Release Date: January 7, 2025
Author: BlockBeats Editorial Team

In the past 24 hours, the mainstream topic in the crypto market has focused on the settlement controversy and potential insider risks of Polymarket in geopolitical events; in terms of ecological development, concerns have been raised about the network health of Solana and MEV behavior, the divergence of Ethereum's roadmap continues to ferment, and the Perp DEX track is accelerating differentiation amid buyback mechanisms and market-making compression.

I. Mainstream Topics

1. Polymarket's Settlement Controversy in the Venezuela "Invasion" Market

On January 3, the U.S. launched military operations against Venezuela, successfully capturing President Maduro and his wife and handing them over for trial in the U.S. The Trump administration characterized this action as a "law enforcement operation," rather than a "military invasion."

On Polymarket, the related prediction market (such as "Will the U.S. invade Venezuela?") ultimately ruled that the "Yes" option was invalid, reasoning that the action did not meet the market's preset definition of "invasion," which refers to a traditional large-scale ground military invasion, rather than a quick, targeted raid.

This settlement result sparked a strong backlash in the community, with many users accusing it of "arbitrary rule interpretation" and "backtracking," directing their criticism towards the controversial adjudication mechanism led by UMA holders. Numerous posts self-mockingly stated "the house always wins," further amplifying doubts about the fairness and credibility of prediction markets. Related discussions quickly surpassed one million views, becoming the core topic of the day.

2. Insider Trading Suspicions Arising from the Maduro Incident

More controversially, just hours before the military action, multiple new wallets appeared on-chain, making large bets on "Maduro will step down before January 31" or "the U.S. will intervene in Venezuela" with a probability of only about 6%–8%. One account invested approximately $35,000 and ultimately profited over $400,000.

The community immediately questioned whether there was insider information leakage, even considering the possibility of connections to the government or intelligence systems. Although some argued that the limited liquidity and high noise of prediction markets made it difficult to draw conclusions from a single transaction, the precise timing was still deemed "too coincidental."

This incident has sparked higher-level discussions, with some lawmakers proposing to restrict or prohibit government officials from participating in prediction markets to prevent potential insider trading risks. Coupled with the aforementioned settlement controversy, Polymarket's systemic risks have become the absolute focus of today's discussions.

3. Berachain's TVL Plummets

Another widely circulated piece of content comes from Berachain. This L1 project, which was highly hyped in 2025 (with frequent high-profile activities and a TVL that once exceeded $3 billion), has now seen its total locked value drop to about $184 million, a decline of over 90%.

Community discussions generally attribute the reasons to "insufficient product and real demand after the hype recedes" and "incentive decay leading to rapid capital outflow." Some users jokingly referred to it as "bear chain" (due to the phonetic similarity of Berachain to bear chain). Comments from prominent figures like CZ also focused on the same point: marketing cannot replace sustainable products and cash flow in the long term. Such discussions reflect a reassessment of the long-term survival capability of new public chains in the market.

4. Rumors of TON Team Selling

TON's price has fallen about 66% from its peak, with some posts attributing this to team selling behavior, sparking brief discussions. However, overall, the topic's heat is significantly lower than that of Polymarket and Berachain, and it is more likely to be viewed as a case within the overall market correction cycle, without forming a sustained controversy.

II. Mainstream Ecological Dynamics

1. Solana

Block Packing Issues Raise Network Health Concerns

New tools (such as ibrl.wtf) have revealed that some validators are adopting a so-called late packing strategy, deliberately delaying transactions to the end of the block to maximize MEV extraction profits.

The community generally believes that this behavior is eroding Solana's core technological advantages: the real-time processing model, originally marketed for transaction streaming, has turned into a "burst" state, where the state is only visible at the end of the time slot, thus affecting transaction real-time performance and breaking execution fairness.
Jito governance lead @DrNickA described it as Solana's "existential crisis moment," pointing out that such behavior could directly constrain the development of advanced applications like on-chain CLOB. He called for coordination at the staker level to punish bad validators or guide staking to nodes with better IBRL scores (such as Jito SOL).

The community consensus is that in the short term, reliance can only be on social-level coordination, while in the long term, protocol-level solutions (such as BAM/MCP proposals) are needed to technify the constraint mechanisms. This topic has garnered significant attention, reflecting the market's collective anxiety about whether Solana's long-term value proposition will be eroded by MEV behavior.

2. Ethereum

Divergence in Roadmap and Upgrades Against Censorship Progressing in Parallel

Former EF researcher Dankrad Feist publicly questioned Vitalik's emphasis on the "trust minimization and resilience-first" approach, arguing that this could push Ethereum towards a "better version of Bitcoin-style digital gold," thereby sacrificing its potential to support real economic activities. He advocates prioritizing high-value DeFi activities back to L1.

Multicoin Capital partner Kyle Samani's criticism is more direct, asserting that EF's development focus is not on serving user needs but revolves around Vitalik's personal vision. This statement quickly sparked polarized reactions: one side supports the long-termism of "sovereignty and anti-censorship priority," while the other worries that Ethereum is gradually deviating from practicality and market competition.

Alongside the ideological debate, there is a technically positive development. Soispoke.eth analyzed on the Ethereum Magicians forum that EIP-7805 (FOCIL: Fork Choice-enforced Inclusion Lists) is expected to be included in the Hegotá upgrade (the successor version of Glamsterdam).

FOCIL enhances censorship resistance, transaction timeliness, and execution neutrality by allowing multiple validators to enforce the inclusion of valid transactions. This proposal previously failed to enter Glamsterdam due to testing scope control issues, but it has now gained more support at the core developer level, and the prototype is ready, believed to benefit ordinary users, L2, institutional participants, and application layers simultaneously.

3. Perp DEX: Positive Signals from Lighter

Lighter has officially launched a protocol fee mechanism for continuous on-chain buybacks of $LIT, with related buybacks publicly traceable through a dedicated treasury account. The community generally views this as a rare, real value capture model that can linearly scale with platform usage, and the recent price performance of $LIT is seen as a direct feedback to this.

At the same time, the spread and marginal analysis of market makers show that the short-term profit margins of leading market makers like Selini Capital and Jump Crypto are being significantly compressed. Data indicates that Jump's transaction share in delayed arbitrage has reached 47%, and since September-October 2025, the overall market-making margins have continued to narrow, with mechanized market-making strategies facing greater pressure under a 0.2 bps fee structure.

4. Other Project Updates

Infinex: The founder disclosed a monthly burn rate of about $1.1 million (with a team of about 60 people), leading some in the community to question the high salary levels of employees. However, subsequent clarifications showed that this figure includes infrastructure and various operational costs, and the controversy quickly cooled down.

Tempo: Released the TIP-20 token standard, optimized for stablecoin and payment scenarios, supporting transfer notes, compliance strategies, yield distribution, and "any stablecoin payment for Gas," and has already collaborated with AllUnity, Bridge, LayerZero, and others.

MegaETH (MEGA): Included in Coinbase's listing roadmap, the community views this as a positive signal for high-performance L2 gaining recognition from mainstream platforms, with speculation that the TGE is imminent.

TON: Old news has resurfaced: the team sold approximately $450 million worth of tokens in 2025, which some users view as a key reason for the price dropping about 66% from its peak, with discussions mainly consisting of jokes and post-event summaries.

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