Original author: Eswar Prasad, Professor of Economics at Cornell University
Original translation: Eric, Foresight News
The early revolutionaries of cryptocurrency aimed to break the monopoly of central banks and large commercial lending institutions over financial intermediaries. The grand goal of the original cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, and the blockchain technology behind it is to bypass intermediaries and directly connect the two parties in a transaction.
This technology aims to achieve financial democratization, allowing everyone, regardless of wealth, to easily access a wide range of banking and financial services. Emerging financial institutions will leverage this technology to provide competitive financial services—including customized savings, credit, and risk management products—without the need to establish expensive physical branches. All of this aims to eliminate the old financial institutions that lost public trust during the global financial crisis and to establish a new financial order. In this decentralized new world of finance, competition and innovation will flourish.

The SEC has approved DTCC to custody tokenized stocks on-chain, marking the application of blockchain at the core of financial clearing. This move means that tokenized securities are no longer just a concept, but have entered the formal financial system, which will have a profound impact on the definition and recording of assets.

The article discusses the innovative way the encryption project Solomon raised funds on Polymarket. Despite the project's low visibility, it attracted a number of small bets through the prediction market. In particular, there were significant investments made just before the public sale was about to end, resulting in an oversubscription of 102 million, setting a historical record. This method demonstrates the project party's new strategy to harvest profits using Polymarket, and there may be more similar innovative plays in the future.

Author: Zhixiong Pan
When we talk about AI, the public discourse can easily be diverted by topics like "parameter scale," "ranking positions," or "which new model has outperformed whom." We cannot say that this noise is meaningless, but it often acts like a layer of froth, obscuring the more fundamental undercurrents beneath the surface: in today's technological landscape, a covert war over the distribution of AI rights is quietly unfolding.
If you raise your perspective to the scale of civilizational infrastructure, you will find that artificial intelligence is simultaneously presenting two completely different yet intertwined forms.
A "lighthouse" like a high-hanging coast, controlled by a few giants, pursuing the farthest illumination distance, representing the current cognitive limits that humans can reach.
Another kind of "torch" that can be held in hand, it pursues portability, ownership, and replicability, representing the intelligent baseline that the public can access.
Only by understanding these two types of light can we break free.

Author: Zhixiong Pan Source: chainfeeds
The annual summary of Bitcoin Optech has always been regarded as a technical barometer for the Bitcoin ecosystem. It does not focus on price fluctuations but records the most authentic pulse of the Bitcoin protocol and key infrastructure.
The 2025 report reveals a clear trend: Bitcoin is undergoing a paradigm shift from "passive defense" to "active evolution."
In the past year, the community has no longer been satisfied with merely patching vulnerabilities, but has started to systematically address existential threats (such as quantum computing) and has aggressively explored the boundaries of scalability and programmability without sacrificing decentralization. This report is not only a memorandum for developers but also a key index for understanding the asset attributes of Bitcoin, network security, and governance logic in the next five to ten years.
Core conclusion
Looking at the technological evolution of Bitcoin in 2025

Author: Kevin Lepsoe Source: X, @lepsoe Translator: Shan Ouba, Golden Finance
When you finish reading this paragraph, a typical Ethereum user may have completed a payment, a token swap, an NFT purchase, a transaction, or registered a decentralized domain name... The key words are "or" and "may."
At the same time, users utilizing Ethereum real-time nodes can complete all of the following operations:
A payment,
A token swap,
An NFT purchase,
A transaction,
A decentralized domain registration,
and more than 200 other operations...
All operations are completed in order, the results are fully determined, and are implemented directly on the Ethereum mainnet without relying on L2.
How is all of this possible?
12 seconds, which can be called the dark age of the financial sector.
A few years ago, Ethereum

After following the prediction market, I increasingly find that it resembles binary options in many ways. Although not exactly the same, from a certain perspective, the prediction market can be seen as an extended form of binary options.
Prediction markets, such as Polymarket/kalshi/Opinion, utilize yes/no binary contracts. Prices reflect the market consensus on the probability of an event occurring, for example, predicting "Will BTC break $100,000 in January 2025?" The price fluctuates between 0 and 1, reflecting the market consensus on the probability of the event occurring in real-time; if the price is 0.7, it means that people in the market believe there is a 70% chance it will happen. At expiration, the settlement is based on the outcome: if it occurs, it's worth 1, and if it doesn't, it's worth 0. Doesn't this seem very similar to binary options?
The core of binary Options is also based on "yes/no"

In November 2025, the Australian Treasurer and Minister for Financial Services formally submitted the "Corporations Amendment (Digital Assets Framework) Bill 2025" (Corporations Amendment (Digital Assets Framework) Bill 2025, hereinafter referred to as the "Digital Assets Framework Bill") to the federal parliament, intending to include "digital asset platforms" and "tokenized custody platforms" within the scope of regulation of the Corporations Act. Specifically, it aims to fully place encryption trading and custody operations under the supervision of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) by relying on the Australian Financial Services License (AFSL) system.
This article believes that this move reflects Australia's intention to supplement the regulatory system for encryption transactions and accomplice services at the legislative level, while maintaining the existing tone of "the current tax law treatment of digital assets". This marks Australia.

Author Anthony Pompliano shared five lessons from 2023, emphasizing the importance of questioning mainstream Consensus, the strong impact of market structure, the rarity of bubbles and the value of innovation, the universality of gambling psychology, and that the public market will be favored by young entrepreneurs in the future. These lessons reflect a deep consideration of market dynamics and investment strategies.

Author: Zhang Feng
1. Vitalik: Predictive Markets as "Emotional Antidotes"
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin recently posted on social media, believing that in the age of rampant misinformation and emotional dissemination on social media, prediction markets based on economic incentives can become an important tool for fostering rational discussions and filtering out noise.
The core issue of social media lies in "emotional传播经济学" - content that provokes strong emotional responses is more likely to be disseminated, while rational and complex facts are often marginalized. This mechanism leads to a public discussion space filled with anger, opposition, and simplified narratives, where truth becomes a secondary consideration. Vitalik believes that prediction markets can create a distinctly different information verification environment by introducing a mechanism of "betting with real money": participants need to bear the economic consequences of their predictions, which forces them to conduct more prudent research.