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Given the volatility we saw yesterday, I thought it might be a good time to do a mini temp check.

We saw bitcoin briefly drop below $90,000 on Monday, and this morning we’re back up over $96,000. 

The volatility seems like it’s here to stay, perhaps until Inauguration Day. ETH, shadowing bitcoin’s movements, also took a tumble before regaining momentum. 

And then there’s top AI agent coin AI16z, which is up 21% in the past 24 hours, having bounced after undergoing its own selloff. Ah, the diversity of crypto. There’s truly nothing like it. 

Bitcoin’s sudden drop didn’t…

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Fartcoin FARTCOIN/USD has emerged as the meme coin sector’s frontrunner, fueled by heightened social buzz, market activity and inflows into the meme coin.

What Happened:

CryptocurrencyPrice   Market Cap24-Hour Trend7-Day TrendFartcoin FARTCOIN/USD $1.11 $1.1 billion +46% -9.7%Dogecoin DOGE/USD $0.3493$51.6 billion +10%-9.6% Shiba Inu SHIB/USD $0.00002141$12.6 billion+6.2% -10.2% 

A savvy trader, identified by Spot On Chain data, made a significant move by swapping 789,000 Dogwifhat WIF/USD for 1.04 million Fartcoin, valued at $1.15 million.

This same trader, who previously gained $2.71 million in profits from early investments in Popcat POPCAT/USD and WIF,…

Read more on Benzinga

Transaction URL: https://etherscan.io/tx/0x6c72b19d207f3b144db73fc2bb6a8faf4f37537a90c7146ba3570ae37bcd289b

This is a segment from the Empire newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.

You’ve probably heard by now that ETH is a cursed asset. Doomed. 

Maybe you’ve read tweets that say Ethereum is destined to go the way of Intel — a stock that has collapsed in value by two-thirds over the past five years while competitors (Nvidia and AMD) have thrived by comparison.

It’s a take that only works if you focus solely on price and ignore how much activity persists on Ethereum and its surrounding web of layer-2s and layer-3s.

Ether has only gained 30% in the past year while its direct rival, SOL, has about doubled.

Even XRP has easily beaten ETH over the bull market to…

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Transaction URL: https://etherscan.io/tx/0xc3836c94365a87566ca8636a7022131a40596d053b97858af86568c572ed8e5b

Digital Asset staking has a problem.

Major institutional players increasingly want to participate, but most of today’s staking providers aren’t regulatory or enterprise-friendly. The status quo is infrastructure pieced together by small, sometimes inexperienced teams on centralized Big Tech clouds that are not tuned for digital assets – nor engineered to meet the regulatory compliance standards that major players like BlackRock demand. The traditional financial world has long-established standards for robust risk management strategies crucial to fulfilling institutional needs, and their service providers in the decentralized financial world must meet these requirements.

And…

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Transaction URL: https://etherscan.io/tx/0xe7bd1eed7e140a1ab02e3678d22b67ad851cd73a45b736c5316003660e15fa7f

Transaction URL: https://etherscan.io/tx/0xaf2d47f7e8dc18737aabf86abbb6dedecec12f04900017b5718419c25cae6db4