Publication Date: January 7, 2025
Author: BlockBeats Editorial Team

Over the past 24 hours, the mainstream discussion in the crypto market has focused on Polymarket's settlement dispute and potential insider risk in a geopolitical event; in terms of ecosystem development, concerns have been raised regarding Solana's network health and MEV behavior, Ethereum's ongoing fork debate, and the Perp DEX track accelerating differentiation through buyback mechanisms and liquidity compression.

I. Mainstream Topics

1. Polymarket's Settlement Dispute in Venezuela "Invasion" Market

On January 3, the U.S. carried out a military operation in Venezuela, successfully arresting President Maduro and his wife and extraditing them to the U.S. for trial. The Trump administration characterized this action as a "law enforcement operation," not a "military invasion."

On Polymarket, the prediction market related to this event (such as "Will the U.S. invade Venezuela") ultimately ruled that the "Yes" option was not valid. The reason was that this action did not meet the market's predefined definition of "invasion," which was understood as a large-scale ground military invasion in the traditional sense, rather than a rapid, pinpoint strike.

This settlement outcome sparked strong backlash in the community, with many users accusing it of "arbitrary rule interpretation" and "post hoc backtracking," pointing fingers at the UMA-dominated dispute resolution mechanism. A large number of posts jokingly referred to "the house always wins" and further amplified doubts about the fairness and credibility of the prediction market. The related discussion quickly surpassed a million views, becoming the most central topic of the day.

2. Insider Trading Suspicions Arising from the Maduro Event

Even more controversially, in the hours leading up to the military operation, multiple new wallets appeared on-chain, placing large bets on "Maduro will step down by January 31" or "the U.S. will intervene in Venezuela" with only about a 6%–8% probability. One account wagered around $35,000 and ultimately made over $400,000 in profit.

The community immediately questioned the possibility of insider information leakage, not ruling out potential ties to the government or intelligence systems. While some argued that prediction markets themselves have limited liquidity and high noise levels, making it difficult to draw conclusions from a single transaction, the precision of the timing was still considered "too coincidental."

This event has sparked a higher-level discussion, with some lawmakers proposing restrictions or bans on government officials participating in prediction markets to mitigate potential insider trading risks. When combined with the aforementioned settlement dispute, Polymarket's institutional risk has become the absolute focus of today's discussion.

3. Berachain Ecosystem TVL Cliff-like Plummet

Another widely circulated piece of news comes from Berachain. This L1 project, which was highly hyped in 2025 (with high-profile events and a TVL that once exceeded 3 billion USD), has seen its total value locked drop to around 184 million USD, a decrease of over 90%.

Community discussions generally attribute this to "insufficient product-market fit after the hype waned" and "incentive decay leading to rapid capital outflow." Some users jokingly refer to it as the "Bear-chain" (due to the sound similarity between Berachain and bear chain). Comments from influential figures like CZ are also focused on the same point: that marketing cannot sustainably replace a solid product and cash flow. Such discussions reflect a market-wide reassessment of the long-term viability of new public chains.

4. TON Team Sell-off Rumors

TON's price has retraced around 66% from its peak, with some posts attributing this to team sell-off behavior, sparking a brief discussion. However, overall, the discussion's heat is noticeably lower compared to Polymarket and Berachain, leaning more towards being seen as an isolated case within the broader market correction cycle and not forming a sustained controversy.

II. Mainstream Ecosystem Updates

1. Solana

Block Packing Issue Raises Network Health Concerns

New tools (such as ibrl.wtf) have revealed that some validators are employing a strategy known as late packing, intentionally delaying transactions to be packed at the end of a block to maximize MEV extraction rewards.

The community generally believes that this behavior is eroding Solana's core technological advantage: transforming its original real-time transaction streaming selling point into a "burst" state, where the state is only visible at the end of a slot, affecting transaction real-time visibility and breaking execution fairness.
Jito governance lead @DrNickA described it as a "crisis moment for Solana" and pointed out that such behavior could directly hinder the development of on-chain order books (CLOB) and other advanced applications. He called for punishing malicious validators through delegation coordination at the staker level, or guiding delegation to nodes with better IBRL scores (such as Jito SOL).

The community consensus is that short-term reliance must be on social coordination, while long-term solutions should involve protocol-level proposals (such as BAM/MCP) to technologically enforce constraint mechanisms. This topic's heat is relatively high, reflecting the market's collective anxiety about whether Solana's long-term value proposition will be eroded by MEV behavior.

2.Ethereum

Concurrent Progress of Fork Choice-enforced Inclusion Lists and Anti-Censorship Upgrade

Former EF researcher Dankrad Feist publicly questioned Vitalik's emphasis on "trust minimization and resilience-first" approach, suggesting that this might steer Ethereum towards an "improved version of Bitcoin-style digital gold," potentially sacrificing its potential to support real economic activities. He advocated for prioritizing high-value DeFi activities back to L1.

Multicoin Capital partner Kyle Samani's criticism was more direct, stating that EF's development focus is not centered around serving user needs but rather revolves around Vitalik's personal vision. This viewpoint quickly sparked polarized reactions: one side supporting a long-termist approach focused on sovereignty and anti-censorship, while the other side expressing concerns that Ethereum is gradually deviating from usability and market competitiveness.

In parallel to the philosophical debate, there has been a technically positive development. Soispoke.eth analyzed on the Ethereum Magicians forum that EIP-7805 (FOCIL: Fork Choice-enforced Inclusion Lists) is poised to be included in the Hegotá upgrade (successor to Glamsterdam).

FOCIL aims to enhance censorship resistance, transaction finality, and execution neutrality by allowing multiple validators to enforce the inclusion of valid transactions. The proposal was previously unable to enter Glamsterdam due to testing scope control issues, but now it has gained more support at the core developer level, with a ready prototype, believed to benefit regular users, L2, institutional participants, and the application layer simultaneously.

3.Perp DEX: Lighter's Positive Signal

Lighter officially launched an on-chain buyback mechanism for $LIT using protocol fees, with the related buyback publicly traceable through a dedicated treasury account. The community widely views this as a rare real value capture model that can scale linearly with platform usage, and the recent price performance of $LIT is seen as a direct response to this.

Simultaneously, market maker spreads and margin analysis indicate a significant compression of short-term profit margins for top market makers such as Selini Capital and Jump Crypto. Data shows that Jump's trading volume share in latency arbitrage is as high as 47%, and since September to October 2025, overall market maker margins have consistently narrowed, with mechanized market-making strategies facing increased pressure under a 0.2 bps fee structure.

4. Other Project Updates

Infinex: The founder disclosed a monthly burn rate of about $1.1 million (for a team of around 60 people), leading some in the community to question whether the staff salaries were too high. However, a subsequent clarification revealed that this number included infrastructure and various operational costs, which quickly resolved the dispute.

Tempo: Released the TIP-20 token standard, aimed at stablecoins and payment optimizations, supporting transfer memos, compliance policies, yield distribution, and "paying Gas fees in any stablecoin." Tempo has already established partnerships with AllUnity, Bridge, LayerZero, and others.

MegaETH (MEGA): Included in Coinbase's listing roadmap, seen by the community as a positive signal of mainstream recognition for this high-performance L2 solution. Speculation is now rife about an upcoming Token Generation Event (TGE).

TON: Old news resurfaced once again: the team allegedly sold around $450 million in tokens in 2025, with some users seeing this as a key reason for the price plummeting by around 66% from its all-time high. Discussions are mostly characterized by humor and retrospective analysis.

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