GM, frens! ☕️

Trying something different isn’t the same as being reckless. Most progress comes from thinking sideways, testing ideas, and learning in public.

What looks like a misstep in the moment often turns out to be part of the process, not a failure. So keep your chin up 🤠 

Here’s what we’re watching this week:

• 🔥 Framework season: where crypto gets treated like a REAL market

• 🥷 Steady lads, deploying prison sentence

• 💣️ ENS renewals turned into a meta

• 🪙 YouTube adopts PYUSD for creator payouts

• 🐎 Stablecoins are winning

In the meantime, $WALLET keeps doing its thing:

For frens, the conversation always keeps going in our Discord 🫡 

Framework season: where crypto gets treated like a REAL market

Every market eventually gets bored of pure chaos. Not because anyone became wiser overnight, but because even ultradegens have a limit for reading the same “unfortunate incident” thread every week.

This week’s vibe comes from a temperature check-in that basically says: the global stance on crypto is changing. Institutions are finally realizing you can’t run a mature industry off bans and subpoenas 📜 

Elliptic’s 2025 Regulatory report frames it as a worldwide pivot away from enforcement-first energy and toward policy that actually tries to accommodate innovation 🙃 

The biggest example being the U.S., where the posture is described as pushing back on the previous regime’s heavy-handed approach, with Trump era policy direction and the GENIUS Act getting treated like a “we’re doing this for real” marker.

Some call it politics, strategy, opportunism even - the output is the same: the space becomes more legible 🫡 

• And “legible” is the entire game. Because once the rules stop feeling like a trapdoor, government bodies start building actual internal machinery instead of improvising via lawsuits ⚙️ 

• The piece points to the DOJ winding down “regulation by prosecution,” plus the SEC forming a Crypto Task Force under Commissioner Hester Peirce. That’s not bullish on its own, but it is a signal that the state is switching from punishing behavior to defining it.

• Elliptic’s report describes institutions in places like the EU and Hong Kong preparing for crypto custody and issuance activity as frameworks get clearer. They didn’t “discover” crypto, but they discovered risk teams can finally consider working with crypto without panicking 🧠 

• APAC and Middle Eastern hubs are positioned as the pace setters on licensing and structured regimes - with Hong Kong repeatedly showing up as the example of a jurisdiction trying to make policy usable in practice. Not perfect or uniform but coherent enough that businesses can plan beyond next Tuesday 🤝 

Elliptic also nods to an important change in how onchain finance is functioning - tokenized dollars becoming more native to activity instead of just sitting around as inert balance sheet decoration 💵 

That change forces regulators to care about market structure and mechanics, not just headlines.

So yeah - the takeaway isn’t “regulation good” or “banks good” it’s that 2025 looks like the year the grown up paperwork started catching up to the size of the market. Less guessing what the rules are. The industry is looking bullish as all hell and the future is bright 🐂 

Steady lads, deploying prison sentence

Some crypto stories take a damn long time to end.

Do Kwon. We’ve basically been covering every step of this dude’s story throughout the years: the confidence posting, the crash itself, the algorithmic faith healing, the dump, the global cleanup tour, the extradition breadcrumbs.

It’s been years of watching one guy treat the space like a reality distortion field. And now the genre switches from “thread” to “sentence” 👇️ 

Do Kwon has been sentenced to 15 years in prison over the $40 billion Terra collapse 🤯 

U.S. District Judge reportedly called the number “eye popping” and, at one point, cut through the fog with the simplest possible framing: “You chose to lie” 🔨 

Kwon is 33, pleaded guilty in August, and showed up “expressing remorse” in an obvious desperate attempt to reduce on his sentence when he realized he was done.

To be honest the judge was an interesting character this time and had a lot to say. He reportedly compared him to a cult leader, which is what you say when you think the spell was part of the harm.

• And the harm wasn’t theoretical. Victims spoke, including a detail that stings because it’s specific: one guy described losing nearly $200,000, saying Kwon’s public assurances made him believe 17 years of savings were safe, right up until the algorithm buckled in May 2022 😲 

• Prosecutors asked for 12 years. The defense wanted five. The court landed at 15, which tells you how little patience remained for the “mistakes were made” routine.

• Kwon is set to forfeit $19 million plus some properties as part of the plea deal, which is pocket change next to the damage, but that’s how these endings usually look 💸 

The wider timeline is the real punchline. The crappy management of Terra didn’t just implode itself, it helped destroy an entire era, it also prompted a series of blowups culminating in FTX’s bankruptcy months later.

After that came the legal dominoes: Terraform and Kwon were found liable on civil fraud charges, later agreed to pay $4.5 billion to settle with the SEC, and the company moved to dissolve the next day. Then the international epilogue: months in custody in Montenegro, an extradition fight, and the forged passport 🤦‍♂️ 

The guy tried the remorse script too, saying blame should be pointed at him and he “failed to operate the system the right way” plus the classic “I hope others learn by my example”. But the judge didn’t buy any of it 👨‍⚖️

Goodnight, sweet prince

Now it’s time to say goodbye. Crypto loves comebacks, but this one ends the old fashioned crypto founder way: a hard stop and 15 years of picking up soap ❌ 

ENS renewals turned into a meta

Grails is dangling a very specific incentive in front of ENS holders this month: stop procrastinating 👇️ 

The setup is straightforward.

Extend or register ENS names through the Grails app during December and each year you add counts as an entry. Three people walk away with cash prizes, plus some merch, picked in January 👀 

What’s interesting isn’t the giveaway itself, but the target. ENS renewals are boring, easy to forget, and usually only get attention when they stop working.

Grails is leaning into that friction and flipping it into a reason to act now, not later. The bulk extension feature is there for a reason too. This is aimed at people sitting on multiple names who’ve been putting it off 🤓 

It’s a small promo, but it says a lot about where Ethereum identity tools are right now. Less hype, more housekeeping. And sometimes, even housekeeping needs a nudge 🙃 

YouTube adopts PYUSD for creator payouts

The internet is infinite, but payday can be extremely finite.. if that makes sense.

For years, “creator economy” meant brand deals + a payout stack that still behaved like was faxing money in 2009. That stack is finally getting rewired to represent 21st century 👇️ 

YouTube is reportedly letting U.S. creators take their earnings in PayPal’s PYUSD, according to a Fortune report, with PayPal’s crypto lead May Zabaneh confirming the option is live for American users 🪙 

The way it’s framed is almost cute: a “payout method”, like choosing between bank transfer and… something that actually moves at internet speed, says alot about how far we’ve come 🥲 

• PayPal added the ability for payment recipients to get paid in PYUSD during Q3, and YouTube simply extended that option to its creator community afterward. So Big Tech didn’t suddenly wake up crypto pilled. It waited until the internals looked good enough to trust, then adopted it 🧠 

• And with PayPal acting as the “complexity sponge” creators now get the upside of onchain settlement without being dragged into custody and compliance stuff or learn about how chains work. That’s the entire pitch of these solutions and that’s exactly how old finance wants to see crypto used. Honestly, it’s not that bad when you think about it 🤷‍♂️ 

And yes, the hype machine is already trying to turn it into a scoreboard 🫠 

Even though some experts are skeptical about total stablecoin market cap blasting past $360B before February, even with the sector around $313B (but more about that in a bit) 😶 

So, no, this isn’t “YouTube goes crypto” per se, it’s YouTube letting a payments giant swap the pipes under the floorboards to allow crypto, while creators keep walking like nothing changed.

But that’s how big adoption actually happens.

Stablecoins are winning

Talking about stables in a more general sense… they always used to be a crypto side thing. A temporary parking spot between trades. A convenient lie we told ourselves about “stability” while everything else did backflips 🤪 

Now they’re showing up where speculation goes to die: payroll, everyday spending, and the kind of economic survival mode where people don’t care about your thesis, they care about whether tomorrow’s money still buys today’s bread 🧠 

And it keeps repeating in places that have nothing in common except one thing: stablecoins fit.

The “normal” use case: pay people, don’t start a philosophy club

• Look at how big platforms treat them, they don’t adopt experimental toys because it makes crypto Twitter clap. They adopt whatever reduces headache, complaints, delays, and cross border problems without asking users to learn ten new concepts and a new religion.

• That’s why stablecoins are suddenly being framed as a payout method rather than a crypto product. The pitch is painfully unsexy: predictable value, faster settlement, fewer surprises. The average joe does not want to be an unpaid beta tester for the future of finance with an UI/UX from 1980s.

They want their money to arrive, on time, in a form that keeps its value until the rent is paid.

The “gaming” use case: fewer illusions, more accounting

Then you have blockchain gaming, a sector that spent years speedrunning the same mistake: build an economy around volatile shitcoins and act shocked when players treat the game like a short term trade 🤷‍♂️ 

Studios are tightening spending. Investors are stricter. User acquisition is more expensive.

Suddenly, “sustainable model” stops being a slide and becomes a requirement. In that environment, stablecoins start to look less like a compromise and more like the only sane unit for payouts, rewards, and ingame transactions 🪙 

The “Venezuela” use case: the world’s most brutal product test

Then there’s the other end of the spectrum: countries where the local currency experience is basically a long running prank with a tragic punchline (but don’t make any mistakes: this is basically what awaits most of us in the future, one way or the other 🤐 )

In Venezuela, research has pointed to stablecoins, particularly dollar pegged ones, becoming central to everyday life after years of economic collapse, isolation, and sanctions pressure 💰️ 

When access to traditional banking routes gets constrained, people don’t sit around arguing about decentralization narratives. They find whatever works 👇️ 

Stablecoins become the practical alternative because they’re easy to quote, easy to transfer, and easy to hold compared to a currency that melts in your hands. They also plug into informal markets quickly, including p2p trading that operates with minimal oversight 💵 

The real stablecoin thesis: distribution beats ideology

The most revealing thing about stablecoins is that their success doesn’t require mass belief in crypto.

If stablecoins become available inside familiar apps, used in ordinary payout settings, and priced in ways people already understand, they spread without needing a cultural conversion. People don’t adopt crypto in a traditional sense, they just start receiving and holding a stable unit because it’s the path of least resistance 💱 

It’s exactly stablecoins, not degen dog coins or any other product that are literally turning into crypto’s default product right under our nose, not because they’re the most exciting, but because they’re the most usable. That might be the perfect gateway drug for more crypto adoption 🤔 

They’re showing up in creator payouts because creators want reliability. They’re showing up in games because games need legible economies. They’re showing up in sanction stressed economies because people need something that holds value and moves.

It’s the same pattern in three different costumes 🤵 

Other worthy reads

“17 things we’ve excited for in 2026” by a16zcrypto:

“Discipline comes from destruction” by Pickle Cat:

The anatomy of a crypto neobank, by Sam:

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

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