Circle's Acquisition Sparks Coin Equity Dispute, Predicted Market Upgrade Acceleration, What's the Overseas Crypto Community Talking About Today?

Publication Date: December 16, 2025

Author: BlockBeats Editorial Team

Over the past 24 hours, the crypto market has witnessed a variety of dynamics ranging from macroeconomic discussions to specific ecosystem developments. The main topics have focused on the token vs. equity dispute triggered by mergers and acquisitions, as well as discussions on the evolution of the prediction market towards specialized trading tools. Regarding ecosystem development, the Solana ecosystem continues to expand around prediction markets and cross-chain infrastructure, Ethereum is advancing its positioning between institutional adoption and protocol upgrades, and the Perp DEX track is further aligning with institutional-grade financial infrastructure.

1. Main Topics

1. Circle Merges with Axelar Network Team, Abandons AXL Token Triggering Coin-Equity Debate

Circle announced the acquisition of the Interop Labs team (the original developers of Axelar Network) to accelerate the development of its multi-chain infrastructure Arc and CCTP. However, it explicitly stated that the Axelar Network, foundation, and AXL token will continue to operate independently, and its development work will be taken over by CommonPrefix. The core of this transaction lies in the "team merging with Circle" to drive the application of USDC in the fields of privacy computing and compliant payments, rather than the overall acquisition of the Axelar Network or its token system.

This arrangement quickly sparked a heated debate in the community about "token vs. equity." Several investors questioned that by acquiring the team and intellectual property, Circle effectively obtained core assets but bypassed the rights of AXL token holders. Some community members pointed out that Circle had a very tough stance toward AXL investors during the negotiation process, further intensifying dissatisfaction.

About this event, there are clearly divergent community views. A more calm perspective views this as a structural reality that has long existed in the crypto industry: tokens are at the lowest level of the capital structure and are naturally at a disadvantage in mergers or restructurings, similar to the situation of equity in bankruptcies for traditional companies. Another camp strongly condemns Circle's behavior as "predatory," believing that this model systematically erodes token holders' trust and calling for more explicit rights protection for holders through tokenized equity or legal and governance tools (such as MetaDAO, LaunchOnSoar, and other solutions).

This event once again highlights a core pain point in the cryptocurrency industry's mergers and acquisitions, and may also accelerate discussions at the market and regulatory levels regarding the legal status of tokenized equity, impacting investors' risk perception of similar protocol-based projects.

2. Kalshi Launches Combo Orders Feature, Predicting Market Professionalization

Prediction market platform Kalshi has officially rolled out the Combo Orders feature to all users, allowing traders to place orders for multiple related contracts, achieving price optimization similar to traditional financial options combinations or arbitrage strategies.

Kalshi disclosed that the feature's volume exceeded $100 million within a week of the testing phase, driving approximately a 50% increase in its November app user base. Yesterday, the platform set a new record with a total trading volume of $340 million. Unlike traditional gambling or centralized matching, the Combos mechanism does not rely on a house price but forms quotes through open market competition, aiming to reduce retail trading costs and enhance overall liquidity.

The community's overall response has been mostly positive, with many users seeing it as a significant milestone in the evolution of prediction markets from "single-event betting" to professional trading tools, even calling it an industry-first innovation. However, some cautious voices have pointed out that the mechanism bears similarities to parlays in sports betting, expressing concerns that in cases of insufficient liquidity or price distortions, it may lead to execution deviations or manipulation risks. They call on Kalshi to further strengthen transparency and risk control mechanisms.

Overall, the Combos feature is expected to further narrow the gap between prediction markets and TradFi, attracting more professional traders and institutions to participate, but its operational effectiveness still heavily depends on market-making depth.

3. Successive Departures of Paradigm Members Spark Discussion on the Crypto VC Cycle

Renowned crypto investment firm Paradigm has recently seen multiple senior personnel changes. Its GTM lead, Nick Martitsch, announced his departure, concluding a three-year term and highly praising Paradigm's engineering and research-driven culture in his farewell post, while also completing the handover arrangements. Previously, partner Charlie Noyes had stepped down from his GP position but retained his role as a board observer at Kalshi.

The community's overall feedback has been predominantly positive, with many industry founders acknowledging Paradigm's historical achievements. For example, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong bluntly stated that it has been a "huge success." At the same time, some slightly ironic comments have emerged, likening Paradigm to "a lone island warrior holding the line after World War II," suggesting that it may face adaptation pressures in the AI wave and new market structures.

These departures did not release a clear negative signal, but against the backdrop of the current overall pressure on the crypto VC industry, they are still seen by some market participants as an acceleration of industry liquidity and talent flow. It may also foreshadow Paradigm's strategic focus adjustment, such as placing more emphasis on the intersection of AI and crypto.

4. pump.fun did not host a side event at Breakpoint, criticized by the community

During the Solana annual event Breakpoint, the popular meme coin launch platform pump.fun did not hold any side event, despite the platform's cumulative revenue nearing $20 billion. This choice sparked widespread criticism within the community.

Some Solana community members criticized pump.fun as "stingy and arrogant," believing that the platform only needed to allocate a tiny proportion of its revenue to hold a symbolic event to give back to the ecosystem but chose to be completely absent, exposing a typical cultural rift between "value-extracting" projects and the developer community. Some strongly worded comments even described its founder as having a "nouveau riche mentality," overlooking the community spirit emphasized by Web3.

A small number of voices also defended pump.fun, stating that its focus on product and cash flow itself was understandable, but the overall sentiment was still notably negative. Many people viewed this incident as one of the inevitable frictions in Solana's ecosystem transition from a highly degenerate state to a focus on practicality and long-term development.

5. Sam Altman publicly responds to Worldcoin, sparking a new round of attention

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman rarely publicly responded to a post from the Worldcoin team, expressing excitement about the progress of World Chain's support for multiple currencies, describing it as a feature he had "long awaited." This statement quickly sparked discussion within the community.

Subsequently, Fundstrat CIO Tom Lee took the opportunity to reiterate that Worldcoin has the "strongest current human verification technology" and sees $WLD as a strategically significant crypto project in the AI era, emphasizing the importance of human verification in the context of the proliferation of generative AI.

Altman's public endorsement was interpreted by many market participants as a bullish signal, further strengthening Worldcoin's core position in the AI x Crypto narrative. However, the discussion also raised questions about $WLD token inflation, price performance, as well as regulatory and privacy controversies.

Overall, this interaction has once again pushed Worldcoin back into the spotlight, potentially attracting more institutional attention. However, its long-term development still needs to strike a balance between technology, ethics, and regulation.

II. Mainstream Ecosystem Trends

1. Solana Ecosystem: Prediction Markets and Cross-Chain Infrastructure Advancements

The Solana ecosystem continues to advance in terms of financial products. Leveraged prediction market platform Space announced the completion of a $3 million seed round and strategic round funding led by Morningstar Ventures, Arctic Digital, and Impossible Finance, among other institutions. The project plans to launch the first prediction market with leverage of up to 10x on Solana, aiming to enhance the capital efficiency and trading appeal of prediction markets through the introduction of leverage.

With its core narrative of "truth about to become tradable," the Space community has overall provided positive feedback, with many participants seeing it as a practical extension of Solana in the prediction market space. However, some voices have cautioned that introducing leverage in the inherently volatile prediction market may amplify risk exposure, necessitating higher requirements for risk management and liquidation mechanisms.

Meanwhile, cross-chain liquidity aggregation protocol LI.FI announced the completion of a $29 million Series A extension financing round led by Multicoin Capital and CoinFund, bringing its total funding to $52 million. LI.FI stated that this funding will be used to advance its long-term vision of a "universal digital asset market." Currently, the protocol has processed approximately $60 billion in transaction volume and established integrations with over 1,000 B2B partners.

The community and developers have shown an overall optimistic attitude towards this financing, viewing it as a significant signal of maturity for cross-chain infrastructure. However, some users have questioned when its token or incentive mechanism will be implemented to ensure that the community receives clear rewards as the protocol expands. This development further underlines Solana's potential appeal in terms of multi-chain interoperability and infrastructure.

2. Ethereum Ecosystem: Institutional Entry and Parallel Protocol Upgrades

The Ethereum ecosystem has seen significant progress in institutional adoption and underlying protocol upgrades.

JPMorgan Chase announced the launch of its first tokenized money market fund, MONY, on Ethereum, with $100 million in proprietary capital as seed funding, set to open to external investors on Tuesday. As one of the world's largest banks by market capitalization, this move is widely regarded as a landmark case of further integration between traditional finance and blockchain. The community has generally responded positively, believing that this will strengthen Ethereum's position as institutional-grade financial infrastructure, although discussions are still accompanied by concerns about market volatility, the macro environment, and ETH price correlations.

At the protocol level, Ethereum has confirmed that the next major upgrade, Glamsterdam, will be implemented in 2026. This upgrade plan introduces enshrined proposer-builder separation (ePBS) and block-level access lists to enhance network scalability and execution efficiency. ePBS aims to achieve near 100% slot utilization by separating consensus blocks from the execution payload and providing support for larger-scale Blob extensions on L1; block-level access lists aim to reduce the Gas cost for state-intensive applications, making the fee structure more predictable.

The upgrade goals include higher throughput, lower fees, and adjusting the minimum transaction inclusion time from "instant" to around 2 seconds. The community has been involved in EIP priority discussions and developer meetings related to the design, but this upgrade still requires client teams (such as Geth, Besu) to make corresponding adaptations. Overall, Glamsterdam is seen as a key milestone to improve user experience and further optimize L2 and DeFi applications.

Furthermore, the Ethereum payment L2 closed-loop stablecoin network Colossus Pay, developed by the former CTO of SushiSwap, has officially launched. The project attempts to directly convert the encrypted signature generated during the EMV credit card swiping process into an Ethereum private key, enabling every card swipe to generate a valid ERC-4337 transaction signature, thereby transforming traditional credit cards into on-chain wallets.

Colossus Pay emphasizes non-custodial settlement, a pre-confirmation time of about 100 milliseconds, and a 92%-96% fee reduction. It claims to comply with the "KYC-Free Minting" compliance framework under the GENIUS Act. Currently, it is supported by issuers such as Frax Finance, Solayer Labs, and Kraken. Community feedback is mixed: supporters see it as a "Visa 2.0" style payment model that could potentially bypass traditional banking infrastructure, while skeptics point out that many current crypto neo-banks are still in the Web2 repackaging stage, lacking a truly irreplaceable advantage.

3. Perp DEX Track: Evolving Towards Institutional-Grade Infrastructure

The perpetual contract and trading infrastructure race continues. Polychain-backed neo-brokerage platform Cascade has launched its first 24/7 perpetual market, supporting trading of cryptocurrency assets, stocks, and private placement assets, and facilitating USD deposits and withdrawals through a unified account. The platform emphasizes the capital efficiency of perpetual contracts, receiving a warm community response. Many users see it as a new trading structure with "no whale intervention," but remain cautious about its reliance on liquidity providers and potential manipulation risks.

Within the Hyperliquid ecosystem, the trading activity of renowned trader 0xRay has garnered widespread attention. In a short period, 0xRay sold his entire approximately 303,000 HYPE spot holdings (around $8.4 million) at an average price of $27.689, resulting in a roughly 6% loss; subsequently, he opened and closed a short position of around 204,000 HYPE and withdrew all funds from the platform. This behavior briefly exerted approximately 4.5% downward pressure on the market price, eliciting mixed reactions from the community, with some calling it a "genius move" and others seeing it as a real-world example of whale behavior impacting Perp DEX liquidity.

On a more macro level, there have been rumors in the market about Nasdaq planning to extend stock trading hours to 23 hours on weekdays. Although there is no official confirmation yet, this news has sparked discussions in the community. Many crypto professionals interpret this as a sign of TradFi moving closer to a 24/7 trading model, while some are concerned about the potential trading fatigue and regulatory risks it may bring.

Furthermore, the Hyperliquid ETF is believed to potentially launch by year-end. Bitwise has filed an amended document disclosing a 67bps management fee and the BHYP ticker, which is typically seen as a signal of an imminent product launch. The overall community sentiment is generally optimistic, but there is still disagreement on the long-term impact of the ETF on the HYPE price.

On the product front, Hyperliquid has also announced the HIP-3 exchange deployment scheme, working in conjunction with its Portfolio Margin mechanism, aiming to build an algorithmic clearing and hedging system akin to traditional hedge fund prime brokerages. Supporters view this as the "DeFi Holy Grail" for addressing risk netting and capital efficiency issues, believing it could drive Perp DEX from a single exchange to a more broad financial infrastructure.