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Issue Summary: Welcome back to Coinstack, the weekly newsletter for institutional crypto investors and industry insiders. We reviewed the top news, stats, and reports in the digital asset ecosystem for our 350k weekly subscribers. This week, Donald Trump pledged to make the U.S. the “crypto capital of the world” as competition with China intensifies, while Ethereum daily transactions hit an all-time high as gas fees dropped to record lows. Elon Musk’s X also banned access to several “InfoFi” crypto projects amid backlash over “AI slop,” and Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin called for “different and better DAOs” as governance experimentation accelerates. Meanwhile, MetaMask expanded its multichain push by adding native Tron support across both mobile and browser extension wallets. On the fundraising front, LMAX Group raised $150M in a strategic round led by Ripple, while Alpaca raised $150M in Series D financing and secured a $40M credit line led by Drive Capital.
Price performance since we began writing Coinstack in January 2021
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💵 Weekly Crypto Fundraises & Deals
Here are all the crypto fundraises we heard about this week, ranked by size…
🗞️ Crypto News Recap: The Top 5 Stories
Welcome back to This Week in Crypto… everything you need to know in one scannable format. Here are the top 5 stories of the week…
🚀 Trump vows to make U.S. the crypto capital of the world to beat China: U.S. President Donald Trump said he helped secure America’s place as the “crypto capital of the world” by backing legislation aimed at boosting the digital asset industry in a lengthy speech to world leaders and bankers at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
📈 Ethereum daily transactions surge to all-time high as gas fees fall to record lows: ETH is processing more transactions than ever before while costing users less than at any point in the network’s recent history, a milestone that reflects the impact of recent protocol upgrades and a surge in stablecoin adoption.
🛑 Elon Musk’s X Bans Access to ‘InfoFi’ Crypto Projects Amid ‘AI Slop’ Backlash: Elon Musk’s X is taking action against projects that seek to financialize users’ attention on the platform using digital assets, Head of Product Nikita Bier declared on Thursday.
🥳 Ethereum Founder Vitalik Buterin Calls for ‘Different and Better DAOs’: Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has argued that modern DAO design is “inefficient,vulnerable to capture, and fails utterly at the goal of mitigating the weaknesses of human politics.”
🥂 MetaMask adds native Tron support across mobile and browser extension wallets as multichain push accelerates: MetaMask has rolled out native support for the Tron network across its web3 mobile app and browser extension wallets. The launch completes an integration built in collaboration with Tron DAO that was first announced in August as part of MetaMask’s broader multichain expansion plans.
💬 Tweet of the Week
Source: @jdorman81
📊 Key Stats of the Week
Here are the most important and interesting stats in crypto this week...
1. Prediction markets continue to capture user attention, drive organic volume, and scale faster than most realize.
Last week alone, the sector handled 23.3M transactions — an all-time high and 2x December — while volume reached $5B, the second-highest week on record.
Polymarket (11.4M) and Kalshi (11.1M) are now operating at near-parity and account for 96% of all activity, with Opinion Labs adding 683k.
Distribution is becoming the real moat: prediction markets are now scaling through familiar, regulated venues like Robinhood and Coinbase, and direct integrations such as Google, rather than crypto-native discovery alone.
Source: @DavidShuttleworth
2. Crypto just had its best week since the October crash, with nearly $2.2B of inflows (BTC $1.6B, ETH $496M), yet macro pressures are mounting:
• CLARITY Act uncertainty
• Tariffs
• Mixed inflation data
• Mixed CPI
On the positive side, March rate-cut odds have risen to 21%.
Source: @DavidShuttleworth
3. The best crypto card piece so far this year. Three most important angles to me:
#1 Distribution matters the most right now.
Visa and Mastercard each support ~130 crypto card programs, yet Visa handles 90% of all onchain card volume. The difference isn’t brand, it’s strategy. Visa went infra-first (e.g. @raincards). Mastercard went exchange-first (Gemini, Revolut).
#2 Wallets have the most underutilized potential.
Self-custodial wallets let users stay where they are and spend directly from their own accounts. MetaMask (mUSD) and Phantom (CASH) both launched their own stablecoin in September 2025. Phantom has an early lead ($85M v. $23M), yet this is still tiny relative to their reach. With 30M+ users and bank-scale distribution, wallets are in a unique position to drive crypto card adoption while internalizing payment economics through native stablecoins.
#3 Crypto card collateral is entirely underexplored.
Right now, ~96% of all card collateral is USDC + USDT. That’s a massive constraint. The cards that win will treat RWAs, tokenized equities, and core crypto assets (BTC, ETH, SOL) as spendable balance, not just idle inventory.
Source: @DavidShuttleworth
4. $753M poured into BTC ETFs yesterday, the largest inflow since the October market crash. Fidelity Investments posted its best day ($351M) since January 2025.
Meanwhile, BTC open interest is up 21% (+$12B) so far in January, while price is up 7% over the same period.
Risk appetite is building.
Source: @DavidShuttleworth
5. What did Warren Buffett say? Be greedy when others are fearful?
For me, there’s no cleaner signal than the Realised Capital Flow.
It shows whether there’s net capital flowing into or out of the Bitcoin ecosystem over the past month.
Right now, we’re deep in extreme red, meaning there’s net outflows.
This is exactly where I want to be buying.
Source: @OnChainMind
📝 Highlights from the Top Crypto Reports
Here are the top highlights from the best crypto research reports this week…
About the Author: OurNetwork, aims to help you understand crypto like never before by harnessing the power of onchain data & analytics. This is an excerpt from the full article, which you can find here.
📝 Editor’s Note:
Welcome to OurNetwork’s latest.
In this one, we’re checking out aggregators, a sector whose monthly volume average doubled to $131B per month in 2025 after hitting a $65B monthly average in 2024.
Shoutout to Surf Query, Summer.fi, and Diego for covering some of the biggest players in the space in this one.
– ON Editorial Team
📈 Jupiter is Solana’s Largest Protocol, Controlling ~90%+ of DEX Aggregation and Leading the Ecosystem with Novel Trading Features
Jupiter is Solana’s leading liquidity and trading layer, with $2.84B in TVL, the largest among all Solana protocols. It consistently routes billions of dollars each month, peaking above $120B in monthly volume in late 2025, cementing its role as Solana’s primary liquidity router. Jupiter handles the vast majority of DEX aggregator volume—often over 80–90% of routed trades. Its 30-day volumes are typically 10–15× larger than competitors, showing how concentrated swap routing is on Jupiter’s rails.
In 2025, Jupiter grew into the backbone of stablecoin DEX aggregation, processing $461B in volume. Momentum peaked in December with a record $70B month. Average stablecoin monthly volume reached $36B, growing ~6% month-over-month, as Jupiter captured over 90% of the market.
Beyond aggregation, Jupiter is also expanding into prediction markets, powered by Kalshi. Just three months after launch, the platform has already generated over $3.3M in prediction market volume, alongside a growing TVL of $451K, signaling early traction & user demand beyond spot trading and swaps.
🎧 Top Crypto Podcasts of The Week
Here are the crypto podcasts that are worth listening to this week...
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Tracking the most important blockchain stories of the 2020s, including a decentralized internet and the creation of a new open global monetary system that works for everyone. As always, published for informational purposes only. Please do your own research. Just our opinions. Not intended as financial advice as we are not financial advisors. We may own some of the digital assets we write about as we believe strongly in the sector. Please do your own research. Published and written weekly by Ryan Allis and Mike Gavela.
Coinstack is a news and analysis newsletter for the digital asset industry. None of the information here is a recommendation to invest in any securities or other types of investments. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Any historical returns, expected returns, or probability projections may not reflect actual future performance. All investments involve risk and may result in loss.
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