Publication Date: December 22, 2025
Author: BlockBeats Editorial Team

Over the past 24 hours, the crypto market has shown a concurrent evolution across multiple dimensions. The mainstream topics have focused on the tension between DeFi governance and privacy compliance: the dispute over Aave's yield distribution and the wallet blacklist risk triggered by Tornado Cash, with the community continuing to discuss the boundaries of power and real-world constraints. In terms of ecosystem development, Solana's annual revenue has exceeded Ethereum's for the first time, strengthening its advantage in high throughput usage and productization; in the Perp DEX race, Hyperliquid's price volatility has raised concerns about the resilience of the perpetual contract ecosystem.

I. Mainstream Topics

1. Aave Yield Distribution and Governance Boundary Dispute

The Aave community has recently engaged in intense debate around the yield distribution mechanism and brand ownership.

Stani Kulechov has made it clear that he will vote against a proposal named [ARFC] $AAVE Token Alignment, Phase 1 – Ownership Governance.

In his post, Stani emphasizes that this is not a "veto-like statement" but rather an attempt to initiate a more open discussion to realign Aave's common mission. He recalls that Aave Labs has been advancing around the original vision of ETHLend for the past eight years, aiming to make Aave a key player in the future multi-trillion-dollar global asset infrastructure. He also acknowledges that community doubts about brand ownership, protocol, and DAO relationships are not unfounded and that previous communication has been insufficient and there will be efforts to improve in the future.

However, in terms of specific positions, Stani believes that the direction of this proposal has fundamental issues: it oversimplifies complex legal, brand, and operational structures, which could slow down the progress of core products such as Aave V4, Aave App, Horizon, ultimately disadvantaging the protocol itself, the DAO, and AAVE token holders. He advocates that similar issues should be gradually addressed through multiple rounds of temperature checks and more actionable solutions, rather than through a one-time institutional adjustment.

The community's response has been visibly divided. Some members criticize Stani for having a "double standard" in governance criteria, such as not following a similar cautious process regarding CowSwap's yield distribution issue and even accusing him of "usurping protocol revenue"; while others support his deceleration of the decision-making pace, believing that multi-round discussions are conducive to long-term ecosystem health.

Overall, this controversy once again exposed a long-standing structural tension in DeFi projects: the lack of a clear consensus on the boundary between DAO governance ideals and the actual power of core developers/founders.

2. "Crypto Existentialism": A Retrospective on Empowerment Narratives

Vitalik Buterin recently made a post reexamining the "core philosophy of cryptocurrency" from a more abstract level. He quoted a user's view that "Crypto has always been constructed towards human empowerment."

Vitalik pointed out that "empowerment" is not a unique concept to cryptocurrency. Before Bitcoin and Ethereum, the German Pirate Party had already made information freedom, privacy protection, and power decentralization its core political ideology. He shared an image of the Pirate Party's "Pirate Wheel" model, where values such as "empowerment, transparency, privacy" form a mutually supportive system.

The community's responses further expanded the discussion. Some emphasized that true empowerment must be irreversible, or else it's merely a surface-level commitment. Others traced crypto back to the cypherpunk and early privacy movements, believing that the significance of blockchain lies in providing a sustainable incentive mechanism and a global execution tool for these ideas. Simultaneously, there were more technical or emotional responses, from BlockDAG, privacy tools to meme-style "Dino powerment," continuously broadening the discussion boundaries.

This topic did not reach a unified conclusion but clearly reflects a fact: in the discussions of privacy, decentralization, and individual freedom, the crypto community is still constantly questioning its "meaning of existence," and this philosophical uncertainty is continuously affecting specific technical and institutional choices.

3. Tornado Cash Blacklist Effect: The Realistic Cost of Privacy

The risk of using Tornado Cash has once again attracted attention. User milian warned that once interacting with Tornado Cash, a wallet address could be flagged by hundreds of apps and protocols, thus excluding it from the mainstream on-chain economy.

In the blacklist screenshot he shared, even popular platforms like Hyperliquid were included. This means that while Tornado Cash's anonymity holds up technically, in the real world, it can easily trigger compliance and risk control mechanisms.

The community's reactions to this were notably divided. Some criticized these "decentralized applications" for effectively taking on a regulatory role, questioning the authenticity of the decentralization narrative. Others proposed compromise solutions, such as proving funds are not related to sanctioned entities like North Korea (DPRK) through zero-knowledge proofs (e.g., on 0xbow.io) or simply switching to more thorough privacy coins like Monero.

The discussion quickly escalated to a more fundamental question: Is the blockchain's high transparency a bug or its most important feature? If dusting attacks could trigger blacklisting, do ordinary users also inadvertently bear compliance risks?

This controversy highlights the longstanding conflict between privacy and compliance, making the "blacklist mechanism" in the on-chain economy more concrete and pushing the community to call for more refined, anti-collateral damage privacy infrastructure (such as Arcium and other solutions).

4. Robinhood Accelerates Tokenization: TradFi Officially Enters L2

Robinhood has been found to have newly deployed around 500 tokenized stocks on Arbitrum, bringing its on-chain total number of stocks to 1993. This move is seen as a clear signal of the accelerated convergence of TradFi and DeFi.

According to related data from the Dune dashboard, the speed of expanding from 1000 to 2000 stocks is significantly faster than in previous stages. In community discussions, some have pointed out that the daily average trading volume of the U.S. stock market exceeds $500 billion, and once even a portion of it migrates to the chain, it will bring substantial fee income and ETH burning effects to the Ethereum ecosystem.

The overall sentiment leans towards optimism. Some see it as an early form of the "DeFi/TradFi singularity," believing that the composability and tamper-resistance of blockchain are gradually attracting traditional institutions. Others emphasize that stock tokenization and 24/7 trading mechanisms may significantly boost liquidity and inject new use cases into the Arbitrum ecosystem.

From a more macro perspective, this development is not a singular event but a continuation of the tokenization trend: traditional assets are entering the Ethereum and its L2-based financial infrastructure network at a faster pace.

II. Mainstream Ecosystem Updates

1. Solana's Annual Revenue Surpasses Ethereum for the First Time

In 2025, Solana achieved annual revenue surpassing Ethereum for the first time, seen as a significant milestone in its ecosystem's maturity.

Community-circulated data charts show that year-to-date (YTD) in 2025, Solana's protocol revenue is around $250 million, while Ethereum's is around $140 million. Looking at a longer time frame, Solana's revenue has grown from around $28 million in 2021 to $480 million in 2024; during the same period, Ethereum has dropped from around $510 million in 2021 to $142 million in 2024.

The recent discussion widely interprets this change as Solana's phased success in user adoption, on-chain activity, and DeFi usage frequency. The community sentiment is notably bullish, with many viewpoints suggesting that Solana is ready to facilitate the next round of "normie onboarding" and position itself as the preferred high-performance blockchain.

Overall, this data change strengthens Solana's competitive narrative in fee generation capability and actual network activity, potentially further attracting developers and capital to tilt towards its ecosystem.

2. "Creator ETF": A New Financial Product Imagination on Solana

The Solana community has recently engaged in discussions around "Creator ETFs." This concept refers to researchers or influential figures constructing asset baskets (such as SOL, BTC, ZEC, etc.) and making them tokenized for followers, with creators earning management fees based on AUM.

Related posts quote Akshay BD's perspective, suggesting that this may be a more sustainable evolution path for "creator coins"—no longer solely relying on narratives or sentiment but building trust through verifiable portfolio performance. For instance, the hypothetical "mert ETF" could hold assets like SOL, BTC, ZEC, HYPE, allowing users to test its asset allocation ability by purchasing shares.

On a mechanistic level, such ETFs can achieve share minting, transparent composition, and on-chain settlement through protocols (such as Symmetry.fi), seen as a new tool that combines peer-to-peer investment advice with globally verifiable funds.

The overall community feedback tends to be positive: some see it as a natural extension of the creator economy in DeFi, while others view it as a new go-to-market strategy. Despite ongoing discussions on cross-chain compatibility and asset coverage, the consensus is that Solana's low cost and high throughput provide a tangible foundation for such financial experiments.

3. Perp DEX: HYPE Breaks Below Assistance Fund Cost Base

In the perpetual contract arena, Hyperliquid's native token $HYPE has shown a crucial price signal. Its price recently dropped below the Assistance Fund's average buy-in cost (around $13.24) for the first time in eight months, briefly falling to the $20 range.

Many discussions have likened this situation to the "jelly incident" in April this year: when $HYPE briefly fell below a key cost level and swiftly rebounded, hitting new highs in the following two months. Drawing from this historical experience, the community broadly views the current range as a potential long-term accumulation window, with some users openly stating their intentions to increase positions.

Overall, this round of pullback did not significantly weaken the market's confidence in the Perp DEX track. Instead, it highlighted the psychological effect of the support fund mechanism in stabilizing expectations. Discussions suggest that with macro and liquidity conditions in sync, the perpetual contract ecosystem may still attract new capital inflows.

4. Other: Bitcoin's "Wrench Attack" Shifts from Alert to Norm

In terms of security issues, Bitcoin security researcher Jameson Lopp announced a gradual reduction in the maintenance of the "Bitcoin Wrench Attack" dossier. This dossier has long documented real-world violent incidents against Bitcoin holders (commonly known as the "$5 wrench attack").

Lopp stated that these events have evolved from early "edge cases" to "real-world issues that occur almost every few days," and maintaining them one by one is no longer newsworthy. He has transferred maintenance permissions to @beausecurity and called for community collaboration to update the information, which is still retained on GitHub.

The community's response has been generally rational. On one hand, they acknowledge the long-term educational value of this dossier, while on the other hand, they discuss the distribution differences of attacks in different countries, as well as the importance of personal protection, privacy management, and real-world security.

This change is seen as a signal that the physical security risk of Bitcoin holders is becoming normalized, and the community's focus is shifting from "alerts" to the systematic development of "response and protection tools."

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