Publication Date: February 3, 2025
Author: BlockBeats Editorial Team

Over the past 24 hours, the crypto market has evolved on multiple fronts simultaneously. The mainstream discussions have focused on structural changes in stablecoins and trading infrastructure, as well as risk and governance discussions around trading platforms and automated market-making mechanisms. In terms of ecosystem development, Solana set a new on-chain activity record under high load, demonstrating signs of renewed utility; Ethereum continues its technical exploration around cross-rollup composability; Perp DEX is accelerating towards decentralized, automated trading infrastructure, intensifying competition in the race track.

1. Mainstream Topics

1. Files Show Epstein's Involvement in Coinbase and Blockstream Early Investments

Recently disclosed Epstein-related files reveal that Epstein, through a fund managed by Joi Ito, invested a small amount of equity in the Bitcoin infrastructure company Blockstream in 2014, after which the fund exited the investment due to potential conflict of interest issues. The files also mention that Epstein may have indirectly invested around $3 million in Coinbase through a capital network associated with Brock Pierce, and may have funded Bitcoin core developers through MIT as a channel.

Furthermore, the files disclose Epstein's meeting with the then NYDFS Superintendent Ben Lawsky during the establishment of New York's BitLicense regulatory framework. BitLicense has been considered a significant milestone in early U.S. Bitcoin regulation but has long been controversial in the industry for restricting innovation and raising compliance barriers.

The information has sparked strong reactions within the community. Some users criticize Blockstream's founder Adam Back for meeting with Epstein, questioning his ethical stance and even calling for his exit from the Bitcoin space. Some have also linked this to Coinbase's early refusal to list XRP, further extending speculation to political influences. More radical comments include accusations of the lack of originality in the PoW mechanism, disputes over on-chain large volume data support, and even evolving into conspiracy theory-like speculations.

Overall, the discussion sentiment is highly divergent, but the core demands are focused on "restoring Bitcoin's reputation" and "advancing a stronger path to decentralization," including calls for block size expansion and reducing infrastructure centralization.

2. Public Chains Intensely Advance Moltbot / AI Hackathon Competition

Solana has announced the launch of the first AI Hackathon, which will last for two weeks with a total prize pool of over $185,000. The event covers six tracks, including AI Agent Infrastructure, DeFi Agent, Transaction Agent, and has received support from multiple ecosystem partners.

Meanwhile, Monad has kicked off the Moltiverse Hackathon, featuring a $200,000 prize pool. The focus is on the application of AI agents in scalable trading, community operations, and commercialization scenarios. It emphasizes endowing Moltbot with native crypto asset capabilities and is sponsored by various funds and AI projects.

The community's overall response has been mostly positive, seeing this as a sign that the competition among blockchains in the AI Agent direction has entered a substantive stage. It is expected to foster new application forms such as chat agents and social agents. Some developers have already started forming teams and actively seeking technical and resource support.

However, there are also cautious voices pointing out that Monad still needs to rely on a low market cap meme coin narrative for market attention, reflecting the intense competition in the blockchain AI ecosystem. Overall, market sentiment is optimistic, with a general belief that such hackathons will provide a stress test for the security, usability, and real-world demand of AI agents.

3. CZ Responds to FUD, Sparking "Selective Clarification" Controversy

Binance founder CZ recently published a lengthy article responding to various FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) surrounding Binance. He particularly refuted some extreme accusations, such as the "Binance involvement in the 10/10 incident," but the article did not directly address the community's more critical concerns.

Some community members interpreted it as a defensive strategy: by amplifying obviously unfounded statements, the focus was shifted away from legitimate criticism. Some users criticized the highly selective nature of his responses, showing a preference for replying to supporters while avoiding key issues.

Sarcasm and dissatisfaction continued to escalate in the discussion, with some comments directly pointing out that this communication style weakened the sincerity of public discourse. Overall, the community is calling for a reevaluation of facts, signals, and emotional venting in a highly noisy environment to prevent further drift from the main issues.

4. Tether Launches MOS Bitcoin Mining Operating System

Tether has officially released the Mining OS (MOS), an open-source operating system designed for Bitcoin mining infrastructure. It features a modular architecture, energy management optimization, and extensive hardware compatibility, covering various applications from home miners to industrial-scale mining farms. The system supports peer-to-peer operation and does not rely on centralized services.

The overall community response has been positive, with many seeing the launch of MOS as a step towards open-sourcing and standardizing Bitcoin mining infrastructure, which can help improve operational efficiency and sovereignty. Some developers have already started studying the relevant documentation and are looking forward to the subsequent deployment and performance validation.

From a broader perspective, the market sees this as a sign of maturity in Bitcoin's infrastructure, indicating that Tether's business scope is expanding from stablecoin issuance to encompass energy and hashing layer infrastructure development. This expansion may enhance the resilience and risk mitigation capabilities of the Bitcoin network in the long run.

II. Mainstream Ecosystem Updates

1. Solana

During last week's market volatility, the Solana network achieved two key milestones: on January 30, it set a new single-day peak in activity, processing 148 million non-voting transactions, which the community compared to approximately 130% of Cardano's total historical transaction volume. Concurrently, the weekly on-chain activity also hit a record high, with transaction volume approaching 1 billion transactions, averaging a non-voting TPS of 1505, described as "close to Ethereum's total transaction volume over the past two years." These figures are seen as indicators of Solana's stability and growth momentum under high loads, with on-chain fee revenue rising alongside activity.

The community is generally excited about Solana's "resurgence." Supporters emphasize that real usage is driving fee and demand growth, positioning Solana once again as a leading chain, with expectations of further on-chain activity surges as market sentiment improves. Some developers added that active addresses increased by about 115% in the week, with daily active addresses exceeding 5 million, even surpassing some Ethereum L2 solutions. Discussions have also emerged regarding institutional fund inflows and the narrative around a SOL ETF. The main point of contention revolves around transaction quality: critics suggest that a portion of the activity may stem from compressed NFTs, short-term speculation, and "pump-and-dump trash" causing spam. However, the overall sentiment remains optimistic, with these metrics at least proving that Solana has moved on from the "dead chain" narrative, attracting more builders to participate, such as the Colosseum hackathon and the upcoming Breakpoint conference being frequently mentioned.

2. Ethereum

Jordi Baylina proposed a new idea on EthResearch, discussing how rollups based on real-time validity proofs could achieve atomic L1↔L2 and L2↔L2 interactions: by synchronously executing across multiple rollups within a single transaction, aiming to restore cross-rollup composability as much as possible. The proposal introduces mechanisms like proxy contracts and execution tables to attempt to eliminate the disjointed experience caused by current asynchronous bridging, making cross-rollup calls closer to internal EVM calls, supporting return values, nested calls, and failure rollbacks.

The community has high recognition of this direction, believing it directly addresses the rollup fragmentation issue, helping Ethereum move closer to a "world computer" unified experience. Vitalik Buterin has also expressed support for native rollup, emphasizing that with the maturation of ZK-EVM, the future is expected to achieve a more real-time withdrawal experience, reducing delays of 2–7 days and centralization risks brought by multi-sig bridging. Developer discussions are more focused on engineering and trade-offs: including simplifying the rollup tech stack, reducing centralization exposure (e.g., anchoring sequencing to the Ethereum validator system), and the boundary and synergy between the real-time execution path of MegaETH, Espresso's coordination layer testnet exploration, etc. The overall view is optimistic, believing that if implemented, it will significantly improve DeFi infrastructure's cross-domain efficiency and attract more builders, but still needs to strike a balance between speed and decentralization.

3.Perp DEX

Chris Ling released a CLI tool for Hyperliquid, positioned as an AI agent-friendly trading gateway: supporting deploying algorithmic trading strategies from GT Protocol's backtesting directly to Hyperliquid and executing locally; while integrating OpenClaw, providing real-time monitoring, Telegram notifications, and a "gas-free first touch" experience, covering Perp and Spot trading. The community generally interprets this as: Hyperliquid is expanding from a "single DEX product" to infrastructure more suited for agent-based trading.

The overall discussion sentiment is predominantly exciting. Supporters believe the CLI lowers the cost of migrating strategies from simulation to live trading, agent-based trading is beginning to have a replicable engineering path, while also reinforcing Hyperliquid's competitive narrative on speed and transparency. Users further emphasize that Hyperliquid's HyperBFT consensus brings sub-second finality and high throughput, citing TVL and revenue growth data as endorsements. On the developer side, they share SDK and automated treasury experiences, believing that it is forming a decentralized trading benchmark comparable to CEX. There are also views pointing out that with the expansion of HIP-3 markets, as well as ecosystem actions such as multiple DEX locking around 500k HYPE, retail trading volume may further increase, driving larger scale daily transaction volumes.

4.Others

Stablecoin Trading Volume Exceeds $100 Trillion

Community-circulated statistics show: the January trading volume exceeded $100 trillion, a 72% year-on-year increase; with USDC trading volume around $8.4 trillion and USDT around $13.3 trillion. The total market cap of stablecoins is about $3,080 billion, processing a transaction volume of about $46 trillion in the past year and being used to compare scale with traditional payment networks like PayPal, Visa+Mastercard, etc.

Overall sentiment is mostly positive, with users seeing it as a signal of stablecoin infrastructure maturity that will further drive global payments and DeFi expansion; some also emphasize USDC's dominant position in transfer volume as signaling "greater reliability" in the market, and predict stablecoins will continue to erode the boundaries of traditional payment networks.

Wintermute Founder Questions Exchange Internal MM

Another discussion thread comes from Wintermute founder Evgeny Gaevoy. He questions the professional capabilities of some exchanges' "internal market makers (MMs)," believing their proprietary trading is not mature, using Alameda as a typical counterexample; he also points out that top market makers (Tower/Jump/Optiver, etc.) have no inherent difference in their ability between crypto and non-crypto markets, suggesting instead that exchange internal MMs lack competitiveness.

Many in the community express agreement, believing that internal MMs are more prone to distortion in an asymmetric information environment, with discussions related to Crypto.com also mentioned and further extending to the risks of low-liquidity stages compounded by high leverage. Overall, the mainstream view tends to attribute a market collapse not to a single exchange but more as a result of bearish sentiment, leverage structures, and liquidity constraints working together; at the same time, many are optimistic about institutions like Wintermute and their liquidity provision capabilities, as well as regulatory legislation advancing long-term industry development.

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