RaaS #588: Gold Hits $5K!

MoonPay Partners with X Games, Mert Fights Adam Cochran, And Moar!

Tarek Mansour thanks & quotes NYT for featuring prediction markets, with traders making millions. Meanwhile, Polymarket traders pointed out how Tarek deleted the sub-heading, calling it the “era of the Polymarket sharp.”

$464M in token unlocks hit the market this week. Cliff unlocks include TREE (39.4%), SIGN (17.7%), and SAHARA (8.8%). RAIN, RIVER, and TRUMP lead linear unlocks. Watch for volatility as emissions pick up again.

Route 2 FI calls the WLFI campaign a "juicy farm" for idle stables. Binance's $40M WLFI drop for USD1 holders is attracting yield hunters with no deposit cap and boosted APRs. Awareness efforts are live via the World Liberty Forum.

Adam Cochran called out Mert’s post about politics, only to get clapped back with a “chonkmaster” insult that CT turned into a Solana token. What started as a spat became a meme, and exposed growing divides over political discourse on crypto Twitter.

Are prediction market alphas hard to come by?

ZachXBT reveals John Daghita (aka Lick) may have stolen $40M+ from U.S. government seizure wallets, potentially via access through his father’s firm, CMDSS, which held an active contract with USMS to manage forfeited crypto. CMDSS has since scrubbed its online presence.

Yen jumped 1.6% after the NY Fed conducted rate checks, a rare signal of possible joint intervention with Japan. If confirmed, it would be the first coordinated FX action since 1998. Crypto could see short-term volatility but long-term tailwinds from a weaker dollar.

Japan plans to approve its first crypto ETFs by 2028, joining Hong Kong and South Korea in replicating U.S. ETF success. Nomura and SBI are expected to lead listings. Alongside ETF adoption, all three regions are also advancing regulated stablecoin frameworks.

Your daily dose of bite-sized crypto news.

1. US Bitcoin ETFs bleed $1.72B in five-day outflow streak.

2. ETHZilla has bought two jet engines for $12.2M via a new subsidiary after selling $114M in ETH holdings.

3. Gold’s market cap officially hits a record $35 trillion as it crosses the $5k mark.

4. The Nifty Gateway platform will be closing on February 23, 2026.

5. The Base to MegaETH gas bridge is now live in one-way test mode to stress-test the system.

Clawdbot is going viral as crypto-native founders spin it into agents with wallets, trading rights, and even GitHub commits. It runs locally and sets up in minutes, no-code. The catch? No guardrails. It’s powerful, fast, and unregulated.

Ethereum Foundation goes all-in on post-quantum (PQ) security with a new dedicated team, $2M+ in open cryptography bounties, multi-client devnets, and bi-weekly ACD breakouts. Full PQ transition now a top priority, without downtime or lost funds.

Action sports enters its next era. The MoonPay X Games League launches March 12 with a global Summer Draft. Four cities. One league. First-ever XGL title on the line.

Is this a good token?

Top Gainers: GXC, BTR, RIVER, AUCTION, SURGE.

High-signal reads are worth your time, all in one place.

1. Resupply modernizes CDPs by letting users borrow against stable, yield-bearing assets like crvUSD, preserving yield, minimizing liquidations, and earning layered rewards. Backed by Convex and Yearn, it reflects DeFi’s shift toward capital efficiency and real revenue.

2. Hyperliquid is evolving into crypto’s everything exchange, hosting $1B+ daily volume across HIP-3 markets with zero incentives. With 99% of revenue fueling HYPE buybacks, native stablecoins like USDH gaining traction, and a 43% community reserve still untouched, a second major airdrop feels inevitable.

3. Stablecoin issuers aren’t interchangeable. Stablecoin outcomes depend on compliance, liquidity, UX, and rails. Enterprises prioritize credibility and custody, fintechs optimize for speed and UX, and DeFi demands programmability. Issuers are competing not on token deployment, but on everything around it.

4. Crypto’s post-quantum future isn’t as urgent as it seems. While encrypted messages risk harvest-now-decrypt-later attacks, blockchain signatures and SNARKs remain largely unaffected, for now. The bigger threat? Rushed upgrades and buggy implementations.

5. What happens when the network is the medium? In this essay, Natalie Stone unpacks Ethereum’s role not just as storage or subject, but as substrate. From net(dot)art to Larva Labs, she traces how network consensus becomes artistic material, and why this changes everything about authorship, permanence, and value.

PeckShield flagged a $16.8M exploit tied to Matcha Meta’s SwapNet, citing an “arbitrary call” bug in the aggregator contract. Only users who bypassed One-Time Approval were exposed. Exploiters bridged 3.6K ETH after swapping $10.5M USDC on Base.

Vitalik revisits a 2017 tweet calling full node validation a “weird mountain man fantasy.” With ZK tech now mainstream, he argues self-sovereign fallback options, like personal validation, are no longer impractical luxuries, but essential guarantees for a resilient chain.

That’s all for today!