Buybacks are already an industry standard.

In a recent proposal, Uniswap’s CEO shared that the DEX had long wanted to return value to token holders, but they were tied up in legal battles with Gary Gensler’s administration.

Now, with the political climate in the US shifting, a new path has opened, and with it, a new value plan for $UNI.

Uniswap now plans to:
◆ Turn on protocol fees and use them to burn UNI.
◆ Send Unichain sequencer fees to the same UNI burn mechanism.
◆ Burn 100 million UNI from the treasury (about 10% of supply), representing what would have been burned if fees had been on since launch.
◆ Alongside this, they’ll turn off interface fees.

All of this means Uniswap becomes a buyback machine on the level of Pump.fun, burning $38M per month.

For comparison: buybacks on $PUMP are $35M, and $HYPE is $95M.

How the ICO Meta Changed in 2025

OGs remember 2017: anyone could ape into any ICO with any amount, no KYC - a playground for manipulation.
In 2021–2022 CoinList arrived: KYC became the norm, but users eventually created account farms and overwhelmed CoinList with volume.

By 2025 the ICO meta is back. KYC is a basic standard, and successful launchpads now add investor scoring:

◆ Kaito Launchpad relies on AI parsing of X (Twitter): a high Kaito score boosts your odds and allocation size.
◆ Legion uses a composite score - on-chain, X, GitHub + a motivation letter, then the protocol team hand-picks holders.
◆ Buidlpad tightens geo filters and gives better terms to active users of the protocols that are raising.

As the result, it’s getting harder for a regular participant to get into a sale with obvious upside - the line often never reaches them.

So, second-tier launchpads are popping up:

🔹 Legion has external curators Nozomi and Cookie (same rails, lower thresholds).
🔹 Buidlpad launched Vibe with smaller sizes and simpler projects.
🔹 Each chain is spawning local platforms. On Solana alone: MetaDAO, Soar, Believe, Pump.fun, Daos.fun, Letsbonk.fun, Heaven.

It feels like there are already more launchpads than quality projects to launch on them.
If you’re a strong builder, the window to raise a presale is open. The hardest part isn’t launching technically, it’s winning attention and cutting through the larps.

Aqua by 1inch: TUV (Total Unlocked Value)

If liquidity is water, DeFi still pours it into a hundred cups. 1inch is proposing a faucet that can fill several at once.

Aqua is a new shared-liquidity layer: your capital stays in your wallet but can work across multiple strategies simultaneously (AMM/RFQ/limit orders/auctions, etc.) with no locks and no transferring assets into third-party pools.

How it works (simplified):
You set wallet rules (permissions). On demand, the protocol pulls exactly the liquidity needed for a trade and returns it with fees (pull & push; auto-compound). Virtual balances let the same capital back multiple strategies in parallel.

The focus shifts from TVL to TUV: not how much is locked in protocols, but how broadly and efficiently the same dollar is utilized over time (your funds remain withdrawable at any moment, yet can earn extra yield while idle).

In doing so, Aqua aims to solve liquidity fragmentation and provide liquidity on demand wherever it’s needed.

A basic initial use case is supplying liquidity to solvers - they find optimal swap/arbitrage routes and share a portion of the profits with LPs.

Will Monad fail to hit $400M?

Right now the $MON presale pool on Coinbase sits at $155M out of the needed $188M, with 2 days left.

On Polymarket, trading implies 67% odds of $300M+ and 33% for $400M+.

Technically, Monad’s raise targets still look more than achievable, but with pre-market pricing +50% vs presale, a stronger inflow would’ve been expected.

Why?
🔹 KYC frictions seem tougher for parts of emerging markets vs. Pump.fun/MegaETH.
🔹 $MEGA ran 4x on pre-market (even with unclear timing); Monad lists on the 24th, yet sits at only +50% (only, lol).
🔹 Market mood: BTC 86k and $MON on Hyperliquid has been drifting down all the time.

Watching the final hours closely - most of the capital usually arrives right at the end.

$TNSR is a perfect example of why, without legal protections, a token can end up as exit liquidity.

The Tensor team had two products: Tensor NFT Marketplace and Vector.fun. Both routed 50% of all fees to the $TNSR treasury. That was the token’s core value.

Then Coinbase acquired Vector along with the team.
The token and the NFT marketplace were left to an “independent foundation.”
Founders got paid by CB.
Token holders got zero from the acquisition.

In the 48 hours before the announcement, the token did an 11x move (from $0.034 to $0.365) on $1.9B volume. A wallet linked to the Tensor treasury bought 725k $TNSR at $0.045 and sold around $0.38, netting roughly $156k (+740%).

Now they propose 100% of marketplace fees to the treasury and partial supply burns, but that’s nothing in comparison with acquisition upside left for founders.

Until a token has a legal wrapper with real holder rights, it’s just a pretty package for a founders’ exit.

At Coinstruct, we architect differently.

How teams burn treasury on buybacks for nothing

We talk a lot about buybacks, but some teams use them absolutely straightforward. Case in point: $WLFI.

The team periodically buybacks from a reserves wallet, but does it in a way that significantly moves the market.
One wallet typically pumps price by 1–2%, while a second bot wallet pushes 8–15% (I’ll leave the addresses in the comments).
That spread goes to arbitrageurs, the chart looks choppy, and the team ends up with a higher average buyback price than necessary.

How to do it smart and bake buybacks into tokenomics:

🔹TWAP/VWAP execution with sliced orders + randomized intervals.
🔹Set limits as % of volume/liquidity, not a fixed $.
🔹Public dashboard: rules, budget, execution (transparency reduces FUD and rumor front-running).

1 USDT is effectively backed by only 87 cents.

S&P Global Ratings lowered USDT’s rating to 5 - the lowest possible score on their scale. We checked Tether’s reports to calculate the risks. Spoiler: the math isn’t very pleasant.

The main reason for the downgrade is the growth in the share of high-risk assets. Over the last year, it grew from 17% to 24%. Tether looks less like a digital dollar and more like a hedge fund.

USDT has a total of $181 billion in reserves (as of the 09/30/2025 report).
Of this, safe assets (US Treasuries, REPO, cash): $139.8 billion.
No questions here.

But here are the risky assets ($41.1 billion or 24%):
🔹 Secured loans: $14.6 billion (issued to whom? possibly the affiliated Bitfinex).
🔹 Precious metals: $12.9 billion.
🔹 Bitcoin: $9.8 billion.
🔹 Certain "other investments": $3.8 billion.

Let's simulate a stress test.
Imagine a crisis where Bitcoin and Gold drop by 50%, and secured loans + "other investments" turn out to be unrecoverable (go to zero).
The company is left with $151.1billion in assets. Liabilities to USDT holders are $174 billion (amount of USDT in circulation).

The real value of 1 USDT becomes $0.87.

Yes, this is a pessimistic scenario. But the lack of reserve segregation and the registration in El Salvador (where oversight is minimal) do not add optimism.

This is a masterclass in how NOT to launch a Tier-1 token.

Monad raised a record $400M. Now it is trading below its presale price.

1. The Artificial Pump
The sale valuation was $2.5B (0.025 per token).
To ensure the Coinbase listing didn't look like a flop, Market Maker aggressively pushed the FDV up to $4.8B.

2. The Reality Check
Once the MM stopped propping up the price, the uncomfortable truth came out: The ecosystem is empty.

🔹 Failed Incentives: The Monad Momentum program (designed to distribute $MON to protocols to attract users) has gone silent. No user acquisition is happening yet.
🔹 Liquidity Issues: On-chain pools are largely paired with USDC, not the native $MON token. This kills the organic demand for the native asset.
🔹 Community Sentiment: The project seems to be FUDed by its own community.

As the result, We are now trading lower than the presale price of $0.025.
We don't want to gloat, but this is starting to look a lot like Berachain 2.0.

5 hard truths that became obvious this year.

2025 didn't go exactly as the crowd predicted. It was a year of sobering realizations.

1) The Echo Chamber is Real.
Crypto marketing currently feels like selling to the same 100,000 people on Crypto Twitter over and over again. The new blood? They are mostly buying Bitcoin ETFs, not your new L2 governance token.

2) Diamond Hands is a Losing Strategy.
In 99% of cases, holding a token post-TGE just makes you exit liquidity for VCs.
Don’t be naive about lockups: Even if VCs have a 1-year cliff, they are often hedging their positions via futures/OTC desks on Day 1. The sell pressure starts immediately, you just don't see it onchain yet.

3) Crypto Crime is real.
And It is apparently fine... as long as it pumps our bags.
The moral compass was thrown out the window in favor of PnL. We saw this with $TRUMP, $ASTER, $MMT, $COAI. If the chart goes up, nobody asks questions.

4) Mass Adoption is Still a Myth.
We made progress with Chain Abstraction and smoother onboarding via Robinhood-like apps, but the average retail user is still far away. We are largely just digging in our own sandbox, moving the same liquidity between different pools.

5) We are Drowning in Infrastructure.
Every month brings a new "revolutionary" L1 or L2. But where are the consumer apps?

The only real product-market fit we saw this year was in Decentralized Perps (mostly gambling), Prediction Markets (mostly gambling), and maybe Yield Basis LP hedging.

Most L1 Altcoins are walking zombies. We expect another 60-70% drop over the next 2 years.
(Excluding BTC/ETH).

The market structure has fundamentally shifted from the "Partnerships" and "Roadmaps" era to the era of P&L.
And the P&L of your favorite L1 looks terrible.

Here is the math:

1. The Fee Generation Trap
L1 business models rely entirely on transaction fees. Fees come from trading.
But who is trading heavily on Monad, Aptos, Polkadot, or TON right now?
To justify its current valuation with a generous P/S ratio of 15, a chain like Aptos needs to generate $80M in annual fees.
That is simply not happening without massive, unsustainable incentives.

2. The Treasury Illusion
"We have a huge treasury!"
No, you have a pile of your own native tokens.
You cannot liquidate them to fund operations without crashing your own price. It is a death spiral waiting to happen.

3. The Super-App Fallacy
Blockchains try to be Super Apps - infrastructure first, users later.
History shows this fails. Successful Super Apps start with a killer product that generates cash, then expand. L1s are trying to skip the product phase and go straight to platform.
(Hyperliquid is one of the few exceptions here that actually started with a product).

4. The Institutional Dilemma
Why would institutions build RWA on an aging 2021 L1 when specialized chains (like Canton) or shiny new 2025 chains exist?
More importantly, why choose a generic L1 over Ethereum or Base?

The Valuation Reality Check:
— Code: Hard to value.
— Assets: Illiquid native tokens.
— Profit: Near zero.
— Userbase: Mostly bots or airdrop hunters.
— Goodwill: Non-existent.

Crypto Spot Trading is dying.

We pulled the data for ETH/USDT on Binance to compare the market structure of 2020 vs. 2025.

March 2020:
Perpetual/Spot Ratio: 1.38
For every 1 of Spot volume, there was 1.4 traded in Perps.
People were buying assets to hold.

December 2025:
Perpetual/Spot Ratio: 9.70
For every 1 of Spot volume, there is nearly 10 traded in Perps.
People are not buying the asset anymore. They are just betting on its price.

The Second Shift: CEX vs. DEX Perps
PerpDEX are eating the centralized giants alive.

Just look at the market share of DEX derivatives volume:
2022: < 1%
2024: 4%
2025: 15% (and growing rapidly).

Protocols like Hyperliquid are now doing volumes comparable to Tier-1 CEXs (reaching 14% of Binance's volume on some days).

The market has matured, but in a weird way. Real spot demand (accumulation) is becoming a niche sport for ETFs and institutions. The rest of the market has moved entirely to leverage and hedging.

This crumpled piece of paper turned into $1.5B in Client TVL.

4 years ago: No team, no clients. Just a sharpie and a belief that Tokenomics needs engineering, not guessing.

They told us the niche was too small.

Today:
🔹 70+ Token Economies built
🔹 $25M+ Raised by clients
🔹 Team of 20+

We turned a napkin sketch into a full-stack economic lab.

We are gwowing and in 2026, we are releasing our internal AI tool to the public. Stay tuned.

a16z crypto just released their "Big Ideas for 2026".

We read the full report so you don't have to.

Here are the 5 trends that will actually define the next cycle:

1) Privacy is the New Moat.
Privacy is no longer just a feature for cypherpunks. It is becoming a core competitive advantage for businesses.
"Secrets-as-a-service" will emerge. If your protocol exposes user data by default, you are building legacy tech.

2) From KYC to "Know Your Agent".
This is a massive paradigm shift. As AI agents start transacting autonomously, traditional ID verification becomes obsolete.
The new trust layer isn't about checking passports; it's about verifying reputation and logic specs of AI agents.

3) The Internet becomes the Bank.
We are moving past the "crypto as an asset class" phase.
Stablecoins will turn the internet itself into a banking layer. Storage, transfers, and yield will be embedded directly into the web's fabric, bypassing traditional fintech rails entirely.

4) Trading is a Feature, not the Product.
For the last 5 years, crypto business models relied on speculation.
a16z predicts that trading is just a waypoint. The next generation of unicorns will build models beyond speculation. (This aligns perfectly with my previous post about the death of empty L1s).

5) RWA goes Crypto-Native.
Stop trying to just copy-paste stocks onto the blockchain.
The future belongs to assets that are created on-chain and leverage programmability, rather than just mirroring the old world.

The infrastructure phase is maturing. The Casino Phase is peaking. 2026 will be about Privacy, AI Agents, and Programmable Money.

New "Crime" in the BNB Ecosystem.

The market consensus was that Opinion Labs would be the chosen Prediction Market for the BNB chain (and CZ).

Then, out of nowhere, CZ mentions Predict.Fun.

The crowd immediately prepared for several months points farming (similar to the Aster), but the platform launches tomorrow, and there is an immediate Claim Page.

This is not a Reward. This is a Vampire Attack.
They took a snapshot of addresses that traded meaningful volume on:

— Competitors: Polymarket, Limitless, Opinion Labs
— Ecosystem: BNB Chain memecoins, Aster perps

They are not rewarding their own users (they don't have any yet); they are aggressively buying users from others.

Our base scenario is that we will see The Crime Pump:
They drop small amounts to thousands of wallets. At launch, the value is negligible.
Then, Market Makers aggressively pump the low-float token to grab attention.
Once FOMO kicks in and the chart goes vertical -> they launch "Season 2" to trap the liquidity.

But we always have room for The Conditional Drop:
You get the allocation, but the tokens are locked. To unlock them, you must generate trading volume on the platform.

Hyperliquid was the King of Decentralized Perps. Now it holds only 18% market share.

A year ago, they were untouchable.
Today, despite having a die-hard community, a really good product, massive profitability - the dominance chart is going down.

The founders decided that Token Price is the best Marketing.
They poured revenue into buybacks instead of aggressive expansion. It is too early to call it a mistake, but the data is alarming.

Can HL make a comeback?
The chances are decent. But Product alone won't save them anymore. They need Distribution.

Hyperliquid needs to integrate into wallets like MetaMask and other Web2 channels. We believe the winner of the Perp and Prediction Market wars will be the project that integrates directly into the Twitter (X) interface.

"Too Big to Fail" does not exist in crypto.

We recently looked at the TVL chart of MEV Capital, once a titan among Risk Curators.

Just two months ago, in October, they were ranked #3 globally with $1.5B in TVL (trailing only behind Steakhouse and Gauntlet).
Today, they manage only $288M.

That is an 80% drop in 60 days.

In November, the stablecoin protocol Stream Finance collapsed, losing $93M of user funds due to an "error by an external manager."

MEV Capital invested user money into Stream Finance. They were supposed to filter the risk. They failed the Due Diligence.

We can blame bad luck, but we must look at the incentives.
For Risk Curators, it is often "just business."
Their revenue model relies on Success Fees.
Higher APR = More Profit = Higher Fees.
There is a subtle but dangerous incentive to approve riskier strategies to boost yields.

Reputation in DeFi is built over years and lost in a single block.

This table explains why the crypto market feels "dead" despite billions in funding.

In 2025, the Stablecoin and Payments sector raised massive rounds:
Tempo: $500M.
Ripple: $500M.
Meshpay: $82M.

The money is there. Huge money.
But everyone complaining about the lack of opportunities because Alpha has been privatized.

Following the passing of the GENIUS Act in July, the game changed. We've shifted from DAO governance tokens to regulated Corporate Equity.

Agora, Rain, Stablecore, Tempo – almost none of them plan to launch a platform token (yet).
The immense value created by these protocols will stay locked inside the companies, accessible only to VCs and shareholders. The retail user is now just a user, not a beneficiary.

Remember the hype around farming Ethena, Usual, Resolv, Plasma? That era is gone.
Yield farming on stablecoins is no longer a path to wealth, it's just a Customer Acquisition Cost for the issuers.

We were told this cycle would be different.
It is. The money is being made in Private Markets (Equity), not in Public Markets (Tokens).

Gold +70%. Bitcoin -8%. What happened to Digital Gold?

For years, we were sold the story that Bitcoin is the ultimate hedge, the Digital Gold that would lead the commodities rally.

While traditional markets and Commodities have been tearing through All-Time Highs, crypto has been left behind.
The performance divergence over the last year is deafening:
Silver: +133%
Gold: +70%
Bitcoin: -8.68%

Gold and Silver were being accumulated as safe havens, the Crypto industry spent the year diluting itself.
We flooded the market with thousands of "VC-backed infrastructure tokens" that turned out to be purely Down-Only assets. Instead of onboarding the masses, the industry treated retail as exit liquidity.

However, this is exactly why Bitcoin looks interesting right now.
Everyone is chasing metals at All-Time Highs. Bitcoin is hated, underperforming, and ignored by the crowd.
Paradoxically, this underperformance makes BTC the best asymmetric bet for 2026

The Hostile Takeover in Web3. How it happened?

The conflict between Aave Labs and the DAO has exposed a critical flaw in how we define decentralized ownership.

1. The Core Dispute
Ernesto Boado (founder of BGD Labs and previous CTO Aave Labs) proposed a hard pivot: transfer control of the Aave brand, domains, and social accounts directly to the DAO. His argument - the brand’s value is created collectively by the holders, yet it is currently monetized privately by one company (Aave Labs).

2. The $10M/Year Trigger
The conflict escalated with the CoW Swap integration.
Previously, swap fees flowed into the DAO treasury. After a recent update, this revenue stream ($200k/week) was redirected specifically to Aave Labs.
This decision was made without a governance vote.

3. The Hostile Vote
The situation turned toxic when Aave Labs forced Boado's proposal to a Snapshot vote without his consent (and during the holidays). Key delegates, including Marc Zeller, labeled it a "hostile takeover" of the governance process. The community revolted against the tactic:
55% Voted Against
41% Abstained

4. The $12.6M Whale Move
Stani Kulechov purchased $12.6M worth of AAVE tokens right before the vote started.
While he claims it was a long-term investment, the timing signals a dangerous precedent: using personal capital to potentially sway a governance outcome.

AAVE went down from $200 to $150 as the market realized that "decentralized" governance might be easily bypassed by the development team.

This is a stress test for the entire DAO model. If a development company can unilaterally redirect cash flow and force votes, are we really operating a DAO? Or just a public company with a token attached?

95% of DeFi staking is economically absurd.

Most staking models are broken. They rely on a simple, self-destructive loop:
Print new tokens -> Pay stakers -> Price dumps due to inflation.

If your yield comes from the printer, you are the exit liquidity.

But we are seeing a shift to Net Positive Staking.
A prime example in 2026 is is Lighter.

On Jan 15, Lighter made staking mandatory for liquidity providers.
Instead of bribing users with inflationary rewards, they created hard utility:

Access: You literally cannot LP without staking $LIT (1:10 ratio).
Deflation: Protocol revenue is used for Buybacks, not redistributed as raw emissions.

These are two powerful sinks that create genuine buying pressure. But the most critical metric here is the Net Economic Effect.

Simply put, this calculates the balance of value flow:
Positive Effect: Value flowing IN (Fees, Buybacks, Lock-ups).
Negative Effect: Value leaking OUT (Emissions, Sell pressure).

If the protocol pays out $1.00 in emissions to generate $0.50 in fees, the Net Effect is negative. No amount of marketing can fix that math.

Read the full breakdown with calculations and charts in our blog about Token Staking in DeFi