Welcome to The Protocol, CoinDesk's weekly wrap-up of the most important stories in cryptocurrency tech development. In this week’s issue of the Protocol newsletter:

Trump’s crypto team

Aptos' leadership shake-up

TikTok meets tokens

Kraken scales up

This article is featured in the latest issue of The Protocol, our weekly newsletter exploring the tech behind crypto, one block at a time. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Wednesday.

Network News

TRUMP CRYPTO APPOINTMENTS: President-

Web3 is drowning in metrics, most of which paint an unclear picture. Transaction volumes, token prices and flashy headlines often mask what really matters: the quality of user engagement and the potential for organic, exponential growth. As the industry moves beyond the hype, reliable, data-driven signals of success are no longer optional — they’re essential.

Here’s the good news: the tools to cut through the noise already exist. By combining multiple on-chain metrics into a single “health inde

CoinDesk Indices presents its daily market update, highlighting the performance of leaders and laggards in the CoinDesk 20 Index.

The CoinDesk 20 is trading at 3319.53, down 2.9% (-98.37) since 4 p.m. ET last Friday.

Three of the 20 assets are trading higher.

Leaders: LTC (+2.5%) and UNI (+2.2%).

Laggards: APT (-14.8%) and AVAX (-6.0%).

The CoinDesk 20 is a broad-based index traded on multiple platforms in several regions globally.

Investment advisers will probably overtake hedge funds as the biggest holders of U.S.-listed spot bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded funds (ETFs) next year, CF Benchmarks said Monday.

A total of 11 spot BTC ETFs debuted in the U.S. on Jan. 11, providing a way for investors to gain exposure to the cryptocurrency without personally having to hold and store it. Since their inception, they have accumulated over $36 billion in investor funds.

Demand has been dominated by hedge-fund managers, who own 45.

Solana-based gaming-focused layer-2 blockchain Sonic will airdrop its SONIC token to all its users onboarded through social-media platform TikTok.

Sonic built its SonicX game natively inside TikTok, attempting to replicate the success of mini apps that were built on theTON blockchain inside messaging platform Telegram.

The game has over 2 million users onboarded using TikTok, which Sonic attributed to the app's seamless experience and reach in an emailed announcement that didn't give further d

Avalon Labs, the issuer of the BTC-backed stablecoin USDa, has raised $10 million to grow its Bitcoin decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem.

The Series A funding round was led by Framework Ventures and included contributions from UXTO Management, Presto Labs and Kenetic Capital, according to an announcement shared with CoinDesk on Monday.

Avalon aims to evolve BTC from a digital store of value to a more active financial instrument that can serve a range of different purposes.

Users can unloc

Disclaimer: The analyst who wrote this piece owns shares of MicroStrategy (MSTR)

MicroStrategy (MSTR), the software developer that has made acquiring bitcoin (BTC) a core value, added to its holding for a seventh week in a row.

The company bought 5,262 BTC for a total of $561 million in the week ended Dec. 22 to take its total holdings to 444,262 BTC it said.

The purchase, at an average price of $106,622 per bitcoin, was teased by Executive Chairman Michael Saylor in a Sunday post on X. It br

Several popular memecoins were added to a number of Chainlink services over the weekend, allowing them to be offered on other networks or as data streaming services.

In the past few days, Shiba Inu (SHIB) and its ecosystem tokens, Turbo (TURBO) and Apu (APU), adopted the Chainlink Cross-Chain Token (CCT) standard to become available across 12 blockchains, making them accessible on networks other than where they were originally issued.

On Sunday, tokens Simon’s Cat (CAT), Coq Inu (COQ), goat (G

XRP dropped 3% in the past 24 hours, leading losses among major tokens as bitcoin (BTC) started the festive week in the red and Japanese bitcoin accumulator Metaplanet (3350) announced its biggest purchase.

The Tokyo-listed company said it bought a record 619.70 BTC for 9.5 billion yen ($61 million) in a move that lifted its BTC holdings by 54%.

BTC is still 1.5% lower over 24 hours, CoinGecko data shows, with ether (ETH), Cardano’s ADA, Solana’s SOL and dogecoin (DOGE) all down as much as 2%.

HyperLiquid, a layer-1 blockchain and decentralized exchange for perpetual futures (perps), has experienced a notable outflow of the USDC stablecoin amid speculation North Korean hackers are interacting with the platform, according to a post on X by pseudonymous observer Tay, known for tracking threats posed by to crypto protocols by the country.

A record $60 million of USDC fled the exchange by 10:00 UTC Monday, according to Hashed Official's Dune-based tracker. USDC, the world's second-larges

Bitwise's Europe head of research, who has been accurately bullish on bitcoin (BTC) for months, has turned cautious after last week's 8% dip, warning of deeper losses in the coming weeks.

Bitcoin, the leading cryptocurrency by market value, fell 8.8% to nearly $95,000 last week, the biggest percentage drop since August, according to data source TradingView and CoinDesk Indices. The losses came as the Federal Reserve signaled fewer rate cuts for next year while stressing that it prohibited from

President-elect Donald Trump announced over the weekend that he is appointing Stephan Miran, a former Treasury official from the first Trump White House, and current economist with Hudson Bay Capital Management, to chair the Council of Economic Advisors (CEA).

The CEA's role is to advise the president on economic issues, including evaluating the effectiveness of federal policies and programs, analyzing economic trends, and crafting recommendations to foster growth and stability.

Miran has long

Solana-based bonk (BONK) led growth among dog-themed memes Saturday as bitcoin staged a recovery rally to above $98,000, a day after Friday’s bloodbath that pushed it near $93,000.

BONK surged 30%, CoinGecko data shows, with dogecoin (DOGE), shiba inu (SHIB), dogwifhat (WIF) and floki (FLOKI) surging as much as 20%. The dog-themed token category gained 8% on average in the past 24 hours, beating a market-wide jump of 4.5% as tracked by the broad-based CoinDesk 20 (CD20) index.

Memecoins are kn

YouTube competitor Rumble (RUM) is in a deal for a $775 million strategic investment from stablecoin giant Tether.

Rumble will use $250 million of the money to support operations and the remainder to fund a tender offer for up to 70 million shares of its common stock at a price of $7.50, according to a Friday evening press release. That $7.50 is the same price per share Tether is paying for its stake.

"I truly believe Tether is the perfect partner that can put a rocket pack on the back of Rumb

There's been a change of guard at the rankings of the $3.4 billion tokenized Treasuries market.

Asset manager Hashnote's USYC token zoomed over $1.2 billion in market capitalization, growing five-fold in size over the past three months, rwa.xyz data shows. It has toppled the $450 million BUIDL, issued by asset management behemoth BlackRock and tokenization firm Securitize, which was the largest product by size since April.

USYC is the token representation of the Hashnote International Short Du

Tether, the crypto company behind the $140 billion cryptocrrency USDT, is working on an artificial intelligence (AI) platform and aiming to debut early next year, according an X post by CEO Paolo Ardoino.

"Just got the draft of the site for Tether's AI platform. Coming soon, targeting end Q1 2025," Ardoino posted on Friday.

Tether is known for issuing USDT, the most popular stablecoin in the market, but the company recently made significant efforts under Ardoino's leadership to expand its busi

Every few decades, a new technology emerges that changes everything: the personal computer in the 1980s, the internet in the 1990s, the smartphone in the 2000s. And as AI agents ride a wave of excitement into 2025, and the tech world isn’t asking whether AI agents will similarly reshape our lives — it’s asking how soon.

But for all the excitement, the promise of decentralized agents remains unfulfilled. Most so-called agents today are little more than glorified chatbots or copilots, incapable o

Crypto Twitter has been overrun by sentient, well informed chatbots which reply at the speed of refreshing your browser and can maintain hundreds of simultaneous conversations without missing a beat. To many, the rise of these on-chain agents is a welcome upgrade from human influencers like BitBoy and GCR, who have mixed track records and opaque incentives. These agents, like on-chain analyst AIXBT, have quickly risen to the top of crypto twitter influencer mindshare rankings, given their abilit

A war for on-chain market dominance may be brewing. The question: What will be the collateral of choice in the decentralized finance (DeFi) economy?

As of press time, DeFi protocols across all ecosystems have locked in almost $126 billion in value, according to DeFiLlama data, inching closer every day to their 2021 high of $175 billion. The majority of those pledged funds take the form of ether (ETH) and derivatives like yield-producing staked ether liquid tokens (stETH) and wrapped eETH (weETH

"Hawk Tuah" girl Hailey Welch said Friday she is "fully cooperating" with lawyers representing people who lost money investing in her crypto token, HAWK, which flopped in early December amid allegations of malfeasance.

"I take this situation extremely seriously," she said in a post on X. The viral TikTok star encouraged victims of HAWK coin to reach out to the law firm suing HAWK's creators as she works to "uncover the truth" about the token.

HAWK token — a memecoin on the Solana blockchain —