Web3 on Fire
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🔥 Hedging the End of Money

🔥 Hedging the End of Money

Also: gas-free swaps, because paying more than you swap is insane

Web3 on Fire 🔥
January 30, 2026

GM, frens! ☕️

Curiosity in our industry is about not taking things at face value. It’s what keeps us going = clicking past the headline, looking at how something works instead of how it’s described. Wondering why something is working, not just that it is.

That habit tends to age better than hot takes 👀

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

🪙 Hedging the End of Money
🔥 Ambire: gas-free swaps, because paying more than you swap is insane
🐸 Meme season tries again: Solana launchpads turn the faucet back on
🇳🇱 Netherlands plans to tax what you didn’t sell
🥷 Inside Telegram’s gambling cash flows

Below is how $WALLET is trading right now.

And if you like pulling threads instead of swallowing narratives whole, our Discord is always open 🤠

Hedging the End of Money

Lately, debates rage about whether hoarding gold bars or stacking crypto coins will save you when the financial world implodes (via the dramatic “fiat crash” scenario) 🤷‍♂️

In a casual chat in your TG or Discord, you might hear sweeping claims: “Bro, when fiat dies, my gold coins will buy me a kingdom” or “Nah man, [insert coin name] will be the only money left” 👂️

Every time inflation flares up, macro turn bad or some large conflicts appear the old metals get dusted off and wheeled back onto the stage. People in our space watch this and start asking questions.

But can you really compare metals to crypto?

Short answer: no.

Longer answer: they solve different problems, and pretending otherwise is how bad narratives are born 👇️

Gold and silver are hedges first, beliefs second. They work because they always have. Thousands of years of collective agreement does a lot of heavy lifting 🏋️
Central banks hold gold not because it’s exciting, but because it survives regimes, wars, currencies, and resets.
Silver tags along, half monetary relic, half industrial workhorse - it often gets lumped with gold (precious metals duo) but it actually behaves a bit differently. Because over half of silver’s demand comes from industry, silver’s price can pump when the economy is booming (high industrial demand) and slump if industry slows.

Crypto is the opposite direction ↪️

It’s belief first, hedge maybe later.

BTC itself wasn’t born out of tradition but out of distrust. Fixed supply, no central issuer, portable, borderless.
Conceptually clean. Historically untested. It behaves less like gold and more like a high beta macro asset that occasionally remembers it’s supposed to be an alternative 🤔

That matters when people start talking about “the crash”

In crypto circles, the crash often means fiat disappearing overnight, banks evaporating, and gold holders emerging from bunkers to reclaim the world 🧛

It’s a fun story. It’s also not how crashes usually work.

When systems actually break, gold and silver are not daily money. During real crises, people want food, fuel, medicine, safety. Shiny metal doesn’t help much at that stage, and trying to use it can make you a target 🎯
Historically, gold does its job after the collapse, not during it. It preserves purchasing power so that when a new system forms, you’re not starting from zero.

Crypto has the opposite problem. It can be incredibly useful during partial failures. Currency controls, hyperinflation, broken banks, but electricity and internet still working. In those moments, digital assets shine. People have already used them that way. But if infrastructure goes dark, crypto pauses too 👨‍🔧

Which brings us back to reality.

A total fiat extinction event makes for good Twitter threads, but most financial stress arrives slowly.

Inflation erodes value. Currencies weaken. In those environments, gold hedges quietly, silver swings harder, and crypto behaves like a risk asset that occasionally flirts with its “digital gold” identity 🪙

Hoarding metal and expecting to transact through the apocalypse is fantasy. Hoarding crypto and assuming the grid will always cooperate is optimism. Both miss the point.

Gold and silver are about durability. Crypto is about optionality. One protects against long term monetary decay. The other offers mobility and an escape hatch when traditional systems misbehave, but haven’t fully collapsed 🧠

They’re not competitors. They’re answers to different issues.

And if the mythical crash ever does arrive in full cinematic form, none of them will matter as much as people think. At that point, the most valuable assets won’t be metals or tokens, but whatever keeps you fed, warm, and unbothered 🐒

Everything else is portfolio theory.

Ambire: gas-free swaps, because paying more than you swap is insane

You know that moment when you’re about to do a small swap and the chains remind you they charge rent for existing. The trade is fine, the numbers make sense, and then gas calculation shows up like a bouncer who wants a cut of your dignity 😐️

Ambire’s solution to this is basically: if the swap fee is already bigger than the transaction cost, Ambire covers the gas.

So the “I wanted to swap $0.04 and ended up donating $3 to the network” experience gets trimmed down into something closer to normal 🧠

Under the hood it’s paymaster sponsorship via ERC 4337, and it extends to EIP 7702 EOAs and Ambire Smart Accounts 🔥

Meme season tries again: Solana launchpads turn the faucet back on

Meme tokens are (sort of) trying to crawl back out of the drawer, and yes, it’s Solana again 🫠

The comeback isn’t happening because the market suddenly found religion, it’s happening because launchpads never stopped feeding the machine, it seems that they just paused to wipe the grease off their hands 🤏

Token creation is up again on coin launcher websites, activity is pushing back toward recent peaks 👇️

The twist is that the slot machine is a little less generous with the fantasy valuations. There’s more mints, more wallets more fees staying elevated, but way fewer tokens 🪙

The narrative fuel got a small refresh: instead of pure dog coin theater, you have stunts like attempts to spoof a Penguin themed token to bait attention and AI token based on (recently extremely popular) Clawdbot.

Old faces also crawl back into the sunlight when conditions allow it, with familiar meme tickers waking up alongside newer names that catch a wave simply because the wave exists.

The combined activity of Pump.fun + PumpSwap reportedly pushed about $5.4M in daily fees, enough to edge past Hyperliquid on a 24 hour revenue basis, which is a very specific kind of flex: less “look at our tech” more “look at the receipts” 💰️

And because the loop is fee heavy, it feeds itself. Pump.fun can keep buying back PUMP, with holdings noted at over 20% of supply, which turns the whole episode into a neat little closed circuit: launchpads drive mints, mints drive trading, trading drives fees, fees fund buybacks, buybacks keep the casino rolling 🃏

So is meme trading “back”? Sure, in the same way late night diners are “back”: the lights are on, the oven is running, and somebody is always ordering something questionable at 3AM. Doesn’t mean it’s anything good.

The Netherlands plans to tax what you didn’t sell

The Netherlands is tightening its grip on crypto taxes, and this time it’s not just about what you sold. It’s about what you could have sold.

The proposed reform would tax both realized and unrealized gains on crypto holdings. Not profits you actually took 🤨

Profits that existed briefly on paper, dependent on market timing, liquidity, and the small detail of whether you ever intended to sell at all. In other words, value that behaved more like a suggestion than an outcome 😵

The policy is presented as modernization. A change toward taxing “real economic outcomes” 🤡

That language sounds reasonable until you notice the contradiction: unrealized gains are not outcomes. They are estimates frozen in time, pulled from markets defined by volatility. In crypto, today’s paper profit is often tomorrow’s footnote 🤪

What’s more interesting than the mechanics is the signal. Governments are no longer debating whether crypto belongs in the financial system. That phase is over.

The Netherlands isn’t questioning crypto’s legitimacy or usefulness. It’s doing something more decisive: treating it as a permanent asset class that needs to be taxed, reported, and normalized like everything else 🤷‍♂️

Taxing unrealized gains assumes a level of stability that crypto markets simply don’t offer.

It assumes prices are reliable and valuation can be cleanly translated into taxable reality. That works reasonably well for slow moving assets, but even then not 100%. But it for sure works far less well for something that can drop 90 percent between filing periods 🤦‍♂️

The obvious risk follows. If you’re taxed at a local top and the market corrects, you’re left paying for value that no longer exists. Refunds, adjustments, and future offsets are promised, but markets move faster than bureaucracies, and the burden always lands on the holder first.

Inside Telegram’s gambling cash flows

You know the feeling when an app is trying to be ten things at once, and somehow succeeds at being exactly one thing: a place where money moves fast and nobody asks questions.

That is the vibe around Telegram’s shadow economy lately, where “escrow style marketplaces”, slimy “wallets”, mini apps, and a rotating cast of names keep popping up like they are running a subscription service for plausible deniability. Somebody gets shut down, and then the same activity pops up again wearing a fresh hoodie and sunglasses just a week later 🥷

One set of onchain intelligence reporting tracked this stuff continuing at scale even after some major linked services were supposedly shut down.

The number floating around is a combined ~414 million USDT over a 53 day period 🤯 tied to gambling related entities still processing volume through Telegram based payment tools. That is not “a few degens” that is an industry 🏭️

And of course it is never “one wallet.” It is always a constellation.

Names that keep showing up in these discussions include Huione Telegram Wallet, Wangbo Wallet, and HWZF, with references to connections around Huione, Haowang, and Tudou Guarantee related services 🤓
The funniest part is that none of this requires the average person to understand crypto beyond “tap, send, done.” - TG did not invent laundering, obviously, but it did help turn it into product design.
Everything is a button, everything is “just a tool,” and everyone can claim they are only providing software, the way a getaway driver claims they are only providing transportation 📲

Even with repeated warnings from payment providers about not sending funds straight to centralized exchanges, tracking still found around 9 million USDT moving into platforms like Binance, OKX, and HTX during that same window, with the predictable compliance risk attached 😶

Authorities have started labeling parts of this world more aggressively, including references to US and UK agencies and the idea that linked entities were treated as a major laundering concern ❌

There have also been reports of prosecutors pursuing large forfeiture cases connected to the same orbit of operations.

That all sounds serious because it is serious, but it also highlights the reality: enforcement actions tend to be episodic, while the underlying demand for fast settlement and low friction payments is continuous 🤔

So, crypto’s “bad neighborhoods” turn out to be pretty simple and they don’t run on no tech wizardry 🧙

🤡

They run on distribution, convenience, and a platforms that people already use for everything else. TG is a good example of those, where communities live, where deals happen, where bots run, where mini apps feel normal and nothing about that is looking like it’s going to be fixed in the near future.