ETF flows made it clear: institutions still treat crypto as a risk-on trade.

They piled in when macro looked clean and pulled back once uncertainty hit, flipping inflows to outflows. If rates ease and policy clarity improves in 2026, flows should stabilize – less reactive, fewer headlines.

January's first insights: let's see what the new year has in store for us ↓

General
➖ Galaxy: Weekly Top Stories - 01/02/26

Market
➖ CoinShares: Digital asset fund flows | January 5th, 2026
➖ CoinShares: Equities update | December 29th 2025
➖ Glassnode: BTC Market Pulse: Week 2

DeFi
➖ DL Research: State of DeFi: RedStone Interview

Blockchains & networks
➖ 4pillars: The DApp Survival Formula: Insights from Solana’s Rent Recovery Market

Stablecoins are tracking toward ~$1.6T by 2030, but the structure is already clear.

USDT and USDC still control ~86% of supply, and only ~10 out of 90 stables ever crossed $1B. These aren’t brands — they’re plumbing.

Early January saw ~$900M in stablecoins hit Solana, mostly USDC.

Big print, but nothing exotic — Circle regularly mints $250–500M every few days. Looks like routine rails activity, not a signal.

At ~50ms block times, Aptos is the fastest major L1 running on mainnet.

That kind of latency actually makes onchain HFT viable — not just theoretical. Speed is starting to matter again.

Over $50M USDT flowed into Morpho on Arbitrum within a week, driven by Bitget Earn.

Managed by Steakhouse, the vault is already Morpho’s third largest — alongside two USDC vaults from the same operator. Capital tends to cluster fast when trust is pre-established.

Derivatives mindshare is basically a duopoly now.

Hyperliquid and Lighter together command ~70%, and the gap to everyone else isn’t closing.

Equities and bonds aren’t niche anymore — U.S. household ownership has been grinding higher for decades.

Trading feels “everywhere” because it kind of is, as the participation base keeps expanding. Straight from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charts.

For over five years, Ethereum TVL has quietly acted as a valuation floor for ETH.

If that relationship holds, app-layer growth matters more than narratives — push Ethereum TVL toward $1T, and that number effectively underwrites the asset powering the system.

Prediction markets just printed a new record.

December spot volume hit $19.1B, ~35% above the prior ATH, led by Kalshi ($7B), Opinionlabs ($6.7B), and Polymarket ($5.3B). Distribution keeps scaling faster than skepticism.

Ethereum quietly turned the dial again.

With the BPO-2 fork, max blobs per block moved from 15 to 21, and as of Jan 7 about 1.5% of blocks are already pushing past the old limit. Scaling keeps happening without much noise.

Jupiter’s prediction markets experiment hasn’t found traction yet.

After ~2.5 months, volume sits around $1.5M across 40K trades — roughly $38 per trade and $155 per user, with only ~$53K in fees flowing through. Integration is there, monetization isn’t.

Privacy now moves from niche to signal.

In 2025, privacy coins outperformed BTC and ETH, held up better during volatility, and saw real usage grow — transaction share rose from ~9.7% to ~11.4%. Monero and Zcash still dominate the flow, while market cap pushed past $24B and infra teams started rebuilding privacy as a default layer, not a feature.

Feels less like a rotation and more like a setup.

Privacy coins and tools are shaping up as a serious 2026 narrative as a response to growing surveillance and demand for on-chain discretion.

Solana memecoins look like they’re warming up again.

Early January 2026 saw daily token deployments spike past 36K — levels last seen in mid-September 2025. Not calling it a full-blown narrative yet, but we can watch where this leads.

Quiet flip happened: SEI just overtook TON in perp volume.

Liquidity follows where traders actually get filled.