The "Weekly Editor's Picks" is a "functional" column of Odaily Planet Daily. Based on its weekly coverage of a large amount of real-time information, Planet Daily also publishes many high-quality in-depth analysis pieces, but they may get lost in the information flow and trending news, passing by you unnoticed.
Therefore, our editorial team will select some high-quality articles worth spending time reading and saving from the content published in the past 7 days every Saturday, bringing you new insights from perspectives like data analysis, industry judgment, and opinion output while navigating the crypto world.
Now, come read with us:
Investment and Entrepreneurship
Institutions come not to contribute but to drain the blood of Crypto
Institutions have finally "entered crypto" — but they are not here to buy from you. They are here to turn the crypto economy into their AUM (assets under management) accumulation machine for fees.
Crypto projects need to retain economic value on-chain quickly, rather than letting it flow continuously into the hands of TradFi.
BTC's "Narrative Crisis": Bloomberg is right, but only halfway
Bloomberg's article has an implied logic: the value of Bitcoin comes from its narrative function. These functions are being taken away by other things, leading to a loss of Bitcoin's value. In the short term, this makes sense, but it treats "shift" and "settlement" as two opposing matters.
A more important sentence in the article is: "Bitcoin spot ETFs have made Bitcoin a permanent fixture in investment portfolios." The holder structure is transitioning from "casino regulars" to "asset allocators".
Researchers see narrative failure as a crisis. Allocators see narrative failure as a return to valuation. Both perspectives are incomplete.
Large drawdowns and trough periods are inevitable for any tech investment. While banks are steadily advancing in their acceptance of Bitcoin, it is much slower than those who struggle to concentrate attention had hoped. Banks need four to five or even six years to accept this entirely new asset class. Yet people hope Bitcoin can gain recognition in four months. A still-imperfect credit system and remortgaging mechanism have generated significant selling pressure, suppressing Bitcoin's price.
Strategy uses equity, not borrowing to buy. Essentially, it is a kind of permanent, risk-free asset swap — exchanging equity for Bitcoin. Hence, the core issue is not the cost price, but whether this swap is profitable for shareholders.
What truly matters is the timeframe: "If we have a 10 to 30 year window to prove ourselves right, then our average buy-in price has no substantive impact."
L1 value capture shrinks significantly, ETH, SOL, HYPE struggle to return to price peaks
Whether it's Bitcoin's congestion cycle, Ethereum's DeFi and NFT peaks, or Solana's memecoin frenzy, all fee booms will ultimately be compressed by innovation. Demand eruptions lead to revenue peaks, peaks stimulate alternatives to arise, and profits are systematically squeezed out. The compression of L1 value capture is not a cyclical phenomenon, but a structural result of open networks.
L1 and investors should consider: when the market no longer prices L1 using "on-chain profits," and instead uses "asset narratives" and "structural capital flows," is this new logic equally fragile? When the narrative recedes, what fundamental support will prices return to?
Practical execution guide: paradigm shift of core KPIs: from "vanity" to "hardcore"; modular task design: building a tiered "funnel"; risk control and "circuit breaker" design; "proactive" experiments in community governance; execution check-list (must-read before going live).
Prediction Markets
Exploratory prediction market ETF: Entering the mainstream or inviting trouble?
ETF issuers Bitwise Asset Management and GraniteShares have submitted applications for prediction market ETFs to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The core of these ETFs is to track the outcomes of U.S. political elections, attempting to package the "probabilities of election outcomes" into a financial product that can be directly traded in traditional securities accounts.
If approved, investors may no longer need to run to the crypto world's Polymarket or register with CFTC-regulated Kalshi; they can simply open a Robinhood or Fidelity account and bet on "who will win the White House" like buying a stock.
Collective wisdom may more widely affect the public's views on political events, liquidity will be amplified, and price signals may become more sensitive. However, when probabilities are packaged as "market consensus," they can easily be interpreted as some objective trend, and large funds' involvement could trigger price manipulation.
Regulation remains the greatest uncertainty. The SEC may be concerned that this is essentially "gamified" finance, increasing the risk of manipulation or moral hazard.
When teams hedge risks using prediction markets, a multi-billion dollar financial market emerges
Explaining why teams should use prediction markets for hedging from the perspective of sports insurance.
Fandom culture is becoming a differentiating variable in prediction markets
In the early stages of prediction market development, competition focuses more on "underlying capabilities". Who is more compliant, who can gain regulatory approval, and who has deeper liquidity and more efficient market-making structures will determine who can build market trust first. But macro events themselves do not have exclusivity. Repetitive competition on the same issue can only unfold on the basis of worse liquidity and weaker trust, making it difficult to truly form structural differences.
For emerging prediction markets on the BNB Chain, if the rule design cannot create a barrier, then content structure and cultural positioning may become new competitive variables. In such a phase, "fandom culture" begins to gain importance.
The activity level of the platform largely depends on whether topics can be repeatedly传播与放大. For emerging prediction platforms, the efficiency of dissemination itself is a growth lever. What fandom culture brings is not only short-term activity, but also a more difficult-to-replicate emotional soil from external platforms.
Also recommended: Earn $8,000 in 4 days: Complete practical trading strategies for Polymarket LP, Under 10 cents to crush a million liquidity, order attacks may hollow out Polymarket's liquidity foundation.
Policies and Stablecoins
The war between stablecoins and banking may not exist
All along, the crypto industry and traditional financial markets' banks have been in a tense confrontation. The introduction and advancement of the stablecoin regulatory bill "GENIUS ACT" and the crypto structure bill "CLARITY ACT" is highly related to the antagonistic state between the two. For traditional banks, they fear that stablecoins will eat into their deposit share and massive user base, threatening their industry position and survival space; for the crypto industry, finding a path to coexist harmoniously with traditional banking and thereby attracting massive liquidity from the traditional financial market has become one of the few "lifelines".
The reality is that the antagonistic war may not exist. As a16z Crypto partner Noah Levine said, "Just like the 'Javon's Paradox' that once existed between ATMs and bank tellers, the development of the crypto industry may help traditional banking find a new development path."
On February 19, the SEC's Division of Trading and Markets published a new FAQ, clarifying how broker-dealers should treat payment stablecoins under net capital rules. Following this, Hester Peirce, chair of the SEC’s cryptocurrency working group, issued a statement titled "Just a 2% Discount".
Peirce stated that if broker-dealers take a "2% discount" instead of a punitive 100% discount on their own positions in eligible payment stablecoins when calculating net capital, SEC staff would not raise objections. Now, the 2% discount levels the treatment of payment stablecoins with money market funds holding similar underlying assets (such as U.S. Treasury securities, cash, and short-term government bonds). Peirce's statement and the accompanying FAQ effectively bridged the gap between the legislative framework of the "GENIUS Act" and the SEC's own rules handbook. For the traditional financial services industry, the real impact and direct consequences of these measures are huge:
Banks and broker-dealers evaluating whether to enter the digital asset space can now better understand how their holdings of stablecoins will be treated for capital purposes.
Companies that were previously hesitant due to the operational costs of maintaining large positions (ultimately netting to zero on the balance sheet) can now reconsider.
Custodians, clearinghouses, and alternative trading system (ATS) operators are exploring tokenized securities settlement, knowing now that the settlement assets (stablecoins) will not be seen as regulatory burdens. The timeline for implementing the "GENIUS Act" is very tight. State regulators must complete their regulatory frameworks by July 2026.
Also recommended: Latest stablecoin report: Real distribution and flow are far more worthy of attention than supply volume.
Airdrop Opportunities and Interaction Guidelines
Interaction Collection | Mahojin check-in to earn points; KAIO waitlist application (February 23)
Ethereum and Scalability
Ethereum is not abandoning L2, but rather clarifying its division of labor — L1 returns to the safest settlement layer positioning while L2 pursues differentiation and specialization, letting the strategic focus return to the mainnet itself. Under this line of thought, the Based Rollup concept is expected to shine in 2026.
Integrating Rollup-like validation logic on the L1 level of the Ethereum protocol also unifies the extreme performance optimizations and protocol-level security that were originally divided between L2 and the Ethereum mainnet. The most intuitive experience for users is that Rollups seem to be embedded within Ethereum, inheriting not only L1's censorship resistance and activity but also importantly solving the most troublesome problem of L2—synchronous composability. However, Based Rollup faces a real challenge: if it completely follows L1's pace (a slot every 12 seconds), the user experience will seem cumbersome.
To address this issue, a community proposal in January titled "Combining Preconfirmations with Based Rollups for Synchronous Composability" proposed a hybrid structure: retaining low-latency sequenced blocks, generating a based block at the end of the slot, submitting the based block to L1, and then combining it with a preconfirmation mechanism to achieve synchronous composability.
Besides underlying scalability, the future breakout and large-scale development of the Ethereum ecosystem will revolve around three structurally significant directions: account abstraction and dissolving entry barriers, privacy and ZK-EVM, and on-chain sovereignty of AI agents.
After ETH drops 40% in 2026, why continue holding?
ETH is the cyberpunk currency, and cyberpunk is reflected in the current environment. In a world that is both adversarial and interdependent, it is an anonymous credential.
Ethereum's positioning lies here: building protocols that enable opposing institutions to interact, while preserving the true exit rights and property rights for anyone who can sign and pay.
The value cycle of Ethereum: utility → security → trusted neutrality → more utility.
CeFi & DeFi
Starting from HyperLiquid: What does RWA truly need in an exchange?
The real breakthrough of HyperLiquid is changing "trading sovereignty", bearing market risks without taking on platform will. This is the on-chain manifestation of "exchange credit."
Aster's explosive growth is due to: users have changed; most users are not novices, not gamblers, but "strategic users/agents/automated systems," and trading behavior is no longer manual but systematic. Aster essentially provides a "legitimate, stable, and composable trading execution environment" for AI/Bot/Agent/Quant.
RWA exchanges often get stuck on three issues: unclear legal liabilities, lack of a closed loop in settlement and execution, and unnatural liquidity. For RWA and RWA exchanges, what needs to be solved is not "placing assets on-chain," but "institutionalizing responsibility, settlement, and default on-chain." Who can be the first to thoroughly write "responsibility, default, and settlement" into on-chain rules? The day that arrives, RWA will no longer be a narrative segment but will become the new foundational layer of institutional finance. And then, that will be the true upgrade and derivation.
The next phase of Web 3 is not an explosion point, but an entry point; not a traffic point, but an institutional point.
Web3 & AI
Tiger Research: How crypto giants are betting on AI Agent payment infrastructure
The subject of payments is shifting from humans to AI agents, making payment infrastructure a core requirement for achieving true autonomy.
Big tech companies (including Google AP2 and OpenAI Delegated Payment) are designing approval-based automated payment systems on top of existing platform infrastructures.
Currencies utilize the ERC-8004 and x402 standards to achieve a decentralized payment model based on NFT identity verification and smart contracts.
Big tech prioritizes convenience and consumer protection, while cryptocurrencies emphasize user sovereignty and broader agent-level execution capabilities.
The key future question will be: Are payments controlled by the platform or executed by open protocols?
Also recommended: A memo from 2028: AI will bring a sweeping super economic crisis to the world.
Weekly Hotspot Recap
In the past week, on February 26, BTC's strong V recovery is approaching the 70,000 mark;
Additionally, in terms of policies and macro markets, Trump's "peace committee" considers issuing Gaza stablecoins for the digital payment system; Trump signals de-escalation in U.S.-Iran relations: leaning more towards agreements than war; the White House confirms Trump will not pardon SBF; Trump calls for the immediate passage of the "Insider Trading Prevention Act", ensuring that Congress members cannot profit from insider information; U.S. senators pressure the CFTC to completely ban "death-related" prediction market contracts;
In terms of opinions and voices, Glassnode: Bitcoin entering the "excessive stop-loss" phase, if history repeats could drop to $44,000; Dragonfly: the crypto industry has not lost to AI, capital shifts are just normal market adjustments; WLFI: USD1 faced organized attacks, tokens still maintained a 1:1 peg; ZachXBT: on February 26 an investigation report related to insider trading by employees of a certain crypto company will be released, subsequently Polymarket will list related contracts; on-chain detective ZachXBT confirmed: Axiom employees used internal permissions for insider trading;
In terms of institutions, large companies and leading projects, market maker Jane Street is embroiled in market manipulation controversy; Morgan Stanley applies for a banking license, increasing digital asset custody and staking services; Meta plans to re-enter the stablecoin field (interpretation); Kraken launches cryptocurrency asset staking loan service "Flexline"; the Ethereum Foundation releases the "strawmap" roadmap, aiming to achieve second-level transactions and significantly improve throughput;
In terms of data, Circle's financial report: total revenue and reserve income grew by 64% to $2.7 billion; Circle's stock price reached $90 (financial report interpretation); analysis: Ethereum ETF assets under management have evaporated about 65% in four months;
In terms of safety, Caixin: 60,000 Bitcoin laundering case's Chinese victims need to provide financial details before June 18; South Korean National Tax Service lost $4.8 million assets due to leaking mnemonic phrases in a press release... Well, another tumultuous week.
Attached is the series portal to "Weekly Editor's Picks".
See you in the next issue~
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