process is a 31-hour continuous Dutch auction.
Currently, Hypurr Fun only supports purchases via Telegram Bot. After entering the Bot, a pop-up message will provide the wallet address, and more information can be obtained through the Wallet module. Currently, it only supports transfers and top-ups from Hyperliquid L1 or Arbitrum, and it should be noted that only native USDC deposits are supported (USDC.e is not supported).
Currently, Hypurr is still in its early stages and is continuously rising, so there may be many 'gold mining' opportunities. However, the tools are obviously very imperfect, and cannot be compared with other mature pump ecosystems. Additionally, information is currently also incomplete.
6 billion dollars flow to 'New Cycle FTX', Hyperliquid's complete guide to mining in a bull market.
After the airdrop is completed, the market is attracted by the rise of HYPE 'single token.' Hyperliquid has already transitioned from PerpDEX to a high-performance trading public chain in the public's view. This is also why Hyperliquid's valuation ceiling continues to rise (shifting from DEX valuation logic to public chain valuation logic). Additionally, blue-chip assets and newly listed coins on Hyperliquid have also gained favor from leading market funds.
After HyperEVM goes live, Hyperliquid will no longer follow the current PerpDEX logic, but rather 'application + trading platform.' At that time, various EVM applications and ecosystems will bloom, and new financial play methods 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 field, accounting for over 50% of trading volume in the past month. With lower fees than CEX competitors and stronger incentives, Hyperliquid has a great 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 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 efficient liquidation of over-leveraged accounts and high-throughput market-making strategies. Anyone can deposit into the vault for profit sharing, including DAOs, protocols, institutions, or individuals. The vault owner can receive 10% of total profits. This original language provides an ideal competitive scenario for AI agents to attract capital.
The profit sources of Hyperliquid mainly include platform fees and token code (ticker) auctions.
It is estimated that the price range of HYPE is from $41.93 (base case, lowest multiple) to $651.48 (bull market case, highest multiple).
The main risks of Hyperliquid are the centralization of mainnet validators, the unrealized nature of the EVM ecosystem, and regulatory risks.
Coinw Research Institute: HyperLiquid in-depth research report.
Introduced basic information about HyperLiquid's products, advantages, data, ecosystem, etc.
NFT
Pudgy Penguins CEO Interview: PENGU will fill the last gap in the Solana ecosystem.
Web3 AI
Review of the Top Ten Crypto+AI Trends Worth Watching
Agent-to-Agent Interaction, Decentralized Agentic Organizations. Agent-driven multimedia entertainment, generative/agent-driven content marketing, next-gen art tools/platforms, data markets, decentralized computing, compute accounting standards, probabilistic privacy primitives, agentic intents and next-gen user trading interfaces.
Also recommended: (AI Agent from technical concept to scene landing, opening a new narrative for Memecoin) (Comprehensive comparison of the 8 strongest AI Agent frameworks, who is the true leader of the track?).
Weekly Hotspot Recap.
In the past week, MicroStrategy (MSTR) was included in the NASDAQ 100 index, with its stock price rising nearly 500% this year, focusing on joining 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: BNB Chain ecological projects will be key observation targets for Binance Alpha (Binance Space Review: Binance Alpha is not equivalent to the main site, and selected projects are not limited to BNB Chain ecology);
In addition, in terms of policy and macro market, Powell: The Federal Reserve is currently not allowed to own Bitcoin and does not wish to change the law; Trump: Congress must eliminate the debt ceiling or extend it to 2029; a judge ruled that Coinbase can delist wBTC, rejecting the temporary injunction application from BiT Global under Sun Yuchen; the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission quickly issued licenses to virtual asset trading platforms;
In terms of viewpoints and voices, 10x Research: predicts BTC may rise to $120,000 by the time of Trump's inauguration; VanEck's top ten predictions for 2025: the US will pass BTC as a strategic reserve, and the bull market will reach new highs by the end of next year; Spartan Group: 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 calls AI agents 'interesting'; Elon Musk thanks CZ for his contributions to the acquisition of Twitter; Marc Andreessen: 30 founders in a16z's investment portfolio have had their bank accounts closed, and Solana ecological projects focus on the narrative of de-banking.
In terms of institutions, large companies, and leading projects, FTX customers will receive compensation within 60 days after the bankruptcy plan goes into effect on January 3 next year; Binance: will airdrop a total of 135 million PENGU tokens to compensate for the untimely updates of its market value and FDV data; OpenSea is suspected to have registered the OpenSea Foundation in the Cayman Islands; Fuel Network opened airdrops; Vana mainnet launched; Kelp DAO announced KERNEL token economics for its re-staking platform.
Data shows that Bitcoin's mining difficulty has increased by 4.43% to 108.52 T, hitting a new high; pump.fun becomes the first Solana protocol to generate over 100 million USD in revenue in a month.
In terms of security, Azoria CEO confirmed that the DOGE department head's account was hacked; Vivek Ramaswamy deleted the tweet about 'DOGE reaching a cooperation with USUAL'; phishing ads impersonating Virtuals Protocol appeared in Google browser... well, it's been another eventful week.
Attached (Weekly Editor's Picks) series transmission door.
See you next time~
