Haseeb breaks down why perp DEXs will consolidate: "Exchanges are not a dominance type business. Even Binance topped out at like 50% market share." His 2026 call? Three big venues split the market 40-30-20 with Hyperliquid, Aster, and Lighter currently leading. https://t.co/9reX4wZ4zc

Name & Symbol: Aster ($ASTER)
Address: 0x000ae314e2a2172a039b26378814c252734f556a

It’s that time again—as 2025 comes to a close, it’s time to drop 2026 predictions. I think 2026 is going to surprise, both to the upside and to the downside. Organized by category: Macro / Chains * $BTC is > $150K by year-end, but BTC dominance decreases in 2026. * Despite the excitement around the recent crop of fintech chains, their metrics will underwhelm. Daily active addresses, stablecoin flows, and RWAs—Tempo, Arc, and Robinhood Chain will underdeliver, while Ethereum and Solana will overdeliver. Best developers will continue to build on neutral infra chains. * A big tech company (Google, Facebook, Apple, etc.) launches or acquires a crypto wallet in 2026. * Many more Fortune 100s launch blockchains, although increasingly concentrated among banking and fintech players. Expect Avalanche to be a standout here, alongside OP stack, Orbit, and ZK Stack. * Monad gets written off as dead by CT, but metrics take off in the latter part of the year after analysts have already forgotten about it. * At least 3 other chains connect to DoubleZero to improve their latency & throughput metrics. DoubleZero hits 80%+ stake on Solana. DeFi * Perp DEX market share consolidates to something like 3 big venues a la HBO (market share something like 40 / 30 / 20), followed by a long tail of smaller players who compete over the leftovers (last 10%). * Equity perps take off, becoming >20% of total DeFi perp volume by EOY. * Significant growth in RFQ compared to CLOBs/AMMs, both on spot and perps. * Some DeFi-related insider trading scandal hits mainstream media. Stablecoins * Stablecoin supply expands by ~60% in 2026, and USD remains 99%+. * USDT dominance declines moderately to ~55%. * Stablecoin-backed cards grow 1,000% in 2026—insanely fast growth. Becomes the dominant way that stablecoins land and expand in emerging markets. Rain is the biggest winner here. Regulation * Clarity Act gets signed into law in 2026 after some significant markups and horse trading. A bit of buyer’s remorse from crypto insiders. * Dems win the house, and there is a parade of hearings about anything in crypto that touched $TRUMP / $WLFI. The underlying deals get subpoenaed. Trump insists he was never involved and didn’t know anything about it (and thus these deals are not protected by executive privilege). Anyone who signed a stupid deal gets publicly embarrassed. Prediction Markets * Prediction markets grow like crazy. Big legal fights over sportsbetting regulation and federal pre-emption, but nothing major gets resolved next year, so status quo continues through 2026. * Meanwhile Polymarket continues to steamroll the culture. Prediction markets are perceived as cool and smart, and so are allowed to throw up odds everywhere. * As Polymarket domestic expansion gets going, it starts winning more and more domestic market share from Robinhood and sportsbooks. * The explosion of other platforms tacking on prediction markets mostly flop. 90% of prediction market offerings are totally ignored and then wind down by EOY. B2B partnership-driven distribution underperforms, direct-to-consumer outperforms. Almost all of the demand in 2026 is sourced directly from Polymarket, Robinhood, and Kalshi frontends (plus traditional sportsbooks). AI * Primary AI use cases in crypto remain within software engineering and security. Everything else remains a prototype. * No good solutions to the spambot proliferation on social platforms emerges. A lot of stuff is proposed, but mostly we just eat the AI slop for 2026. Eventually it will get bad enough that people align on a solution, but not there yet. * Wallet automation remains minimal. * AI agents will still not be “paying each other” or spending any meaningful money in 2026. * We see more small teams (<10 people) shipping scaled products because of coding agent force multipliers. In 2025, you needed to be Hyperliquid-level cracked devs to be this dev-efficient. In 2026, you just need to be AI-native and versed in the modern agentic stack. 2026 is dubbed the year of the agentic startup, and it hits crypto startups in a big way. * AI becomes used for both attack & defense in cybersecurity. We see many more hacks in 2025, but smaller sizes. Defensive AI gets integrated into CI/CD pipelines and much better continuous monitoring. Security posture across the board improves, even for small teams, and the total amount hacked decreases compared to 2025. So those are my predictions! If I had to summarize them to a two meta-theses, it’d be: * slow and steady beats new and shiny * the trend lines mostly continue Let’s see how I do. Keep me honest, CT. Disclosure: I’m an investor in many of the assets mentioned. NFA. DYOR.

Name & Symbol: DoubleZero ($2Z)
Address: J6pQQ3FAcJQeWPPGppWRb4nM8jU3wLyYbRrLh7feMfvd

It’s that time again—as 2025 comes to a close, it’s time to drop 2026 predictions. I think 2026 is going to surprise, both to the upside and to the downside. Organized by category: Macro / Chains * $BTC is > $150K by year-end, but BTC dominance decreases in 2026. * Despite the excitement around the recent crop of fintech chains, their metrics will underwhelm. Daily active addresses, stablecoin flows, and RWAs—Tempo, Arc, and Robinhood Chain will underdeliver, while Ethereum and Solana will overdeliver. Best developers will continue to build on neutral infra chains. * A big tech company (Google, Facebook, Apple, etc.) launches or acquires a crypto wallet in 2026. * Many more Fortune 100s launch blockchains, although increasingly concentrated among banking and fintech players. Expect Avalanche to be a standout here, alongside OP stack, Orbit, and ZK Stack. * Monad gets written off as dead by CT, but metrics take off in the latter part of the year after analysts have already forgotten about it. * At least 3 other chains connect to DoubleZero to improve their latency & throughput metrics. DoubleZero hits 80%+ stake on Solana. DeFi * Perp DEX market share consolidates to something like 3 big venues a la HBO (market share something like 40 / 30 / 20), followed by a long tail of smaller players who compete over the leftovers (last 10%). * Equity perps take off, becoming >20% of total DeFi perp volume by EOY. * Significant growth in RFQ compared to CLOBs/AMMs, both on spot and perps. * Some DeFi-related insider trading scandal hits mainstream media. Stablecoins * Stablecoin supply expands by ~60% in 2026, and USD remains 99%+. * USDT dominance declines moderately to ~55%. * Stablecoin-backed cards grow 1,000% in 2026—insanely fast growth. Becomes the dominant way that stablecoins land and expand in emerging markets. Rain is the biggest winner here. Regulation * Clarity Act gets signed into law in 2026 after some significant markups and horse trading. A bit of buyer’s remorse from crypto insiders. * Dems win the house, and there is a parade of hearings about anything in crypto that touched $TRUMP / $WLFI. The underlying deals get subpoenaed. Trump insists he was never involved and didn’t know anything about it (and thus these deals are not protected by executive privilege). Anyone who signed a stupid deal gets publicly embarrassed. Prediction Markets * Prediction markets grow like crazy. Big legal fights over sportsbetting regulation and federal pre-emption, but nothing major gets resolved next year, so status quo continues through 2026. * Meanwhile Polymarket continues to steamroll the culture. Prediction markets are perceived as cool and smart, and so are allowed to throw up odds everywhere. * As Polymarket domestic expansion gets going, it starts winning more and more domestic market share from Robinhood and sportsbooks. * The explosion of other platforms tacking on prediction markets mostly flop. 90% of prediction market offerings are totally ignored and then wind down by EOY. B2B partnership-driven distribution underperforms, direct-to-consumer outperforms. Almost all of the demand in 2026 is sourced directly from Polymarket, Robinhood, and Kalshi frontends (plus traditional sportsbooks). AI * Primary AI use cases in crypto remain within software engineering and security. Everything else remains a prototype. * No good solutions to the spambot proliferation on social platforms emerges. A lot of stuff is proposed, but mostly we just eat the AI slop for 2026. Eventually it will get bad enough that people align on a solution, but not there yet. * Wallet automation remains minimal. * AI agents will still not be “paying each other” or spending any meaningful money in 2026. * We see more small teams (<10 people) shipping scaled products because of coding agent force multipliers. In 2025, you needed to be Hyperliquid-level cracked devs to be this dev-efficient. In 2026, you just need to be AI-native and versed in the modern agentic stack. 2026 is dubbed the year of the agentic startup, and it hits crypto startups in a big way. * AI becomes used for both attack & defense in cybersecurity. We see many more hacks in 2025, but smaller sizes. Defensive AI gets integrated into CI/CD pipelines and much better continuous monitoring. Security posture across the board improves, even for small teams, and the total amount hacked decreases compared to 2025. So those are my predictions! If I had to summarize them to a two meta-theses, it’d be: * slow and steady beats new and shiny * the trend lines mostly continue Let’s see how I do. Keep me honest, CT. Disclosure: I’m an investor in many of the assets mentioned. NFA. DYOR.

Name & Symbol: AI Rig Complex ($arc)
Address: 61V8vBaqAGMpgDQi4JcAwo1dmBGHsyhzodcPqnEVpump

Time to review how I did in my 2025 predictions. These were written Dec 31st 2024, right before Trump was inaugurated. I did pretty good! Solid battering average. Here's a straight tally of the concrete predictions I made—what I got right and got wrong. Infra 1. L1/L2 distinction collapses, users no longer care about the difference ✅ 2. L1s/L2s overcrowded and due for a shakeout ✅ 3. EVM market share will grow in 2025 ✅ seems true! But mostly because SVM market share declined, rather than because of LLM-powered DevEx improvements I postulated. 4. We'll move from TPS wars to latency wars ❓ kinda? @monad, @megaeth, @doublezero, @flashbots_x all pushing on the latency front but this was less of a theme than I thought. Not wrong, but not totally right. 5. More optimistic UIs, email onboarding, in-browser wallets ✅ 6. More applications will follow Hyperliquid and create specialized chains❓I guess kinda? @Lighter_xyz, @edgeX_exchange, stuff like that have dedicated L2s. But less of a theme than I'd think, maybe just because not that many applications have broken out. Will give this one a wash. Token Launches 7. Airdrops move to a two-track world: points for projects with clear KPIs like DEXes/lending, while L1s/L2s will move to crowdsales ✅ nailed this. 8. Stablecoin usage will explode, particularly among SMBs, with real business using stables for settlement ✅ Stablecoins 9. Announcements of bank-issued stablecoins toward the end of 2025 ❓ we got JPM Coin earlier in the year, but that's a tokenized deposit, not a stablecoin. Some international banks announcing stablecoins, like Societe Generale, but a bunch of the GSIBs have announced they're joining consortia to consider launching a stablecoin. Not a total miss. 10. @ethena_labs gobbles up more capital as treasury yields continue to decline ❓ USDE started the year at $5.8B circulating supply, peaked at $14B after indeed gobbling up a lot more capital, but then declined after 10/10 to currently $6.3B. So gobble it did, but the huge deleveraging flushed out a lot of OI from the system. That said, even after all that it still grew ~10% since Jan 1, so I'm going to put this as mixed. Regulation 11. Stablecoin bill passes in 2025, Market Structure doesn't ✅ 12. Fortune 100 companies offer more crypto products to consumers under Trump admin ✅ AI Agents 13. Memecoins will lose market share to "AI agent" coins ❌ 14. AI agent craze will continue throughout most of 2025 ❌ 15. But the AI agent craze will die off by end of the year ✅ 16. Chatbots will become so ubiquitous people will get turned off by them ✅✅✅ 17. Chatbots will start hiding that they're AIs, trying to pass as humans to try to capture more attention ❓ ehhh... not really. I mean they do insofar as they're trying to get pass spam filters, but they're not fully emulating humans really, like with backstories and stuff. Or maybe they are and we just haven't caught it? Anyway I'll give this a mixed, but maybe I'm being too generous. 18. Autonomous scambots will proliferate ✅ 19. AIs will not give everyone their own "trading agent" or miniature hedge fund ✅ 20. AIs will increase liquidity on small markets like @Polymarket ❓ I don't know? Maybe? This is seems like a stretch but hard to know either way if this is true. 21. Software engineering agents will be the most impactful kind of agents, because software is the primary input into our industry ✅ given the lack of PMF of AI in everything else in crypto, and the PMF of all the coding tools, I'm going to say yes. But there hasn't really been that much deflation of software as an input yet IMO. But starting to change. 22. AI powered static analysis and monitoring will become ubiquitous ✅ 23. AI agents will use crypto to pay each other ❌ definitely too early 24. The memecoin stuff will get superseded by serious decentralized AI infra players like @NEARProtocol, @NousResearch, @PrimeIntellect, and @gensynai ✅ to the extent that there's anything going on here, it's the real tech stuff OK, those are all the concrete predictions about 2025 I counted in my post. So to tally up: ✅: 15 ❌: 3 ❓: 6 (meaning 6 were a wash) Total: 24 Not bad! Will be posting my 2026 predictions next week, stay tuned 👀

Name & Symbol: DoubleZero ($2Z)
Address: J6pQQ3FAcJQeWPPGppWRb4nM8jU3wLyYbRrLh7feMfvd

perps make noise. RWAs need structure. @kaledora unpacks how a CFD-like model can make equity exposure usable on-chain. Timestamps 00:00 Intro 01:39 Kaledora’s Crypto Twitter Controversy 03:43 Perpetuals & Equities 07:20 Funding Rates & Market Dynamics 16:09 CFDs vs. Perpetuals 29:31 CZ's Pardon & Political Backlash 37:42 Trump's Pardon: Optics and Implications 39:06 Crypto's Midterm Impact 41:50 Echo x Coinbase 46:11 Crowdfunding Platforms & MegaETH 55:36 Luxury Goods & Token Sales Analogy 🔥Stay updated with all the latest hot takes by following and subscribing to @_ChoppingBlock and @unchained_pod! 🎥 YouTube: https://t.co/D7dpooilIH 🎧 Spotify: https://t.co/0ilprLbQb6 🍎 Apple: https://t.co/jrnmstpjql 🎙 Podcast Home: https://t.co/r6OZC52PK5

Name & Symbol: Echo Protocol ($ECHO)
Address: 0x06238c1b8e618abedf17669228dc95fb2d2e210b

Solana daily active addresses are now down 60% from ATH at the end of 2024, according to @artemis Left: daily active addresses on Solana (7.5M => 3M) Right: daily active addresses on Pump (420K => 120K) Memecoin mania has now perhaps cooled into steady state. It's not going away, but it's also not all-encompassing anymore.

Name & Symbol: Pump.fun ($PUMP)
Address: pumpCmXqMfrsAkQ5r49WcJnRayYRqmXz6ae8H7H9Dfn

Introducing Agent #1: The Stablecoin Optimizer 🤖 Your personal yield genius for on-chain USDC/USDT boosting 💰 CeFi yields fail you. DeFi is messy and technical. This Agent finds, allocates, and deploys automatically, powered by $BLUAI and its network. The new era of agent-driven on-chain transactions start on Bluwhale today 🌊

Name & Symbol: Bluwhale ($BLUAI)
Address: 0xed9ae3def8d6f052971bb8b6d1975ff267cf9aad

The Total Connected Value (TCV) of @doublezero just hit $23 BILLION

Name & Symbol: DoubleZero ($2Z)
Address: J6pQQ3FAcJQeWPPGppWRb4nM8jU3wLyYbRrLh7feMfvd

New episode just dropped (recorded this one before all the market craziness, it was a simpler time): • Polymarket's massive round and prediction markets taking on sportsbooks • Kalshi vs Polymarket and the KOL wars • Is Aster's volume completely faked? • Galaxy One and echoes of BlockFi Check it out ⤵️

Name & Symbol: Aster ($ASTER)
Address: 0x000ae314e2a2172a039b26378814c252734f556a

New episode just dropped (recorded this one before all the market craziness, it was a simpler time): • Polymarket's massive round and prediction markets taking on sportsbooks • Kalshi vs Polymarket and the KOL wars • Is Aster's volume completely faked? • Galaxy One and echoes of BlockFi Check it out ⤵️

Name & Symbol: Aster ($ASTER)
Address: 0x000ae314e2a2172a039b26378814c252734f556a

Live at TOKEN2049: @CryptoHayes and @fundstrat join the Chopping Block! We debate Hyperliquid vs Aster, @Rewkang's bearish ETH thesis, Plasma’s massive airdrop, DATs & ETH’s “supercycle,” Polymarket vs Kalshi, and what drove the Zcash revival. Watch/listen 👇

Name & Symbol: Plasma ($XPL)
Address: 0x405fbc9004d857903bfd6b3357792d71a50726b0

Live at TOKEN2049: @CryptoHayes and @fundstrat join the Chopping Block! We debate Hyperliquid vs Aster, @Rewkang's bearish ETH thesis, Plasma’s massive airdrop, DATs & ETH’s “supercycle,” Polymarket vs Kalshi, and what drove the Zcash revival. Watch/listen 👇

Name & Symbol: Aster ($ASTER)
Address: 0x000ae314e2a2172a039b26378814c252734f556a

Live at TOKEN2049: @CryptoHayes and @fundstrat join the Chopping Block! We debate Hyperliquid vs Aster, @Rewkang's bearish ETH thesis, Plasma’s massive airdrop, DATs & ETH’s “supercycle,” Polymarket vs Kalshi, and what drove the Zcash revival. Watch/listen 👇

Name & Symbol: Aster ($ASTER)
Address: 0x000ae314e2a2172a039b26378814c252734f556a

Live at TOKEN2049: @CryptoHayes and @fundstrat join the Chopping Block! We debate Hyperliquid vs Aster, @Rewkang's bearish ETH thesis, Plasma’s massive airdrop, DATs & ETH’s “supercycle,” Polymarket vs Kalshi, and what drove the Zcash revival. Watch/listen 👇

Name & Symbol: Plasma ($XPL)
Address: 0x405fbc9004d857903bfd6b3357792d71a50726b0

Live at TOKEN2049: @CryptoHayes and @fundstrat join the Chopping Block! We debate Hyperliquid vs Aster, @Rewkang's bearish ETH thesis, Plasma’s massive airdrop, DATs & ETH’s “supercycle,” Polymarket vs Kalshi, and what drove the Zcash revival. Watch/listen 👇

Name & Symbol: Aster ($ASTER)
Address: 0x000ae314e2a2172a039b26378814c252734f556a

Live at TOKEN2049: @CryptoHayes and @fundstrat join the Chopping Block! We debate Hyperliquid vs Aster, @Rewkang's bearish ETH thesis, Plasma’s massive airdrop, DATs & ETH’s “supercycle,” Polymarket vs Kalshi, and what drove the Zcash revival. Watch/listen 👇

Name & Symbol: Plasma ($XPL)
Address: 0x405fbc9004d857903bfd6b3357792d71a50726b0

My 2Z thesis in two paragraphs: Scaling blockchains is one of the biggest problems in the industry. Almost every blockchain's latency is ultimately network-bound. How much value do you create by cutting the block time of a chain in half? And how much value can you capture if every blockchain has to use you to stay competitive? A: Solve a big problem, win a big prize. The only path to true speed-of-light transmission is dedicated fiber. That’s how YouTube moves data around the world—you can’t match it over the public Internet. 2Z is building that for blockchains. If it works, it will be bigger than just blockchains. There, that's the thesis. (Congrats to @doublezero on the launch 👏) Note: Dragonfly is an early investor in 2Z.

Name & Symbol: DoubleZero ($2Z)
Address: J6pQQ3FAcJQeWPPGppWRb4nM8jU3wLyYbRrLh7feMfvd

Three wars are breaking out in crypto: • Perps: Hyperliquid vs. Aster • Stablecoins: USDT (at $500B?) vs. USDC • Regulation: regulatory capture and the L1 vs L2 squeeze Amid the noise, @rooqster who's building stablecoin payment rails @ @raincards, breaks down what’s what ⤵️

Name & Symbol: Aster ($ASTER)
Address: 0x000ae314e2a2172a039b26378814c252734f556a

hyperliquid is unbothered. aster is farming for its life. circle is quietly crying in the corner. tether is casually making $4B a quarter. and @rooqster is building rails! Timestamps 00:00 Intro 01:02 Aster vs. Hyperliquid 14:25 Regulatory Capture: L2s, Sequencers, CFTC 26:08 Tether’s $500B Valuation: Bubble or Bargain? 31:36 Tether vs. Circle: Stablecoin Economics 42:56 Rain: Stablecoin Payments Infra 47:16 Stablecoin Use Cases; Cards, Payroll, P2P 54:04 Global Stablecoin Growth 🔥Stay updated with all the latest hot takes by following and subscribing to @_ChoppingBlock and @unchained_pod! 🎥 YouTube: https://t.co/zaAyMkgQBj 🎧 Spotify: https://t.co/0ilprLbQb6 🍎 Apple: https://t.co/jrnmstpjql 🎙 Podcast Home: https://t.co/r6OZC52PK5

Name & Symbol: Aster ($ASTER)
Address: 0x000ae314e2a2172a039b26378814c252734f556a

Three wars are breaking out in crypto: • Perps: Hyperliquid vs. Aster • Stablecoins: USDT (at $500B?) vs. USDC • Regulation: regulatory capture and the L1 vs L2 squeeze Amid the noise, @rooqster who's building stablecoin payment rails @ @raincards, breaks down what’s what ⤵️

Name & Symbol: Aster ($ASTER)
Address: 0x000ae314e2a2172a039b26378814c252734f556a

Three wars are breaking out in crypto: • Perps: Hyperliquid vs. Aster • Stablecoins: USDT (at $500B?) vs. USDC • Regulation: regulatory capture and the L1 vs L2 squeeze Amid the noise, @rooqster who's building stablecoin payment rails @ @raincards, breaks down what’s what ⤵️

Name & Symbol: Aster ($ASTER)
Address: 0x000ae314e2a2172a039b26378814c252734f556a

Stablecoins have network effects, but they’re not winner-take-all. USDC owns DeFi, while Tether owns emerging markets. Now Tempo, Arc, USDH, and Solana all want a piece. Who captures the next tranche of users (and the yield)? We break down Circle's perspective w/ @gordonliao ⤵️

Name & Symbol: AI Rig Complex ($arc)
Address: 61V8vBaqAGMpgDQi4JcAwo1dmBGHsyhzodcPqnEVpump

Had an incredible conversation with the brilliant minds of @hosseeb, @tomhschmidt, & @tarunchitra. We explored everything from the innovation at @Arc and the future of onchain FX and local stables to the need for monetary sovereignty.

Name & Symbol: AI Rig Complex ($arc)
Address: 61V8vBaqAGMpgDQi4JcAwo1dmBGHsyhzodcPqnEVpump

Stablecoins have network effects, but they’re not winner-take-all. USDC owns DeFi, while Tether owns emerging markets. Now Tempo, Arc, USDH, and Solana all want a piece. Who captures the next tranche of users (and the yield)? We break down Circle's perspective w/ @gordonliao ⤵️

Name & Symbol: AI Rig Complex ($arc)
Address: 61V8vBaqAGMpgDQi4JcAwo1dmBGHsyhzodcPqnEVpump

We just decided, live on air, that all episodes of @_choppingblock will be posted to @zora and all proceeds (if any) will be donated to @coincenter let crypto rule

Name & Symbol: Zora ($ZORA)
Address: 0x1111111111166b7fe7bd91427724b487980afc69

Came on Bankless today and broke my silence on the Roman Storm case. A lot to say—important discussion. We also talk Project Crypto, Ethereum's position in the market, and Zora vs Pump 👇

Name & Symbol: Zora ($ZORA)
Address: 0x1111111111166b7fe7bd91427724b487980afc69