As markets dwelled over the past four months, foundational primitives emerged quietly, including x402, an HTTP-native standard for internet-native payments, and ERC-8004, an open standard for onchain agent identity, reputation, and verification.

An explosion in demand for tools like OpenClaw, an open-source autonomous agent with persistent memory and execution access, demonstrated that agents can coordinate, deploy code, and operate continuously, revealing both demand for agent activity and the limits of existing coordination models.

Agent-native economies are now possible as payments and trust become machine-native. x402 allows agents to request, price, and settle services programmatically, while ERC-8004 provides persistent identity, reputation, and execution validation, enabling agents to discover and transact with one another without centralized intermediaries.

ERC-8004 enables the discovery of agents that consistently execute by recording performance history and verification outcomes to their reputation registry. Unreliable agents are filtered out through repeated task non-selection rather than governance enforcement.

Clawd.atg.eth shows what productive agents look like in practice. As an OpenClaw-based autonomous builder, Clawd.atg.eth deploys applications, manages capital, and delivers services to other agents, demonstrating how execution-driven agents can compound reputation, usage, and economic relevance as agent-native markets form.

Pyth’s average daily price updates increased 31.4% QoQ from 675,100 in Q3 to 886,700 in Q4. Cumulative price updates reached 907.1 million at the end of Q4, up 10.3% QoQ from 822.0 million.

In Q4, Pyth’s total value secured (TVS) decreased 32.1% QoQ from $6.2 billion at Q3-end to $4.2 billion at Q4-end, in line with TVS declines across all major oracle networks in Q4.

Pyth price feed listings increased 27.0% QoQ to 2,850 at Q4-end from 2,250 at Q3-end, contributed in part by the Oct. 13 partnership with Kalshi to publish prediction market data onchain.

On Sept. 24, Pyth launched Pyth Pro, a data service for institutions that provides 1ms updates across all Pyth price feeds. The service generated $352,600 in Q4 revenue.

On Dec. 12, Pyth introduced the Pyth Reserve, a token buyback initiative to allocate 33% of monthly protocol revenue to open-market PYTH purchases, and on Jan. 5, the DAO executed its first purchase, acquiring 2,157,100 PYTH.

Sei experienced a sharp reset in DeFi activity in Q4 2025 as TVL (USD) fell 63.5% QoQ to $157.2 million alongside a 33.4% QoQ decline in stablecoin supply, reflecting broader DeFi deleveraging during the quarter.

DeFi drawdowns were concentrated in lending and driven by Yei Finance and Takara Lend. Together, they accounted for 76.1% of the quarterly loss in TVL, highlighting how Sei’s TVL concentration amplified the impact of withdrawals.

Network activity remained an area of strength for Sei, growing for a 6th straight quarter. Average daily active addresses (DAAs) increased 492.2% YoY to 1 million, and average daily transactions made by active addresses rose 598.7% QoQ to 2.3 million.

Trading infrastructure continued to expand despite DEX volume declining 33.9% QoQ. Average daily DEX volume (USD) declined to $28.8 million, but DragonSwap retained AMM dominance, and Oxium launched onchain perpetuals in November.

Liquid staking consolidated as Silo Stake exited the market. Splashing Stake ended the quarter with a 95.1% share of Sei’s liquid staking TVL following Silo's shutdown as iSEI tokenholders withdrew the SEI from the protocol.