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Alt Coins Jump - Bitcoin traded relatively unchanged on Wednesday despite a four-year low in the Dollar Index (DXY), which fell below a 2011 trendline.
Ripple Treasury - Ripple launched Ripple Treasury, a corporate treasury platform merging GTreasury's enterprise software with Ripple's blockchain infrastructure.
Markets Eye Fed - The U.S. dollar index fell to around 95.5, its weakest level in nearly four years, which analysts noted supported BTC’s rebound above $88,000.
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Key Insights
DePIN has matured from speculative experiments into real, revenue generating infrastructure businesses. The sector now represents roughly $10B in circulating market cap while generating an estimated $72M in FY25 onchain revenue, with leading networks trading at 10–25x revenue versus over 1,000x in the 2021 cycle.
Among leading DePINs with meaningful usage, revenues have begun to decouple from token price action. While much of the $10B DePIN sector declined in price in 2025, a small group of revenue generating networks continued to grow onchain revenues driven by utility rather than speculation.
Only a narrow set of paths remain viable for scaling DePINs globally and sustainably. In practice, DePINs must either adopt InfraFi, focus on capex light infrastructure with fast paybacks, or take advantage of speculative capital in bull markets.
InfraFi is emerging as a potential alternative financing model for crypto-based physical infrastructure. With over $175B in stablecoins outstanding, early InfraFi deployments suggest a new path to fund DePIN assets using yield seeking capital, though the model remains early and introduces new credit, duration, and regulatory risks.
Private capital continues to accumulate into DePIN despite depressed public valuations. DePIN startups raised approximately $1B in 2025, primarily at seed and Series A, indicating long term private market conviction even as the public token market prices in limited survival.
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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.
Livepeer is repositioning from decentralized video transcoding toward infrastructure optimized for real-time AI video, guided by the Cascade vision.
The shift builds on Livepeer’s core strengths, low-latency video pipelines, distributed GPU operators, and stake-coordinated execution, while expanding supported workloads to continuous AI inference on live video.
Daydream serves as a flagship product and design partner, translating the real-time AI video thesis into developer-facing workflows and early production demand.
Network economics reflect this transition, with ~3× YoY fee growth and over 70% of fees driven by AI inference rather than traditional transcoding.
The roadmap focuses on productizing real-time AI pipelines, improving tooling and performance benchmarks, and scaling use cases across avatars, agents, and interactive video.
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.
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