GM, frens! ☕️

Loyalty isn't agreeing with something forever. It's sticking with your own judgment after you've done the work. In a space where opinions change every few hours, that's surprisingly rare. People chase attention. Loyalty means remembering what earned your respect in the first place.

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

• 🦜 SocialFi hits reality on Base

• 🪙 BTC’s “data wars” return with BIP-110

• 💀 Robinhood Chain’s launchpad pushes back on degen token spam

• 💵 USDC recovery fight exposes some stablecoin issues

• Plus: 💜 Apps We Love and other worthy reads

On that note, we're starting something new. Great Ethereum apps deserve more exposure, so we'll add an apps we love section with short spotlights on apps we genuinely find useful, interesting or simply too good to leave sitting in the corner while everyone argues about whatever cat coin pumped today.

None of it is sponsored. If it makes the list, it's because we'd recommend it to a friend 👀 

Also here’s the last look at our W3oF Degen Portfolio experiment before it moves on 🫡

To be honest, not that bad for a degen bag. ETH and $WALLET saved the portfolio from going completely broke from messing with memecoins 🙃 

And as always, our Discord is open if you think there's something we've overlooked 🤠 

SocialFi hits reality on Base

The realistic part about consumer crypto is that the market doesn’t always hold back when it’s giving feedback 🫢 

Builders can spend a lot of time pushing one direction, shaping the app, rallying creators, building social tools and trying to make the experience feel more or less good, but then users show up and make it painfully clear what they actually care about.

SocialFi on Base got roughly the same treatment 👇️ 

• Jesse Pollak is now stepping back from leading the Base App and handing the product back to Coinbase. He will remain focused on Base itself, while Jordan Fish, better known as Cobie, takes over product development for the app.

The reason is not complicated: the social bet did not work, at least not the way Jesse expected 📱 

• Base had been trying to turn the app into a all in one onchain consumer product. The idea was to combine trading, social networking, messaging, miniapps, creator monetization and AI tools into something normal people might actually use.

• It was a reasonable direction on paper. Crypto has needed better consumer apps forever. Base also had every reason to think it could help push that forward, since it had Coinbase distribution, Ethereum alignment and one of the more active L2 ecosystems 🔒️ 

But Pollak admitted the actual adoption signals came from somewhere else.

In his post, he said Base made the right bet on builders, but the wrong bet on social. The things pulling users in were not creator coins, Farcaster, Zora, miniapps or the overall onchain social stack. They were prediction markets, perpetuals, stablecoins, trading and payments 🤷‍♂️ 

That is a pretty blunt admission. He even said the social side of the market that many were building toward has disintegrated completely 🥀 

Corporate founders usually dress that kind of thing up in 400 words of beige BS. Pollak more or less said the bet was wrong and moved on. Respect where due 🫡 

But to be completely honest, the category has always sounded better in theory than it has looked in practice. Users owning their social graph makes sense. Creators having more control makes sense. Turning platforms into open networks makes sense.

But when every social action becomes a shitcoin launch and every creator becomes a part of the speculation this becomes too extractive to properly work. And we’ve got more than enough garbage to lose money on in crypto 🤷‍♂️ 

Base now seems to be moving toward the parts of crypto with better demand. Pollak said the focus for the rest of 2026 will be trading, payments and AI agents. That is less romantic than “onchain social will onboard the next billion users” but it is also much closer to what people are already using.

BTC’s “data wars” return with BIP-110

Bitcoin’s strongest selling point has always been that it does not move easily.

The rules are hard to change. That has protected Bitcoin for a long time. It is also why every argument around changing it feels like a family inheritance fight where everyone brought a lawyer.

The latest big debate that shook the BTC community is about what should actually be allowed to live on the network 🤨 

• Since Ordinals and BRC-20s arrived, people have been using BTC for more than simple payments. They have been putting images, text, token metadata and other data into transactions.

• Critics call it spam. Miners just see fees, because sending a lot of data is way more profitable 💰️ 

• That argument has now turned into BIP-110, a proposal that would restrict several methods used to embed arbitrary data into Bitcoin transactions.

• The goal, according to supporters, is to reduce blockchain spam and keep Bitcoin focused on its original role as money. They argue that inscriptions and similar data-heavy uses clog block space, push up fees and turn the network into something it was never meant to be.

• Critics see a much bigger problem. These transactions are valid under Bitcoin’s current rules. Users pay fees, miners include them and the chain processes them. Restricting them after the fact means Bitcoin is no longer just enforcing neutral rules. It starts deciding which use cases are acceptable 🤔 

BIP-110 would tighten consensus rules through a soft fork. It would limit new transaction outputs to 34 bytes, restore an 83-byte limit for outputs, cap certain witness elements at 256 bytes and temporarily restrict several Taproot features commonly used for inscriptions. In simpler terms, it would make it much harder to place large chunks of arbitrary data on BTC.

For supporters, that is the point. For opponents, that is the danger 😐️ 

Adam Back has argued that Bitcoin already deals with spam through the market. If someone wants block space, they pay for it. If block space gets expensive, users adjust. Michael Saylor also pushed back, saying BIP-110 turns a spam dispute into a consensus change that could invalidate some currently valid fee-paying transactions 💵 

So far, the proposal does not look anywhere close to broad support. Reports noted that only around 1% of miners had signaled support, with one snapshot showing just 10 blocks out of 2,016 backing the temporary upgrade. For a proposal about changing consensus, that is not momentum. That is a few people shouting into a very deep cave.

Still, the split exposes something deeper about BTC itself.

Bitcoin can be hard money. It can be pristine collateral. It can be a settlement layer people trust because it refuses to change quickly. But that same rigidity is exactly why it struggles as a foundation for modern finance ❌ 

Finance is not just sending value from one wallet to another. It is lending, borrowing, trading, issuing assets, building markets, creating derivatives, moving stablecoins and letting developers combine all of that into new systems 💱 

Ethereum understood that part early. It made the opposite trade. More flexibility, more complexity, more chaos, more useful financial experiments. That is why DeFi, stablecoins, tokenized assets, onchain exchanges and most of the actual application layer formed around Ethereum instead of Bitcoin.

Bitcoin keeps running into the same wall. The moment people try to make it more expressive, the debate becomes ideological. Is this money? Is this spam? Is this allowed? Should this be filtered? Should people fork off if they disagree?

That is the exact reason Bitcoin will probably never be the future of finance, if you think about it seriously. Not because it has no value. It clearly does. But because the future of finance needs programmable infrastructure, and btc maxi culture often treats programmability like contamination 🤐 

💜 Apps we love

Some Ethereum projects are interesting because they chase the current meta. Others are interesting because they refuse to move very far from the original idea: keep the rules onchain and do not make users depend on a company sitting between them and their money.

This week we have Liquity, that falls into the second camp.

It is a decentralized lending and borrowing protocol on Ethereum. Users deposit ETH, stETH, or rETH as collateral and can mint $BOLD, Liquity’s dollar pegged stablecoin. The simple version is: borrow against your crypto without selling it 🪙 

• $BOLD is not backed by bank deposits, treasury bills, custodians, or an issuer holding reserves somewhere offchain. It is backed by crypto collateral inside Ethereum smart contracts.

• That gives Liquity a very different shape from centralized stablecoins that still depend on banks, legal wrappers, frozen accounts, reserve managers, and all the other “don’t worry, this is still crypto somehow” stuff 🤦‍♂️ 

That does not make Liquity magic. Borrowing against volatile collateral still comes with risk. If the value of your collateral falls too far, your position can be liquidated. The peg still depends on incentives working properly. Users still need to understand what they are doing, because the blockchain remains famously uninterested in babysitting anyone 🧠 

But the design is worth paying attention to because it keeps more of the important logic onchain.

One of Liquity’s more unusual ideas is borrower-set interest rates. Instead of every borrower receiving the same rate from a DAO vote, central team, or fixed protocol formula, users choose their own rate. A lower rate may look attractive, but it can make your position more likely to be redeemed against. A higher rate can give more protection, but costs more over time 💰️ 

So the rate becomes part of the user’s own risk management. Not exactly “click button, number go up” which is tragic for the shitcoin casino wing of crypto, but useful for anyone who wants more control over how their debt behaves.

Liquity also has Stability Pools where users can deposit BOLD and earn from protocol activity. The point is not to invent a new reward circus. The point is to connect the protocol’s own mechanics back to the people providing liquidity to the system.

That is why Liquity feels like an Ethereum app worth highlighting. It is not trying to dress up a centralized bank account as DeFi. It is trying to build a real DeFi borrowing system where the collateral, rules and incentives are visible onchain.

Robinhood Chain’s launchpad pushes back on degen token spam

Last week, we already talked about Robinhood Chain and the weird start it had: a chain built for tokenized finance getting its first loud burst of activity from memecoin trading.

That part was normal enough by crypto standards. New chain launches, degens rush in, launchpads appear, low effort tokens multiply, charts go vertical.

But a strange situation appeared later 🤔 

Noxa, the biggest launchpad on Robinhood Chain, stopped accepting new token launches on July 11 after reportedly generating nearly $12 million in cumulative fees. The reason given was low quality tokens flooding the platform 😵 

That’s extremely strange. Because it’s not how this space usually behaves.

Most crypto platforms do not look at a money printer and say “maybe this is bad” they look at it, create a leaderboard, launch a token, sell “pro tools” etc and call the result community growth. The entire industry has trained itself to reward volume first and ask basic questions later… usually after someone has already lost everything they had to some frog coin.

Noxa had the opposite reaction. The platform got traction, started making $2m per day, then decided the quality of what was being launched had become a problem 🤨 

First, the launchpad said it would stop accepting new launches. Then its website went dark, with the team blaming a Cloudflare issue. After that, the domain began redirecting users toward ENS services and creator earnings withdrawals. Late Tuesday, Noxa said it would no longer collect platform fees and would redirect 100% of transaction revenue to creators instead 🪙 

In a market where most teams squeeze every last dollar out of degeneracy until the chart goes flat, seeing a launchpad voluntarily step away from fees feels almost unnatural. Crypto has created so many incentives for platforms to embrace spam that rejecting it now looks like a radical act 🫥 

The move divided people for obvious reasons.

One side sees it as responsible. Robinhood Chain is still trying to position itself around RWAs, tokenized markets and consumer friendly onchain finance. If its first major cultural marker becomes endless garbage tokens, that can poison the brand early. A chain can recover from low activity. It is harder to recover from becoming known as this cycles’ shitcoin casino 🃏 

The other side sees it as a fumble. Noxa found attention, users and fees on a brand new chain. In crypto, that is usually the whole game. Walking away from launches right when the market is paying attention can look like killing the one thing that was working.

Both reactions make sense, but the bigger point is that this is one of the rare moments where a crypto product openly treated short-term volume as a liability.

That should not be shocking. It should be basic. But this is the same industry where “high activity” often means 4,000 worthless tokens and chats full of people typing “wen?” at 3 a.m 🤪 

Robinhood Chain now has a different problem than it had last week. The question is whether the chain can turn that attention into something that does not immediately rot the place from the inside.

Noxa’s move does not solve that. It may slow the early rush. But it does show something unusual: someone in the middle of the casino looked at the tables while they were still making money and decided enough was enough 🫳 

For crypto, that alone is almost suspiciously mature.

USDC recovery fight exposes some stablecoin issues

Freezing stolen money sounds useful until the victim finds out “frozen” does not mean “returned” 🤔 

According to a report detailed by the ICIJ, prosecutors in Wisconsin and New York are now frustrated with Circle over several stolen USDC recovery cases. Their complaint is not just that criminals used USDC. That part is already baked into crypto life, sadly.

Their complaint is that Circle allegedly refused or delayed action when law enforcement tried to freeze, recover, burn, or reissue stolen funds.

• One case involved a pig butchering scam victim in US who reportedly lost around $400,000. Prosecutors said Circle froze the victim’s USDC, but authorities then wanted the company to go further: seize the funds, invalidate them, and issue roughly $381,000 in new USDC back to the victim 💰️ 

• That is the part Circle pushed back on. Prosecutors claimed the company intentionally “disobeyed, resisted, or obstructed” a court order asking it to “burn and reissue” the stolen funds.

• Circle, meanwhile, has called the charges “meritless” and argued it did not have the technical ability to comply with the warrant in the way prosecutors wanted.

But Circle can freeze USDC in certain addresses. It has done so before. That is a huge difference from decentralized money. It also means everyone immediately starts asking what else Circle should be able to do once stolen funds are frozen.

From a victim’s perspective, the answer sounds obvious: if the money is frozen and everyone agrees it was stolen, return it. From a self custody perspective, the answer is more uncomfortable: if an issuer can freeze, burn, reissue, and redirect funds because a court or investigator asks, then the asset is not really behaving like open crypto money and there’s zero difference from a regular bank account 🤷‍♂️ 

That does not mean victims should be left with nothing. Nobody sane is rooting for scammers, although crypto does make that sentence necessary far too often. But it does show the tradeoff very clearly. A centrally controlled stablecoin gives users a possible recovery path, but it also introduces a company as the final operator of what can move, what can stay frozen, and what can be recreated somewhere else 🔒️ 

What happened in New York adds to the overall story:

• Prosecutors reportedly sent a letter to Congress claiming Circle has refused to cooperate with law enforcement or freeze assets unless compelled by legal process, refused to comply with valid state search warrants, and refused to return stolen funds to victims even when compelled by court order 🙄 

• The letter also made a sharper claim: that it can be financially preferable for Circle to freeze stolen crypto rather than return it, because Circle can continue collecting interest through investment of the underlying reserves. That is obviously the kind of allegation Circle will not want sitting around unanswered.

Some crypto investigators have accused the company of moving too slowly in previous cases. Blockchain researchers have claimed that 119 million USDC remains frozen. Circle was also criticized after the 2025 GMX hack, where tens of millions of USDC were swapped into DAI, a stablecoin that cannot be frozen in the same way.

And that contrast is basically the whole debate in miniature.

Still, the self custody side has the simpler principle: users should not have to depend on a private issuer to decide whether their money is movable, frozen, burned, or returned. If an asset needs a company to intervene after the fact, it may be useful, but it is not the same thing as permissionless money.

Circle’s problem is that it sits in both worlds. It wants USDC treated as serious financial infrastructure, but when law enforcement and onchain investigators ask for bank like intervention, it argues there are limits to what it can do. That may be legally or technically true to some degree. It may also be deeply frustrating for victims who can literally see stolen funds sitting frozen and still cannot get them back 😢 

Other worthy reads

Tether could flip BTC soon - a thought from @0xCryptoSam:

Actionables on airdrops & other meta from Katexbt:

Big tech is getting back in control of the market:

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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