OVERVIEW

The Safe Word Is: Fifty-Two 🙂

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:

TECHNICAL ANALYSIS
The Safe Word Is: Fifty Two 🙂

While this analysis focuses on $ADA ( ▼ 1.83% ), it might as well be a template for any major altcoin right now. They all look similar, or worse, or just slightly less beaten up. 🤕

ADA just happens to be the one I'm dissecting today, but if you're holding $ETH ( ▼ 2.37% ), $LINK ( ▼ 2.66% ), $AVAX ( ▼ 3.0% ), or any other equally sad ticker, this chart probably feels and looks painfully familiar.

Is The Bottom In?

Hell if I know whether the bottom is in. But if it isn't, I genuinely don't know how much more exhausted and black-and-blue one of life's truly great disappointments can get.

So let's get our daily/weekly/monthly dose of hopium in before we remind ourselves that a frog meme is outperforming Cardano - again - for the 1,000th time. 😶

How Long Have We Been Doing This?

That 44-bar and 52-bar measures are shown for two reasons:

• The pain is quantifiable. From the December 2017 peak to the September 2021 ATH, it took ADA 44 months. We're now at 52 months or1,583 days since that high. That’s a kick in the nuts.

• 52 is Gann's master number. And there is something positive-ish about 52. W.D. Gann emphasized 52 as a major cycle pivot - the annual rhythm (52 weeks) - where exhausted patterns either release or intensify. If the market ever taps out on our behalf, this is structurally where it happens. 🤷 

The Good & Not So Good

• Dat gap. There’s a big gap between the candlestick body and the Tenkan-Sen ($0.6735). It’s out of equilibrium, meaning it is increasingly likely to see price bounce up - but not necessarily right away. #sadface

• That $0.47 trendline (orange trendline) looks decorative, but it’s most definitely going to be a biatch when and if Cardano gets back up to it.

• Composite Index and Detrended Price Oscillator hit December 2022 levels. That was the cycle low before ADA's relief rallies, also known as lies that it would never hurt us like that again but it did.

No guarantees. But from a momentum exhaustion standpoint, we're in territory that has historically preceded something different happening. 🙏 

And if you want to see how Stocktwits users are currently feeling, well, they’re quickly turning bullish AF:

Let's see how January treats us. 🧊 

NEWS
Stellar Is The Cameron Diaz Of Crypto 👱‍♀️

Hold up, just stay with me here. This will all make sense. Stellar was trending pretty hard on Stocktwits this weekend, so I got a few requests for some reasons why. And Cameron Diaz helps. ✋ 

Cameron Diaz was everywhere in the early 2000s. The Mask. Charlie's Angels. A-list royalty. Then she got married. Went home. Had a family. Made wine or something. Stopped doing the desperate fame maintenance dance.

Then 2024 hits and she's got a Netflix deal and everyone remembers oh right, she's actually really, really good a this.

That's $XLM ( ▼ 1.86% ).

What Happened While You Weren't Watching

XLM spent years being boring and useful while crypto social PvP armies argued about L2s and monkey JPEGs. Meanwhile:

• Franklin Templeton parked $580M in tokenized Treasuries on Stellar

• $PYPL ( ▼ 1.91% ) added PYUSD (only the fourth chain to get that nod)

• $USB ( ▼ 2.34% ) started testing custom stablecoin issuance

• The Marshall Islands completed the world's first on-chain UBI disbursement

Stellar also built the compliance stuff banks care about (asset freezing, transaction clawbacks, KYC compatibility) baked into the base layer. That's not sexy. But it's why US Bank is piloting there instead of on whatever chain has the hottest airdrop this week.

She stepped away. Did her own thing. Came back when she was ready. And so did Stellar. 👍️

Oh, and here’s a video version:

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

🚀 Akash Turned a Market Crash Into a Product Launch Spree

While October 10th wiped $19 billion in liquidations across crypto, Akash shipped Mainnet 14, AkashML managed inference, and WASM smart contracts - all in Q4. AkashML now offers 70-85% cost savings on models like DeepSeek V3 and Llama 3.3-70B compared to hyperscalers. Akash Network.

🔐 COTI Says DeFi's Transparency Problem Is Actually a Privacy Problem

The argument: public order books and lending positions invite front-running and scare off institutions, so the next generation of DeFi needs confidential computation. COTI's Garbled Circuits run 3000x faster than FHE and enable sealed bid auctions, on-chain dark pools, and private lending agreements on Ethereum. Basically, the finance stuff that requires secrecy can finally happen without centralized intermediaries. COTI Network.

🧩 Civic Says Your Business Is Held Together by One Exhausted Person

As work accelerates, someone ends up manually copying numbers, reconciling invoices, and updating price books because systems don't talk to each other. That person becomes the "glue" holding everything together, and when glue stretches too thin, it fails. Civic Nexus is their pitch for connecting existing tools so infrastructure handles the busywork instead of humans. Civic.

🌐 NEAR's 2025 Was Sharded Scaling, Cross-Chain Intents, and Private AI

The protocol hit 1 million TPS in benchmarks, expanded to 9 shards, and dropped block time to 600 milliseconds with 1.2-second finality. NEAR Intents crossed $7B in all-time cross-chain volume with 13M+ swaps across 25+ blockchains. The AI stack went live with deployments serving 100M+ users through Brave Nightly and TravAI. NEAR Protocol.

STOCKTWITS
Stonkmarket News 📰

Also, we’ve got more video content for you to checkout or listen to:

📆 The Weekend RIP - Silver Bugs Win, Nvidia Buys GRQQ, and Ben’s 2026 Conviction Bets

🏪 Retail Edge - Why China’s Export Controls Are Sending Silver Into Frenzy Mode

📺️ The Howard Lindzon Show - Long Degeneracy: Why Robinhood, Coinbase, and Platforms Will Keep Winning

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

💳 Alchemy Pay Launches the First Fiat-to-Tokenized-Stocks Platform

While Robinhood, Kraken, and Bybit announced tokenized stock plans, Alchemy Pay already built a platform where you can buy Apple, Tesla, and SPY directly with fiat - no crypto conversion required. They're using Backed's xStocks infrastructure with 1:1 backing and support 173 countries through existing payment rails like Visa, Apple Pay, and PIX. Alchemy Pay.

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

🦁 Brave's Leo AI Now Has Keyboard Shortcuts for Your Favorite Prompts

Hooray for prompt engineering for people who hate typing. Skills lets you save commonly used prompts as slash commands - type "/summarize" or "/improve" instead of rewriting the same instruction every time. You can create custom skills for anything from competitor analysis to lunch recommendations, and they work on desktop and Android. Basic Attention Token.

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

⚡ Radix Hit 381,000 TPS With Swaps Running on a MacBook Air

Wut? The latest Hyperscale test ran across 60+ nodes - data centers, home servers, desktops, and yes, a WiFi-connected MacBook that predictably ran out of disk space. The breakthrough came from rewriting the spam script to use all cores instead of bottlenecking on one, which is the kind of obvious fix that only becomes obvious after weeks of frustration and is really only obvious for people who know what the hell this all means. Radix.

NEWS IN THREE SENTENCES
Protocol News 🏦

🪙 Litecoin Got an ETF, Doubled Its Hashrate, and Hit 3 Million Blocks

Fourteen years of 100% uptime, honestly kind of boring at this point. 2025 was the year Litecoin finally got its institutional moment - Canary Capital's spot ETF launched on NASDAQ, and Lite Strategy became the world's largest LTC treasury with 929,000 coins. MWEB privacy balance hit an all-time high of 402,000 LTC, and hashrate nearly doubled year-over-year to 3.8 PH/s. Litecoin.

🌉 LayerZero Published 25 Stats That Explain Why Interoperability Won

The year-end report shows OFT adoption grew 173%, stablecoin transfers exploded, and the protocol now connects 25+ blockchains with 125+ assets. FAFO hit 1 million TPS at 91% lower cost than sharding alternatives, and tokenized stocks started flowing cross-chain through Ondo and Dinari. LayerZero.

👁️ World Network Hit 38 Million Users and Open-Sourced the Orb

Someone signed up for World App every 1.7 seconds in 2025, and someone verified at an Orb every 3.6 seconds - making it the most-used self-custody wallet by monthly active users. Match Group and Razer are now using proof-of-human verification, which says a lot about how bad the bot problem has gotten. Worldcoin.

LINKS
Links That Don’t Suck 🔗

🐖 A $7 Million Crypto Transfer From Tron To Ethereum Shows Signs Of Pig-Butchering Scam

🦜 Gold Moved First — Bitcoin May Be Next, Says Michael Van Poppe

👛 A New Crypto Wallet Is Wagering Big On A China–Taiwan Conflict

👍️ Coinbase Rallies After Goldman Calls COIN Stock A ‘Best-In-Class’ Crypto Play

Get In Touch 📬

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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. 📋