👻 Phantom Fantasies, Divorce Spats, Firedancer Fun: This Week's Tea Spilled

GMGM! 

What a terrific start we’ve had to the year! Protocols like Jupiter are gearing up for airdrops, the AI agent meta has been amplifying with every passing day, the political transitionary-phase drama in the US is heating up, we’re seeing unanticipated twists in crypto-related lawsuits, and oh well, our bags — they’re dumping. 

Don’t panic, anon

First things first, if you’re a trend observer and believe that history echoes cycle after cycle in one way or the other, then I have a chart for you. January dumps have more often than not been followed by bang-on recoveries.

Post-finding bottoms, we’ve traditionally pumped to new yearly highs. Plus plus plus, altcoins have fared much better than BTC and ETH. If you remember, SOL bottomed at $80 last year and rallied to $200 in the following weeks, soooo we could be primed for something like that again.

Phantom airdrop comin’?

Well well well, the social feature went live on Phantom recently. You can create a profile and add other users as friends. You can also choose between three profile privacy levels — public, private, and invisible. For now, usernames are only supported on Phantom's mobile app, and not on its Chrome extension. 

Once this feature was launched, people started speculating that an airdrop would complement this initiative. Over the hols, folks started mass following others to increase their follower-following count under the assumption that they’d get a share of the airdrop pie. 

BUT BUT BUT, the team soon burst their bubble by clarifying that there are no token launch/airdrop plans at the moment. So, for heaven’s sake, stay 10 feet away from all Phantom airdrop phishing links.  

Meanwhile, if you’re dejected about Phantom’s no-airdrop announcement, then I’ve something for you to rejoice. Jupiter’s Jupuary airdrop checker is all set to go live next week. So strap in and sit tight. 

• mETH Protocol (LST) - Restake with mETH and earn COOK and EIGEN rewards

• Nillion (First blind computer) - Tease’s big things coming up in February

• SwapX (DEX) - Announces Solv Protocol partnership

• Superseed (L2) - 1 day left until the end of Superseed Meme Contest

• Sophon (Entertainment layer) - KYC for backdated rewards ends Jan. 14th

• Peapods Finance (DeFi) - Announces $120k Smart Contract Bug-Bounty Program

• Tanssi (DeFi) - Announces partnership with Mellow

• Zentry (Gaming) - Gigaverse game whitelists available for ZENTRY holders

• Mode (L2) - Explaining the Mode DeFAI stack in a new blog post

• Yeet (Berachain NFTs) - Announce YEET token public sale

• Time (DeFi) - Announcing new TIME tokenomics

• Dinero (DeFi) - Now listed on MEXC

Altman to guide our AI bags to Valhalla?

Sam released a blog called “Reflections” this week and spilled out a few truths that we all already kinda know, but are… ummm…. reluctant to admit. 

He declared that the first AI agents could enter the workforce this year. He also indicated that his company is inching closer to developing AGI. 

You know, I know, everyone knows that AGI will directly put AI and humanlike intelligence in the same equation. It’s gonna only get interesting from here on! 

Fun fact: he had predicted the 2025 AGI takeover back in 2019 itself. Mind you, 2019 wasn’t last year or last-to-last year. It was six goddamn years back! 😭 

AI x Crypto is going to be wild this year: DeFAI, gAIming — it’s all just the beginning. Cherry on the cake: Apart from Altman, even Nvidia’s CEO said this week that the agent industry is a “multi-trillion dollar” worth opportunity. Just gotta capitalize on it all. 

Staking suit 

Time for some dramaaa now, so listen up! Solana Co-Founder Stephen Akridge has been sued by his ex-wife. 

Why? She claims that he “secretly” profited from her stash of SOL. He apparently earned “millions of dollars in staking rewards” without her knowledge. Their March divorce agreement split ownership of SOL they owned. But the ex-wife says he “took advantage” of his crypto expertise to keep control of her tokens.  

She sent “no less than a dozen” text messages to Akridge about the staking rewards, but that guy has made it clear that he has no interest in returning her staking rewards. 

In fact, at one point, he laughed in her face and said, “Good luck getting those staking rewards from me!” The number of SOL tokens at issue and the sum stolen are redacted in the complaint, so therre’s no juice on that front. 

69k BTC dump incoming?

The DOJ has reportedly been green-flagged to sell 69,370 BTC [~$6.5 billion] that it seized from Silk Road. The timing of this decision is fascinating because the US administration is now on the cusp of changing, and Trump has vowed he’d not sell any BTC. 

Now, even if they end up selling, it’s not a huge amount, to be honest. Bitcoin is almost a $2 trillion asset. $6 billion is 0.3% of the total market cap [it ain’t even 1% — so chill]. We sustained the German government dumping; we can survive this also if it comes to the worst-case scenario. 

Note that the court flashing a green light doesn’t mean they will sell-sell. Arkham has confirmed that all coins are still on-chain; nothing has been moved (yet). So breathe. 

The year ahead

If you wanna get a concrete idea about what to expect this year in terms of trends, price actions, regulatory developments, macro x crypto intersection, etc. head to our 2025 outlook article. It has everything summed up.

Other siziling scoops:

• The Solana team has ramped up ‘Firedancer’ testing. Yeyeyeye, Firedancer! You read it right. The upgrade will help Solana crawl out of the ‘down-time’ trenches and boost its speed and stability.
  

• Solayer has unveiled the LAYER token and InfiniSVM blockchain. The network will dynamically scale to meet application demands. In this process, it will maintain a transaction confirmation time of just one millisecond and support a throughput of up to 100 Gbps.
  

• The IRS has postponed the implementation of the new crypto cost-basis reporting rules until January 1, 2026. A one-year breather!
  

• Do Kwon pleads NON-GUILTY. His hearing has tentatively been scheduled for next year because 6 TB worth of data ought to be reviewed by lawyers, and duh, they need time.
  

• The European arm of FTX was acquired by Backpack Exchange this week. Fun fact: Backpack is founded by FTX and Alameda alumni, lmeow!

And finally… 

That’s pretty much it from my end for this week’s round-up. With innovation firing on all fronts, I’m pretty excited to see what’s in store in 2025. The ecosystem seems to be primed for a new era of growth.

It ain’t just gonna be a bull run brew; it’s gonna be a full-scale evolution, and I’m ready to ride the wave.

Tag along, anon! It’s gonna be fun. 

Peace, Lavina