Publication Date: December 23, 2025

Author: BlockBeats Editorial Team

Over the past 24 hours, the crypto market has shown strong growth momentum across multiple dimensions. The main topics have focused on Coinbase's official entry into the prediction market through the acquisition of The Clearing Company, as well as intense debates within the AAVE community regarding token incentives and governance rights.

In terms of ecosystem development, Solana has introduced the innovative Kora fee layer aimed at reducing user transaction costs; meanwhile, the Perp DEX race has intensified, with the showdown between Hyperliquid and Lighter sparking widespread community discussions on the future of decentralized derivatives.

I. Main Topics

1. Coinbase Acquires The Clearing Company, Officially Enters Prediction Market

This week, Coinbase announced the acquisition of The Clearing Company, marking another significant move to deepen its presence in the field after last week's announcement of launching a prediction market on its platform.

The Clearing Company's founder, Toni Gemayel, and the team will join Coinbase to collectively drive the development of the prediction market business.

Coinbase's Product Lead, Shan Aggarwal, stated that the growth of the prediction market is still in its early stages and predicted that 2026 will be the breakout year for this field.

The community has reacted positively to this, widely believing that Coinbase's entry will bring significant flow and compliance advantages to the prediction market. However, this has also sparked discussions about the industry's competitive landscape.

Jai Bhavnani, the founder of Rivalry, commented that for a startup, if its product model proves to be successful, industry giants like Coinbase have more than enough reason to replicate it.

This serves as a reminder to all entrepreneurs in the crypto space that they must build a deep enough moat to withstand competition pressure from big players.

2. Kalshi Launches Kalshi Research and Integrates BSC Network

Regulated prediction market platform Kalshi launched its research department, Kalshi Research, this week, aiming to open its internal data to the academic community and researchers to facilitate exploration of prediction market-related topics.

Their first published research report highlights Kalshi's performance in predicting inflation has surpassed Wall Street's traditional models. Kalshi co-founder Luana Lopes Lara commented that the power of prediction markets lies in the valuable data they generate, and now is the time to better leverage that data.

Meanwhile, Kalshi announced support for the BNB Chain (BSC), enabling users to deposit and withdraw BNB and USDT via the BSC network.

This move is seen as a significant step for Kalshi to open its platform to a broader crypto user base, aiming to unlock access to the world's largest prediction market. Additionally, Kalshi revealed plans to host the first Prediction Market Conference in 2026 to further drive industry exchange and development.

3. AAVE Token Incentive Controversy Continues as Founder and Whale Increase Holdings Against the Market

The AAVE community recently engaged in heated debate around an ARC proposal titled "$AAVE Token Alignment Phase One - Ownership Governance." The proposal aims to transfer ownership and control of the Aave brand from Aave Labs to Aave DAO.

Aave founder Stani Kulechov publicly stated his intention to vote against the proposal, believing it oversimplifies the complex legal and operational structure, potentially slowing down the development process for core products like Aave V4.

The community's reaction has been polarized. Some criticize Stani for adopting a "double standard" in governance and question whether his team has been appropriating protocol revenue, while others support his cautious stance, believing significant governance changes require more thorough discussion.

This controversy highlights the tension between the ideal of DAO governance in DeFi projects and the actual power of core development teams.

Despite governance disputes putting pressure on the AAVE token price, on-chain data shows that Stani Kulechov himself has spent millions in the past few hours buying a significant amount of AAVE.

Meanwhile, a whale at address 0xDDC4, after six months of silence, once again spent 500 ETH (approximately $1.53 million) to purchase 9,629 AAVE tokens. Data indicates that this whale has accumulated nearly 40,000 AAVE over the past year but is currently at an unrealized loss.

The Founder and Whale's accumulation behavior during market fluctuations has been interpreted by some investors as a vote of confidence in AAVE's long-term value.

4. Top Articles: DeFi Curator and Ethereum Yearly Recap

In this week's top article, Morpho Labs' "Curator Explained" details the role of "Curators" in DeFi.

The article compares Curators to traditional asset managers in finance who design, deploy, and manage on-chain Vaults, providing users with one-click diversified investment portfolios.

Unlike traditional fund managers, DeFi Curators use non-custodial smart contracts to autonomously execute strategies, with users retaining full control of their assets. This article offers a new perspective on the specialization and risk management in the DeFi space.

Another widely circulated article, "Ethereum 2025: From Experiment to World Infrastructure," provides a comprehensive summary of Ethereum's development over the past year. The article notes that 2025 is a pivotal year for Ethereum's transition from an experimental project to global financial infrastructure. Through the Pectra and Fusaka hard forks, Ethereum achieved significant reductions in account abstraction and transaction costs.

Simultaneously, the SEC's clarification of Ethereum's "non-securities" nature, and the launch of tokenized funds by traditional financial giants like JPMorgan on the Ethereum mainnet, signal Ethereum's gaining recognition from mainstream institutions. The article suggests that whether it is the continued growth of DeFi, the thriving L2 ecosystem, or integration with the AI field, all foreshadow Ethereum's vision as a "World Computer" gradually becoming a reality.

II. Mainstream Ecosystem Updates

1. Solana: Introduces Kora Fee Layer and propAMM Data Research

The Solana Foundation engineering team launched a fee layer solution called Kora this week.

Kora is a fee relayer and signer node designed to provide the Solana ecosystem with a more flexible transaction fee payment method. Through Kora, users will be able to achieve gas-free transactions or choose to pay network fees using any stablecoin or SPL token. This innovation is seen as an important step in reducing the barrier to entry for new users and enhancing Solana network's availability.

Furthermore, an in-depth research report on propAMM (proactive market maker) has garnered community attention. The report's data analysis on propAMMs like HumidiFi on Solana indicates that Solana has reached or even surpassed traditional finance (TradFi) market levels in trade execution quality.

For example, on the SOL-USDC trading pair, HumidiFi is able to provide a highly competitive spread (0.4-1.6 bps) for large trades, which already outperforms the trading slippage of some mid-cap stocks in traditional markets.

Research suggests that propAMM is making the vision of the "Internet Capital Market" a reality, with Solana emerging as the prime venue for all of this to happen.

2. Perp DEX: Hyperliquid vs. Lighter Intensifies Competition

The competition in the perpetual contract DEX (Perp DEX) space is becoming increasingly fierce.

In its latest official post, Hyperliquid positioned the emerging competitor Lighter on par with centralized exchanges like Binance, labeling it as a platform utilizing a centralized sequencer. Hyperliquid emphasized its own transparency advantage of being "fully on-chain, validator-network-operated, and stateless."

The community widely interpreted this as Hyperliquid declaring war on Lighter. The technical divergence between the two platforms has also become a point of discussion: Hyperliquid focuses on ultimate on-chain transparency, while Lighter emphasizes achieving "verifiable execution" through zero-knowledge proofs to provide users with a Central Limit Order Book (CLOB)-like trading experience.

This battle over the future trajectory of decentralized derivatives exchanges is expected to peak in 2026.

Meanwhile, discussions about Lighter's trading fees have surfaced. Some users pointed out that Lighter charged as much as 81 basis points (0.81%) for a $2 million USD/JPY forex trade, significantly higher than the near-zero spread of traditional forex brokers.

In response, some argue that Lighter does not follow a B-book model where they bet against liquidity providers, anchoring its prices to the TradFi market, and the high fees may be related to the current liquidity or market maker balance skew incentive. Providing a more competitive spread for real-world assets (RWA) in the highly volatile crypto market is a key issue that Lighter needs to address in the future.

Welcome to join the official BlockBeats community:

Telegram Subscription Group: https://t.me/theblockbeats

Telegram Discussion Group: https://t.me/BlockBeats_App

Official Twitter Account: https://twitter.com/BlockBeatsAsia