Publication Date: January 23, 2025
Author: BlockBeats Editorial Team

Over the past 24 hours, the crypto market has seen simultaneous fermentations from public opinion controversies to ecosystem advancements. Mainstream discussions have focused on the trust crisis caused by the Farcaster shutdown incident and the platform credibility questioning brought about by Polymarket's frequent dissemination of fake news. In terms of ecosystem development, Solana has strengthened the RWA narrative through BitGo's IPO tokenization of transactions, Ethereum's side MegaETH stress test and Vitalik's discussion on privacy sovereignty have heated up, and Perp DEX has accelerated its internal loop through index and RWA perpetual product expansions.

I. Mainstream Topics

Farcaster "Shutdown" Incident: Acquisition, Founder Exit, and Rug Concerns Coexist

The Farcaster protocol has not been fully shut down but has been acquired by the startup Neynar. Neynar plans to pivot it towards a more developer-focused product path. Meanwhile, founders Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan have announced their withdrawal from day-to-day management to focus on advancing new projects; Farcaster's parent company Merkle plans to fully refund the previously raised $180 million to investors.

In response to external controversies, Dan publicly clarified that the funds for his mansion purchase came from the proceeds of the Coinbase IPO, not from misappropriating Farcaster project funds. However, there are also reports suggesting that Dan may have sold around $40 million in shares on the secondary market before the project's failure, leading to accusations of "rug pulling."

The community is divided on this. Some viewpoints refer to Dan as a "serial scammer," believing that he used VC funds to achieve wealth transfer but let employees and investors bear the losses, and mocked his career trajectory from a "unicorn" to "zero." However, others (such as Haseeb, Brian Armstrong, Regan Bozman, foobar, Linda Xie) have defended him, arguing that secondary market sales are legal in themselves, and the Farcaster team operated with restraint, did not issue "meaningless tokens," always tried to find a genuine Product-Market Fit (PMF), and in the crypto industry, they could be considered a "relatively responsible shutdown case."

Some have taken a longer-term view of the controversy. Laura Shin believes that decentralized social networking is still in its early stages, and it will take at least 5–10 years for the widespread adoption of wallets and stablecoins before it can truly take off. 0xngmi and Marc Zeller point out that Farcaster and Lens were almost simultaneously stuck, reflecting a long-standing lack of traction for crypto social products, and users may still be trapped in the inertia of Crypto Twitter (CT).

2. Polymarket Official Account Frequently Shares "Fake Breaking News," Platform Reputation Questioned

The Polymarket official account has recently posted misleading "breaking news" multiple times, such as distorting Elon Musk's startup advice as "advising to work at McDonald's or Palantir," or spreading unverified information without sources to attract user participation in prediction market betting. Similar operations have also been observed on the social media accounts of its competitor, Kalshi.

The community generally views this as irresponsible or even abnormal growth behavior. Rachel Karten described it as "very strange," DCinvestor said they unfollowed due to too much fake news, believing it would directly erode the platform's reputation. Alex Finn believes this is a typical "growth hacking" tactic, essentially stimulating betting behavior with information noise; TallForNxthing and Garret Skrovina have also stated that they have blocked the account.

A sharper irony is that: Polymarket has always positioned itself as a "truth-telling oracle," but creating fake news-like dissemination strategies paradoxically makes this identity appear contradictory. The overall consensus is that this approach may generate short-term clicks and exposure but will continue to erode trust, ultimately affecting the platform's long-term image as a reliable prediction market.

3. BitGO Debuts on NYSE through IPO: Crypto Infrastructure Further Moves into Mainstream Market

Digital asset custody company BitGO has officially completed its IPO listing on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), with the stock ticker symbol $BTGO. The company emphasizes its capabilities in security, processing efficiency, and scalability, with the market seeing it as a significant milestone for crypto infrastructure entering the traditional financial system.

The overall community response has been leaning positive, considering this a key step for the industry towards "going public." The NYSE, Justin Sun, and others have publicly congratulated, emphasizing that crypto assets are entering a broader financial stage. Vijay Boyapati also praised the BitGO team for driving the industry's digital asset infrastructure. Some perspectives (like Lázaro) believe that this move will further enhance the compliance and credibility of BTC-Fi and asset custody services, transitioning Bitcoin from a "passive holding asset" to an "income-generating financial product."

The overall discussion focuses on the trend of integration between the crypto industry and traditional capital markets, with the market expecting more infrastructure companies to take the path to IPO, thus enhancing transparency and institutionalized trust.

4. Berachain Ecosystem Wide Account Suspension: From "Cult-like Narrative" to Silence Discrepancy

In recent days, multiple key accounts within the Berachain ecosystem have experienced widespread suspensions or have been banned by X (Twitter), including The Honey Jar-related projects, some NFT protocol accounts, and several individual accounts. A year ago, Berachain was still seen as the "next top-tier new chain," with the ecosystem emphasizing the creation of a tightly knit "cult-like community." However, today, overall hype and activity have nearly disappeared.

Community feedback has been mainly negative. Beacon criticized the ecosystem for being "all talk, little build," transitioning from once being vibrant to hollow. Smokey The Bera explained that some suspensions may be related to X's mass bans (reportedly related to risk controls triggered by conflicts with Milady) and emphasized that GitHub and Discord are still operational. DracoVelli pointed out that Jani did build projects such as Honeycombs, Apiology DAO, and others that were profitable, but issues with token distribution have led to ongoing user attrition, with profit-driven users gradually moving to other chains to seek opportunities.

Others view this as a typical case of "overarching narrative and underdelivery." Chivas and BakingBenjamins mocked its collaboration with suspected scammers leading to eventual collapse. The general consensus is that the lesson from Berachain is that ecosystem development cannot rely on hype and slogans alone; ultimately, it must return to real delivery and long-term product capability.

II. Mainstream Ecosystem Updates

1. Solana: On-Chain RWA Acceleration, Reinforcement of the "Internet Capital Market" Narrative

Following BitGo's IPO with $BTGO on the NYSE, Ondo Finance subsequently launched an on-chain version of BitGo stock called BTGOn on Solana. Users can directly trade these tokenized shares on platforms like Jupiter Exchange, enabling a "global wallet user bypass of intermediaries to participate in IPO investments" experience. This move is seen as an important step for Solana to advance the "Internet Capital Market" vision—BitGo provides institutional-grade custody and security backing, while Solana offers high-performance on-chain trading and liquidity support.

Community sentiment is notably bullish, with the general belief that the combination of BitGo + Ondo + Solana has accelerated the migration of RWA (Real World Assets) and Traditional Finance (TradFi) to the blockchain. Discussions focus on the low-friction path of "wallets anywhere being able to buy IPO shares" and Solana's enhanced positioning in institutional adoption, payments, and capital market infrastructure.

Meanwhile, Solstice staking has officially launched, offering both native staking and liquidity staking options, with the current APY at around 5.87%. There are plans to launch an ambassador program targeting content creators. The community broadly sees this as a signal of the ecosystem toolchain's maturity, especially with the positive response from the creator community to the ambassador opportunity, creating an overall optimistic atmosphere.

2. Ethereum: Performance Narrative, Privacy Autonomy, and AI Infrastructure Simultaneously Heating Up

The discussion within the Ethereum ecosystem has been mainly fueled by a high-intensity "performance showcase." MegaETH initiated a global stress test, achieving approximately 16k TPS and aiming to complete 11 billion transactions within a week (described as a rapid "replay" of the total transaction volume in the entire EVM chain's history). Within just 6 hours of the test launch, the cumulative transaction volume surpassed the aggregate historical volume of Hyperliquid and Polkadot, unlocking the imaginative space for high-throughput real-time applications.

Simultaneously, Vitalik Buterin also made statements on X, stating that 2026 will be the "year of computational autonomy." He emphasized the support for open-source encrypted document tools (such as Fileverse), privacy communication tools (such as Signal, Simplex), and decentralized social media, proposing the exploration of on-device LLM as necessary to mitigate data leakage risks.

On the developer front, progress in various "AI + Blockchain" infrastructure initiatives was also a focal point of discussion:
Coinbase released the Python x402 v2 SDK, highlighting the incorporation of TypeScript/Go development experiences during the refactoring process to facilitate AI agent payments, tool construction, and system integration.
ERC-8004's ecosystem map received synchronized updates, covering areas such as infrastructure, agent orchestration, frameworks, AgentFi, developer tools, identity, markets, storage, and data, involving projects like Phala, Virtuals, Cod3x, ENS, Pinata, among others, aiming for the systematic assembly of the "trustless AI agent" ecosystem.
In addition, Ethereum saw two noteworthy on-chain signals: transaction fees hit a historic low while contract deployment volume reached a record high; EthResearch also proposed a unified SlowBlock metric for client benchmarking and network health monitoring.

The community sentiment has notably shifted from skepticism to excitement. MegaETH has been hyperbolically referred to by many as the "savior of crypto," drawing comparisons with routes like Polkadot, but overall, it is more inclined to be seen as a positive signal of the Ethereum ecosystem's revival. Vitalik's post sparked discussions on privacy and autonomy, with some users taking the opportunity to criticize Ethereum for its slow progress in the AI direction; meanwhile, the x402 SDK and ERC-8004 are regarded by developers as practical roadmaps for implementation. The combination of low fees and high deployment volume is also interpreted as a "return of construction activities after pricing mechanism adjustments," transitioning the market narrative from "dead chains" to gradually "resuming work."

3. Perp DEX: Indexing and RWA Perpetuals Heating Up, Specialization Competition Intensifies

The focus of the perpetual contracts track is shifting from "coin-native frenzy" to "TradFi assets and indexing," with typical events including:
Lighter.xyz launching new assets, adding $SPY and $QQQ ETF perpetual contracts supporting up to 20X leverage. The platform is based on Ethereum L2 and utilizes custom ZK circuits for lower cost, lower latency verifiable matching and settlement.

The feasibility of RWA Perps has become a discussion focus. The community broadly believes that to dominate real-world price discovery, the core competition lies not in the "DEX narrative" but in whether it can support ultra-low latency and high-frequency market-making environments; simultaneously, discussions have emerged around non-custodial Spot/Perps/RWA execution infrastructure such as the upcoming launch of Agent3.

Other related developments include the SENT token launching perpetual products on multiple platforms, driving short-term discussions in the market around leveraged trading and funding rate volatility.

The community's overall evaluation of Lighter's expansion is positive, especially looking forward to its further coverage of more asset classes (such as emerging market indices) and support for a more complete delta-neutral strategy toolchain. Regarding RWA Perps, more views believe this will become a more "institutional-grade price discovery" arena, with some users optimistic that Lighter will strike a balance between compliance and efficiency through ZK mechanisms and even envision its future introduction of more traditional market-making forces to participate in liquidity competition. The overall consensus is: the perps track is expanding towards RWA and indexing, and Lighter's differentiated path of "ZK + verifiable matching" is attracting more attention.

4. Others: Chainlink Acquires Atlas, DeFi Value Capture Narrative Ramps Up

In on-chain infrastructure, Atlas Protocol (application-specific order flow auction mechanism) from Monad ecosystem infrastructure team FastLane Labs has been acquired by Chainlink and is planned to be integrated into the Chainlink SVR (Secure Value Retention) system, expanding further to Arbitrum, Base, and more ecosystems to help DeFi protocols capture and retain on-chain value. FastLane Labs will remain independently operated while continuing to focus on Monad's staking infrastructure, developer tools, and application execution software.

The community widely views this acquisition as a positive signal of an "upgrade to the value-capture mechanism." Supporters believe that Atlas's inclusion will bring greater revenue-generating capabilities and cross-chain coverage to SVR, while FastLane's continued focus on Monad's selection is also referred to as a "burning ship commitment," helping to strengthen the network effect. Combined with Chainlink's endorsement of "handling over $27 trillion in transactions," the market's expectations for the next phase of innovation in order flow auctions and MEV recapture are heating up, with an overall positive sentiment.

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