GM, frens! ☕️

The wind of change is a strange thing. It never asks if you’re ready. One day everything feels familiar, the next it’s all reshaping, moving on.

You can fight it, or you can catch it and see where it takes you 😌 

Here’s what we’re discussing this week:

• 🧠 Will panic crack crypto before big brain machines do?

• 🤳 The JESSE coin moment

• 🦜 SEC wants a “chat” about crypto privacy

• 👀 BlackRock eyes staked ETH – and the ETH thesis grows up

And as for the bags - here’s how $WALLET is doing 👷 

Come feel the current in the Discord 🤗 

Quantum FUD wakes up again, will panic crack crypto before big brain machines do?

Every few months the same ghost taps the glass of the crypto space: “… quantum soon”.

Grifters yap more and more and suddenly half of the community is pricing in a doomsday they can’t explain.

TLDR: Today’s chains lean on math tricks like ECDSA signatures and elliptic curves. Shor’s algorithm says that with a large enough quantum machine, those tricks stop being tricks. Old addresses are in theory, all exposed. That’s the kernel of the fear 🌽 

Why are we talking about this one again? Because big tech labs keep posting milestones that are way closer than before and analysts keep updating countdown clocks 👇️ 

One track is currently hot: “late 2020s” if the breakthroughs stack 🤯 

Vitalik, speaking to devs in Buenos Aires, pointed right at the weak spot: signatures and old onchain data, and said the community should plan for staged upgrades instead of one giant flip 🔧 

Quantum researcher Scott Aaronson has the spicy version: with the current pace, a machine running Shor could be plausible before the 2028 U.S. election 😐️ 

Though, a separate line of research pegs 5 - 15 years before machines big and clean enough can actually tear through real world keys, something like early 2040s worst case for BTC’s older address types if nobody moves or rotates 👇️ 

Even those takes are reacting to real progress (e.g., Google’s demos of faster quantum processors), but “demo chip” is not “break crypto tomorrow” 🧠 

• Vitalik’s middle path makes sense: don’t shrug it off, but don’t start flipping the tables. Ethereum can potentially “ossify” different layers at different speeds and keep the parts that face users flexible, stuff like wallets, rollups and clients.

• Something like designing the upgrade so you can swap locks without evacuating the building. Push innovation to the edges where upgrades are easier. Let the base layer get boring and safe 🔒️ 

The two practical risks worth caring about:

• Harvest now, decrypt later. Public data is forever. If someone records traffic / data / txns today, future hardware can become smarter take a crack at it later 🤖 

• Migration pain. Rotating keys for millions, upgrading hardware wallets, moving old UTXOs/EOAs into post quantum schemes is logistics. Early pay to pubkey or otherwise exposed key addresses are the soft targets. Modern best practice already hides the key until spend time.

On the fix side, we’re not naked.

• Post quantum signature schemes exist (they’re heavier, but they work). Clients and wallets can roll in hybrids (classical + post-quantum) so users are covered during the transition 🛠️ 

• Networks can phase upgrades, starting with opt in paths for high risk holders and institutional flows that must meet long-retention compliance.

So is quantum a real concern? Yes.. in the same way rising sea levels are a concern if your server room is in the basement. But you don’t abandon your building, you move the racks upstairs and install pumps.

Devs can do the boring work now so they sleep easy when the next wave of “Quantum Breakthrough! SELL EVERYTHING NOW!!!!” headlines hit 🤡 

Panic and bad headlines will crack the vibe long before qubits crack those keys.

The JESSE coin moment

Attention is a commodity. In 2025, it even mints onchain.

So when Jesse Pollak, the public face of Coinbase’s Base L2 rolls out a shitcoin based on his own name nobody was all that shocked. It’s the logical finish to this year’s meta: make your name the ticker and see who bites 🐟️ 

Pollak calls it a “creator coin”, not a memecoin, an “asset tied to his brand and influence”.

The pitch is to align incentives with supporters, experiment with direct fan economics, show a cleaner path for attention markets 🤷‍♂️ 

The setup

• Creator coins are the annoying remixes of a social coin idea that just stubbornly keep coming back 🙄 

• Usually it’s some form of posts becoming mintable “content coins” with trading creator’s name as the product. We’ve watched cycles of this on Zora (the protocol that auto mints posts into tradable tokens) and elsewhere all year - but in simple sense they’re a scrollable casino where a viral post is a ticker by itself and a thread is a launchpad.

In April, the official Base account deployed “Base is for everyone” on Zora, It was later reposted from Base’s X account. The thing shot to a ~$17M cap within an hour, then cratered 90% just as fast. Pollak later said he personally approved the post and called it an experiment. Cool. Though for most it was still a pump and dump shaped experiment 💸 

He’s kept minting “content coins” on his personal Zora ever since 😶 

The model

Creator coins sound tidy on paper. Tokenize the feed. Make engagement an onchain good.

In practice, it usually looks like any other crap you get from a launchpad, it pumps a bit at launch and then everyone forgets about it.

One analysis of X promoted tokens last year found that 86% lost at least 90% of value within three months. Attention hits the top. The rug underneath disappears. Repeat. The problem is that with minted words the hype dispersal much faster 🤔 

Why people are side eyeing this one

Coinbase spent years painting itself as the grownup exchange. And Base is their DeFi consumer chain. When the most visible Base exec spins up a personal coin, you’re not just “testing” a format (that was properly tested as far back as 2017) you’re teaching the market that this is fair game for executives too 🤪 

Maybe Pollak doesn’t even profit off this. Maybe it’s clean and Base is genuinely trying something new. Even so, the reputation risk still lands on Coinbase and Base if the thing behaves like every other launchpad coin.

People won’t separate “JESSE the experiment” from “Base the network”. They never do.

Is there a legitimate product hiding in here? If creator coins ever become more than launch week fireworks, they’ll need utility that isn’t just check marks ✔️ 

Not even something basic like revenue rights, verifiable deliverables, slashing for missed promises, and onchain guarantees that outlive the hype - something beyond, that works and that wasn’t thought of before. In other words, actual product work 🤡 

Coinbase wanted Base to feel mainstream friendly. Creator coins attached to executives is anything that. It’s just another casino.

If the goal is pushing onchain culture forward, the go to thing is building primitives that help real projects and their devs build, sharing cash flows, supporting work without turning every personality into a bag. Not everything needs to be a coin 🪙 

SEC wants a “chat” about crypto privacy

Privacy keeps being the most discussed topic these few weeks. But the most important thing is that every time it heats up, some boomer calls it “a concern” then the room fills with lawyers 👎️ 

Now the SEC’s crypto task force is convening a December roundtable to talk privacy and financial surveillance. The date floating around is mid month - Dec 15 - which tracks with how hot this topic just got 👇️ 

And yeah it’s not cooling down.

Not that long ago, the summer gave us a guilty verdict for Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm. Then a big pump in prices for privacy coins, and just literally yesterday, November brought a highly discussed conviction and sentences for the Samourai Wallet founders 📌 

People close to this roundtable say the brief is simple: get crypto leaders and regulators in a room and ask why “tools that protect users” keep getting treated like contraband.

The prosecutions have sparked a bigger fear than price charts ever could - that opensource devs are being punished for writing code. Many prominent legal voices have flagged it as a bad precedent 👨‍⚖️ 

Even the DOJ’s line has wobbled toward sanity 👀 

The acting criminal division lead recently said the department won’t pursue people “solely for writing code” without malicious intent. Great - now square that with cases that did exactly the opposite 😑 

So in the end?..

Best case - the SEC hears from people who actually dev wallets, mixers and privacy tools and stops painting code by itself as market manipulation 🥸 

Worse case - we get another “we hear you” session that turns into more rules for UI while the real risk (blanket surveillance) goes untouched.

Hopefully, though, they can see sense here. Because the space doesn’t need a hug circle. It needs clarity. Don’t criminalize tools. Go after abuse. Let people keep their financial lives out of public spreadsheets. That’s not edgy or wrong, that’s completely normal.

BlackRock eyes staked ETH – and the ETH thesis grows up

There’s a difference between stories and real signals. The first one is typical attention farm BS to fill feeds. The second one moves how big money thinks. This week really felt like the latter.

A new Delaware entity popped up with a very promising name: iShares Staked Ethereum Trust. It sits under BlackRock’s umbrella and it’s the kind of registration you make right before you file a 1933 Act product 💵 

According to reports, the world’s largest asset manager is lining up a way for traditional investors to hold ETH with staking built in, inside a regulated wrapper.

BlackRock doesn’t spin up trusts for fun. This is them pointing at where the puck is going 🏒 

Why staked ETH is the point

Plain ETH exposure is one thing.

Staked ETH packages the network’s native yield. If BlackRock can thread the needles on custody, slashing risk, reward treatment, and disclosure, they’ve turned Ethereum’s security budget into a Wall Street income product.

That’s a completely different conversation in boardrooms than “number go up” 🧠 

It also formalizes something onchain folks already know - staking rewards are not a meme, they’re the cash flow of a live network.

While that filing hint landed, one thing got more discussed: the Ethereum supercycle thesis. Something of a BTC 2017 arc but for ETH in the back half of this decade. The supporting facts aren’t mysterious:

• Long term wallets keep accumulating. The base is thickening, not thinning.

• Price has hovered around areas that onchain analysts call “cost basis” for patient holders.

• Corporate behavior is changing. Take as example BitMine repositioning itself as an ETH treasury company with millions of ETH on the balance sheet and becoming its largest corporate holder. ARK added exposure. Some other big public names are geting involved too. The meta for them is pretty simple, “treat crypto assets as balance sheet strategy, not just tradeables” 🤔 

None of this proves a supercycle but it sketches the posture of capital that isn’t just here for the weekend.

ETH stops being only “tech beta” on crypto and becomes “yielding digital infrastructure” that sits next to bonds and utilities in allocation decks. Add the treasury trend and you get a feedback loop - regulated wrappers invite conservative capital, conservative capital stabilizes the base, a stabler base justifies more wrappers 🎁 

Crypto had a year of extreme noise - celeb coins, one second casinos, everyone trying to quickly cash out. This is the opposite energy. Pair it with steady accumulation, treasury experiments, and the “eth as an operating asset” story, and you get a simple picture: the longterm ETH meta is graduating from culture to capital 🫡 

Other worthy reads

Make Prediction Great Again by Ditto:

Crypto Trends Report 2025 by Alana Levin:

Takeaways from Galaxy’s Q3 crypto leverage report by OKX Ventures:

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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