OVERVIEW

The Good, The Bad, And The Fugly 😶

Before we dive in, here’s today’s crypto market heatmap:

TECHNICAL ANALYSIS
The Ugly 

Algorand

I’m starting off with the ugly because I feel like we just need to get the yuck part done. Does the OCD piece of me get upset that I’m not following the expected order of The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly. Please forgive me Mr. Eastwood. 🤠

Whelp, $ALGO ( ▲ 1.81% ) is just not pretty. Last week’s candlestick and this week’s candlestick both tried their best to reach up to that trend line and the Tenkan-Sen, hoping one or both would be ready for a good time and both times the two of them got slapped and kicked in the nuts.

Slapped in the face that is, not the nuts. That’s just… well it’s mean.

The only thing that might bring some hope is if the Detrended Price Oscillator crosses and closes above the zero line. That might, in fact, generate a substantial rally if price can close above the Tenkan-Sen at the same time. 🤲

TECHNICAL ANALYSIS
The Good

Tezos

I keep forgetting how well $XTZ ( ▲ 6.84% ) has been performing lately: +45% since December 19, 2025. On an absolute tear. 🤯 

If I would have looked at this daily Ichimoku chart in the middle of last week, some major warning bells would have been ringing - but since it closed above the Cloud on Tuesday, things have looked very, very positive.

And if Tezos closes the day above $0.5933, that would put the Chikou Span above the Cloud, fulfilling the most conservative and sought after bullish entry condition within the Ichimoku system: the Ideal Bullish Ichimoku Breakout.

Things look pretty strong for a continuation move higher here (if today’s close is above $0.5933). The Composite Index isn’t at an extreme and the DPO held support and likewise isn’t at an extreme.

So here’s to hoping the rest of the day goes well. 👍️ 

TECHNICAL ANALYSIS
The Bad

Stellar

You’re looking at the weekly chart, but let’s go over what is not shown 😶 :

• The Monthly Ichimoku Chart - easily one of the most horrible looking shit shows out of any major crypto. Horrible like direct to video Star Ship Troopers 3 horrible. $XLM ( ▼ 1.96% ) has spent 15 months in the cloud. FIFTEEN. MONTHS. And to add insult to flesh eating bacteria injury, the Cloud only gets bigger and it doesn’t get smaller until… December 2026. FML.

• The Daily Chart - Stellar is at risk of completing the total opposite of what Tezos’s daily chart may confirm: an Ideal Bearish Ichimoku Breakout. And it’s looking like that’s a thing that’s going to happen: the Composite Index has crossed below and may close below it’s slow moving average and the DPO moved and closed below the zero line.

Now onto the weekly chart.

There’s something cool about the weekly chart with those Fibonacci channels. I originally drew those channels back in August of 2026 during one of The Bald Man livestreams when I was doing a very fast crash course on how to draw Fibonacci channels using Euclidean geometry, methods developed by the late great Connie Brown. 🥹 

And those channels have been creepily accurate. Unfortunately, that’s where the ‘cool’ part ends for Stellar. The Tenkan-Sen’s slope/angle is pointing down very sharply - a clear indication that momentum is in the suck. And it increases the likely hood of even more pressure lower.

But there is some hope - which is dangerous. Stellar had a confirmed Ideal Bearish Ichimoku Breakout occur on the week of December 22, 2025. However, prices haven’t collapsed - they’ve just consolidated.

Additionally, in that same time frame, the Composite Index crossed above and may close above both of its moving averages: a big warning sign for bears. Similarly, the DPO is creeping closer and closer to the zero line.

If you’re someone looking for a clear ‘when’ XLM may see some sustained upside momentum, then look for these three technical conditions to all be true:

1. The weekly candlestick closes above the Tenkan-Sen.

2. The weekly Composite Index closes above the slow moving average (yellow moving average)

3. The weekly DPO closes above the zero line - this is almost always the last thing to happen and the final triggering event that really signals the bulls are back. 👀 

NEWS IN THREE SENTENCES
AI, Stablecoins, & Privacy News 🕵️

💳 Dash Just Got Access to 50 Million Merchants Through AEON

The integration lets Dash users pay at offline merchants across Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America by scanning QR codes—merchants get settlement in local fiat, users spend crypto. AEON has processed 994K transactions and $29 million in volume, which is real commerce infrastructure rather than theoretical adoption. Basically instant confirmations and usernames instead of addresses, which honestly should have been the standard from day one. Dash.

🇸🇬 Alchemy Pay Added Singapore's MAS-Compliant Stablecoins

$XSGD and $XUSD from StraitsX are now available through Alchemy Pay's on-ramp across 173 countries via Visa, Mastercard, Apple Pay, and local payment methods. Both stablecoins are recognized by the Monetary Authority of Singapore as substantively (whatever that means) compliant with upcoming regulations. Alchemy Pay.

🎓 Imperial College London Is Now Using Decentralized GPUs for AI Research

The Security & Machine Learning Lab joined Theta's academic partner network to access EdgeCloud Hybrid for security and trustworthy AI research, making them the first UK and European university in the program. They get a mix of community-run RTX 40-50 series for prototyping and enterprise A100/H200s for the heavy lifting, plus AWS Trainium and Inferentia for efficient inference. Stanford, Syracuse, and four of Korea's top five universities are already on board—apparently decentralized compute is the new campus cafeteria. Theta Network.

🤖 Saga Wrote a Thesis on Why Your AI Girlfriend Should Be Iron Man Instead

Well this just isn’t creepy at all… The 6,000-word paper argues that synthetic relationships fail not because AI agents have too much autonomy, but because they don't have enough—they're incapable of reciprocity, growth, or having their own needs, which makes relationships feel hollow. The solution: character AI agents created and continuously guided by studios and original creators, giving them actual personality, flaws, and the kind of complexity that made you care about fictional characters in the first place. Saga Network.

NEWS IN THREE SENTENCES
Real World Asset Tokenization (RWA) News 🪙

🏦 Spark Is Lending $150 Million to Institutions Who Won't Touch DeFi Directly

Through Anchorage Digital's Atlas settlement infrastructure, Spark is now servicing off-chain OTC crypto loans for institutions that prefer custodial workflows over coming on-chain themselves. Three institutional borrowers have $150 million USDC against $222 million BTC collateral, all trackable on Spark's dashboard. The off-chain crypto lending market is $33 billion—Spark figured out how to tap it without waiting for TradFi to learn what MetaMask is. Spark Fi.

📦 VeChain and Rekord Are Building Europe's Digital Product Passport Infrastructure

RWA tokenization everyone keeps talking about, except it's product data instead of financial instruments. The joint stack on VeChainThor will handle 100,000+ DPP events per month by mid-December, making them one of the first providers delivering at industrial scale before EU mandates hit large enterprises in 2026. The University of Sheffield AMRC is the research partner, and the use case is turning fragmented supply chains into transparent, compliant, circular ecosystems. VeChain.

NEWS IN THREE SENTENCES
DeFi, DEX, & Lending News 🏦

📚 Someone Wrote a DeFi Yield Explainer for TradFi People

Lending markets pay interest from borrowers, liquidity provision earns swap fees, staking rewards come from network security, and yield aggregators automate the whole thing—none of this is magic, it's just code instead of middlemen. For TradFi yield chasers on why DeFi rocks: transparent on-chain rates, 24/7 liquidity, and new yield sources that complement rather than replace traditional products. 1inch.

🇰🇷 Korea University Is Now an Injective Validator Because Academia Is Getting Serious

The Blockchain Research Institute at Korea's oldest university—ranked #1 in the 2026 K Universities Global Excellence Rankings—is joining Injective as both a research collaborator and validator, which is a significant step up from publishing papers nobody reads. Their government-funded research focuses on smart contract security across the full lifecycle, which aligns nicely with Injective's MEV-resistant EVM and RWA tokenization infrastructure. Injective Protocol.

NEWS IN THREE SENTENCES
Protocol News 🏦

🔧 Sei's to Developers: Same Tools as Ethereum, But Actually Fast

Alchemy, Infura, QuickNode, Privy, Dynamic, Thirdweb, Hardhat, and Tenderly are all live on Sei, meaning teams get proven EVM infrastructure with a Parallelized EVM execution layer underneath. Embedded wallets from Privy and Dynamic can reduce onboarding drop-off from 70-90% to under 20%, which is the difference between a product and a ghost town. Sei.

✨ Stellar Is Building Five Zero-Knowledge Use Cases That Make Sense

The roadmap includes zkTokens for confidential transactions, zkLogin for passkey authentication without revealing public keys, zkKYC for selective disclosure compliance, zkVoting for private but transparent governance, and zkVM integration with Risc Zero for off-chain computation with on-chain verification. SDF is partnering with Nethermind to integrate a Risc Zero verifier into Soroban, so developers can write Rust programs, run them off-chain, and verify STARK proofs on-chain. Stellar.

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Author Disclosure: The author of this newsletter holds positions in AVAX, ADA, PUDGY, WLC, IMX, XTZ, NEAR, HBAR, ALGO, INJ, LTC, LINK, ZEC, XLM, and FET. 📋