Whose Yield is it Anyway?

The 'Max Pain' price where the largest number of option contracts expire worthless is currently sitting around $90,000.

The Jan 30th "Max Pain" Pivot

The "Max Pain" price where the largest number of option contracts expire worthless is currently sitting around $90,000.

• The Pull: This acts like a gravitational anchor. As long as we stay in the low $90s, market makers (who sold those options) are laughing all the way to the bank.

• The Scale: We are looking at roughly $8.27 billion in open interest. This isn't just a ripple, it's a tidal wave that will either wash away the bears or drown the over-leveraged bulls.

The $100k Short Side: A Billion-Dollar Tinderbox

While the $90k–$91k range is where the volume is, the real fireworks are hidden just above the six-figure mark.

• The Short Squeeze Fuel: There is roughly $2 billion in short liquidations stacked between $100,000 and $104,000.

• The Tipping Point: For weeks, bears have been comfortable shorting every $98k rally. But if we close above $96.5k and start eating into that $100k wall, those bears are forced to become buyers to cover their losses.

• The Result: This creates a "feedback loop." A break past $100k isn't just a psychological win, it's a potential explosion. We could rip to $105k+ simply because the bears are being liquidated, not because there's new buying demand.

Bottom Line

We have a massive $90k gravity well pulling us down and a $100k liquidation bomb waiting to go off above us. Until the Jan 30th expiry clears the air, expect more of this high-tension range-bound theater.

CLARITY got held back after Coinbase threw their weight around and halted it. Proof that money talks, in the same way big banks were winning in getting what they want. The banks don't want to have competition on yield and Coinbase doesn't want to lose being able to make money off of it. Both are fighting for their own business models. The Coinbase position just happens to lean more into things I'd want personally, which is freedom of choice.

Price Movements on the Week

• $BTC - Up 4.39%
• $SOL - Up 1.22%
• $ETH - Up 6.88%
• $ZEC - Up 1.14%
• $BNB - Up 4.79%
• Total Crypto Market Cap - Up 4.26% (3.13 Trillion)

So it goes…The CLARITY bill was ready for a markup on for Thursday, but @Coinbase came out and said, nope, we don't support it, even though @a16z, @circle, @krakenfx, @DigitalChamber, @Ripple, and @coincenter all endorsed it. Coinbase showed their power in stalling it, but could this end up killing the bill and pushing it so far down the road that we run into a different regime by the time it's ready? The big banks can offer competitive products if they want to.

The banking industry's henchwoman and greased pocket warrior, @SenWarren suggested these amendments to the market structure bill. Another name for this is neutering.

• Removing or limiting developer protections in the bill.
• Increasing sanctions compliance obligations for crypto entities.
• Expanding government powers to address illicit activity.
• Adding stronger anti-money laundering (AML) requirements, particularly for DeFi platforms and front-end interfaces.
• Repealing positive OCC (Office of the Comptroller of the Currency) guidances that allow banks more flexibility in crypto activities.
• Restricting or gutting provisions that would enable easier tokenization of assets (e.g., preventing a "tokenization loophole" that could allow financial products on blockchain to evade SEC securities regulations).
• Banning or limiting yield payments on stablecoins.
• Other ethics-related or investor protection measures, such as preventing public officials from profiting off digital assets. *This is the only one I can't hate on.

The $SKR TGE is coming and you can check your allocation now in the Wallet app on your Seeker (@solanamobile)

1. Grab your Seeker
2. Open Seed Vault Wallet
3. Hit the Activity Tracking tab
4. See your tier. Check your allocation.
5. Do a little dance.

SKR Allocation Tiers:

• Sovereign - 750,000 SKR
• Luminary - 125,000 SKR
• Vanguard - 40,000 SKR (I was here)
• Prospector - 10,000 SKR
• Scout - 5,000 SKR

It looks like @Base is listening to the community and following @brainarmstrong's gut that something wasn't working on the Base App.

@jessepollak announced: "We're focusing the Base app to be trading-first to drive demand and distribution for every asset and to be the best app for whatever you do in the onchain economy."

Aka, a shift away from trying to be social first into what it should be, finance first. Why was the main app for Base showing multiple social feeds with defi and other Base apps hidden? It never made sense.

Good news for $ZEC holders who use Ledger. @Zcash are currently migrating the @Zcash Ledger device app to Rust in order to be iso with the previous implementation.

• This migration is a prerequisite before implementing shielded support on top of it.
• Progress so far: ~60% completed, with existing features being re-implemented first to ensure full parity and security.

In parallel with the shielded support development, they have also been working on Ledger Live Swap support for Zcash. ZEC Swap in Ledger Wallet should be enabled before the end of January, pending final testing. The bad news in this? Apparently Ledger requested $500k for this to happen according to some reports on the forums.

ZCash got another win this week. On August 31, 2023, Zcash Foundation received a subpoena from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). They announced that the SEC has concluded its review and informed them that it does not intend to recommend any enforcement action or other changes against Zcash Foundation regarding this matter.

Watch out Polygon (@0xPolygon). Polygon is becoming a U.S. regulated payments platform. They acquired Coinme and Sequence to move all money onchain.

• Regulated money movement in 48 states
• Fiat on/off ramps
• 50,000 fiat-to-crypto locations in the U.S.
• Easy onboarding with wallet infra
• 1-click crypto transactions across chains

Coingecko (@coingecko) gave us all a smack in the face. How can you pick the new winners in this atmosphere? What constitutes a failed token? The study analyzes cryptocurrencies listed on @GeckoTerminal that are no longer actively traded, grouped by their last active trading year. Only tokens that had one trade or more before going defunct were considered. Meanwhile, only pump.fun tokens which have 'graduated', were included in the study. If you counted all the other pump and zora slop, this would be so much worse.

Number of Failed Cryptocurrencies by Year

• 2021: 2,584 tokens
• 2022: 213,075 tokens
• 2023: 245,049 tokens
• 2024: 1,382,010 tokens
• 2025: 11,564,909 tokens

Privacy Cash (@theprivacycash) rolled out private swaps, so you can now privately swap supported tokens. This hockey stick below isn't a meme chart, it's pmf. People want to transfer and swap privately.

You thought you were buying an $ETH DAT with bitmine? Apparently they are now a venture fund. Tom Lee @fundstrat lays out why @BitMNR chose to invest in @MrBeast's @BeastINDUSTRIES. I mean, $ETH is cool and all, but it's not enough it seems.

Take your Info-Fi and shove it where the sun don't shine. Nikita Bier (@nikitabier) got out the whooping stick and slayed some of the ai slop that's been proliferated by the yappers out there. Kaito (@KaitoAI) quickly pivoted to announcing Kaito Studio to link with influencers across other platforms.

Overclock (@OverclockSol) built a full node that could verify @Solana Mainnet on modest hardware and home internet, making decentralization accessible. They suggest good, but affordable hardware - $450-500 (16 GB RAM, newer Zen 4 Ryzen CPUs with 6+ cores, and a 1 TB+ PCIe 4.0 NVMe drive). The tech is over my head, but you can read more on their site and post on X.

Monero (@monero) $XMR pumped from $440 to $800 this week. Massive proof proving the desire for privacy tokens…wait a minute. Yes, but, as reported by ZachXBT (@zachxbt): On January 10, 2026 a victim lost $282M+ worth of LTC & BTC (2.05M LTC, 1459 BTC) due to a hardware wallet social engineering scam. The attacker began converting the stolen $LTC & $BTC to @Monero via multiple instant exchanges causing the $XMR price to sharply increase. On one side, it's working as intended but the price movement was because of a hacker swapping into it with size. It's since retraced back around $620 after the news.

Remora (@RemoraMarkets) goes heavy metal and launched Tokenized ETFs for: Gold, Silver, Platinum, Palladium and Copper on Solana.

Solana continues to open the doors to other tokens. We saw $STRK, $ZORA, $LIT, $FUN tradable and able to be used in LP's on Drift, Jupiter, Raydium, etc.

Thanks for reading,

Stay Free

• Ebullition