GM, frens! ☕️ 

The #1 goal of every living organism is survival.

Doesn’t matter if it’s plants, people, or internet born financial abstractions that would have a medieval peasant screaming witchcraft…. the first step is always the same: make it to tomorrow. Just saying 👀

Today we’re discussing:

• 💰️ Wall Street’s crypto desk sees two more years of green ahead

• 🦊 Ambire EXPANDS to Firefox

• 🤦‍♂️ Kanye’s coin: the eternal rug

• 🥷 Beacon Network: big players teaming up to combat crypto crime

• 🤯 Hyperliquid puts top 500 companies to shame with $102M revenue per head

The W3oF Degen Portfolio did what it had to. It’s still doing fine (though clearly overdue for the facelift it’s been putting off)👇️

Come talk survival tactics with us in the Discord🤝 

Wall Street’s crypto desk sees two more years of green ahead

In most cycles, everyone is overly focused on pinpointing when it all ends. This time, though, the call is that it might not, at least not for another two whole years.

In a note to clients published on Tuesday, Bernstein (a global wealth manager overseeing $700B) raised its BTC price target to $200,000 and argued the current bull market could extend into 2027, fueled by U.S. policy support and even a deeper wave of institutional adoption 🤯 

• The headline number is pretty bold: $150K - $200K BTC within a year. But the note doesn’t stop at just BTC.

• Ethereum, Solana, and a cluster of DeFi tokens are being framed as the next leg of the cycle: Chainlink, Uniswap, Polkadot and Stellar all got name checked as standouts 🤔 

Policy fuel

Bernstein’s analysts pinned part of their thesis on U.S. policy.

• The Trump administration is being cast as “mission critical” in building the U.S. into the global capital for crypto, a change that could stretch the market’s life well beyond the shorter peaks of earlier cycles 🍊 

• Unlike the stop/start bull runs of the past, this one is expected to have institutional and political scaffolding behind it.

Winners outside the coins

The bullishness isn’t just on assets. Bernstein lifted its targets for several U.S. crypto platform stocks tied to this cycle:

• Robinhood: July’s crypto volumes hit $16.8B, more than doubling month over month. The Bitstamp acquisition and European expansion into staking and tokenized products are seen as major growth levers.

• Coinbase: Volumes crossed $100B in July, with revenues up 44%. The Deribit buy, its push into perpetual futures, and global footprint give it what Bernstein calls “AWS of crypto” positioning 🪙 

• Circle: Analysts project USDC’s supply could climb from $68B today to $173B by 2027, with Circle’s Arc chain and banking ties as key drivers.

It’s not just coins that are projected to run. The exchanges, brokerages, and stablecoin issuers are all written into the script.

The long cycle

The phrase Bernstein used to describe the next phase was “long” and “exhausting” 🥱 

A cycle that doesn’t just spike and collapse but drags on, expanding across assets and infrastructure. Unlike 2017 or 2021, where a handful of majors defined the bull, this one is expected to be wider, heavier, and harder to kill 🛡️ 

The picture painted isn’t just of prices rising, but of crypto moving deeper into global finance. Backed by law, funded by institutions and extending into DeFi and stablecoins.

If it plays out, the 2025 pump won’t be remembered as a peak. It’ll be remembered as the halfway point to big golden bullrun 🐂 

Ambire EXPANDS to Firefox

For years, Firefox users had to watch from the sidelines while crypto extensions piled up on Chrome.

The “other browser” crowd got used to being left out second class citizens, especially in Web3 🙃 

Now the tables turned. Ambire just landed on Firefox 🪂 

A small act of recognition: Web3 shouldn’t revolve around one browser monopoly. If we have decentralization onchain, no reason not to have decentralization in where and how people use them 🧠 

Ambire on Firefox means you can fire up a fresh install, add the extension, and be in control of your assets without switching to whatever Silicon Valley jerk dev thinks is best for you 🤓 

A small win for the underdog browser, but more importantly, a win for choice. And that’s what crypto was always supposed to be about 🫡

Kanye’s coin: the eternal rug

Kanye West never does small. The man doesn’t drop a shoe, he drops a religion. He doesn’t tweet, he ignites wars. And when he finally decided to step into crypto, of course it wasn’t going to be some low key rug pull…. right?

At least, that’s what most people assumed. And got burned pretty bad 🤕 

• On August 21st, Ye unveiled YZY, a memecoin on Solana wrapped in Yeezy branding and pitched as the “official currency” of his ecosystem.

• There was talk of YZY Pay, YZY Card, the whole dream package of music/fashion/blockchain fusion. For a short while, it felt like Ye could use web3 in a correct way unlike other celebs 🤔 

But behind the smoke machine, the numbers told another story. One that we’re all used to and tired of by now 🙃 

• Onchain data showed that the top six wallets controlled over 90% of supply. Even worse, Kanye himself allegedly held around 70% of the tokens.

• +irony: not that long ago Kanye trashed celebrity tokens as predatory. Now he was running the very scenario he swore off 📜 

The market noticed. Traders didn’t see “Yeezy Money”, they actually saw a massive insider dump risk.

And sure enough, within hours wallets started unloading YZY bags on unsuspecting fans 💰️ 

This is where things get truly degen. While fans were bending backwards hoping to ride Ye’s aura, blockchain sleuths caught snipers and insiders printing life changing money in minutes 👇️ 

• One wallet dropped $250K at launch, scooped YZY at $0.02, and cashed out $1M eight minutes later.

• Another turned $50 into $40,000 in hours. And the same networks that exploited earlier launches like $LIBRA reappeared, siphoning $23M during the opening swings 💵 

For some reason CT thought it was a “community launch”, probably because everyone knew Kanye understood these rugs and wouldn’t be caught doing something like this, but in reality, ruggers were already circling their fresh prey.

Some degens tell themselves they’ll outsmart the dump, but as always they’re just financing the rinse and repeat.

Kanye tries to unsink the ship

Even Ye himself jumped in to prop up the dream, dropping 30M YZY (~$34M) into liquidity pools on Meteora, with a trading band between $3.17 and $4.49 👜 

Near the top, that bag could’ve netted him $134M. But enthusiasm didn’t last. The token dropped around 150% as the hype was burning out 🤷‍♂️ 

Dead on Arrival

For a few hours, YZY was the talk of crypto Twitter. Then fatigue set in. Because this isn’t new by any means.

The celebrity coin cycle has one plot: concentrated supply → insiders in profit → FOMOing degens left holding the bag. The fact that it still soaks up billions on day one says less about Kanye than about crypto’s unresolved immaturity 🤦‍♂️ 

Interesting how behind every headline we usually see the same circle of people (the cabals that we swore never existed back in 2021?). The same wallets, the same deals, the same exits.

But worst of all is that behind every instance there is an audience willing to play along, telling themselves it’s fun, it’s “culture”, it’s entertainment, that’s just how the trenches are.

Which is true. But it isn’t wealth creation and certainly not what crypto or even finance in general are all about 🤪 

So what does YET ANOTHER celeb rug really prove? Not that Kanye can “revolutionize crypto” or that memecoins are forever or that they’re unstoppable. What it proves is that the industry still, after all these pumps and dumps, can’t tell the difference between cultural hype and actual progress 😐️ 

Wall Street on one side and rug factories on the other. Finance 2.0? Or are we just a part of the most expensive carnival in history? 🤡 

Beacon Network: big players teaming up to combat crypto crime

Crypto has bled $47 billion into fraud linked addresses since 2023 🥷 

Scams, hacks, and ransomware have been the industry’s tax, one almost everyone in the space had to pay 👇️ 

• This week, TRM Labs rolled out its answer: the Beacon Network, an early warning system for suspicious flows. With Ripple, Coinbase, Binance, PayPal, Kraken, and other heavyweights are plugged in from day one 🧠 

• The idea is simple but overdue. When a hack happens, stolen funds often move across exchanges in minutes.

• Until now, each platform scrambled alone, usually after the damage was irreversible. Beacon is setting up real time alerts, pooled intelligence, and a shared defense layer designed to freeze scammers before they fully cash out 🔨 

It’s the closest thing crypto has had to an immune system.

According to TRM labs, apparently exchanges, stablecoin issuers, DeFi teams and even independent researchers would be able to link in 🔌 

That makes it less about building walls and more about raising the floor, a baseline of protection the whole space has needed (and tried to implement) but never quite built due to various reasons.

Yes, it’s still coordination among giants, but sometimes maturity looks like standard setting. The ecosystem certainly needs the breathing room from the parasites that have drained it for years 🫡 

The real test will be adoption beyond the first movers. If smaller exchanges and DeFi protocols join in, Beacon could become less a compliance badge and more a default layer of safety. If not, it risks becoming just another walled garden for the big boys.

For now, though, it’s worth supporting & celebrating.

After years of scammers dictating the headlines, crypto is finally starting to coordinate its defense instead of shrugging and moving on to the next rug ⚔️ 

Hyperliquid puts top 500 companies to shame with $102M revenue per head

Efficiency usually belongs to the Fortune 500. Wall Street types love reminding us that Apple squeezes $2.4 million per every employee, or that Nvidia’s printing so hard it barely matters how many engineers Jensen Huang keeps on payroll 🫰 

This time thought, a crypto DeFi protocol with 11 people on the roster made them all look like bloated bureaucracies 🤯 

According to DeFiLlama stats, Hyperliquid generated $1.127 billion in annualized revenue. Do the math and you land at $102.4 million per employee 💰️ 

For comparison:

• Tether - $93 million

• OnlyFans - $37.6 million

• Nvidia - $3.6 million

• Apple - $2.4 million

• Meta - $2.2 million

Eleven guys running a derivatives DEX just beat Silicon Valley, porn platforms, and the biggest stablecoin in the game 🤔 

The lean machine

Hyperliquid didn’t get there by stacking VPs of Marketing or paying for corporate campuses.

Its model is brutally simple: a handful of core contributors, a product people actually want to use, and a structure that routes fees directly back into the protocol. That’s DeFi in its purest form: fewer gatekeepers, higher margins ✍️ 

The ecosystem effect

Revenue efficiency is one thing, but Hyperliquid also dominates at the protocol level. In July, just nine protocols accounted for nearly 90% of all distributed revenue, and Hyperliquid alone grabbed ~35% of that pie 🥧 

• The protocol is even preparing for HIP-3, an upgrade that shifts it from a derivatives exchange into a full Web3 infrastructure layer.

• Intended to be less of a trading pit and more of a smart derivatives backbone. If that works, Hyperliquid won’t be DEX but more like a foundational hub in the broader DeFi economy 🤓 

Comparisons to Apple or Tether will always come with caveats. Headcount doesn’t map perfectly across industries. But the point isn’t whether Hyperliquid can design iPhones.

It’s that a scrappy DeFi shop is running circles around global giants on the most basic metric of corporate performance.

These numbers show what happens when crypto gets it right. Lean, efficient, and unapologetically DeFi 🫠 

Other worthy reads

“A Bird's Eye View - The practical case for DeFi” by zacharyr0th

“A Template for (Quick) Due Diligence: The Arbitrum Grant Case” by Chilla

Fresh data on founders from Alliance:

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!