Arthur Hayes has introduced his essay “This Is Fine”

Bitcoin is the global fiat liquidity fire alarm. It is the most responsive freely traded asset to the fiat credit supply. The divergence recently between Bitcoin and the Nasdaq 100 Index (“Nasdaq”) sounds the alarm that a massive credit destruction event is nigh. Many investors perceive Bitcoin, because of its past correlation with US big tech stonks, as a leveraged play on the Nasdaq. Therefore, when they diverge in performance, it warrants further investigation into any trigger that could cause a destruction of fiat, but mostly dollar, credit, aka deflation!

https://cryptohayes.substack.com/p/this-is-fine

Grayscale Sui Staking ETF is live on NYSE Arca

https://x.com/Grayscale/status/2023963615607615725

Hyperliquid Launches Hyperliquid Policy Center, Allocates 1M HYPE Tokens (~$29M) to Engage U.S. Regulators

https://fortune.com/2026/02/18/hyperliquid-launches-defi-focused-policy-shop-led-by-prominent-crypto-lawyer-jake-chervinsky/

Financial giant with $3.5 trillion asset Apex to pilot Trump-affiliated WLFI stablecoin for tokenized funds

The financial giant with $3.5 trillion in assets has teamed up with World Liberty Financial to test the USD1 stablecoin for fund flows and tokenized assets.

https://www.coindesk.com/business/2026/02/18/apex-group-to-pilot-trump-affiliated-wlfi-stablecoin-for-tokenized-funds

Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon said he owns only a small amount of bitcoin but is closely watching the cryptocurrency as part of a broader shift in financial technology.

https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2026/02/18/goldman-sachs-david-solomon-says-he-owns-very-little-bitcoin-but-watching-it-closely

Pineapple Financial has released a brand new dashboard showcasing that it has accumulated over 7 Million INJ tokens to date, representing 7% of the total supply of Injective

https://x.com/PAPLpineapple/status/2023845394103628108

The crypto market is neutral
BTC Dominance - 57.67%

Market Cap - $2.32T
BTC - $66,983 (-0.95%)
ETH - $1,972 (-1.36%)
BNB - $607 (-1.72%)
SOL - $81 (-4.11%)
INJ - $3.41 (+9.71%)

https://dropstab.com

Base, the Coinbase-incubated Ethereum Layer 2, is pivoting away from Optimism’s Superchain ecosystem and "evolving its foundational software by moving to a unified, Base-operated stack"

https://www.theblock.co/post/390380/coinbase-incubated-base-network-to-ditch-optimism-for-unified-solution

OpenAI and Paradigm have introduced EVMbench — a new benchmark that measures how well AI agents can detect, exploit, and patch high-severity smart contract vulnerabilities

https://cdn.openai.com/evmbench/evmbench.pdf

Ethereum Foundation Introduces Protocol Priorities Update for 2026

Three strategic initiatives: Scale L1, Scale Blobs, and Improve UX.

Glamsterdam is the next major network upgrade, targeted for the first half of 2026.

https://blog.ethereum.org/2026/02/18/protocol-priorities-update-2026

Aptos Tokenomics Update: Moving to Performance-Driven Supply Mechanism

— Aptos Foundation intends to initiate a governance proposal to reduce the annual staking rewards rate from 5.19% to 2.6%.
— 10X Gas Fee Increase
— Decibel, which was incubated by Aptos Labs in partnership with the Decibel Foundation, represents one of the first fully decentralized exchanges that executes all trading activity onchain: every order, match, and cancel.
— Hard Supply Cap: 2.1 Billion APT
— Foundation Permanent Lock: 210 Million APT
— Performance-Gated Grant Issuance
— Programmatic Buyback Program

https://x.com/aptos/status/2024216329826230392

SEC Chairman Paul S. Atkins says the SEC is rolling out multiple crypto regulatory initiatives in the coming weeks to months

https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/speeches-statements/atkins-peirce-021826-number-go-down-other-schadenfreude

Uniswap’s governance is voting on a proposal to activate protocol fees on all remaining v3 pools and expand fees to eight more chains.

The temp check, now live on Snapshot and set to conclude on Feb. 23, proposes activating protocol fees on v2 and v3 deployments across eight additional chains, including Arbitrum, Base, Celo, OP Mainnet, Soneium, X Layer, Worldchain, and Zora.

https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/speeches-statements/atkins-peirce-021826-number-go-down-other-schadenfreude

Morgan Stanley, other top holders add Bitmine exposure amid sell-off

https://cointelegraph.com/news/morgan-stanley-bitmine-shareholders-bmnr-holdings-stock-crash

Injective announced its flagship event — Injective Summit 2026

▫️July 16, 2026

https://injective.com/summit2026
https://x.com/injective/status/2024485584631206247

The crypto market is neutral
BTC Dominance - 57.93%

Market Cap - $2.32T
BTC - $67,310 (+0.89%)
ETH - $1,948 (-0.89%)
BNB - $607 (-0.18%)
SOL - $82 (+1.53%)

https://dropstab.com

Vitalik Buterin: “Lengthening the feedback distance between humans and AIs is not a good thing for the world.

Today, it means you're generating slop instead of solving useful problems for people. It's not even well-optimized for helping people have fun.
Once AI becomes powerful enough to be truly dangerous, it's maximizing the risk of an irreversible anti-human outcome that even you will deeply regret.

The point of ethereum is to set *us* free, not to create something else that goes off and does some stuff freely while our own situation is unchanged or worsened. (And, as others have pointed out, the models are run by openai and anthropic, so the thing is not even "self-sovereign"; you're actually perpetuating the mentality that centralized trust assumptions can be put in a corner and ignored, the very mentality that ethereum is at war with)

The exponential will happen regardless of what any of us do, that's precisely why this era's primary task is NOT to make the exponential happen even faster, but rather to choose its direction, and avoid collapse into undesirable attractors.”

https://x.com/vitalikbuterin/status/2024543743127539901

Haseeb: “Crypto was not made for humans”.

https://x.com/hosseeb/status/2024136762424185208

Upbit will list Aztec today at 7:30 UTC

https://upbit.com/service_center/notice?id=6025&view=share