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Bitcoin Mining Slows - U.S. Bitcoin mining activity slowed this week due to a major winter storm straining power grids across central and eastern regions.
Bitcoin Decline Continues - BTC faces the risk of its fourth consecutive monthly loss, a streak not observed since 2018.
ZeroHash Unicorn Status - Blockchain infrastructure firm Zerohash is currently in discussions to raise $250 million at a $1.5 billion valuation.
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Messari's protocol reports give you a deep dive on the foundation and state of top crypto protocols, including key metrics and notable events. See the complete list of protocol reports here and get a preview of our latest report below.
RUNE-denominated TVL increased 22.6% QoQ to 81.6M RUNE, even as RUNE’s price fell 51.1%. This divergence indicates that existing liquidity providers continued to add or maintain positions, despite adverse market conditions.
Total swap volume declined 10.3% QoQ to $4.06B, extending the correction following the Q1 spike caused by the exploit of Bybit, but average daily unique swappers increased 23.6% to 1.6K. This means that while trade sizes fell, the number of users interacting with THORChain continued to grow.
Protocol revenue rose 39.0% QoQ to $5.0M despite declining swap volume, reflecting improved fee capture efficiency. As a result, THORChain exited Q4 with a compressed trailing P/E ratio of 9.8, down from 11.2, driven primarily by lower market capitalization rather than weakening fundamentals.
Affiliate revenue fell 35.1% QoQ to $2.7M even as affiliate swap volume increased 12.2%, indicating that integrators likely reduced fee rates to remain competitive.
The beta release of THORChain’s swap interface established an official direct user-facing entry point for the protocol for the first time.
Rujira launched RUJI Lending, a money market with CDP loans, allowing users to borrow against native BTC in a fully decentralized manner.
Fluid has scaled into a top-tier DeFi protocol, reaching $5.10 billion in total market size across chains, including $1.6 billion via Jupiter Lend on Solana, firmly placing it among the largest crosschain lending platforms.
Fluid ranks 3rd in active loans when accounting for Jupiter Lend, with $2.12 billion borrowed, signaling strong product-market fit and sustained borrowing demand rather than passive deposits driven by incentives.
Fluid DEX finished 2025 as the second-largest DEX on Ethereum by trading volume, processing $156.45 billion in volume during the year, validating its Smart Collateral and Smart Debt model as a scalable alternative to traditional AMMs.
The introduction of the Fluid Reserve in October 2025 marked a transition toward long-term sustainability, with protocol revenue funding onchain FLUID buybacks to support governance, alignment, and resilience as the protocol matures.
The upcoming launch of Fluid DEX V2 represents a structural evolution from a single DEX into a general-purpose liquidity engine, enabling multiple AMM designs, range-based strategies, and permissionless expansion without fragmenting liquidity.
Wormhole connects over 40 blockchains and has processed more than $70 billion in cumulative cross-chain volume and one billion cross-chain messages, making it one of the most widely used interoperability protocols in crypto.
Wormhole’s NTT (Native Token Transfers) standard aims to replace fragmented wrapped assets with canonical multichain representations, consolidating liquidity, preserving issuer control, and simplifying risk management.
NTT is already in production across multiple deployments, including Ripple’s RLUSD rollout, Dogecoin’s canonical DOGE implementation, M0’s multichain M token, and Monad’s native bridge.
Wormhole Portal has evolved from a standalone bridge interface into a multichain gateway, integrating cross-chain swaps via Mayan.
Institutional adoption spans tokenization and real-world asset platforms (e.g., BlackRock, Ripple, Apollo, Hamilton Lane, Mercado Bitcoin, Centrifuge, Securitize), which use Wormhole for cross-chain distribution of tokenized funds, tokenized private credit, and stablecoins.
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"Q-day", the hypothetical moment a Cryptographically Relevant Quantum Computer (CRQC) can crack legacy encryption, has become a persistent bogeyman for the crypto community. With Bitcoin showing relative weakness against Gold and Equities, a narrative has emerged that investors are front-running the existential risks posed by breakthroughs in quantum computing.
While it is true that Bitcoin’s "ossified" nature and infrequent upgrades present unique long-term technical challenges when transitioning to post-quantum cryptography, the data suggests that the "Quantum Threat" narrative is currently nothing more than a ghost story in the eyes of the market.
Testing the Correlation
To determine if the market truly views quantum progress as a "Bitcoin Killer," we must look at how these assets interact. If quantum computing were perceived as an existential threat, we would expect to see a negative correlation between Bitcoin and a basket of quantum stocks.
We tested this by analyzing Bitcoin’s price action against a basket of seven prominent quantum-linked equities, such as IBM, IONQ, and RGTI. The results were the exact opposite of what the "Quantum Threat" narrative suggests.
Over the last 264 trading days, the correlation between BTC and the quantum computing industry actually grew stronger. In 245 rolling 20-day windows, that positive correlation held firm 95.5% of the time.
The Reality is in the Regression
A deeper dive into the daily returns reinforces this disconnect. If the market were hedging against a quantum breakthrough, a linear regression of Bitcoin’s returns against our quantum basket would show a downward-sloping trendline. Instead, the data reveals a clear positive slope.
With a correlation coefficient of 0.399, the data indicates that when quantum stocks rally, Bitcoin generally follows suit. Concerned investors and traders would be "Long Quantum / Short BTC" as a pair trade.
The distribution is wide but weak
To understand how much the quantum sector actually influences Bitcoin, we have to look beyond simple correlation and examine the "R-squared" value. While correlation (r) tells us the direction of a relationship, R-squared tells us how much of Bitcoin's price action is actually caused by the performance of quantum stocks.
By squaring our correlation coefficient (0.399²), we arrive at an R-squared of approximately 0.159. This means that quantum computing stocks only account for 15.9% of Bitcoin’s price variance. For a narrative that is supposedly an "existential threat," this is a remarkably weak connection. It suggests that 84% of Bitcoin's price action is being driven by factors that have nothing to do with quantum computing.
The distribution of these correlations shows wide dispersion, ranging from -0.15 to 0.75, with frequent "decoupling" periods in which the correlation hovers near zero. If investors were truly dumping Bitcoin because they were scared of quantum computers, that relationship would be steady, predictable, and negative. Instead, it's messy and inconsistent.
The real driver of BTC’s weakness
If quantum computing isn't the culprit, what is? By analyzing the combined volume of Whale transfer to exchanges and Digital Asset Treasury (DAT) flows, we can see exactly where the pressure came from.
The current market weakness is a function of a massive pivot in institutional positioning following the crash and volatility of October 10. Since then, whales and DATs have sold an average of $15.0 billion in BTC per day. In the 100 days leading up to the October crash, whales and DATs accumulated an average $19.3 billion BTC per day. This proves that Bitcoin’s current weakness is driven by whale sell pressure and institutional capital de-risking following the volatility of the crash, not a long-term hedge against a CRQC.
Quantum computing remains a genuine technical challenge for the coming decade, and the transition to post-quantum cryptography will be a significant undertaking for any decentralized blockchain. But attempting to blame Bitcoin’s current price weakness on quantum risk is a classic case of post-hoc rationalization.
