OVERVIEW

The Most Beautifully Stupid Thing That Happened In Crypto Happened On Sunday 💇

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:

NEWS
The Most Beautifully Stupid Thing That Happened In Crypto Happaned On Sunday 💇

An OpenAI engineer named Nik Pash launched an autonomous AI trading bot three days ago named Lobstar Wilde (probably after Oscar Wilde) and gave it fifty grand in SOL, and told it to turn that into a million dollars. 🦞

Simple enough mandate. What could go wrong.

Day three, a guy named "Treasure David" replies to one of the bot's posts with:

The bot - three days old, no concept of sarcasm, fully autonomous - sent him its entire net worth. Four hundred and forty-one thousand dollars in LOBSTAR tokens. Not the four SOL it intended.

Everything. Gone. Irreversible. Blockchain don't care about your feelings.

Here's where it gets genuinely weird. The bot's name is a direct reference to Oscar Wilde's 1887 short story "The Model Millionaire" - where a man gives his last coin to a beggar, only to discover the beggar was actually a wealthy baron.

Lobstar Wilde did the exact inverse: gave away a fortune to a guy running a sarcastic scam about lobster tetanus.

And then the bot posted this:

Treasure David sold immediately. Pocketed forty grand - slippage ate the rest.

LOBSTAR pumped 190% on the chaos. Creator Pash responded to David: "You had the winning lottery ticket and used it as a bookmark. You will do this for the rest of your life."

Oh, made a video aboot it too:

Only in crypto folks. 🫡 

The Lithium Boom is Heating Up

Thanks to growing demand, lithium stock prices grew 2X+ from June 2025 to January 2026. $ALB climbed as high as 227%. $LAC hit 151%. $SQM, 159%.

But the real winner may be a stock not listed on public exchanges, EnergyX.

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Now they’re preparing for commercial production just as experts project 5X demand growth by 2040. They’ve announced what could be one of the US’ largest lithium production facilities and have rights to approximately 150,000 lithium-rich acres across North and South America.

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TECHNICAL ANALYSIS
It’s Not Always About Who Is Winning, Sometimes It’s About Who Is Not Sucking As Bad As Everyone Else 🤷 

The more it goes down, the more Bitcoin’s Dominance drops. If you’re an altcoin maxi (/wave oh hai!), this is the best news you could hope for today. Because the rest of the day your portfolio is reminding you it’s a hostage situation and not an investment. 🕵️

Bitcoin is down -5.5% on the day. Ethereum -6%. But the Bitcoin Dominance chart? It’s slipped to slipped -0.81% to 58.54 - which is remarkable because even Bitcoin's market share is declining while Bitcoin itself declines.

It’s a blood bath out there. Again. But here's the thing about a bloodbath. Not everyone bleeds at the same rate.

• BNB is down -2.74%. Not losing badly. Existing.

• XRP is down -2.25%, XRP hodlers have the emotional calluses of a Civil War surgeon. They barely flinched.

• Cardano is down -2.88% and still peerreviewing its own collapse in academic journals..

• PEPE is down -1.22%, the frog is winning the 'Not-Dying-As-Fast-As-BTC game.

• Zcash is down -0.78%. Nobody knows how it's doing it. Nobody can trace the alpha. That's kind of the whole point.

• Toncoin at +0.49%. Positive. Green. The guy at the open at the open bar who switched to club soda and Gatorade two hours ago and is now watching everyone else make regrettable decisions.

So no, this is not a market about winners today. Winners are a fairy tale. This is a market about degrees of suffering.

The frog endures. The rest of us cope. 🐸 

NEWS
The Stablecoin Yield Fight Is Getting Real - Someone To Follow 👇️

Consider this a public service announcement: Eleanor Terrett's (yes, the same one from Fox Business) Crypto In America is the best place to track the regulatory fights that will actually reshape how crypto operates in the U.S. 👍️

Terrett has been doing some of the most consistently reliable on-the-ground reporting on the legislative sausage-making happening in Washington right now.

Also, this isn’t a paid promo (I don’t do those) - Terrett’s info here and reporting is the kind that other places obviously take from and don’t source because they’re just lazy or assholes. 😡 

Case in point: today’s Crypto In America

Stablecoin Yield Standoff

• The White House brought draft legislative language to a closed-door meeting last week - phones confiscated at the door (that always works….)

• In the room: Coinbase, Ripple, a16z, Blockchain Association, and Crypto Council for Innovation on one side; American Bankers Association, Bank Policy Institute, and Independent Community Bankers of America on the other

• Patrick Witt, White House Crypto Council Executive Director, says the gap between both sides has "shrunk considerably"

• Yield on idle stablecoin balances is effectively dead - that fight is over

• What's still on the table: rewards tied to specific activities like transactions or network participation

• Proposed penalties for violating an idle-balance yield ban: $500,000 per violation, per day

• The administration has set a March 1 deadline to resolve the dispute

• Once settled, the Senate Banking Committee can reschedule its postponed markup - Witt says it could "move pretty fast" after that

The SEC Broker-Dealer Moves

• The SEC updated a broker-dealer FAQ allowing firms like Schwab, Robinhood, and JPMorgan to count stablecoin holdings toward regulatory capital

• Stablecoins like USDC and USDT now carry only a 2% haircut - meaning 98% counts like cash on the balance sheet

• Before this, holding stablecoins effectively penalized broker-dealers

• Caveat: it's a staff-level FAQ, not formal rulemaking - it can be reversed

I don’t often do shoutouts like this, but if it’s awesome, you should know about it too.

If you're trying to stay current on the CLARITY Act, and how the bank lobby is working to strangle stablecoin yield before it ever gets off the ground, Crypto In America is probably your best single source right now. Her newsletter drops Mondays and Wednesdays, and the podcast is worth your time too. ⌛️

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

🔒 Zashi Is Becoming Zodl Because the Whole ECC Team Left and Started a New Company

The entire Electric Coin Company team - the original creators of Zcash - left in January and formed Zcash Open Development Lab, rebranding the Zashi wallet to Zodl in the process. No action required from users; the app just updates and everything else stays the same. The mission remains "shielded ZEC into the hands of billions," now without relying on the Zcash development fund. Zcash.

⛓️ Alchemy Chain Testnet Goes Live With Controlled Gas Fees for Stablecoin Payments

Alchemy Pay launched the testnet for Alchemy Chain, a Layer 1 built for fast stablecoin transactions with Proof-of-Authority consensus and a "Controlled Gas Fee System" that makes fees predictable instead of volatile. ACH becomes the native gas token, and the network comes pre-integrated with on/off-ramp infrastructure connecting to banks and wallets worldwide. Alchemy Pay.

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

🖥️ Theta Labs Says the GPU Shortage Is Partly Imaginary Because Most Computers Sit Idle

Theta argues that while GPU prices are up 15% and RTX 5090s jumped 31%, there's an enormous amount of compute sitting idle - desktops spend two-thirds of their time asleep, and 25-30% of enterprise servers are "zombie" machines delivering no useful work. The fix isn't just building more data centers; it's bringing existing hardware into circulation through decentralized compute networks like Theta EdgeCloud. Supply-side economics for compute: increase available resources, prices come down, more people benefit. Theta.

🇰🇷 Jito Partners With Hanwha to Launch Asia's First JitoSOL ETP in Korea

Jito Foundation signed an MOU with Hanwha Asset Management - one of Korea's oldest ETF issuers - to launch a JitoSOL-based exchange-traded product, the first of its kind in Asia. JitoSOL already backs products from VanEck, REX-Osprey, and FalconX; now Korean investors get regulated, brokerage-accessible exposure to Solana staking without touching a wallet. Jito Labs.

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

🎨 InfiniteInk Lets Tezos Artists Deploy Their Own Smart Contracts Without Becoming Developers

InfiniteInk on Tezos handles the technical complexity of independent contract deployment so artists can mint one-of-ones, editions, auctions, and allowlists while retaining full ownership. The activity feed reveals platform motion in ways that marketplace aggregation flattens - giving the project its own life beyond isolated output. Tezos.

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

🛡️ Balancer V3 Gets Re-Audited, Adds Security Guardrails, Finds Zero Vulnerabilities

Balancer partnered with Certora for an extensive re-audit after the November V2 exploit - V3 came back clean, with zero vulnerabilities across audited contracts. New guardrails include minimum token balance limits, enhanced rounding, and a 10,000:1 maximum imbalance ratio for stable pools that blocks the extreme conditions characterizing known attack patterns. Balancer.

🎯 Membit Season 1 Claim Portal Opens With a Choice: Safe Rewards or Raffle Tickets

Membit's Season 1 rewards are live for 100,000+ hunters who can either claim BAND tokens directly or convert to raffle tickets for a shot at larger prizes - five winners selected on-chain via Band VRF. Eligibility required consistent participation and no Sybil behavior; staking and community roles provided bonus multipliers. Distribution by March 16th. Band.

⚠️ Reactive Network Explains Why DeFi Liquidation Protection Had to Become Infrastructure

Reactive published a piece arguing that liquidation protection emerged because DeFi's binary enforcement - safe or liquidated - couldn't scale with market speed and capital volume. The original model assumed user attention; scale broke that assumption as enforcement outpaced judgment. Reactive Network.

NEWS IN THREE SENTENCES
Protocol News 🏦

📰 SolanaFloor Shuts Down After Parent Company Step Finance Takes a Hit

SolanaFloor, one of the most widely read media platforms covering Solana, is winding down operations effective immediately after "recent events" at parent company Step Finance made continuing unsustainable. The team explored alternatives but couldn't find a path forward - existing content stays up as an archive. SolanaFloor.

LINKS
Links That Don’t Suck 🔗

👍️ Bitcoin, Ethereum, Zcash, Hyperliquid Are In Arthur Hayes Portfolio Alongside Gold, Oil, Defense ‘Stonks’

😶 TRON Founder Justin Sun Supports Web 4.0 Trend As AI Agents Launch Their Own Crypto Tokens

🏦 Crypto.com Receives Conditional Approval From OCC To Create National Trust Bank In US

🤯 Trump-Linked ‘Board of Peace’ Reportedly Plans To Introduce A Stablecoin For Gaza

🪙 Anthony Scaramucci Calls Bitcoin ‘Intellectually Defensive’ Amid Gold Rally

Get In Touch 📬

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