Good News Doesn’t Move It, Bad News Doesn’t Either 🤷
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OVERVIEW
Good News Doesn’t Move It, Bad News Doesn’t Either 🤷
Before we dive in, here’s today’s crypto market heatmap:
Source: Santiment
And here’s a look at crypto’s total market cap chart:
Source: TradingView
NEWS IN THREE SENTENCES
Crypto News 📰
🚫 Banks, Regulators, & “Debanking” Drama
The Senate Banking Committee just grilled lenders on whether they’re ghosting entire industries like crypto and political groups under the banner of “compliance.” Republicans blame watchdog overreach, Democrats say banks are half-asleep at the wheel, and the banks claim they’re just following archaic rules. Nnobody’s exactly sure who’s pulling the plug on customers. Reuters.
🔓 Hedera Donates Code to Linux Foundation & Names It “Hiero”
They basically set their code free, handing it to a vendor-neutral governance so no single entity can hog the keys. Now it’s under a Technical Steering Committee that holds public meetings on Zoom—so you can watch the sausage get made. If you want to fork it, improve it, or just stare at the GitHub commits, no one’s stopping you. Hedera blog.
🇫🇮 Paxos + Membrane: Grabbing EU Licenses Like Pokémon
Paxos scooped up Membrane Finance in Finland, snagging an Electronic Money Institution license with a shiny EU stamp. Now they can roll out stablecoins and tokenized assets across Europe without causing regulatory heart attacks. The plan: keep everything MiCA-compliant so you can finally have a stablecoin that’s, you know, stable and legal. Paxos blog.
🛎️ Travala + trivago: 2.2M Hotels, Paid In Crypto
Travala’s hooking into trivago so you can book hotels using BTC, ETH, or 98 other coins. They nearly doubled revenue last year, so apparently, “crypto tourism” is a real thing. If you’d rather spend your altcoins than hodl them, trivago just made your travel plans way easier. Travala blog.
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XRP
XRP Ledger’s 64-Minute Coffee Break ☕️
The XRP Ledger froze for 64 minutes today, pausing block production transactions stuck in limbo. 🥶
The Deets
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Duration: 64 minutes
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Transactions Affected: ~88,000
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XRP Price Action: Meh. Dipped to $2.45 before crawling back to $2.50 and now (noon) back to $2.45ish.
Ripple CTO David Schwartz explained that consensus kept running, but validators withheld their confirmations. One operator’s manual intervention may have nudged the network back on track, though Schwartz thinks it might have self-healed anyway.
No funds were lost, but because this is the internet and crypto, anti-XRP keyboard warriors used the glitch as ammo against XRP’s centralization. 🔫
Blockchains That Have Experienced Complete Outages ⬇️
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Solana: Gold medal of failure. Multiple outages, including a 17-hour downtime in September 2021 due to transaction overload, a seven-hour outage in May 2022, and a six-hour disruption in October 2022. Eight to ten complete outages, depending on the criteria.
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Sui Blockchain: Faced a significant outage on November 21, 2024, halting block production for over an hour due to a bug in the transaction scheduling logic.
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TON Blockchain: Experienced a major operational disruption in August 2024, failing to produce new blocks for over seven hours due to high traffic from a meme coin.
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Bitcoin: Contrary to popular belief, Bitcoin has had outages – but a long ass time ago: the Value Overflow Incident in 2010 and a chain split in 2013. Since then, it has maintained 100% uptime.
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Stacks (Bitcoin Layer 2): On January 6, 2025, Stacks faced a significant outage lasting over four hours, halting transaction processing due to a delay in block production caused by a signer.
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Avalanche: Experienced a brief but complete network halt in 2023 on its C-Chain due to a consensus mechanism bug.
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Arbitrum: Faced an outage in 2023, where the network ceased processing transactions due to technical issues.
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Cronos: Encountered a full network halt in 2022, stopping all activities temporarily because of system failures.
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zkSync: Underwent a complete shutdown in 2023, with the network becoming entirely non-functional due to a bug.
Blockchains That Never Gonna Give You Up, Never Gonna Let You Down – 100% Uptime 💪
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Litecoin (2011): Running smoothly for almost 15 years(!), never a major halt.
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Stellar (2014): Cross-border payments on autopilot—no outages since launch.
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Cardano (2017): Academically developed, hasn’t missed a beat from day one.
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Tezos (2018): Self-amending chain with zero pauses in operation.
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Algorand (2019): Fast finality and no downtime since the day it went live.
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Hedera (2019): Hashgraph in action, zero full-network shutdowns on record.
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Cosmos (2019): Interconnected blockchains, uninterrupted from the get-go.
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NEAR Protocol (2020): Sharded Proof of Stake that’s never hit the brakes.
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SKALE (2020): Elastic blockchains running strong—no major interruptions.
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THORChain (2022): Cross-chain swaps going strong, no full outage in sight.
NEWS IN THREE SENTENCES
DeFi, DEX, and Lending Protocol News 🏦
🏢 Lumia Wants to Tokenize Everything (Yes, Everything)
Lumia’s cooking up a high-performance chain with Polygon tech to tokenize stuff like a $220 million real estate project in Istanbul. They’re tying it all to Agglayer so you can seamlessly shuffle assets cross-chain and brag about owning fractions of skyscrapers. Polygon blog.
⚖️ The Balancer Report: Tokenized S&P 500? Sure, Why Not
Balancer’s teaming with BackedFi to bring the S&P 500 onchain, letting you swap, stake, and grab GNO rewards on Gnosis Chain. Morpho’s new Boosted Pool merges DEX and lending yields, while Sonic’s multi-layer incentives promise free alpha if you’ve got the guts. Meanwhile, Balancer V3 hums along with stable liquidity expansions, veBAL bribes, and a decent APR for anyone craving governance drama. Balancer blog.
🚀 Governance UI & Template: Because “Legacy” Means “Outdated”
Aragon wants you to stop hacking ancient UIs every time you try a fancy new voting system. They released a kit and template so you can spin up custom DAO interfaces without going insane. It’s open source, flexible, and likely your best bet at not rage-quitting mid-DAO upgrade. Aragon blog.
🔧 GIP 0061: The Graph’s Streamlined Governance Overhaul
The Graph is dropping complicated proposal hoops in favor of a single “Draft, Candidate, Approved” system. Think less bureaucratic madness, more clarity, and faster shipping. They even made a new form so if you want help or want to talk about your big idea, you just fill it out instead of howling into the governance void. The graph blog.
🏦 ZeUSD Lands on Metis, Promises Real-World Asset Yields
ZeUSD merges TradFi’s “serious money” with DeFi’s “I can’t believe this is real” vibe, bringing T-Bills, ETFs, and more onto Metis. It’s basically the grown-up stable token that means business, so you can mint, lend, and earn without the usual rug-pull paranoia. Whitelisted users can hop in early, snag RWA yields, and feel smug about it. Metis blog.
🏠 Real Estate Tokenization: Fractional Ownership > 30-Year Mortgage
Tokenizing property on a blockchain like Polymesh breaks real estate into bite-sized digital shares, making it easier for everyday investors to get a piece. Compliance is baked in, and fractional ownership means more liquidity with fewer headaches. It’s complicated but beats dealing with realtors and 15 reams of paper. Polymesh blog.
LINKS
Links That Don’t Suck 🔗
🪙 Semler Scientific adds $88 million to its Bitcoin treasury
🪨 BlackRock and Fidelity fuel $307 million Ethereum ETF inflow
⚖️ SEC scales back anti-crypto unit and strengthens new task force
👛 MetaMask wallet adds Gas Station feature to pay fees with tokens
⚔️ Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 sells more than 1 million copies in just 1 day
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Author Disclosure: The author of this newsletter holds positions in ADA, LTC, IMX, WMT, COPI, MIN, AGIX, ALGO, DOGE, ZEC, AVAX, XLM, XTZ, and NEAR. 📋
