Publication Date: December 17, 2025
Author: BlockBeats Editorial Team

Over the past 24 hours, the crypto market has seen simultaneous advancements on multiple fronts. The mainstream discussion has focused on the renegotiation of DeFi core protocols at the regulatory, governance, and token equity levels, as well as the intense debate between founders and communities regarding control and incentive alignment. In terms of ecosystem development, Solana has been exploring issuance mechanisms and fairness mechanisms, Ethereum and Base continue to advance payment infrastructure iterations, and PerpDEX has accelerated its move towards institutional finance and commodification.

1. Mainstream Discussion

1. Aave Founder's Outlook on the Future of the Protocol

Aave founder Stani Kulechov has stated that after four years of communication and response, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has formally concluded its investigation into the Aave protocol. Stani, in a public statement, mentioned that this process consumed a significant amount of the team's resources, with his deep involvement aimed at protecting the Aave ecosystem and the broader DeFi industry from being misclassified under regulatory uncertainty.

With the investigation coming to a close, Stani described this milestone as a phase where "developers can refocus on building the financial future" and summarized it with "DeFi will win." This news has received highly positive feedback within the community, with industry figures such as Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, crypto lawyer Gabriel Shapiro, and others congratulating the move, seeing it as a significant milestone for DeFi's move towards mainstream compliance.

There have also been discussions linking this progress to Stani's recent increase in AAVE token holdings, suggesting that the relief of regulatory pressure combined with a shift in the founder's attitude has provided a short-term boost to the $AAVE price. At the same time, there are cautious voices questioning whether the "governance narrative has been overly dramatized." Overall, the conclusion of the SEC investigation is expected to enhance Aave's credibility in terms of institutions and compliance. However, the market remains vigilant about whether new variables will emerge in the subsequent regulatory environment.

2. Aave V4 Roadmap Sparks New Round of Technical and Governance Discussions

Against the backdrop of temporarily lifted regulatory clouds, the Aave community's discussions on the V4 roadmap have notably intensified. The focus of the discussions centers around the proposed design of the Unified Liquidity Layer in V4 and its potential for expansion in terms of cross-chain functionality and risk isolation.

In a related discussion, Stani emphasized that the goal of V4 is to further enhance capital efficiency and strengthen risk isolation at the architectural level. Some developers and analysts believe that this design could reshape the operational paradigm of DeFi lending protocols and create a synergistic effect with existing L2 solutions.

Community feedback has shown a divergence: supporters see V4 as a key milestone for Aave to regain its technical leadership, emphasizing its culture centered around engineering-driven efforts over the long term; critics, however, are concerned about the longer development cycle of V4, coupled with team bandwidth and incentive dispersion, which may impact short-term execution efficiency. The conclusion of the SEC investigation overlapping with V4 discussions has further heightened community sentiment, potentially accelerating the related proposals into a more substantive governance process. However, this needs to balance innovation progress with the potential risks brought by V3 user migration.

3. "AAVE Token Alignment" Proposal Sparks Intense Governance Debate

Aave contributor Ernesto proposed a governance proposal titled "AAVE Alignment Phase 1: Ownership," advocating for the DAO to explicitly hold core rights such as protocol IP, brand, equity, and revenue. Aave service provider representatives, including Marc Zeller, publicly endorsed the proposal, calling it "one of the most impactful proposals in Aave's governance history."

The proposal directly addresses the incentive misalignment between Aave Labs and the DAO, calling for token holders to engage more actively in governance to prevent the protocol's value from being "captured" by the core team. Community discussions quickly intensified, with supporters believing that the DAO must "stand up" at key junctures; there were also suggestions to introduce legal and governance structures like BORG to strengthen the real-world enforceability of on-chain governance.

Opposing views are also present. Some participants are concerned that an overly aggressive governance stance could lead to the loss of core contributors, citing historical examples from projects like Compound. Investors like Haseeb pointed out from a market perspective that AAVE's price-to-sales ratio has risen to around 25x, reflecting the market's pricing in of expectations around "governance alignment."

This proposal once again highlights the longstanding token-equity dichotomy in DeFi projects, seen by some community members as a key case that could influence the entire DeFi governance paradigm, although its advancement path needs to be carefully navigated to mitigate division risks.

4. $KLED Project Founding Team Discord Exposed, Labeled a Typical "Rug Case"

Recently, the project $KLED issued on the Solana ecosystem's "ICM" concept platform Believe has become the center of public attention due to a public dispute within the founding team.

The project's founder, Avi Patel, accused former partner Ben Pasternak of violating established commitments by continuously selling millions of $KLED tokens during a critical project update before and after, in a time window of low liquidity, reducing his holdings from about 6% to close to 2%.

In a public statement, Avi detailed multiple attempts to coordinate the sell-off through OTC without success and accused the other party of long-term lack of communication, labeling the behavior as "unacceptable," even calling on other industry projects to avoid cooperation. Community feedback has been overwhelmingly negative, with several opinion leaders bluntly stating that $KLED embodies "almost all typical characteristics of a grift in this cycle," describing it as the "simplest IQ test" and advising holders to exit as soon as possible.

Some comments were ironic, noting that the project's price history has survived several FUD events, but the incident itself further amplified the trust crisis in meme-type and small projects regarding team transparency, lock-up commitments, and governance structure. This turmoil may drive the community to raise higher demands on team behavior and disclosure while also exposing the structural vulnerability of small projects in a weak market cycle.

II. Mainstream Ecosystem Updates

1. Solana Ecosystem: Institutional Exploration and Fairness Controversy in Parallel

①Colosseum Introduces STAMP Investment Contract, Exploring a New Path for Tokenized Ownership

The Solana ecosystem is accelerating towards a more institutionalized financing and issuance framework. The accelerator Colosseum has introduced the new investment contract STAMP (Solana Tokenized Asset Management Protocol), aiming to provide crypto founders a clear path from private fundraising to publicly issuing tokens through MetaDAO, while offering investors and token holders more binding ownership and market protection.

STAMP seeks to streamline the legal and operational processes between private and public issuance, enabling public investors to participate in projects at a more mature stage with fuller information. The overall community feedback has been highly positive, with many developers and investors calling it a "future-oriented infrastructure innovation," believing it will strengthen Solana's leading position in tokenized equity and fair distribution mechanisms. However, there are discussions pointing out that its actual impact still depends on MetaDAO's governance and execution performance.

②pump.fun Lawsuit Against Solana Foundation Sees New Development

On the other hand, the legal dispute surrounding the meme coin launch platform pump.fun continues to escalate. In a recent development, the plaintiff has been granted permission to amend the complaint, alleging that pump.fun, under the guise of seemingly automated processes, systematically favored privileged users holding Solana infrastructure and Jito transaction sequencing tool, thereby extracting value from ordinary users systematically.

The updated complaint underscores that the platform, under the facade of "permissionless" and "fair launch," harbors hidden mechanisms disadvantageous to regular participants. Community discussions quickly heated up: some view it as a signal of unveiling systemic risks in meme launch platforms that could drive stricter transparency and disclosure requirements, while others believe that this case will directly test Solana's decentralization narrative and ecosystem governance.

In the short term, the lawsuit may introduce legal uncertainties and impact retail user confidence; however, it could also pressure the ecosystem to introduce more fair and verifiable launch and transaction tools.

2. Base Ecosystem: Payment Standards Under Continuous Iteration

The Base ecosystem has seen updates at the payment infrastructure level. The Base on-chain Internet-native payment standard x402 has released the V2 version, incorporating extensive community feedback to add support for multi-chain and fiat payments, extension mechanisms, automatic API discovery, dynamic routing, a more modern HTTP header design, and modular SDK.

While maintaining backward compatibility with V1, the V2 version decouples the specification, SDK, and facilitators to adapt to more networks and transport scenarios. The overall community response has been positive, with many developers believing that this upgrade significantly simplifies use cases such as delegated payments, multi-tenant APIs, and will help drive mainstream adoption of Base in the payment realm.

Structurally, the continuous iteration of x402 is reinforcing Base's positioning as an Ethereum L2 payment hub, but its long-term impact will depend on the actual deployment progress of facilitators and ecosystem adoption.

3. Prediction Markets: Tooling Trend Acceleration

Users of the prediction market platform Polymarket have introduced the auxiliary tool PolymarketScan, providing traders with more intuitive market analysis and monitoring capabilities to help users quickly filter and track event contracts.

The overall community feedback has been positive, with many traders believing that this tool has significantly reduced information gathering costs and improved "market surfing" efficiency during hot events. At the same time, there have been discussions pointing out that the popularity of this tool indirectly reflects the insufficient native search and analysis capabilities of Polymarket, which may prompt the platform to expedite the development of similar features.

4. Perp DEX Track: From Exchange to Infrastructure

① Lighter: Balancing Product Advancement and Execution Pressure

In the perpetual contract track, Lighter revealed during a Japan AMA that its TGE timeline may be delayed until 2026 ("Christmas" referring to the general holiday season), and the tokenomics are expected to be announced within weeks. The platform is advancing a universal cross-margin mechanism and a new spot market, and whether meme coin issuance will go live will depend on community sentiment. Founder Vlad did not provide a clear timetable but hinted at lingering M&A logic.

The community's response is mixed: some users expressed disappointment over the token launch delay but also acknowledged the "product-first" strategy; the market is looking forward to the upcoming public conversation with a Dragonfly partner, hoping to receive a clearer roadmap.

Meanwhile, some Lighter whales provided feedback on execution delays during high volatility periods: although the median delay is around 325ms, tail delays can reach several seconds or even 10 seconds, and there is also latency in WebSocket. The team responded that they have made multiple optimizations but there is still room for improvement. The community overall sees this as a constructive discussion and believes that if addressed promptly, it will help enhance attractiveness to high-frequency and professional traders.

② Hyperliquid Ecosystem: Intensive Product Advancement

The Hyperliquid ecosystem has been active recently. The Felix protocol launched silver and natural gas perpetual contracts on HIP-3 (previously gold had been launched), further expanding the commodity trading category, and the community has begun discussing whether to introduce uranium and other underlyings next.

Simultaneously, renowned HYPE holder NMTD publicly criticized Binance for its ongoing sell pressure behavior, calling it an "industry parasite." Such remarks resonated widely within the community, further reinforcing the discussion on the transparency advantage of decentralized trading venues but also exposing the real-world influence of CEX on price discovery.

On the governance front, the Hyper Foundation proposed, to be confirmed by validator voting, a permanent burn of HYPE from the aid fund (this part of the tokens is irretrievable). The voting is scheduled for December 21–24, and the community generally sees this as a deflationary positive, expected to enhance the scarcity outlook for HYPE.

In addition, Trove has launched Season 1 Loyalty Points Program, based on the December 5 snapshot, open for claiming by Trove, Hyperliquid, Unit, Kinetiq, Hyperlend, Felix users, and Hypurr holders. The points may be linked to $TROVE in the future, driving activity in the RWA and collectibles trading-related ecosystem.

Variational has confirmed that the points mechanism will be launched in Q4, with current participation in the competition still relatively low (Silver tier requires only $5 million monthly trading volume). The community's enthusiasm for farming is clearly rising, with some users seeing it as a potential new opportunity post-Lighter.

Meanwhile, HypurrFi has announced a partnership with Euler Finance to deploy the full Euler lending stack on HyperEVM (covering Euler Lending, Swap, and Earn). The community jokingly refers to it as "Mewler," believing that this combination significantly improves capital efficiency for traders or reshapes the lending landscape of HyperEVM.

5. Others: MegaETH Ecosystem Projects

Within the MegaETH ecosystem, the project BRIX has introduced a sovereign yield product targeting emerging markets, starting with a stablecoin pegged to the Turkish lira called iTRY. It claims to achieve around 40% real yield through tokenizing a money market fund and plans to expand into the forex market in the future.

The project emphasizes its composability and global accessibility, with the community optimistic about bringing TradFi's real yield into the DeFi system, forming a potential loop of compound returns. However, this model still needs to address regulatory uncertainty and exchange rate risks. BRIX plans to open for use by eligible investors after the official launch of MegaETH.

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