Weekly Editor's Picks (0131-0206)

"Weekly Editor's Picks" is a functional column by Odaily. While covering a vast amount of real-time news each week, Odaily also publishes many high-quality in-depth analyses, but they might get lost in the information feed and hot topics, passing you by.

Therefore, our editorial team will select some worthwhile articles from the past 7 days every Saturday—pieces deserving of your time to savor and bookmark. From data analysis, industry insights, and opinion pieces, we aim to bring new inspiration to you in the crypto world.

Now, let's read together:

Investment & Entrepreneurship

What Will the Crypto Market Be Trading in One Year?

If the primary market stops producing "future secondary market assets," what will the secondary market be trading in a year? What changes will happen to exchanges?

Projects about to undergo TGE are all "existing old projects"; the industry is in a destocking phase. The change in the primary market is not just an overall funding contraction but a structural collapse. Established funds, though struggling with fundraising now, can still survive, lie low, live off management fees, or pivot to investing in AI, while many more funds have already shut down or shifted to secondary markets.

The solutions the industry seeks externally are asset tokenization and prediction markets.

When the primary market no longer produces the future, what the secondary market can truly trade are these two things—uncertainty from the external world and tradable narratives that can be repeatedly reconstructed.

What If This Is the Bottom?

Bitcoin faces three major survival competitors: AI and capital-intensive growth, real estate, and the US Treasury market. The combined market cap of these three markets (AI growth, real estate, and Treasuries) exceeds $100 trillion. For Bitcoin to succeed in a negative Rho environment, it doesn't mean these three markets must collapse, but their attractiveness relative to zero-yield investments must decline.

Bitcoin's lack of cash flow becomes an advantage. It has no earnings expectations, no coupons to be devalued, and no yield curve to anchor market expectations. Bitcoin doesn't need to be repriced against failing benchmarks because it wasn't priced against them in the first place. It only needs to remain scarce when everything else proves to be excessive or unreliable.

The bottom is almost always accompanied by a fundamental shift in market mechanisms, which fundamentally reshapes investor behavior and expectations. While it may be difficult to perceive at the time, it becomes obvious in hindsight.

The Great Collapse! Who Killed the Tech Premium in the Crypto Market?

Under the dual pressures of exhausted native narratives and institutional deleveraging, the crypto industry is being forced to bid farewell to its wild era of attempting to build a parallel financial system, instead embarking on a brutal "species evolution"—from disruptor to dependent; from creating assets to transporting assets.

Wake Up! Stop Trying to Buy the Dip: The Harsh Truth Behind the $2.6B Crypto Liquidation

The massive AI capital expenditure cycle itself is shifting from "injecting liquidity" to "draining liquidity," leading to a substantive shortage of global financial capital.

HYPE Buying Pressure Far Exceeds Imagination: Decrypting PURR's ATM Dynamic Expansion Mechanism

If trading volume can be maintained at current levels, PURR could potentially add about $8 million in daily "firepower" to buy HYPE.

To reiterate, this doesn't mean they will mindlessly sweep the order book and buy at any price; but the incentive structure here is completely different from PIPE.

PIPE financing: Funds arrive in a lump sum, there's no urgency, cash can be held while waiting for sell-side pressure to appear slowly.

ATM issuance: The incentive structure changes.

If issuance capacity expands with trading volume and momentum, and higher PURR volume can continuously open the ATM window, then maintaining HYPE's strong momentum might actually expand future issuance and fundraising capacity.

Under this structure, actively buying during an uptrend is no longer irrational. It can be a means to maintain liquidity, boost trading volume, and maximize the funds raised via ATM over time.

This is not "blindly placing limit buy orders." It means: under specific conditions, quickly absorbing sell-side pressure, or even adding to positions following the trend, can itself be a strategically rational choice.

Also recommended: 《a16z's Opening View of the Year: When Supply-Side Leaps Occur, We Need a New Thinking Framework》《Without Compounding, Can Cryptocurrency Outperform Stocks?》《To You in Panic: Every Crash is a Gift for Long-Termists》《The Great Ebb: The Collapse and Liquidation of Crypto Faith》.

Prediction Markets

"Betting That Madness Won't Happen": Vitalik's Prediction Market Trading Strategy

XX% is not reflecting true probability, but rather sentiment. Vitalik stands on the opposite side of sentiment, using rationality to profit from that overestimated probability gap.

After optimization through established trading systems based on mathematics and statistics, such as the Kelly Criterion, such strategies become one of the most robust investment methods in prediction markets today.

Also recommended: 《Prediction Markets: Concepts, Mechanisms, and Arbitrage Strategies》《Prediction Market Activity Hits Record Highs: Key Events for Top Projects to Watch Are All Here》《By Predicting the Weather, They Made Millions on Polymarket》.

Airdrop Opportunities & Interaction Guides

The Biggest Airdrop for Crypto Enthusiasts is Given by Yuanbao

The current imbalance between "effort and reward" in crypto airdrops is not the result of a single project's "moral failure," but rather the outcome of a whole set of structural changes in the industry.

Web2 giants use cash to buy user certainty, while Web3 uses token rewards as a promise that might be fulfilled.

From user acquisition to retention, airdrops' utility can only sustain the first half at most.

Also recommended: 《Hot Interaction Collection | Perle Labs Launches New Tasks; Early Test Experience for ambient.xyz (Feb 3)》.

Meme

$300k to Build a Gilded Trump Statue: The Crazy Marketing of a Meme Coin

Almost everyone in the cryptocurrency space is trying to profit from Trump's presidency: either by striking business deals with his family or seeking regulatory relief from his administration. But few have acted as boldly as the supporters of PATRIOT.

They used this statue to promote a meme coin called PATRIOT. Building a giant statue is an expensive social media publicity stunt, but also a potentially profitable plan.

Ethereum & Scaling

Vitalik's Layer2 Reckoning: Five Years of Expansion, Finally Becoming the "Discarded Child"

On February 3rd, Vitalik Buterin said on X: The original vision of Layer2 as 'Branded Sharding' to solve Ethereum's scalability is no longer valid.

One sentence almost declared the end of Ethereum's mainstream narrative of the past five years. The Layer2 camp, once highly anticipated and seen as Ethereum's lifeline, is facing its biggest legitimacy crisis since its inception. More direct criticism followed, as Vitalik wrote mercilessly in the post: "If you create an EVM that does 10,000 TPS, but its connection to L1 is via a multisig bridge, you are not scaling Ethereum."

Ethereum is reclaiming its sovereignty.

Also recommended: 《Besides Negating Himself, What Else is Vitalik Thinking About?》.

CeFi & DeFi

Is Binance Still the Universe's Largest Exchange?

Facing challenges in futures trading volume; mainstream coin liquidity being locally surpassed; slow progress in expanding new listings. What Binance is losing is not market share, but the discourse power to "define what an exchange is."

Web3 & AI

From Moltbook to MOLT: How Was the Imagination of AI Autonomy Embraced by the Crypto Market?

Moltbook is a social network for AI Agents. The completely unrestrained collective improvisation of AI agents has formed a highly fragmented, mind-blowing, and occasionally profound digital carnival.

The charm of Moltbook may not lie in "depth" or "usefulness," but in that pure, unmediated eruption of collective unconsciousness.

Amid celebrity endorsements and media snowballing, Moltbook has successfully broken into the mainstream.

The meme coin MOLT has also gone from riding the hype to being "claimed."

As Someone Who Heavily Invested in the First Wave of AI Agent Hype, How Do I View Today's Moltbook?

In the last wave of AI Agent hype, what the market paid for was less the utility value and more the collective FOMO towards the "AI Agent narrative." Because Moltbook suddenly went viral, the market has started paying for "AI Agents themselves" after a long hiatus. This time, the focus of discussion is no longer whether AI Agents can help people work, but whether Web3 can still participate when Agents exist in this way.

There may not be a major rally in the AI Agent sector in the short term, but it's worth paying attention to again.

In 2026, Has the AI Agent Economy Really Started to Operate?

The infrastructure phase is winding down, and the application phase has begun. Current builders should focus on three things:

1. Build a unified discovery/indexing layer, aggregating services from all platforms into a single searchable entry point;
2. Establish a capability benchmarking system, proving agent capabilities with verifiable results rather than relying solely on ratings;
3. Develop trust-gated middleware, integrating ERC-8004's verification mechanism into x402's payment execution flow.

The transition from "protocol-ready" to "product-ready" will happen within the next 2–3 months. Now is the time to start building.

Security

Nearly $1.26 Billion Frozen: How to Guard Against USDT Freezing Risks

In 2025, Tether blacklisted 4,163 unique addresses, freezing funds totaling $1.26 billion. Of this, 55.6% ($698.42 million) was destroyed, and only 3.6% of blacklisted addresses were unfrozen that year. Responding to law enforcement requests is the primary trigger for address freezes. The article also provides guidance on preventing freezes, checking freeze status, and appealing.

Weekly Hot Topics Recap

In the past week, on January 31st, gold recorded its largest single-day drop in 40 years, and silver fell over 36%, a record; on February 6th, the market plunged, with BTC hitting a low near the $60k mark;

Furthermore, regarding policy and macro markets, the Warsh nomination triggered a reassessment of policy logic, with the Fed potentially shifting to a combination of "QT + rate cuts"; the US government officially entered a partial shutdown; the European Central Bank held steady as expected, keeping its three key interest rates unchanged;

Regarding opinions and statements, Trump was unaware of Abu Dhabi's $500 million investment in WLFI; Santiment: market sentiment hit a yearly low, but institutional positioning shows undiminished long-term confidence, releasing bullish signals; Bitwise CIO: the crypto winter began in January 2025, but was masked by ETF and DAT inflow data, and is now about to end; Deutsche Bank: Bitcoin's recent decline stems from loss of confidence, not a market structure collapse; Uniswap founder Hayden Adams: if Ethereum wants more independence, it needs to adopt an engineering-driven approach; He Yi: The community-initiated "withdrawal movement" is an effective stress test for exchanges;

Regarding institutions, large companies, and leading projects, Multicoin Capital: Co-founder and Managing Partner Kyle Samani has stepped down from his day-to-day duties and management role at Multicoin, transitioning to an advisory role, as Samani's interests have expanded from the cryptocurrency field to frontier directions like AI, longevity tech, and robotics (analysis); Polymarket and Kalshi diverged due to definitional differences, with the US government shutdown博弈 highlighting