OVERVIEW

The Market Rallied and I Still Feel Nothing 🤷

Before we dive in, here’s today’s crypto market heatmap:

Source: finviz

And here’s a look at crypto’s total market and altcoin market cap charts:

Source: TradingView

NEWS
Morgan Stanley Joins the Crypto ETP Party Fashionably Late 👗 

$MS ( ▲ 0.65% ) just filed paperwork for a Bitcoin Trust and, gasp, a Solana Trust. 🫢

The filings are with the SEC, so nothing’s approved yet, and these would be plain-vanilla passive products that track spot prices. Standard stuff.

The Bitcoin Trust? Yawn. BlackRock, Fidelity, and a dozen others already dominate that space. Morgan Stanley’s late to a party that’s already running low on beer.

The Solana Trust? Now that’s interesting. We’ve seen the Solana ETF race heating up, and Morgan Stanley throwing its weight behind SOL signals where institutional money sees opportunity. Someone ran the numbers and decided there’s demand.

For crypto hodlers, this changes nothing today. For the long-term legitimacy narrative? Another blue-chip name normalizing digital assets for the advisor class is a win. More suits at the table. 🥄 

STOCKTWITS
New on Stocktwits: Stream Topics

When a ticker heats up, there’s never just one conversation. Valuation debates. Earnings reactions. Macro pressure. Technical levels.
Stream Topics break active streams into clear discussion themes – so you can jump straight to the part of the conversation you care about.
Instead of scrolling through everything, you can now:

• See what traders are debating at a glance

• Tap a topic

• Read only the posts focused on that discussion

Stream Topics are now live on Trending and Most Active tickers.

ON-CHAIN ANALYSIS
Something New: The Structural Conviction Index 🧠

Click to enlarge.

What most on-chain metrics don’t tell you is where conviction is headed – and in a market that moves on belief as much as it does on fundamentals, that’s kind of the whole ballgame. 👀

So I built something that does… well, as close as I could get.

Structural Conviction Index (SCI) tracks what holders are doing and how decisively conviction is shifting across the Bitcoin hodler base. Think of it as measuring the urgency of belief, not just the snapshot of positions.

The Framework: Three Migration Channels

SCI tracks conviction across three channels:

• Age Migration – Are long-dormant coins waking up, or staying parked?

• Custody Migration – Are things moving into exchanges (sell prep) or out (accumulation)?

• Concentration Migration – Are whales loading up while retail panics, or vice versa?

Each gets normalized, then combined into a composite from -100 (conviction collapsing) to +100 (conviction accelerating). The first crypto we’re going to look at using this new tool is, of course, Bitcoin. ↔️ 

Current Readings

Click to enlarge.

Bitcoin’s SCI Composite: +29.5 (Lean Bullish)

All three channels aligned. That’s not nothing.

December averaged essentially zero. January opened with conviction clearly tilting one direction – SCI up +21.7 in the past week alone.

The Supporting Data

Age Migration

• Mean Coin Age (90d): 41.8 days (up from 36.5 in July)

• Age Consumed running below 30-day average

• Interpretation: Diamond hands holding, not distributing

Custody Migration

• Exchange supply: 1,208,545 BTC (down 6,506 since July)

• 7-day rolling flows: net negative, accelerating

• Interpretation: coins leaving exchanges = accumulation behavior

Concentration Migration

• Whale cohorts (1K-100K): 32.11% of supply

• Distribution phase exhausted, concentration velocity flipped positive

• Interpretation: smart money done selling, started nibbling

So. Um. How Is This Useful?

SCI isn’t a timing mechanism. It’s not going to call the exact day Bitcoin rips face.

What it is telling us: Conviction is firming, not softening.

• Long-term holders are not selling

• Coins are leaving exchanges

• Whales have stopped distributing

What Would Change My Mind

Things I’m looking out for this week and into the weekend:

• Age Consumed spiking above 2x its 30-day average

• Exchange inflows for 7+ consecutive days

• Concentration velocity flipping negative (whale distribution resuming)

Until then? The on-chain data says accumulation is underway. Patient accumulation – the kind that looks obvious only in hindsight.

Right now, conviction is migrating toward bullish positioning at an accelerating pace. 🏃

Note: As soon as I figure out why this isn’t updated and uploading to Santiment, I’ll share the link for it.

DEFI
Token Projects Are Getting Fleeced. Some Are Fighting Back 👊

Of the 230+ official blogs/news/updates/Xaccoutns pages I check each day, most are either empty, filled with stuff no one understand, or these new fluff pieces called ‘thought leadership’ pieces. Most of them are just AI drivel. 🤖 

But every once and a while a true gem pops up, like this one from $BNT ( ▲ 1.63% ).

Here’s the situation: you launch a token, chase CEX listings, and immediately get handed the bill. One project recently got quoted 8-10% of total supply just to get listed – before listing fees, before market-making arrangements.

Nope. We’re Done With That.

So some teams are saying “screw it” and going on-chain. But that comes with its own problems.

When a project tries to “market make” on a standard AMM (automated market maker), all anyone sees is one-way selling. No visible structure. No buy orders. Just what looks like a team dump.

Traditional constant product AMMs (just one of the many types of AMMs out there) weren’t built for this. They force you to lock up quote assets (USDC, ETH) in ways that don’t match how projects actually think about their tokens.

You want to sell at specific prices, buy back lower, fund operations. The AMM just says ‘here’s a curve from zero to infinity, good luck.’ Concentrated liquidity helps a bit – you can go single-sided, pick your range. But when your asks get taken, they convert into bids right behind your sell price.

The real answer? Tools that let projects define actual sell ranges and separate buy ranges, recycle proceeds automatically, and keep everything transparent on-chain. No bots. No keeper networks. No opaque OTC deals.

Personally, I’d love to see that and not every fooking person in DeFi being a victim to sandwhich attacks and all the other asshatery that exists. 🧠 

NEWS IN THREE SENTENCES
AI, Stablecoins, & Privacy News 🕵️

🦄 Virtuals Protocol Now Has Three Ways to Launch an Agent

I’ll keep it short and sweet: Pegasus is for early builders who want fast, fair distribution without team allocations – nearly all supply goes to liquidity. Unicorn adds conviction-driven capital formation where founders earn funding only after the project hits real market traction. Titan is for credible teams at scale with 50M+ valuations and 500K+ USDC liquidity requirements, including migrations from existing tokens. Virtuals Protocol.

NEWS IN THREE SENTENCES
Real World Asset Tokenization (RWA) News 🪙

🏦 Ethena Picked Kraken to Babysit USDe’s Backing Assets

The Ethena Risk Committee approved Kraken Custody after a comprehensive review, meaning USDe reserves now sit in fully segregated, bankruptcy-remote cold storage with HSMs and MPC protection. Starting January 2026, Kraken will participate in monthly attestations and weekly Proof of Reserves reporting. Kraken.

💵 MANTRA Built a Stablecoin That Pays the Ecosystem Instead of Shareholders

MANTRA USD is backed by short-term US Treasuries via M0’s platform, but unlike USDC and USDT, the yield flows back to ecosystem participants rather than the issuer. Developers share in yield so they build deeper, exchanges earn more so they provide liquidity, and the ecosystem grows without inflationary token incentives. First large-scale attempt at a community-led stablecoin for the RWA economy. MANTRA.

NEWS IN THREE SENTENCES
DeFi, DEX, & Lending News 🏦

⏰ Synthetix Is Killing Synths on Optimism – Swap Now or Deal With Discounts

All Synths on Optimism get deprecated January 31st, and after that you’ll need manual treasury redemptions at frozen oracle prices. Wait past April 30th and you’ll eat a discount that grows 12.5% per month until it hits 100% by year-end. Synthetix.

💸 Solana Pulled $9 Billion in Bridged Assets in 2025

Nearly $9 billion worth of assets bridged to Solana from other chains last year, with over $5 billion coming from Ethereum alone. That’s a lot of capital voting with its feet. Solana.

🔧 VeChain’s 2025 Was 50 Million Transactions and Zero Narrative Chasing

While much of crypto played casino, VeChain shipped VeBetter with 5.2 million users, 50+ apps, and nearly 50 million transactions across sustainability-focused applications. The Renaissance upgrades moved them to DPoS, cut VTHO inflation 50%, and got MiCA-compliant whitepapers approved. They also onboarded Lululemon China and hit 100% network uptime since 2015. VeChain.

NEWS IN THREE SENTENCES
Protocol News 🏦

🌉 COTI Just Got a Direct Pipeline to Cardano and USDT Liquidity

ChainPort integrated COTI as its 28th chain, letting ADA bridge from Cardano and USDT flow in from nine major networks including Ethereum, Arbitrum, and Base. Wrapped ADA on COTI means Cardano holders finally get privacy utility for DeFi, payments, and RWAs. Hooray. COTI Network.

🧠 Brave Cut Adblock Memory Usage by 75% Because Extensions Can’t

The browser’s Rust-based adblock engine now uses 45 MB less memory after a FlatBuffers refactor that moved 100,000 filters into a zero-copy binary format. This style of deep optimization is impossible for extension-based blockers stuck behind browser APIs and sandboxing. Also why Brave’s blocking is completely unaffected by Manifest V3, in case you were wondering. Basic Attention Token.

LINKS
Links That Don’t Suck 🔗

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Author Disclosure: The author of this newsletter holds positions in AVAX, ADA, PUDGY, WLC, IMX, XTZ, NEAR, HBAR, ALGO, INJ, LTC, LINK, ZEC, XLM, and FET. 📋