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Greeting fellow apes and trench warriors. 

This week’s been a mixed bag, innit? Markets were shit, then they recovered, and now they look shit again. A tale as old as time as we stay within the constant limbo between “it’s so over” and “we’re so back”. 

Alright, I know you all don’t have much time, so let’s get into this quickly. 

But first, a quick sip. 

AHHH alright, let’s get started. 

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Smart-money movements on Ethereum.

Smart-money movements on Solana.

Trenches in turmoil

The trenches have never been more insufferable. Ever since the memecoin mania in early 2024, things have rapidly gone downhill. 

If there were a way to summarize the current state of the trenches, it would be this. 

Basically, there are straight-up rugs and insider scams, with every trench warrior getting rinsed by the grifters for every penny they have. 

We’ve had D-tier celebs, broke politicians, and most recently, washed-up Silicon Valley tech founders all launching and slow-rugging coins. 

I mean, I know we are meme about the crime cycle, but this is already insufferable amounts of grifting. 

All we can hope for is a good reset of the trenches or a couple of the insider grifters getting arrested so that this blatantly extractive and scammy behavior will decrease. 

New content to study.

• The Great AI Sell-Off Of 2025 — is it All Over or is the DeFAI Supercycle on the Horizon? by Castle Labs

New updates & projects.

• Mainframe (Generative computing)

• TaoFi (DeFi on TAO)

• Levia (Metacognition & tooling for AI agents)

• Mentat AI (Meta AI agent)

AI Over 

Three weeks back, AI x Crypto was the future, and today it’s vapourware garbage that’s going to zero. 

The entire sector is down around 70-80%, and things look bleak. 

While I’m still bullish on the sector, we actually started this week with some interesting AI news. 

The launch of DeepSeek had everyone quivering. A Chinese company launched an AI model that is as good as OpenAI for a fraction of the cost at which OpenAI operates. This naturally led to corrections in AI stocks like NVDA, but people used this as the scapegoat to blame for the broader market drawdown, which is foolish. 

In my opinion, the DeepSeek stuff is bullish for the entire AI sector. 

Their work is open source, so everyone can see how they built what they built. Secondly, competition that brings down prices is always good. 

This will also be good for crypto because as more models come out from different companies, we will have more API connections with different projects, reducing reliance on OpenAI models.

The important bits.

• Mode (L2) - Mode Terminal Alpha Release is live

• Core DAO (BTCFi) - Stake with Core DAO and receive Dual Stake Satoshi Tier yield

• Yeets (Berachain NFT) - Announces partnership with bera.buzz for Yeet bonds

• Vana (Data, AI) - Join Vana Ai Data Summit February 28th

• Sharpe AI (AI) - Integrates Deepseek

• pSTAKE FInance - (BTCFi) - Explains BTC institutional staking with pSTAKE

• Etherealize (ETH marketing) - Announces partnership with Securitize

Even more important bits.

• GSR releases a research piece on Based Rollups

• Hoeem releases guide on how to earn more Kaito Yaps

• Czech Republic Central Bank approves proposal to consider investing in Bitcoin

• Tether is launching USDT on the Bitcoin Lightning Network

• Central banks could buy Bitcoin on Trump’s proposal

• SEC approves Bitwise combined Ethereum / Bitcoin ETF

• Elon Musk says there will be "no inflation in 2026"

• Joe Rogan talks about memecoins on his podcast

Charts and stats of the day.

• BTC retail investors sent $625M to Binance in January, while whales hold off on selling

• M2 money supply is breaking out

• Ross Ulbricht lost $12m on Pumpfun

• Trump’s WorldLibertyFi just bought 2.9K ETH ($9.97M)

Life gets busy so here’s what you’ve missed.

Has Ethereum Taken the Solana Bait?

Podcast

Join Grant as he sits down with Ren and Terry from Eclipse. The lads discuss whether Solana has the potential to surpass Ethereum.

Also they chat about how Eclipse is leveraging the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) on Ethereum and examine the future of L2 rollups. Are general-purpose L2s becoming obsolete?

Tune in on Spotify | YouTube →

• Mevvy (MEV capture)

• Hyperlone (Hyper EVM launchpad)

• GoFundMeme (Meme revenue-sharing launchpad)

Beyond this, we had a couple of interesting tidbits of news sprinkled among the chaos. 

1. Boyco went live - Boyco is Berachain’s incentivization market, where users can pre-commit action on Ethereum prior to the Berachain launch. 

2. Erik Voorhees launched the coin for Venice AI called VVV - It started off with a nice pump followed by a sharp dump. I honestly do not know what to make of this coin. 

3. HyperEVM announced its architecture - The Hyperliquid EVM chain announced its unique dual-block architecture, which honestly sounds very interesting. It should be great for scalability. 

4. Jupiter announced JUPnet - After a successful JUPuary, the Jupiter team is taking things to the next level with an omnichain network. 

Alright, I think that covers it all for this week. 

Don’t ask me what I’m looking at for this week because I am down horrendous and wholly lost. Just going to sit on my hands until something obvious comes up. I don’t want to get chopped to death. 

Until next time then. Cheers!

Emiri 🫡