U.S. Justice dept has opened a criminal investigation into Fed Chair Jerome Powell.
Apparently, it's over a renovation project at the Fed's HQ. Powell says it's a personal attack meant to bully him into cutting rates.
Not trying to get political, but Mr. Powell's story sounds correct.
Pretty safe bet the next Fed Chair will just do whatever Trump wants.
It's a reminder for the market that USD can be printed to infinity by humans.
Bullish sound money. Bullish BTC.
Here's what we got today:
Open Money Stack. The big new initiative from Polygon.
B
Around the web. Railgun wallet alpha, Zama public auction, new perp dex from Kinetiq, Former New York Mayor rugs a memecoin, and more.
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Update
Open Money Stack: Is This Return of the $POL?
Source: Polygon.technology
Polygon has been doing quite well recently.
The $POL price is up 18.2% on the weekly chart. And it's up >45% on the biweekly. It has been getting some attention on crypto Twitter as well.
Metrics
Polygon Chain has around ~$3 billion in stablecoin supply. It's up 87.5% from December 8th.
It made ~$1.5 million in fees in the last week alone. It's the highest fees since December 2023.
Since September 2025, weekly transactions have been increasing consistently. Last week, the chain did 41.6M transactions.
The weekly stablecoin transaction volume on the chain has ranged ~$10B since September 2025.
These are very strong metrics.
To clarify, compared to industry leaders like Ethereum and Solana, Polygon is still a bit behind. But in 2026, Polygon has been trending in the right direction.
The recent X post from Sandeep, Polygon founder, clarified how $POL accrues value.
Transaction fees
Staking rewards
Interoperability fees
So the increasing activity on Polygon Chain (and AggLayer in the future) will be bullish for $POL.
Still, it's not enough to explain the buzz. It's better attributed to their new announcement.
Open Money Stack
Over the coming years, the infrastructure of money movement will change drastically. So there'll be intense competition for it. From TradFi's Canton Network to Stripe's Tempo, many big players are aiming for the spot.
"The Open Money Stack will be an open and integrated stack of services and technologies to instantly and reliably move money anywhere, and put it to work."
The following image is (sorta) the architecture of the Open Money Stack.
Source: @0xPolygon
It includes everything from offchain orchestration to onchain earning.
The goal of this stack is to remove all friction in money movements. It'll offer banks, fintechs, and other businesses the tools and solutions to move all money onchain.
It'll allow businesses to provide many financial services based on simple integrations.
This will add real-world utility for stablecoin (& other cryptos).
Until now, onchain money has had limited utility in the "real world. If you want to use it, you'd have to offramp the money and use it. This stack is looking to fix that. With this stack, you'll be able to use your crypto in real life without offramping it.
Right now, this is a vision. In the coming days, Polygon has promised initiatives that'll make it a reality. Those will include capabilities across payments, orchestration, compliance, and onchain money primitives.
Towards this vision, they'd already announced many partnerships like Revolut, Mastercard, Stripe, and SHIFT4. There'll be more.
This will make Polygon a regulated payments platform.
Fiat on/off ramps
Easy onboarding with wallet infra
~50k fiat-to-crypto locations in the U.S.
Regulated money movement in 48 states
1-click crypto transactions across multiple chains
Enterprise-ready API that'll allow web2 and web3 companies to offer crypto trading, custody, and on/off ramps.
The era of blockchains giving out grants and hoping for devs and users is over. Now, they're picking specific niches and building the products for them by themselves.
Yield farming is a great strategy for the current market.
But it can feel like a full-time job. Tracking best rates, calculating risk-reward, switching between protocols, approving countless transactions, paying high gas fees, and more.
Is there a better way?
Enter Summer.fi They've built a yield optimization protocol that finds the best yield automatically.
You deposit crypto to a vault
In the backend, SummerFi will find the best farms and farm them for you.
You can withdraw the principal and yield anytime you want from the vault
This is a proven product. It has been live for almost a year and has integrated 65 protocols to source yield. You can see the growth metrics here.
The APY on these vaults is also good. While the median DeFi yield is only 0.77%, a low-risk USDC vault on base had 5.45% in 30-day APY.
Additionally, the vault is also giving 13.29% APY in SUMR tokens. SummerFi is boosting yield on all its vaults using SUMR.
The token will go live on January 21st via Aerodrome Ignition.
Despite being known as a high-quality project, the $LIT token had continued to slide. Yesterday, it hit the lowest FDV at just $2.06 billion.
So, is the Lighter doomed? Will the dip keep dipping?
We'd written about Lighter and its "fair valuation" before. You can read it here.
When we consider the $LIT valuation, we should compare its performance before and after the airdrop. Airdrop happened on December 30th. For our purpose, I'll compare metrics from December 1st and today.
17% decline in Open Interest. It went from $1.7 billion to $1.4 billion. But since the airdrop on the 30th, it has been maintaining OI around $1.4 billion. So, it's not that bad.
The fees went down >58% from $468.7k to ~$190k yesterday (12th Jan). That looks bad on the outset. But if you look at the data, you'll see that fees have been largely holding steady since 20th December. So, all else being equal, I don't think Lighter will continue to drop fees.
Volume went down by 57% during the period from Dec 1st to today. This was expected from a platform that offered free trades for most users. OI and fees are more important metrics than pure volume.
TLDR; the airdrop took away a lot of farming activity and reduced the metrics. However, it has been largely holding steady for the past couple of weeks. So, all else being equal, I'm not expecting a major decline in metrics going forward.
Airdrop dumping was a major fear factor for $LIT. Again, this wasn't as bad as it was feared.
Qwantify has released a dashboard with more data on the airdrop. You'll be able to find more insights there. For example, it's the small airdrop recipients who are selling. As the airdrop size increases, a larger % of wallets were increasing to their allocation.
There are a couple of ways to interpret these data. Here's one way to do it. That post was largely bullish for Lighter. For example, it sees a large % of people holding airdrop as showing conviction and therefore, bullish.
But the bears can see it as a potential selling pressure. Airdrop recipients have been selling in the past day and week as well. So, there's some validity to that fear.
I think the airdrop data is indicating bullishness in the long-term. In the short term, there'll be selling, but I don't see $LIT FDV going below $2 billion.
To get an approximate valuation of $LIT, we can compare its fundamentals to $HYPE.
HL has 6.6x ($9.2B/$1.4B) Open Interest. It's the metric that I like the most for comparison.
HL has 1.9x ($7.1B/$3.7B) volume of Lighter. This isn't a huge lead, but Lighter doesn't have fees. So, its volume will be higher.
HL has 13.3x ($15.04M/$1.13M) in fees. But Lighter doesn't have fees for everyone. So, it isn't fair to use this metric alone. You'll have to make a qualitative judgement of the strategies of different protocols to use this metric alone.
But the HL still has 10.6x ($23.4B/$2.2B) lead in Fully Diluted Valuation. If we look at the OI, $LIT might feel undervalued.
But there are reasons to be worried in the short term.
There are other competitors without tokens. Many are expecting them to take market share away from Lighter.
After the $LIT launch, there were some withdrawal issues. It highlighted the tech immaturity of Lighter in comparison to HL.
Potential airdrop dumping from people still holding on to the airdrop. They could be waiting for the token to pump a bit for them to dump.
However, I see most of these worries as a temporary phenomenon. In the long term, I think $LIT at $2-$2.5 billion FDV is undervalued.
🚀 DeFi Catalysts
Railgun Intern has said that a Railgun integrated wallet drops in ~30 days. This can be very bullish for $RAIL.
Football.fun has announced the date for TGE, which will be on 15th January 2026. It was a trending protocol that had generated a lot of money.
Zama has opened registration for the public auction. It provides private computation for smart contract chains like Ethereum.
PumpFun is tweaking its creator fees mechanism. They've introduced new features like sharing fees with up to 10 wallets.
Temple has gone live on Canton, the "Wall Street" blockchain. Temple is a compliance-focused, privacy-preserving order book for digital asset trading.
Kinetiq has launched Perp DEX at Markets.xyz. It's a HIP-3 Perp DEX on Hyperliquid similar to Ethena's Hyena.
Ranger has raised over $86M in deposits via the MetaDAO platform. It is building a unified market across perps, spot, and yield.
Dango has launched the mainnet alpha. It describes itself as the one app for everything DeFi.
Denaria has exclusively gone live on Linea L2. It's a Perp DEX built around a novel virtual AMM architecture called the "dynAMM."
Wagyu, a cross-chain swapping application, has integrated Monero's XMR by routing the orders through HyperLiquid. It claims this will massively reduce XMR sell pressure and pump its price.
Phantom has enabled swapping to Bitcoin from Ethereum, Base, and Solana. This means holding native BTC via Phantom, not wrapped assets.
📰 Industry News
Eric Adams, former mayor of NYC, launched a memecoin. It hit $580M in Market Cap before the rug crashed the price by -80% in minutes.
Ukraine has blocked Polymarket in a wider online gambling crackdown. This prediction market platform is already restricted in 33 countries.
Strategy, the treasury strategy company that accumulates BTC, has bought $1.25 billion worth of Bitcoin. That's the largest purchase since July.
DISCLAIMER: I'm NOT a financial advisor. This content is for education and information purposes only. Crypto and DeFi are risky and speculative. Please do your research before investing.
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