GM, frens! ☕️

Resilience is not a victory lap or a dramatic comeback.

It’s coming again after a rough week, keeping your head clear when things swing, and not letting one bad stretch define the whole story.

In crypto especially, staying in the game matters more than any single move 🤠 

Here’s what we’re looking at this week:

• 📈 Uncertainty climbs while crypto markets stay under pressure

• 🔥 Ambire: dealing a blow to scammers & a $WALLET governance vote

• 👨‍🦲 Coinbase community fumes as COIN dumps and CEO’s sales resurface

• 🪨 BlackRock brings BUIDL to Uniswap for onchain trading

• 🥩 Ethereum staking is climbing / The future zkEVM upgrade is making waves

Below is how $WALLET is trading right now:

If you’re still here, still watching, still thinking, our Discord is open 🤝 

Uncertainty climbs while crypto markets stay under pressure

When prices swing hard, sentiment gauges suddenly become everyone’s favorite source of “context”, so now we’ve got the World Uncertainty Index ripping to fresh highs while the crypto Fear and Greed Index is doing its best impression of an elevator with a cut cable ✂️ 

The uncertainty index is the macro version.

It’s a big, slow gauge built from broad signals and reports, and lately it’s been printing “nobody knows anything” at near historical volume 🌐 

The point isn’t that a single event broke the world, it’s that the backdrop is pretty busy at this moment (not in a good sense): tension in geopolitics, policy issues, growth anxiety, and everyone trying to front run everyone else 🤪 

Then you zoom in and get the crypto version of the same anxiety.

• The Fear and Greed Index has recently slid into record low territory, which usually means the market has stopped arguing about narratives and started arguing with gravity.

• You also don’t get readings like that without forced selling showing up somewhere deep down: leverage resetting, liquidations, people learning that “I’ll just wait it out” is not a strategy when you borrowed to be right ⏰ 

What’s interesting is how often people try to use these indicators as prophecy.

Extreme uncertainty plus extreme fear tends to describe a market that’s already done damage, not one just asking permission to do it. That’s why you’ll always see the “turning point” talk pop up around these ugly readings: not because the index has mystical powers, but because panic eventually runs out of sellers who still have buttons left to press 🪤 

Also the same writeups that point at uncertainty peaking also admit the crypto doesn’t reliably soak up macro fear the way people want it to. It mostly amplifies whatever the room is already feeling 🌡️ 

So what do you do with this without turning into an index enjoyer who refreshes sentiment gauges like weather apps? 🧭 

You treat it as context. Fear at the floor means a lot of weak hands already left the building, but it doesn’t guarantee that this building won’t shake again. A solution is to stop worshiping any single signal and remember that the market can stay emotionally unstable longer than any one portfolio can stay patient.

Ambire: dealing a blow to scammers & a $WALLET governance vote

Ambire’s been doing the unglamorous work this week: keeping people from donating funds to scammers 🥷 

Address poisoning is a trick where a lookalike address shows up in your history so you copy the wrong one on autopilot 🤖 

The practical fix: save real addresses in your Address Book (whitelist them), stop copying from history tabs, and actually double check the destination before you hit send.

Also, on the rewards side, Ambire has a governance vote running until Feb 16 to stop the remaining $WALLET claims tied to Web Wallet (v1) rewards, Ambire Rewards Season 0 (Ambire Legends), and early supporters vesting 👀 👇️ 

Coinbase community fumes as COIN dumps and CEO’s sales resurface

Coinbase’s stock has been getting treated like a risk asset that forgot to pack a parachute, and a reason here that makes the people in the community squint 👇️ 

• According to the numbers shared by various sources, Brian Armstrong sold more than 1.5 million Coinbase shares between April 2025 and January 2026, which reportedly added up to roughly $550M in proceeds.

• Meanwhile, COIN is described as being down nearly 60% from its July 2025 peak and more than 50% over six months. That gap between “founder sells” and “stock bleeds” is where the story lives, because nobody reads a Form 4 and thinks “love that for us” 💰️ 

To be clear, the selling is shown as being done under a pre arranged Rule 10b5 1 trading plan, which is the standard corporate way to avoid the insider accusations by setting a schedule in advance.

In other words, it’s allowed, it’s common, and it’s not automatically a scandal 🤔 

It’s also still the kind of thing that looks terrible on a chart when the chart is already having a rough year.

• The largest single transaction cited is June 25, 2025, when Armstrong sold 336,265 shares at $355.37 each. There’s also a more recent example mentioned on January 5, 2026, where he sold 40,000 shares at $254.92.

• Those are very “normal rich person” numbers, but they land differently when readers are staring at a dump and trying to figure out whether leadership is feeling confident or simply feeling like they need more cash in their bags 💵 

• In the meantime, Armstrong appears to have dropped out of the world’s 500 wealthiest individuals, with his net worth estimated around $7.5B, down from a $17.7B record last summer, and a big chunk of that is linked to his roughly 14% stake in Coinbase 🤷‍♂️ 

• That kind of swing is not rare in founder land, but it’s still an example of how fast paper wealth evaporates when your company’s ticker becomes a proxy for macro mood.

So right now, Coinbase is getting hit from two directions at once. The stock is being dragged by the market and at the same time, the insider selling narrative gives everyone a neat, emotionally satisfying explanation for why the red candles exist. Markets love neat explanations 🤐 

None of this automatically means that Coinbase is doomed but it does mean Coinbase, as a public company, is stuck playing a different game than crypto Twitter wants to admit 🙃 

Public markets punish ambiguity, they punish dumps and they definitely punish news that read like “CEO cashes out while holders cope”, even if the sales are scheduled and compliant, the storyline is still easy to weaponize.

BlackRock brings BUIDL to Uniswap for onchain trading

BlackRock keeps taking the most traditional asset on Earth (Treasuries) and dragging it into DeFi, one integration at a time.

• This week the community is actively discussing BUIDL, BlackRock’s tokenized Treasury fund that’s issued through Securitize.

• Instead of living purely in the “tokenized but still walled off” corner of the space, it’s now being set up for direct onchain trading through Uniswap infrastructure 👇️ 

• The key detail is that this isn’t a random pool anyone can ape into. Access is still gated to pre qualified, whitelisted participants, with Securitize sitting in the middle as the regulated layer that handles the compliance and the “who’s allowed to touch this” part 🤏 

So yes, it’s DeFi, but with the kind of whitelist you’d expect from some organization of that level 📜 

Still, it matters because it’s another real step toward regulated finance using public chain liquidity venues instead of building a private sandbox and calling it innovation.

The deal here is basically: tokenized fund on one side, Uniswap as the onchain routing and execution layer on the other and Securitize connecting the two 🔒️ 

UNI moved after the announcement, because if the biggest asset manager on the planet is comfortable using Uniswap’s stack as part of the trade path, that’s a pretty big signal about where this stuff is heading, even if it’s still behind velvet ropes for now 🪙 

Ethereum staking is climbing / The future zkEVM upgrade is making waves

Ethereum staking is getting another big money shove. Bitmine just added 140,464 ETH to staking on top of what it already had 💰️ 

More ETH going into staking means less ETH sitting around ready to be sold or rotated instantly, and it’s not some mystical supply story but just mechanics: more ETH committed to securing the network and earning yield, less ETH freely floating.

And yes, people are already eyeing the big round milestone talk again, with staked ETH getting discussed around the 4 million mark 🤔 

The obvious tension is concentration. Bigger players staking more ETH is good for security, but it always drags the same question back into the room: how wide is validator ownership really, and how many independent operators can realistically keep up as the stakes rise.

At the same time, Ethereum’s core work is also pushing toward something that could make the validator job less heavy over time: zero knowledge based block validation, with a rough target around 2027 ⌚️ 

• Right now validators confirm blocks by re executing transactions. That’s reliable, but it scales with usage, which means higher activity slowly turns validation into more hardware, more bandwidth, more operational overhead.

• The direction Ethereum is exploring is proof verification: instead of every validator repeating the same computation, validators verify cryptographic proofs that the execution happened correctly 👇️ 

The plan being discussed sits under the Ethereum Foundation’s L1 zkEVM roadmap, with early work tied to EIP 8025. With this, validators can keep doing the standard flow, while some take on a role as zkAttesters, checking zkEVM proofs broadcast through a dedicated channel 😎 

There’s also a safety check baked in, because Ethereum never wants a single proving stack to become a single point of failure. Early designs mention a 3 of 5 proof threshold, which is basically a guardrail for diversity and redundancy 🧠 

When this lands, the upside is bigger than “it’s going to be faster”. It’s accessibility. ZK Validators wouldn’t need to carry the same execution burden, and syncing could become closer to pulling recent proofs since a finalized checkpoint instead of grinding through everything the hard way 😉 

Other worthy reads

Berachain getting a surprising pump:

“Building permissionless neobanks” from Jay Yu:

“Build cults, get paid” from Kumbaya:

MEMES

That's all for now, frens.

We'll meet in a week! And remember, the market conditions are temporary, but our commitment to building a better Web3 is here to stay. Thanks for joining us, and we look forward to seeing you back next week. Cheers!

Yours, The 🔥 Team

Brought to you by Ambire: The Only Web3 Wallet That You’ll Need!