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

Over the past 24 hours, the crypto market has witnessed a simultaneous surge in both public debate and ecosystem developments. Mainstream topics have focused on the trust crisis surrounding Farcaster's founders triggered by the shutdown, and the skepticism surrounding Polymarket's credibility due to frequent fake news posts on Official Twitter account. Regarding ecosystem development, Solana strengthened its RWA narrative through tokenized trading during the BitGo IPO; discussions on Ethereum's MegaETH stress test and Vitalik Buterin's privacy and autonomy initiatives intensified; and Perp DEX accelerated its internal competition in the expansion of its index and RWA perpetual products.

I. Mainstream Topics

Farcaster's "shutdown" controversy: Acquisition, founder's departure, and rug-related allegations coexist.

Farcaster was not completely shut down, but was instead acquired by the startup Neynar. Neynar plans to shift it towards a more developer-centric product path. Meanwhile, founders Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan announced their departure from day-to-day management to focus on new projects; Farcaster's parent company, Merkle, plans to return the $180 million it had previously raised to investors in full.

In response to the controversy, Dan publicly clarified that the funds for his luxury mansion purchase came from the proceeds of the Coinbase IPO, not from the misappropriation of Farcaster project funds. However, some reports also indicate that Dan may have sold approximately $40 million worth of shares on the secondary market before the project failed, raising accusations of "rug cashing out."

The community is clearly divided on this issue. Some call Dan a "serial fraudster," arguing that he used VC funding to achieve a meteoric rise in wealth while leaving employees and investors to suffer losses, and mocking his resume for plummeting from "unicorn" to "zero." Others (such as Haseeb, Brian Armstrong, Regan Bozman, foobar, and Linda Xie) defend him, arguing that secondary market sales are legal, and that the Farcaster team operated with restraint, did not issue "meaningless tokens," and consistently sought genuine product-market fit (PMF), making them a "relatively responsible shutdown case" in the crypto industry.

Some view the controversy over a longer timeframe. Laura Shin believes that decentralized social networking is still in its early stages and will not truly be viable until at least 5-10 years later with the widespread adoption of wallets and stablecoins. 0xngmi and Marc Zeller point out that Farcaster and Lens almost simultaneously stalled, reflecting a long-term lack of traction for crypto social products, and users may still be trapped in the inertia of Crypto Twitter (CT).

2. Polymarket 'Official Twitter account frequently posts "fake breaking news," raising questions about the platform's credibility.

Polymarket's official account has recently been posting numerous misleading "breaking news" messages, such as misrepresenting Elon Musk's entrepreneurial advice as "suggestions for working at McDonald's or Palantir," or spreading unverified information without proper source to entice users to participate in prediction market betting. Similar tactics have also been alleged to have appeared on the social media accounts of its competitor, Kalshi.

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

The more pointed irony lies in the fact that Polymarket has always positioned itself as a "truth oracle," but its fake news-style dissemination strategy makes this identity seem contradictory. The general consensus is that this approach may gain clicks and exposure in the short term, but it will continuously erode trust and ultimately affect the platform's long-term image as a reliable prediction market.

3. BitGO's IPO on the NYSE: Crypto Infrastructure Further Enters the Mainstream Market

Digital asset custody company BitGO has officially completed its IPO on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), with the stock code $BTGO. The company emphasized its capabilities in security, processing efficiency, and scalability, which the market views as a significant milestone in the integration of crypto infrastructure into the traditional financial system.

The community's overall reaction has been positive, viewing it as a crucial step towards "public marketization" for the industry. The NYSE and Justin Sun, among others, have publicly congratulated the move, emphasizing that crypto assets are entering a broader financial arena. Vijay Boyapati also praised the BitGO team for advancing the infrastructure of the digital asset industry. Some opinions (such as Lázaro's) suggest that this move will further enhance the compliance and credibility of BTC-Fi and asset custody services, allowing Bitcoin to evolve from a "passively held asset" to a "yield-generating financial product."

The overall discussion focused on the trend of integration between the crypto industry and traditional capital markets, with the market expecting more infrastructure companies to go public in the future, thereby increasing transparency and institutional trust.

4. Widespread shutdown of Berachain ecosystem accounts: The fall from "cult-like narrative" to silence

Recently, several key accounts within the Berachain ecosystem have experienced large-scale shutdowns or bans by Twitter, including those related to The Honey Jar project, some NFT protocol accounts, and numerous personal accounts. A year ago, Berachain was still considered "the next top-tier blockchain," and its ecosystem emphasized building a highly cohesive "cult-like community," but now its overall popularity and activity have almost disappeared.

Community feedback has been predominantly negative. Beacon criticized the ecosystem for having "many yaps but few builds," going from a vibrant hub to a hollow one. Smokey The Bera explained that the partial shutdowns might be related to the mass bans on X (reportedly related to risk control measures triggered by the Milady conflict), and emphasized that GitHub and Discord are still operational. DracoVelli pointed out that Jani did indeed build projects like Honeycombs and Apiology DAO and profit from them, but issues such as token distribution led to a continuous loss of users, with profit-seeking users gradually migrating to other chains to seek opportunities.

Many voices view it as a typical case of "over-narrative and under-delivery." Chivas and BakingBenjamins satirized its collaboration with suspected fraudsters, which ultimately led to its collapse. The overall consensus is that the lesson of Berachain is that ecosystem building cannot be supported by hype and slogans; it must ultimately return to real delivery and long-term product capabilities.

II. Mainstream Ecosystem Dynamics

1. Solana: RWA's on-chain implementation accelerates, further strengthening the narrative of the "Internet capital market".

Following BitGo's successful IPO on the NYSE on [date missing], Ondo Finance immediately launched BTGON, a real-time tokenized version of BitGo shares, on Solana. Users can directly trade these tokenized shares on platforms like Jupiter Exchange, enabling global wallet users to participate in the IPO investment without intermediaries. This move is seen as a significant step in Solana's vision of building an "internet capital market"—BitGo provides institutional-grade custody and security, while Solana offers high-performance on-chain trading and liquidity capabilities.

Community sentiment is clearly high, with many believing that the combination of BitGo + Ondo + Solana accelerates the migration of RWA (Real-World Assets) and traditional finance (TradFi) to on-chain. Discussions focus on the low-friction path of "buying IPO shares with wallets anywhere," and Solana's rising position in institutional adoption, payments, and capital market infrastructure.

Meanwhile, Solstice staking officially launched, offering both native staking and liquidity staking options, with a current APY of approximately 5.87%. It also plans to launch the Ambassador project for content creators. The community generally views this as a sign of a more complete ecosystem toolchain, especially with creators responding positively to the Ambassador opportunity, resulting in an overall optimistic atmosphere.

2. Ethereum: Performance narratives, privacy autonomy, and AI infrastructure are all gaining momentum.

The heated discussions within the Ethereum ecosystem primarily stem from a high-intensity "performance demonstration." MegaETH launched a global stress test, achieving approximately 16k TPS, and plans to complete 11 billion transactions within a week (described as a rapid "replay" of the total historical transaction volume of the entire EVM chain). Within just six hours of the test's launch, the cumulative transaction volume had already surpassed the combined historical totals of Hyperliquid and Polkadot, revealing the immense potential for high-throughput real-time applications.

Meanwhile, Vitalik Buterin also spoke out on X, calling 2026 "the year of reclaiming computational autonomy." He emphasized the need to support open-source encrypted document tools (such as Fileverse), privacy communication tools (such as Signal and Simplex), and decentralized social media, and proposed the necessity of exploring native LLMs to reduce the risk of data breaches.

On the developer side, several advancements in "AI + Blockchain" infrastructure were also discussed:
Coinbase released the Python x402 v2 SDK, emphasizing that it incorporated TypeScript/Go development experience during the refactoring process to facilitate AI-powered agent payments, tool building, and system integration.
The ERC-8004 ecosystem map is updated in real time, covering infrastructure, agent orchestration, frameworks, AgentFi, developer tools, identity, marketplace, storage and data, involving projects such as Phala, Virtuals, Cod3x, ENS, and Pinata, with the goal of systematically assembling a "trustless AI agent" ecosystem.
In addition, two noteworthy on-chain signals emerged for Ethereum: transaction fees hit an all-time low, while contract deployments reached a record high; EthResearch also proposed a unified SlowBlock metric for client benchmarking and network health monitoring.

Community sentiment has clearly shifted from skepticism to excitement. MegaETH has been exaggeratedly touted as the "savior of crypto," with some comparing it to Polkadot and other similar projects, but overall, it's seen as a positive sign of Ethereum's ecosystem revival. Vitalik's post sparked discussions about privacy and autonomy, with some users using the opportunity to criticize Ethereum's slow progress in AI; while the x402 SDK and ERC-8004 are seen by developers as a roadmap for practical applications. The combination of low fees and high deployment volume is also interpreted as a "return to building activity after the pricing mechanism was fixed," with the market narrative gradually shifting from a "dead chain" to "restarting."

3. Perp DEX: Indexing and RWA are gaining momentum, intensifying professional competition.

The focus in the perpetual contract sector is shifting from "coin-based involution" to "TradFi assets and indexation," with typical examples including:
Lighter.xyz has launched new assets, adding ETF perpetual contracts with the numbers $SPY and $QQQ, supporting leverage up to 20x. The platform is based on Ethereum L2 and uses custom ZK circuits to achieve verifiable matching and settlement with lower cost and latency.

The feasibility of RWA Perps has become a focal point of discussion. The community generally believes that if we want to dominate real-world price discovery, the core competition is not in the "DEX narrative," but in whether we can support an ultra-low latency and high-frequency market-making environment. At the same time, there is also discussion about unmanaged Spot/Perps/RWA execution infrastructure, such as Agent3's upcoming launch.

Other related developments include the launch of perpetual products for the SENT token on multiple platforms, which has sparked discussions in the market about short-term fluctuations in leveraged trading and funding rates.

The community generally views Lighter's expansion positively, particularly anticipating its coverage of more asset classes (such as emerging market indices) and support for a more complete delta-neutral strategy toolchain. Regarding RWA Perps, many believe this will become an arena closer to "institutional-grade price discovery," with some users optimistic that Lighter will achieve a balance between compliance and efficiency through the ZK mechanism, even envisioning its future introduction of more traditional market-making forces to compete for liquidity. The overall consensus is that the perps sector is expanding towards RWA and indexation, and Lighter is gaining more attention due to its differentiated path of "ZK + verifiable matching."

4. Other: Chainlink's acquisition of Atlas further elevates the DeFi value capture narrative.

Regarding on-chain infrastructure, FastLane Labs' Atlas protocol (an application-specific order flow auction mechanism) has been acquired by Chainlink and is planned to be integrated into Chainlink's SVR (Secure Value Retention) system, further expanding to more ecosystems such as Arbitrum and Base, to help DeFi protocols capture and retain on-chain value. FastLane Labs will continue to operate independently, while focusing on Monad's staking infrastructure, developer tools, and application execution software.

The community generally views the acquisition as a positive signal of an "upgraded value capture mechanism." Supporters believe that the inclusion of Atlas will bring stronger revenue capabilities and cross-chain coverage to SVR, while FastLane's continued focus on Monads is described as a "burning ship" approach, which helps strengthen network effects. Combined with Chainlink's narrative of "processing over $27 trillion in transactions," market expectations for the next stage of innovation in order flow auctions and MEV recapture are rising, and overall sentiment is positive.