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🔥 One year of Trump: how did crypto fare?

🔥 One year of Trump: how did crypto fare?

Plus: Some devs admit token launches weren't designed for you

Web3 on Fire 🔥
January 23, 2026

GM, frens! ☕️

Balance is a boring word, but it does a lot of heavy lifting. In our space, leaning too hard in either direction usually ends the same way - overconfidence gets punished, hesitation gets left behind. The trick is staying flexible without losing your footing, especially when the ground keeps moving 🫡

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

🍊 One year of Trump: how did crypto fare?
🫢 Token launches weren’t designed for you and Solana basically admits it
💰️ Farcaster refunds $180M as it changes the center of gravity
🫥 DAC8 – crypto losing its blind spots in EU

Below is how $WALLET is trading right now.

If you want to talk it through, our Discord is always open 🤠

One year of Trump: how did crypto fare?

Crypto started Trump’s second term with a great tailwind, and then spent most of the year getting pinned down by Trump’s geopolitical habits 🍊

People forget how unforgiving the markets can actually be. They don’t wait for laws to pass, they trade the vibe of what they think is coming - and Trump coming back certainly looked like a green light for crypto.

The administration leaned into it early, and they weren’t shy to promote it.

In March 2025, Trump signed an executive order establishing a “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve” plus a separate “U.S. Digital Asset Stockpile” for other seized crypto, with the White House pitching it as a formal step toward treating crypto like a strategic asset.

That helped the narrative more than mechanics. It told markets: “We’re not trying to choke this industry anymore, we’re trying to own the story” 😌

The price action in 2025 reflected that early optimism. Prices ran hard during the year and even hit a peak well above where they started, but by the time the year ended most assets were sitting below their highs and the broader market had cooled with it.

So somehow still, crypto finished 2025 with losses despite the reelection hype, while gold and other safe havens stole attention in institutional portfolios 🤷‍♂️

What’s the connection between the most “pro crypto president” since crypto became a thing and “meh, another year in red”? 🤔

The policy wins didn’t get the last word

The biggest clean win was stablecoin regulation finally getting a US federal framework. On July 18, 2025, the White House announced Trump signed the GENIUS Act into law, framing it as a cornerstone piece of legislation for digital assets.
That is not a small thing. A stablecoin framework is basically the part of crypto that intersects with payments, treasury management, and mainstream finance without requiring everyone to pretend they’re a trader. It’s the boring but most important part of the market in the good sense, the part that keeps working even when prices look rough.

But here’s the catch: markets can respect policy and still sell the asset 👎️

Geopolitics vs optimism, and how Trump helped make sure politicial shenanigans would overshadow everything

Trump did what Trump does. He turned foreign policy and trade into a constant stress test, but the thing is… crypto does not enjoy stress tests when it’s already fragile as it is.

Look at what’s happening with tariffs 🤓

In early April 2025, Trump’s tariff moves and the retaliation from China helped trigger a sharp global market selloff, with major US indexes getting hit hard and recession fears popping up in mainstream commentary.
Crypto isn’t magically detached from that. When markets start thinking “trade war, slower growth, inflation risk, maybe I should buy some shiny metal and forget about putting my money in fancy internet computer money” - the first thing that gets trimmed is exposure to risk, and crypto still trades like risk most of the time ✂️

Then later in the year, you got more examples of the same pattern.

Reuters reported that on October 10, 2025, BTC fell sharply amid escalating US China trade conflict after Trump threatened massive tariff hikes and export controls, and the move hit broader markets too.

Put those and other examples like Greenland, etc. together and you get the core dynamic of the year.

The attitude toward crypto got friendlier, but the macro environment got way more unpleasant. And a lot of that jumpiness came straight from the White House itself.

The crypto “Trump year” story ends up being about contradiction

On one hand, you had the administration doing symbolic and practical things that a lot of crypto people have wanted for years 🫡
On the other hand, the same administration kept injecting uncertainty into the global system through trade escalation. And that uncertainty helped cap risk appetite 🤦‍♂️

When that happens, crypto stops acting like the future and starts acting like a leveraged bet on “good times continuing”.

Even the year end reflects that. Crypto ended the year below its peak and that precious metals drew more institutional attention, which is exactly what you’d expect when geopolitics dominates the mood 🧠

So did we “fare well”?

Structurally, crypto probably had one of its best US policy years in a long time, financially, it was a lot less heroic than the post election chest thumping suggested it would be, because the year kept getting interrupted by geopolitical chaos, and Trump’s approach to that chaos didn’t give markets the calm runway they needed to stay committed 🥴

What comes next probably isn’t a single catalyst but a grind. More shenanigans, more whiplash, more moments where crypto moves less on fundamentals and more on headlines. The market already knows how to live in that environment. The question is how long patience lasts 🤐

Token launches weren’t designed for you and Solana basically admits it

Token launches have spent the last few cycles pretending they’re somehow “fair”.

With vesting schedules that stretch into years, circulating supply that is vague and fully diluted valuations that balloon before anyone can reasonably touch the asset.

Solana’s co founder Anatoly Yakovenko is arguing that this isn’t a market problem. It’s a design problem 👇️

The core critique is simple.

Early stage tokens are being shaped by capital formation mechanics instead of users. Heavy VC allocations, long cliffs, and controlled float turn launches into controlled experiments rather than open markets 🪙

The alternative being outlined flips several assumptions:

First, real supply should exist at launch. Not symbolic supply, but enough tokens in circulation to allow actual price discovery.
The suggestion of releasing over 20 percent at TGE isn’t about volatility tolerance, it’s about honesty. If a network can’t handle its token being tradable early, that’s a signal worth seeing.
Second, long term alignment shouldn’t be social. It should be enforced. Staking becomes the primary mechanism, not a yield gimmick but a commitment filter. Holders who believe in the network lock in, while short term participants accept the tradeoffs upfront.

Third, if investors are involved at all, they wait. Fully. Either there are no investors, or their allocation unlocks entirely at the same time, a year after launch. Without rolling cliffs or partial trickles, or any advantage disguised as patience 💰️

The market knows the supply schedule in advance and prices it accordingly.

According to Toly, instead of private rounds feeding a narrow set of insiders, launches should lean on airdrops to real users or fair auctions that don’t privilege access. The idea isn’t to punish capital, but to stop pretending capital equals commitment 🧠

But what’s notable here isn’t that these ideas exist. Variations have been discussed for years. What’s notable is who is saying them now.

This isn’t a fringe builder complaining about VCs from the sidelines. This is an ecosystem that benefited IMMENSELY from the old model, openly admitting that it no longer works 😲

The subtext is hard to miss.

And it’s true, markets have become very good at spotting financial engineering. So if the next cycle is going to look different, it won’t be because token standards somehow got more smarter, but because crypto stopped treating users as exit liquidity 🫠

Well, for now at least it’s a sign that even the biggest players are done pretending the current system is fine.

Farcaster refunds $180M as it changes the center of gravity

In crypto to hear someone is “returning money” is so rare it almost sounds like a bug, yet that’s exactly what Merkle Manufactory, the team behind Farcaster, says it plans to do: hand back roughly $180 million in venture funding while the protocol keeps running.

The immediate instinct when hearing “returning capital” is to assume something broke. Farcaster’s founders moved fast to kill that narrative 👇️

Dan Romero was explicit: Farcaster isn’t shutting down. The protocol still works, still has around 250,000 monthly active users, and more than 100,000 funded wallets as of December. Development continues, just under different ownership 🤨

Neynar, a venture backed startup that already built infrastructure around Farcaster, has acquired the protocol and will now control the smart contracts, code repositories, and core tooling. The founding team is stepping back from day to day work.

The real signal is buried a bit deeper.

Farcaster started as a decentralized social network pitch. Social first. Users first. Ownership rhetoric everywhere. But after years of trying to compete directly with mainstream social platforms, the numbers never really justified the capital behind it 🤷‍♂️

The pivot was subtle but decisive: away from social feeds and toward infrastructure and developer tooling.

In December, Farcaster shifted focus to in app wallets and trading features. Neynar now plans to push even harder in that direction, turning Farcaster into something closer to a protocol layer for builders rather than a consumer social product 🤓

Returning $180M is the implicit admission that the original scale narrative didn’t pan out the way original investors had hoped. Instead of dragging that baggage forward, they’re cutting it loose 🔪

What this actually says about Web3 right now

We always seem to have rewarded maximal narratives. Everything had to be a social network, a financial system, and a cultural movement all at once. That era burned a lot of people and left very little good infrastructure behind 🫢

What’s picking up instead is going to look more honest. Protocols that work but don’t conquer the world. Teams that accept constraints instead of fighting them. Products that choose sustainability over spectacle 🤡

In a space addicted to escalation, de escalation might be the most bullish signal we’ve seen in a while.

The EU’s DAC8 crypto tax directive is now in force, and it changes how crypto activity is seen across Europe.

From January 1, exchanges and crypto service providers are required to collect and report detailed user and transaction data to national tax authorities, which then share it across member states ✉️

This is not a new tax and it does not automatically trigger payments.

What DAC8 does is remove ambiguity. Names, addresses, tax IDs, transaction volumes, crypto to crypto trades, transfers, and even payments for goods and services are now part of standardized reporting. If activity happens on a regulated platform in the EU, it leaves a record that authorities can access later 🕵️
The law sits alongside MiCA, but its focus is narrower and sharper.
DAC8 is about visibility. Annual reporting replaces fragmented national systems and closes gaps that previously let activity slip between jurisdictions.

Self custody remains legal. Moving funds from an exchange to a private wallet is reportable as a transfer, but the wallet owner’s identity is not automatically disclosed beyond aggregated data 🖥️

The distinction still exists, but the perimeter around exchanges has tightened significantly.

For DeFi, the picture is less settled. Pure protocols without an identifiable operator are not directly targeted, but regulators are clearly testing where responsibility begins and ends. Crypto to crypto trades are explicitly within scope when intermediaries are involved 😰

So thus far, DAC8 does not mean immediate enforcement or real time monitoring. But it means history is being logged, standardized, and shared.

For EU crypto users, the era of assuming activity goes unnoticed on centralized platforms is effectively over 🖐️