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Despite the end of the longest government shutdown in US history (at 43 days!) BTC continues to struggle, even though Saylor bought 8.2K BTC for approximately $836 million ($102,171 per bitcoin). Out of the major DeFi ecosystems, Solana has been hit the hardest, especially with MPLX and PUMP struggling.

Following the longest government shutdown in US history, markets still have not recovered well. While Gold has outperformed (+1.79% over the past week) and the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 are only slightly down (-0.21% and -0.57%, respectively), BTC has seen significant downside, with -10.32% over the past seven days.

Alts have similarly not fared well. The only sectors which have outperformed BTC are RWA, and no revenue indices. No revenue tokens have outperformed slightly due to XRP holding up better than BTC (down only -6.36% over the past week) and RWA tokens have been held up by OUSG (+0.73%) and HASH (-3.44%) this past week.

In terms of worst performers, we’ve seen crypto miners, Solana Eco and Modular indices bear the brunt of the pain. Notably, within Solana Eco, MPLX is down -42.36% over the past week (due to an exploit/incident during the PSG1 launch), and JTO is down -26.81% (possibly due to the announcement of Harmonic as a competitor).

— Boccaccio

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On Friday's livestream, we were joined by MacBrennan from Project0 to discuss:

Project Zero's prime brokerage model: MacBrennan discussed Project Zero, a decentralized prime broker enabling cross-venue capital efficiency on Solana. The protocol launched in September, holds $250 million in liquidity with $100 million borrowed, and averages over $1 million daily inflows. Project Zero integrates with lending markets like Kamino and plans 100% Solana credit market coverage within six months, followed by perps integrations with Drift and Hyperliquid.

Solana's valuation thesis: We examined Solana's $80 billion FDV against $2.5 billion in protocol revenue, noting the multiple compression represents a value opportunity. MacBrennan argued this excludes application revenue from projects like Pump.fun, and expects validator margins to compress as capacity increases while value accrues to applications through fee-sharing mechanisms with validators.

Risk management in prime brokerage: MacBrennan explained Project Zero's onchain verification advantages over offchain prime brokers like Genesis, which faced contagion post-FTX. Currently, bad debt from integrated venues socializes across the entire credit pool, though Project Zero plans venue-specific risk isolation. The protocol requires two months of integration work per venue to validate market risk.

Solana perps landscape for 2026: We analyzed upcoming innovations including BAM, Firedancer and new protocols like Bulk targeting sub-20 millisecond latency. Drift v3 prioritizes prop AMM market makers, while Temporal and Anza compete on client implementations. MacBrennan expects prop AMMs to handle 80-90% of trading needs, potentially enabling onchain price discovery vs. Binance.

Token buyback economics: We noted Hyperliquid executed roughly $700-800 million in buybacks, Pump.fun repurchased 11% of circulating supply while holding $1 billion cash reserves, and Maker pioneered buyback models. The discussion highlighted how protocols with day-one buyback programs may outperform in recovery cycles.

Find the full livestream on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and X.

This summary was generated with assistance from AI tooling.

Charts of the week

Hyperliquid continues to lead in terms of application revenue, making $17.1 million over the past week, followed by Pump.fun, which made $9.6 million. Despite Pump.fun having a lower multiple based on these revenue figures, the token has held up worse than HYPE. The PUMP/HYPE pair is down 23.4% over the past week.

In terms of chain revenue, Solana has held up surprisingly well, despite the continued downturn in memecoin activity (apart from Pump.fun). Over the past two months, Solana revenue market share has shrunk from 21% of all chains to 12%. Despite this, the chain still has higher revenue compared to Ethereum, but now sits behind Hyperliquid and Tron. 

MSTR outstanding mNAV has fallen to 0.9. Earlier today, Saylor announced that MSTR bought 8,178 BTC for ~$835.6 million at ~$102,171 per BTC. Although Saylor is unlikely to sell, NAV less than 1 makes issuance increasingly difficult, leading to fewer buys and potentially lower mNAV.

In the most recent Upbit 10 listings, the median listing-day price jump was 70%, with an average of 115%, compared to roughly 40% on Binance for non-meme listings — reflecting South Korea’s highly active retail investor base, where enthusiasm for new assets often drives short-term price spikes (read more).

Loopscale deposits have grown by about 28% over the past 90 days to $93 million, with active loans growing at a similar rate to $34 million. For comparison, both Kamino deposits and outstanding loans have experienced negative growth over the same period (read more).

— Boccaccio