Aave Will Win

Aave Labs Unveils “Aave Will Win,” a new governance model committing 100% Revenue to its DAO Treasury. Plus the top news, stats, and reports.

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Issue Summary: Welcome back to Coinstack, the weekly newsletter for institutional crypto investors and industry insiders. We reviewed the top news, stats, and reports in the digital asset ecosystem for our 310k weekly subscribers. This week, Aave Labs unveiled “Aave Will Win,” committing 100% of its product revenue to the Aave DAO, while Indiana advanced legislation to allow crypto expansion in public retirement funds. Meanwhile, Tomasz Stańczak announced he will step down from the Ethereum Foundation by February 2026. On the fundraising front, Relay secured $17M in a Series B round led by Archetype and Union Square Ventures (USV) alongside the launch of Relay Chain, and Bullshot raised $7.5M from Animoca Brands, TBV Ventures, and OneAM Capital to scale its AI-powered meme token launcher on BNB Chain.

Price performance since we began writing Coinstack in January 2021

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💵 Weekly Crypto Fundraises & Deals

Here are all the crypto fundraises we heard about this week, ranked by size…

1. Relay, a multi-chain payments network that enables the instant swap and transfer of digital assets across 85+ networks, has secured $17 million in Series B funding, alongside the launch of its new platform, Relay Chain, led by Archetype and Union Square Ventures (USV).

2. Bullshot, an AI-centric meme token launcher built on the BNB chain, has secured $7.5M in a private funding round from a group of top-tier Web3 investors, including Animoca Brands, TBV Ventures, and OneAM Capital, to enhance product development and global user base.

3. Levl, the stablecoin-powered global Fintech platform that supports major stablecoins, including USDC and USDT, announced on February 11 that it has raised $7M in a seed round led by Galaxy Ventures. The seed funding will support the global expansion of its stablecoin payment system.

4. Superset, a blockchain infrastructure provider building a unified liquidity execution layer for stablecoins, has successfully raised $4M in seed funding, led by 7RIDGE and Exponential Science Capital.

5. Birch Hill Holdings, a New York-based digital asset infrastructure firm, has closed a $2.5 million pre-seed funding round to prioritize capital preservation, institutional lending, and enhanced risk management, led by ParaFi Capital and Castle Island Ventures.

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🗞️ Crypto News Recap: The Top 5 Stories

Welcome back to This Week in Crypto… everything you need to know in one scannable format. Here are the top 5 stories of the week…

1. 🤑 Aave Labs Unveils “Aave Will Win,” Directing 100% Revenue to Aave DAO: Aave Labs, the open-source, DeFi lending platform, has unveiled a new governance model, dubbed “Aave Will Win,” which commits 100% revenue generated from the Aave products to its DAO treasury.

2. ⚖️ Indiana Advances Crypto for Public Pension Funds: Indiana State legislature advances cryptocurrency investments within public retirement plans after the Senate Committee cleared House Bill 1042.

3. 👔 Tomasz Stanczak To Step Down From Ethereum Foundation By Feb 2026: Tomasz Stanczak, Co-Executive Director at the Ethereum Foundation and the Founder of Nethermind, announced on February 13 that he will step down after serving one year in the role. Bastian Aue, with Hsiao-Wei, will take over as interim co-Executive Directors.

4. ☕ Espresso Launches ESP Token with 10% Airdrop: Espresso Network (ESP), the decentralized Proof-of-Stake platform on Ethereum, officially launched its ESP token on February 12. The launch rolls out a fully unlocked total supply of 3.59 billion ESP tokens and 10% community airdrop to eligible & active wallets.

5. 🦘 Solana Firm Stock Jumps 17% After Enabling Institutional Lending Against Staked SOL: Shares of the Solana-focused and Nasdaq-listed company (NASDAQ: HSDT) jumped as high as 17% after it announced a lending program that allows institutions to unlock liquidity by borrowing against natively staked SOL without the need for unstaking or selling tokens. The firm has partnered with Anchorage Digital and Kamino to facilitate the lending initiative.

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💬 Tweet of the Week

Source: @francescoswiss

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📊 Key Stats of the Week

Here are the most important and interesting stats in crypto this week...

1. Sports betting continues to emerge as the dominant driver of prediction market activity.

On Super Bowl Sunday, single-day spot volume reached a staggering $1.4B while daily transactions surged to 7.6M: both record highs.

To put this into perspective, daily volume during the November 2024 election peaked at $742M. Super Bowl activity nearly doubled that figure, while transactions were 8.5x higher.

Overall, Kalshi handled $377M of sports betting volume on Sunday followed by Polymarket ($142M).

User attention is increasingly shifting towards prediction markets and sports betting, suggesting a rotation away from earlier speculative flows and potentially the arrival of new users drawn by familiar, mainstream betting behavior.

Source: @DavidShuttleworth

2. The total market capitalization of tokenized gold has surpassed $6 billion, with an increase of more than $2 billion since the beginning of this year. Among them, Tether Gold (XAUT) and Paxos Gold (PAXG) together account for approximately 96.7% of the market share. Tokenized gold has locked up more than 1.2 million ounces of physical gold.

Source: @WuBlockchain

3. The ETH staking queue continues to swell despite mounting macro headwinds.

There is now 4.1M+ $ETH ($8.2B) waiting for staking activation, up 12% in the past two weeks alone and 362% since January 1st. At the same time, validator exits have trended towards 0.

Corporate balance sheet capital has been a key driver. BitMine Immersion Technologies has accumulated 260,000 ETH within the last 6 weeks and has activated their treasury through staking.

Lido Finance has been a big winner here, seeing their ETH deposits grow by more than 1M (+12%) since December. That growth has pushed Lido’s monthly fee generation to $57M+, more than the next six largest competitors combined over the same period.

Source: @DavidShuttleworth

4. 📉 Market Overview:

🔹 Crypto mcap up 0.89% to $2.26T. BTC +1.46%, ETH +0.57%.

🔹 Liquidations ease, barely exceeding $300M on most days.

🔹 Funding rates stabilize, majors reclaim low positive funding.

🔹 Strategy buys 1,142 BTC for $90M, total holdings 714,644 BTC.

🔹 Binance completes 15,000 BTC SAFU conversion, worth ~$1B.

🔹 Stripe integrates x402, enabling AI agents to pay in USDC on Base.

🔹 S&P +0.24%, Nasdaq +0.13% as equities show early signs of fatigue.

Source: @CoinMarketCap

5. $SOL 🟣🟢

Weekly RSI is now its lowest in HISTORY.

MACD, second lowest in history.

Solana, it’s not for tourists.

Source: @JamesEastonUK

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📝 Highlights from the Top Crypto Reports

Here are the top highlights from the best crypto research reports this week…

2026 Digital Asset Outlook

About the Author: Grayscale Research offers institutional-grade reports, aims to help you understand crypto like never before by harnessing the power of DeFi market dynamics along with macro trends, on-chain data & analytics. This is an excerpt from the full article, which you can find here.

📝 By Grayscale Research Team:

Key Takeaways

• We expect 2026 to accelerate structural shifts in digital asset investing, which have been underpinned by two major themes: macro demand for alternative stores of value and improved regulatory clarity. Together, these trends should bring in new capital, broaden adoption (especially among advised wealth and institutional investors), and bridge public blockchains more fully into mainstream financial infrastructure.

• As a result, we expect rising valuations in 2026 and the end of the so-called “four-year cycle,” or the theory that crypto market direction follows a recurring four-year pattern. Bitcoin’s price will likely reach a new all-time high in the first half of the year, in our view.

• Grayscale expects bipartisan crypto market structure legislation to become U.S. law in 2026. This will bring deeper integration between public blockchains and traditional finance, facilitate regulated trading of digital asset securities, and potentially allow for on-chain issuance by both startups and mature firms.

• The outlook for fiat currencies is increasingly uncertain; in contrast, we can be highly confident that the 20 millionth Bitcoin will be mined in March 2026. Digital money systems like Bitcoin and Ethereum that offer transparent, programmatic, and ultimately scarce supply will be in rising demand, in our view, due to rising fiat currency risks.

• We expect more crypto assets to be available through exchange-traded products in 2026. These vehicles have had a successful start, but many platforms are still conducting due diligence and working to incorporate crypto into their asset-allocation process. As this process matures, look for more slow-moving institutional capital to arrive throughout 2026.

• We also outline our Top 10 Crypto Investing Themes for 2026, reflecting the breadth of use cases emerging across public blockchain technology. In each case we include the relevant crypto assets associated with each theme. They are:
  
  

  • Dollar Debasement Risk Drives Demand for Monetary Alternatives

  • Regulatory Clarity Supporting Adoption of Digital Assets

  • Reach of Stablecoins to Grow in Wake of GENIUS Act

  • Asset Tokenization at Inflection Point

  • Privacy Solutions Needed as Blockchain Tech Goes Mainstream

  • AI Centralization Calls for Blockchain Solutions

  • DeFi Accelerates, Led by Lending

  • Mainstream Adoption Will Demand Next-Generation Infrastructure

  • A Focus on Sustainable Revenue

  • Investors Seek Out Staking by Default

• Finally, two topics that we do not expect to influence crypto markets in 2026:
  

  • Quantum computing: We believe that research and preparedness will continue on post-quantum cryptography, but this issue is unlikely to affect valuations in the next year.

  • Digital asset treasuries: Despite their media attention, we believe that DATs will not be a major swing factor for digital asset markets in 2026.

2026 Digital Asset Outlook: Dawn of the Institutional Era

Fifteen years ago, crypto was an experiment: just one asset (Bitcoin) with a market capitalization of about $1 million. Today, crypto is an emerging industry and mid-sized alternative asset class, consisting of millions of individual tokens with a combined market capitalization of about $3 trillion (Exhibit 1). Now, a more complete regulatory architecture across major economies is deepening the integration of public blockchains with traditional finance and fueling long-term capital inflows into the marketplace.

Exhibit 1: Crypto now a mid-sized alternative asset class

Along the journey from crypto’s early beginnings, token valuations have experienced four large cyclical drawdowns, or about one every four years (Exhibit 2). In three of these examples, the cyclical peak in valuations occurred 1 to 1.5 years after a Bitcoin halving event, which also happens once every four years. The current bull market has lasted more than three years, and the most recent Bitcoin halving was in April 2024, more than 1.5 years ago. Therefore, conventional wisdom among certain market participants says that Bitcoin’s price likely peaked in October, and 2026 will be a challenging year for crypto returns.

Exhibit 2: Rising valuations in 2026 will mark the end of the “four-year cycle” theory

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🎧 Top Crypto Podcasts of The Week

Here are the crypto podcasts that are worth listening to this week...

1. Bankless - What’s the Story? AI Stocks, Crypto Downturn, Metals Selloff, SaaSpocalypse | Jim BiancoWhy

2. The Defiant - Rebuilding Global Payments with Stablecoins | Circle & USDC with Nikhil Chandhok

3. Coin Bureau - The Epstein Files Just Exposed Bitcoin’s Darkest Secret

4. Forward Guidance: How I Called 2026’s Biggest Rally | Vincent Delaurd

5. Unchained: How a Hedge Fund Blowup Could Be Dragging the Bitcoin Price Down

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Join our Telegram Channel here to chat with our community, ask questions, and learn more about the future of money as we move to a decentralized internet and the creation of a new open global monetary system that works for everyone.

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💬 The People We’re Following Closely on Twitter

1. Vitalik Buterin

2. Justin Drake

3. Hayden Adams

4. Hasu

5. Ryan Adams

6. Vance Spencer

7. Camila Russo

8. Ryan Selkis

9. Anthony Sassano

10. Lyn Alden

11. Gavin Wood

12. Cathy Wood

13. Beniamin Mincu

14. Barry Silbert

15. David Hoffman

16. Preston Pysh

17. Willy Woo

18. Ultra Sound Money List

19. Polkadot Ecosystem List

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📚 How To Get Started With Crypto Learning

1. Crypto: Explain It Like I’m 5 (Article)

2. The Infinite Machine by Camila Russo (Book)

3. Crypto Theses for 2021 by Messari (PDF)

4. Bankless - The DeFi community (Substack + Podcast + Discord)

5. Understanding Polkadot - The Next Generation Blockchain Tech (Website)

6. The Ethereum 2.0 Report from Messari (PDF)

7. Blockgeeks Video Tutorials (Video)

8. The Coinstack Website (Website)

9. 2008 Bitcoin Whitepaper (PDF)

10. 2013 Ethereum Whitepaper (PDF)

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📰 The Coinstack Newsletter:

Tracking the most important blockchain stories of the 2020s, including a decentralized internet and the creation of a new open global monetary system that works for everyone. As always, published for informational purposes only. Please do your own research. Just our opinions. Not intended as financial advice as we are not financial advisors. We may own some of the digital assets we write about as we believe strongly in the sector. Please do your own research.

Coinstack is a news and analysis newsletter for the digital asset industry. None of the information here is a recommendation to invest in any securities or other types of investments. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.AI usage disclosure: Some portions of this document may have been created with the assistance of AI tools. The content has been reviewed and edited by a human. As a result, our research/editorial may contain errors. For more information on the extent and nature of AI usage, please contact the publisher. For personalized investment advice consult with a registered investment advisor. Any historical returns, expected returns, or probability projections may not reflect actual future performance. All investments involve risk and may result in loss.

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