Release Date: January 15, 2025
Author: BlockBeats Editorial Team
In the past 24 hours, the cryptocurrency market has shown a complex development trend across multiple dimensions. The mainstream topics focus on the industry divisions triggered by regulatory drafts and the game of "good bill/bad bill"; in terms of ecological development, Solana has launched stronger privacy exchange capabilities, Ethereum has reiterated its vision of decentralized sovereignty and strengthened the narrative of staking rewards, while the Perp DEX track continues to heat up amid trading volume spikes and mechanism adjustment controversies.
1. Mainstream Topics
1. Coinbase CEO and a16z among crypto institutions publicly disagree on Senate Banking Committee draft
The U.S. Senate Banking Committee is about to review the draft of the "CLARITY Act," which aims to establish a unified regulatory framework for the cryptocurrency market, involving key issues such as stablecoin rewards, DeFi privacy protection, tokenized stocks, and the division of authority between the CFTC and SEC.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong publicly stated that he cannot support the current version, claiming the draft has "significant flaws." He specifically criticized four points: it could effectively constitute a ban on tokenized stocks; the regulatory terms for DeFi amount to a "de facto ban," such as allowing the government unrestricted access to financial records, infringing on user privacy; it weakens the CFTC's authority, making it further subordinate to the SEC; and it prohibits stablecoin rewards, which could result in a "banking exclusion of competition" umbrella. Armstrong emphasized that he "would rather have no bill than a bad bill," but remains optimistic about revisions in future versions.
In contrast, a16z partner Chris Dixon publicly supports pushing the bill forward, believing that even if it is not perfect, it can provide clearer rules for developers and protect decentralized innovation. Meanwhile, institutions such as Circle, Kraken, Ripple, and Coin Center have also expressed support for the advancement. Reporter Eleanor Terrett reported that Coinbase's opposition could lead to a delay in the Senate's markup meeting, amplifying the divisions within the industry.
Community reactions have also been quite intense. Some users appreciate Coinbase's tough stance, believing it is "holding the line" for privacy and innovation, praising Armstrong for "showing them some color." However, others mock Coinbase's past push for regulation and its current opposition to the draft as a flip-flop.
Supporters of the bill emphasize that this is the result of bipartisan efforts over five years, relating to whether the U.S. can maintain its leadership in the crypto space, asserting that "now is the time to push the CLARITY Act." Opponents are more concerned that the bill is essentially a product of bank lobbying, which could ultimately lead to regulatory capture, with some community members sarcastically stating, "Thank you, Senate, for protecting consumers from… the danger of earning profits."
Overall, the core of the controversy centers on one question: is this bill opening space for innovation, or is it reinforcing the moat of traditional finance with a "compliance framework"?
2. Noise raises $7.1 million in seed funding, announces launch on Base
Emerging trading platform Noise announced the completion of a $7.1 million seed funding round, led by Paradigm, with participation from Figment Capital, Anagram, GSR, JPEG Trading, and Kaito AI. Noise's product positioning is to trade the prices of "trends, brands, and ideas," attempting to combine social data with trading behavior to form a signal system that captures cultural heat.
The project was initially incubated by MegaETH but ultimately chose to launch on Base. Similarly, another MegaETH-related project, GTE, also left after funding to build its own L1 application chain. This trend of "migrating from MegaETH" has sparked considerable discussion, with some interpreting it as a model of project pivoting after Paradigm's investment, potentially involving deeper strategic or even political considerations.
The community's overall response to the funding is positive, viewing it as a confirmation of the project's phased progress and reflecting market interest in the "social signal + trading" narrative. However, the decision to leave MegaETH and launch on Base after funding quickly sparked controversy, with some users bluntly stating, "The first three applications went elsewhere, so what does Mega have left?"
Supporters argue that Base has more practical advantages in user distribution, asset coverage, and ecological synergy, making it suitable for products focused on "cultural/trend trading" to scale quickly; skeptics point out that this migration equates to voluntarily giving up MegaETH's ultra-low latency and native community benefits, prompting a reevaluation of MegaETH's attractiveness and ecological retention capabilities.
Meanwhile, discussions have further extended to the influence of investment institutions: in key chain selection and route adjustments, whether top capital like Paradigm is "supporting the trend" or has, to some extent, shaped the project's strategic direction. Overall, this debate ultimately hinges on two trade-offs: Base's distribution capability and asset coverage vs. MegaETH's speed and local ecology, as well as how significant Paradigm's influence is in project selection.
3. Morpho shuts down project Discord: shifting from "community hall" to "customer service system"
DeFi protocol Morpho announced the closure of its public Discord channel, shifting to tools like Intercom for service support, including instant translation, help center, AI support bots, and ticket management, to enhance user experience and security.
Founder @MerlinEgalite stated that Discord has been severely polluted with scam information, and even with strict monitoring and quick bans, users still fall victim to phishing via direct messages. Similarly, DefiLlama has also transitioned to real-time support chat and email ticketing mechanisms, emphasizing that the product form of Discord itself makes it difficult to effectively protect users.
0xngmi shared experiences stating, "Discord makes it almost impossible to protect users from scams; even if you ban quickly, they can still DM scam." However, he also proposed a compromise: keep Discord as an entry point, guide users to open tickets through a gateway page, and use a verification code system to filter out bots, preserving a channel for genuine user feedback.
The community generally understands this decision, considering it "the best decision; Discord is a time black hole, especially related to crypto." Some believe this is a sign of industry maturation, predicting that "the next step may lean towards Web2 standards, such as Intercom, real-time chat, or even phone support." A few critics argue that this is not an operational issue but rather a "fundamental flaw" of Discord, with one user bluntly stating, "This is a feature of Discord, not a bug."
Overall sentiment leans towards "safety first," but some lament that this shift means the "sense of community" is being weakened, believing that "the mainstreaming of DeFi is a bit bittersweet."
4. Solana's official Twitter attacks Starknet user data, sparking inter-chain bickering
The official Solana account tweeted to mock Starknet's extremely low activity: only 8 daily active users, 10 daily transactions, yet boasting a market cap of $1 billion and an FDV of $15 billion, calling for it to "go to zero." Starknet founder @EliBenSasson quickly retaliated, mocking Solana for having "8 bald marketing interns, 10 daily tweets, yet 1 billion fans and 150 trillion FDV."
Subsequently, Starknet's official account responded with a video, to which Solana replied, "That's right," and the back-and-forth escalated into a meme exchange. Projects like MegaETH and Injective also joined in the teasing, quickly turning it into a public "inter-chain narrative battle."
Community reactions are largely humorous, finding it "funny," and saying, "Bro… at least use a burner account." Others feel that the main account publicly mocking a competitor is not very dignified, stating, "If the main account starts belittling others, it might indicate they are a bit desperate." Overall, this resembles a typical marketing battle: using competitor data as material and trading mockery for attention.
5. Base releases new roadmap: trading first, redoing "on-chain economic entry"
Base founder @jessepollak released a new roadmap, with the core direction being to return the Base App to "trading first" and become the best application entry point for the on-chain economy, promoting asset demand and distribution.
Pollak explained that the feedback received by the team was very clear: the original roadmap was too socialized, more like a Web2 product, offering limited help to users and failing to cover a broader range of asset needs. Therefore, the new version emphasizes: a trading-first product experience and interaction design; introducing more high-quality assets, including protocols, applications, stocks, predictions, memes, and creator assets; and more finance-oriented functional designs, such as copy trading, information flow trading, and leaderboards.
The community's overall response is positive, but some have raised sharper questions: who is Base's direct competitor? Is it trading terminals, Fomo-type products, or the "on-chain version of the Coinbase App"? Some critics are more straightforward, stating, "No one wants to mint tweets," implying that the previous social route deviated from demand. However, overall sentiment leans towards optimism: many believe this means Base is trying to make self-custody wallets the "entry point for global asset trading," rather than remaining stuck in on-chain social narratives.
2. Mainstream Ecological Dynamics
1. Solana
Solana's privacy transfer protocol Privacy Cash has launched a new feature, Private Swaps, allowing users to exchange multiple tokens in a private mode, such as SOL with USDC/USDT/ORE, etc. Privacy Cash emphasizes that its underlying privacy protocol has processed over $173 million in private transfers and has undergone 14 audits.
The core of this upgrade is that users can complete "token swaps" without exposing their main wallet address on-chain.
Its working mechanism can be summarized in three steps:
1) Input tokens are unmasked from the privacy pool and enter a temporary wallet on the client;
2) Complete the swap through Jupiter;
3) Output tokens are re-masked and returned to the main wallet.
Meanwhile, the protocol has also introduced a "partial swap deposit" mechanism to interfere with amount analysis, reducing the ability of onlookers to track the path and scale of funds. On the interface, users can directly see private balances and swap options, such as displaying the operation entry for "3.79 SOL swapping to -555 USDC." The project team also emphasizes its "No CA (no contract address)" feature, aiming to strengthen privacy and anti-tracking narratives.
The overall sentiment in the community is clearly excited, with many users believing this is a "hard upgrade" for Solana's privacy capabilities. The founder also emphasized the commitment to "never dilute privacy" during interactions. Meanwhile, some are comparing it to other privacy swap projects (such as Liberty Swap's ETH private exchange), focusing the discussion on whether this type of "usable privacy trading experience" will become a key competitive advantage for Solana in the privacy narrative.
2. Ethereum
Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has recently posted continuously on X, bringing the discussion back to Ethereum's original vision of a "decentralized sovereign network"—not merely about scaling, performance, or financial narratives, but a complete three-layer architecture that can replace Web2 infrastructure.
He reiterated that the core concept proposed by Ethereum in 2014 is essentially a decentralized internet stack:
Blockchain Layer: Ethereum as the "world computer," responsible for the account system and verifiable state changes;
Messaging Layer: Whisper (later evolved into Waku) handles decentralized data communication and messaging;
Storage Layer: Swarm is responsible for decentralized storage and content distribution.
Vitalik believes this vision has long been obscured by various "meta-narratives," but now the technological conditions are being fulfilled: Ethereum has completed its PoS transition, significantly reducing costs through mechanisms like ZK-EVM and PeerDAS, while L2 further provides throughput and experience gains on this basis; at the same time, Waku has been implemented in multiple applications, and the decentralized storage ecosystem (like IPFS) is also showing strong performance, although there are still many engineering details that need to be refined.
To make this vision more tangible, he used Fileverse as an example to describe a truly "decentralized and sustainable" application form: using Ethereum for account and permission management, and utilizing decentralized messaging networks and storage systems to carry data and content, thereby achieving what he calls the "walk-away test"—even if the project team disappears and the platform shuts down, users can still access their data and continue using the product. This ability to "exit as a user, with data not being held hostage" is seen by him as a key marker distinguishing sovereign tools from traditional internet products.
In his critique, Vitalik directly attacked the "corposlop" of Web2, a product form that gradually loses its soul under corporate metric optimization: algorithm-driven social media, endless data collection, and walled garden-style platform lock-in ultimately turn users into passive objects of attention and behavior. He calls on developers to refocus on "sovereign tools," such as privacy and locally prioritized applications, user-controlled content platforms, low-risk financial infrastructure, open-source AI, and DAOs.
The community reacted enthusiastically to this series of posts. Discussions revolved around the opposition of "sovereign networks vs. corposlop," with general agreement on Vitalik's judgment of the structural issues in Web2; on the other hand, more realistic landing demands were raised, such as the need for a more seamless gateway experience, allowing ordinary users to utilize complete decentralized capabilities without needing to understand complex components. The overall sentiment leans towards consensus: privacy tools, exit mechanisms, and user control are transitioning from idealistic slogans to new product thresholds.
Meanwhile, the financial narrative of Ethereum's "productive assets" is also being further strengthened. Public company SharpLink announced that it earned 500 ETH through ETH staking last week, with total staking rewards reaching 11,157 ETH, emphasizing that the earnings are still compounding. The significance of this data lies not only in the earnings themselves but also in its ability to show the market more intuitively that ETH is gradually evolving from a "price asset" to an on-chain capital tool that can be operated and generate cash flow.
Additionally, Base has also jointly released the "2026 AI × Blockchain Integration Report" with AWS Cloud and Superscrypt, advancing the discussion from "AI on-chain" to more specific execution levels: how AI agents trade on-chain, how to coordinate calculations, and how to participate in operations and settlements. The report particularly emphasizes the practical progress in the Asian region regarding native payment agents, decentralized GPU networks, and on-chain identity systems, citing multiple industry participants' cases as support, making it more like a landing-oriented industry roadmap rather than a simple conceptual output.
Finally, MegaETH has also sent a strong signal at the infrastructure level: it has open-sourced its stateless verifier code, marking the third open-source contribution following the open-sourcing of the SALT database and MegaEVM implementation. This verifier allows lightweight clients to validate blocks through witness data without needing to store the complete history, and it can even validate sequencer behavior on consumer-grade hardware. This move has not only received public recognition from Vitalik but also further reinforces a trend— in the new generation of scaling competition, "open-source progress" is becoming a hard indicator for competing for developer trust and ecological collaboration.
3. Perp DEX
The Perp DEX track has recently shown frequent dynamics, exhibiting a dual characteristic of "increased trading heat + more aggressive mechanism design."
First, Hyperliquid-related HIP-3 refreshed its intraday high: trading volume reached 757 million; open interest was 421 million, with the data seen as a reflection of high liquidity and market activity.
The community generally interprets this as a signal of the recovery of liquidity and real trading demand in the perpetual DEX track: without relying on subsidies to "inflate volume," trading volume and fees can still form a positive cycle, reflecting a more market-oriented growth structure.
Secondly, the Lighter protocol announced that access to the LLP (liquidity provision pool) requires staking LIT, which takes effect immediately, with the rule being: for every 1 LIT staked, 10 USDC can be deposited.
However, after Lighter introduced the "access to LLP requires staking LIT" threshold, it almost immediately triggered a strong backlash. Opponents argue that such restrictions will directly raise participation costs, leading to liquidity outflow, TVL contraction, and decreased trading execution efficiency, even causing the protocol to fall into the self-contradiction of "sacrificing scale to align incentives." Some have attempted to endorse it using the logic of top traditional financial funds, but this was quickly questioned, as the analogy was deemed invalid.
More pragmatic concerns focus on changes in risk structure: if the new threshold forces LP behavior to change, the rising hedging demand may lower APR while making LPs passively bear higher directional risks, ultimately weakening the attractiveness of the liquidity pool. Although its goal is to enhance the alignment of interests between LIT and LLP and improve the risk-adjusted return structure, the controversy lies in the fact that such restrictions may directly compress TVL and reduce liquidity depth, thereby affecting user trading experience.
The third incident comes from Ink Chain: after an on-chain outage, the DEX Nado based on Ink suspended deposits/withdrawals, while trading continued normally. The team stated that user funds are safe and provided continuous updates during the recovery process. Nado's product positioning emphasizes a unified margin experience of "spot + perpetual + money market," so infrastructure failures can easily trigger user panic.
Community sentiment has shifted to "urgent tension." Most users appreciate the team's continuous synchronization and transparent communication emphasizing fund safety, but they are highly sensitive to recovery progress, intensively questioning deposit delays and repair times, reflecting the fragile trust of trading products under infrastructure fluctuations.
Overall, the core contradiction in this round of Perp DEX discussions is: the track is still growing, but every mechanism adjustment triggers a new game between liquidity and user experience.
4. Others
The Sui network experienced several hours of downtime on January 14, with the mainnet facing network stagnation, causing some dApps (like Slush) and browsers (like SuiScan) to become unavailable, and transactions to be slow or unprocessable.
The core team of Sui responded quickly after the incident, announcing network recovery and normal trading about 6 hours later. The team suggested refreshing applications or browsers if issues persist and promised to release a complete incident review report in the coming days while continuously updating progress through the Sui Status page.
This incident once again exposed the "stability stress test" issue of high-performance L1s: while performance narratives are important, what truly affects user confidence is often the usability and recovery speed during downtime.
Community discussions quickly spilled over from "the outage itself" to a typical inter-chain mockery and route dispute. Voices from competing chain camps were noticeably more frequent, with related content often taking a mocking tone: on one hand, emphasizing their own network's advantages in stability and performance, and on the other hand, seizing the opportunity to amplify Sui's outage costs, spreading it as a "counterexample to high-performance narratives," even extending to questioning and mocking the PoS mechanism.
Meanwhile, the responses from Sui supporters focused on two points: first, the team handled the situation quickly and the recovery process was relatively transparent; second, they believe that the controversy generated by the outage itself also signifies attention, even being viewed as a "heat indicator." After the network recovery, some public opinion showed a clear emotional reversal, shifting from pessimism to recognition of the team's response capabilities, and reintegrating it into the narrative framework of "the next Solana-like growth curve."
Overall, the discussion ultimately converged on three focal points:
1) Can the stability and reliability of high-performance public chains withstand real pressure tests?
2) The old debate of PoS vs. PoW has been reactivated, becoming an outlet for emotional venting and positioning alignment.
3) The outage event itself is no longer just a technical accident but has quickly been processed into a material repository for inter-chain narrative competition.
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