OVERVIEW

The Market Has Taken Everything Except My Ability to Make Jokes About It 🫡

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

And here’s a look at crypto’s total market and altcoin market cap charts:

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ETHEREUM
Oh Great, TheDAO Is Back. Everyone Remain Calm. 🤫

If you felt a disturbance in the Force today, don't worry - it's just the ghost of crypto's most spectacular failure rising from the grave for a second act. 🎭️

TheDAO launched in April 2016 as the most ambitious experiment in blockchain governance ever attempted. A leaderless venture fund. No CEO. Just code and token holders voting on stuff.

It raised 12.7 million ETH - roughly $150 million - making it the largest crowdfund in history. The community was insufferably smug about it.

Then, three months later, a hacker drained 3.6 million ETH through a reentrancy exploit so basic it would embarrass a junior developer.

What followed was worse. Vitalik Buterin and Ethereum's core developers decided the solution to bad code was to just... rewrite history. A hard fork rolled back the hack and returned the funds.

The blockchain - that immutable, trustless, censorship-resistant technology - was edited. By a committee. To fix an embarrassing mistake.

The chain that accepted the rewrite became the Ethereum everyone trades today. The chain that refused became Ethereum Classic. So the ETH sitting in your wallet? It's the revisionist fork. The "real" Ethereum, by the original rules, is ETC. Chew on that.

Now TheDAO wants to redeploy 75,000+ ETH as a "Security Fund" to protect Ethereum's infrastructure. 🛡️

ETHEREUM
Peter Thiel Just Ghosted ETHZilla 👻 

Speaking of Ethereum, Peter Thiel is out. 👋

A Schedule 13G filed with the SEC on February 17 confirms that Thiel and all affiliated Founders Fund entities now hold exactly zero shares in $ETHZ ( ▲ 1.11% ) - down from a 7.5% stake disclosed just six months ago.

For context: ETHZilla wasn't born a crypto company. It spent its previous life as 180 Life Sciences, a failed biotech, before pulling the corporate pivot of 2025 and rebranding as an Ethereum treasury firm last summer.

The MicroStrategy-for-ETH thesis attracted serious capital fast - the company raised $565 million in August 2025 with backing from Electric Capital, Polychain, and GSR, and at its peak held over 100,000 ETH.

Thiel's Founders Fund disclosed its 7.5% stake that same month, and the market loved it. Shares surged more than 90% in a single session, briefly touching $107. That turned out to be the top.

As ETH cratered roughly 60% from its 2025 highs, ETHZilla started liquidating its treasury - $40 million in October to fund a stock buyback, another $74.5 million in December to cover convertible debt. It now holds approximately 69,800 ETH, and the stock is trading around $3.20. That's a 97% haircut from the peak.

Thiel's exit was reported as of December 31, 2025. No explanation required by the filing - and none given. ETHZilla, meanwhile, is now pivoting again, this time into tokenized jet engine leases through a new subsidiary called ETHZilla Aerospace.

One of the most crypto things ever. 🚀 

STOCKTWITS
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DEFI
Aster Has 6 Users? I checked. ✅

The other half of the crypto team here at Stonktwits (the man behind the social platforms) asked me a question about this post: ‘are these metrics real?’ 🤔

Answer: Yes. Only six.

Which is nuts. 🐿️ 

NFTS
Crypto Bro Tried To Put Pikachu On The Blockchain. The Card Sold For $16 Million Anyway 🙄

Logan Paul sells a Pikachu card for $16,492,000. Guinness World Record. Most expensive trading card ever sold. Bought it in 2021 for $5.3 million. Cleared $8 million in profit. 🤑

One of 39 Pikachu Illustrators ever made. Graded PSA-10.

But people in the NFT and crypto community are not happy - for good reasons.

• In 2022, Paul took this same card and fractionalized it on a platform called Liquid Marketplace.

• Tokenized slices. NFT-style. Raised $270,000 from investors who thought they owned a piece of history. Then the platform went offline.

• Funds locked. Canadian lawsuit filed. Delphi Labs' general counsel publicly called it "slop tokenization." Meaning the tokens gave holders zero enforceable rights to anything.

Paul bought the fractions back, killed the lawsuit, sold the card for a world record. His Azuki NFT he bought for $623,000? Worth $155 today. CryptoZoo? $2.3 million in buybacks to make that disaster go away.

Up $8 million on cardboard. Down 99.9% on the digital stuff.

Meanwhile, the Pokémon Company's official position on NFTs is a hard no - their exec said it directly in late 2025. And yet Sui blockchain pumped 62% in a week when Pokémon's privacy policy quietly added a Mysten Labs subsidiary. 

$SUI ( ▼ 1.33% ) published confirmation of a Pokémon NFT deal - then deleted it.

Third-party platforms did $124 million in tokenized Pokémon card volume in August 2025 alone. Nobody asked permission. Nobody waited.

Gotta catch 'em all, I guess. 🤷 

STOCKTWITS
Stockmarket News 📰

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

💳 Alchemy Pay Hit 4.4M Users and Launched the First Fiat-to-RWA Platform

Alchemy Pay's 2025 review: 4.4 million on-ramp users, 332% transaction volume growth, 24 regulatory licenses across four continents, and the world's first fiat-to-tokenized-stocks platform with 60+ assets. They're also building Alchemy Chain, their own stablecoin-focused L1. Testnet coming soon; own stablecoin planned; "infinite possibilities" mentioned repeatedly. Alchemy Pay.

🤖 World Explains Why "Proof of Human" Is the Missing Internet Layer

World argues that as AI scales, the ability to verify someone is a unique real person becomes economic infrastructure. Use cases: verified ad attribution, fair ticket drops, human-only governance, and ensuring AI training data actually comes from humans. 38 million people across 100+ countries have already joined and been scanned by the creepy orb thingy. Worldcoin.

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

📞 ICE Chat Now Connects to Kraken So Institutions Can Message About Crypto Professionally

Intercontinental Exchange's ICE Chat integrated with Kraken's OTC desk, letting institutional traders reach crypto liquidity without leaving their Bloomberg-adjacent messaging setup. Kraken.

🇬🇧 Chainlink Explains Why UK Tokenization Is Working

Chainlink's UK op-ed argues tokenization success depends on data infrastructure, compliance automation, and interoperability - not the tokens themselves. FTSE Russell is publishing indices on-chain via DataLink, and the CALM project is modernizing corporate actions with Schroders. The UK's regulatory approach is "deliberately sequenced," which is British for "we'll get there eventually." Chainlink.

NEWS IN THREE SENTENCES
Metaverse, NFT, & Gaming News 🎮️

👁️ Decentraland Wrote an Essay About Why Realistic Avatars Creep People Out

Decentraland published a cultural analysis of the uncanny valley, arguing that social virtual spaces fail when avatars look human but don't behave human enough. The lesson from Horizon Worlds' "dead eyes" and There.com's mask-like faces: legibility beats realism, and people stay longer when they can actually read each other. Decentraland.

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

📈 Grayscale Launches Sui Staking ETF

GSUI started trading on NYSE Arca, giving investorsSUI staking rewards through an ETF instead of actually learning what a wallet is. Grayscale calls Sui "the next-generation smart contract platform," which is what they call every chain they list - at least that’s what it feels like. Fun fact: Sui is built by the same team that built Facebook's Diem. Sui.

📊 Truflation Proves It Sees Inflation 45-75 Days Before the Government Does

Truflation published research showing it leads BLS CPI by 45 days in normal conditions and 75 days during volatile inflation shocks, with a 93-94% correlation. How it works? Millions of daily data points versus the government's monthly surveys and smoothing procedures. Truflation.

⭐ Axelar Integrates Stellar So Tokenized Assets Can Actually Move Between Chains

Axelar connected Stellar to its interoperability network, letting builders combine Stellar's payment rails with cross-chain liquidity from other ecosystems. Solv, Stronghold, and Squid are already live—bridging solvBTC, moving SHx between Stellar and Ethereum, and routing assets across chains. Stellar gets DeFi composability; Axelar gets institutional credibility; everybody gets more bridges to maintain. Axelar.

STOCKTWITS
Latest Cryptotwits & Stocktwits Podcasts 🎤

Cryptotwits

The Howard Lindzon Show - Robinhood Sentiment Whiplash: From “Vlad Should Go to Jail” to “Genius”

Talkin Tickers - PayPal Pain, Shopify Strength, SoFi Growth, DraftKings Warning + Google AI Comeback

Retail Edge - PayPal Nukes Its CEO + Stock Drops 20%: Is Venmo the Unlock?

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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. 📋