Indepth Research

Provide in-depth research reports and independent analysis, leveraging data, technology, and economic insights to deliver a comprehensive examination of the blockchain ecosystem, project potential, and market trends.

Loss Exceeding $26 Million: Analysis of Truebit Protocol Security Incident and Tracking of Stolen Funds Flow

On January 9, the Truebit Protocol suffered an attack resulting in a loss of 8,535.36 ETH (approximately $26.4 million) due to an exploit in a five-year-old unaudited and unopen-sourced contract. The attack involved a suspected arithmetic logic flaw, possibly due to integer truncation, in an unverified function (0xa0296215). The attacker repeatedly called this function with a minimal msg.value to mint a large number of TRU tokens, which were then burned to withdraw ETH from the contract’s reserves. According to Beosin’s analysis, the stolen funds—totaling 8,535.36 ETH—were primarily transferred to two addresses: 0xd12f6e0fa7fbf4e3a1c7996e3f0dd26ab9031a60 (holding 4,267.09 ETH) and 0x273589ca3713e7becf42069f9fb3f0c164ce850a (holding 4,001 ETH). The attacker’s address (0x6c8ec8f14be7c01672d31cfa5f2cefeab2562b50) still retains 267.71 ETH. All related addresses have been flagged as high-risk by Beosin KYT. The incident underscores the importance of security audits, contract upgrades, and incorporating emergency pause mechanisms and modern Solidity safety features to mitigate risks in legacy smart contracts.

marsbit01/09 10:46

Loss Exceeding $26 Million: Analysis of Truebit Protocol Security Incident and Tracking of Stolen Funds Flow

marsbit01/09 10:46

Penetrating the Noise of Ethereum's 'Degeneration': Why is 'Ethereum Values' the Widest Moat?

Amidst recent debates questioning Ethereum's perceived "regression" compared to high-performance blockchains, this article argues that Ethereum’s core strength lies in its foundational values—decentralization, censorship resistance, and long-term reliability—rather than short-term efficiency. While other chains prioritize speed through centralized trade-offs, Ethereum emphasizes resilience under worst-case conditions. It has never experienced a full-network outage or rollback in nearly a decade of operation. This resilience stems from deliberate design choices: avoiding hardware centralization, maintaining low node operation costs, and ensuring ordinary users can verify the chain. The concept of "Ethereum Alignment" is clarified not as blind loyalty but as a multidimensional social contract involving technical alignment (using Ethereum’s consensus and open standards), economic alignment (value accrual to ETH), and ideological alignment (public good over extractive growth). Ethereum’s slower evolution reflects a conscious trade-off: performance improvements must integrate with existing security assumptions without compromising decentralization or censorship resistance. Despite criticism, growing ETH staking numbers indicate continued trust in its model. In essence, Ethereum’s “conservative” is strategic—prioritizing sustainable trust over temporary gains, making its value proposition the widest moat in Web3.

marsbit01/09 10:40

Penetrating the Noise of Ethereum's 'Degeneration': Why is 'Ethereum Values' the Widest Moat?

marsbit01/09 10:40

2026 Investment Framework: The End of Globalization, AI Supply-Demand Mismatch, and the Silver Frenzy

Investment Framework 2026: End of Globalization, AI Supply-Demand Mismatch, and Silver’s Surge The author outlines a macro investment framework centered on three key themes: the end of globalization, accelerating resource nationalism, and the rise of AI-driven structural shifts. The portfolio returned 131%, largely due to significant long positions in gold and silver. Silver markets are experiencing extreme volatility and a potential supply squeeze, with prices influenced by COMEX contango, LBMA backwardation, and Asian export restrictions. Investment strategies include calendar spreads and butterfly options on silver. Other positions include shortening duration, adding crash protection via SPY, shorting student loan servicers, and going long on tin miners and Japanese banks. Key thematic drivers: - Globalization’s end: Resource nationalism rises; Monroe Doctrine 2.0 emerges; metal inflation continues while oil may face oversupply. - China’s challenges: Banking system fragility, hidden real estate losses, and rising religious dissent. - AI acceleration: Compute demand will vastly outstrip supply by 2035. Two phases: near-term oversupply (2025–2027) followed by demand explosion (2028–2030+) as agentic AI matures. - Domestic US issues: Government shutdown risks, student debt crises, and the societal impact of AI and GLP-1 drugs. Investment opportunities include copper, tin, photonics, nuclear energy, natural gas, and compute infrastructure. Markets face pressure from Japanese monetary normalization and private credit illiquidity. Core view: AI demand is real, energy and metal markets are shifting, and policy changes are accelerating. Short-term cash flow gaps may cause volatility, but long-term thematic bets remain valid.

marsbit01/09 08:48

2026 Investment Framework: The End of Globalization, AI Supply-Demand Mismatch, and the Silver Frenzy

marsbit01/09 08:48

Web3's Failed Assumption: Ultimately Just Another Expansion of Wall Street's Balance Sheet

The article argues that the core assumption of Web3—that it would revolutionize finance by moving traditional assets on-chain—is failing. Instead, a one-sided absorption is occurring: Traditional Finance (TradFi) is successfully expanding into crypto, while the reverse movement of crypto into traditional assets is struggling. The pivotal moment was November 10, 2023, when CME's Bitcoin futures open interest surpassed Binance's, signaling a major shift. This is because TradFi giants like CME or BlackRock can launch crypto products with near-zero marginal cost, leveraging their existing regulatory licenses, mature risk models, and institutional networks. Conversely, crypto-native platforms face an insurmountable "compliance cost" barrier when trying to tokenize real-world assets (RWA), such as stocks. The stringent regulatory requirements for securities trading make it a prohibitively expensive endeavor. The author concludes that true liquidity comes from large, regulated institutional capital (pension funds, etc.), which prioritizes security and compliance. Products like Bitcoin ETF provide this, allowing traditional capital to enter easily. Therefore, crypto is being stripped of its ideological attributes and is becoming a pure, volatile financial asset class within the traditional system. The financial upper layers of trading and derivatives will likely remain dominated by TradFi, with Web3's role reduced to the base layer of asset generation and settlement.

比推01/09 08:43

Web3's Failed Assumption: Ultimately Just Another Expansion of Wall Street's Balance Sheet

比推01/09 08:43

BitMEX Report Highlights Crypto Perpetual Swaps in 2025: The Year the Engine Broke and Rebuilt

The 2025 crypto derivatives market experienced a transformative crisis that exposed critical flaws in perpetual swaps, long considered the market's backbone. A pivotal October liquidation cascade erased $20 billion in positions as Auto-Deleveraging mechanisms failed, forcing market makers' hedged positions to close and triggering a systemic liquidity withdrawal. This event shattered trust in centralized exchanges, particularly those operating opaque B-Book models against users. Simultaneously, easy yield from funding rate arbitrage vanished due to overcrowded institutional strategies, pushing rates below traditional risk-free returns. Decentralized perpetual exchanges gained popularity but introduced new vulnerabilities, including oracle manipulation and governance gaps. Innovation emerged through equity perpetuals for 24/7 stock trading and tradable funding rate instruments. The market concluded the year leaner and more mature, prioritizing platform resilience, transparency, and fairness over leverage and speculative yield.

TheNewsCrypto01/09 07:58

BitMEX Report Highlights Crypto Perpetual Swaps in 2025: The Year the Engine Broke and Rebuilt

TheNewsCrypto01/09 07:58

2025 Annual Marketing White Paper

The 2025 Web3 Marketing White Paper highlights a major industry pivot from vanity metrics like DAU to tangible, revenue-focused goals such as transaction volume and TVL. Both projects and users have become more pragmatic, prioritizing capital security, predictable returns, and sustainable growth. Key trends include Binance redefining wallets as growth engines through its Alpha platform, which ties user activity to rewards and liquidity. Community-building shifted from KOL-centric campaigns to fostering genuine cultural engagement, as seen with Sahara AI’s UGC-driven identity. Projects like Sign and Kite AI used simple, high-impact messaging and strategic timing to build trust pre-TGE. Meanwhile, Plasma and Zerobase incentivized long-term liquidity through behavior-based rewards. Notable challenges include shortened attention spans, post-TGE neglect, over-reliance on KOLs, and a lack of cultural cohesion. The report warns that sustainable growth requires ongoing community engagement, balanced incentive structures, and authentic storytelling. Looking ahead, 2026 will demand even sharper focus on pre-TGE liquidity, deeper community integration, and stronger private ecosystem management to survive increased competition and market saturation.

marsbit01/09 06:55

marsbit01/09 06:55

Gold Rushes Ahead of Quantitative Easing, Bitcoin Awaits Liquidity (Part 2)

The article analyzes why Bitcoin has remained stagnant around $80,000 despite the U.S. entering a rate-cut cycle, while gold continues to rise. It attributes this divergence to two structural factors: high real interest rates due to persistent inflation and a "middle-layer blockage" where monetary easing isn't translating into looser financial conditions. Additionally, this is a defensive rate-cut cycle driven by recession risks and rising debt burdens, not growth, causing capital to prioritize safety over risk-taking assets like Bitcoin. The U.S. faces a debt trilemma: rolling over debt, shifting to short-term issuance, or allowing currency devaluation. Gold's surge reflects hedging against dollar devaluation. Bitcoin awaits confirmed liquidity expansion. The outlook involves two phases: an initial recession shock where gold may peak while Bitcoin faces a sell-off, followed by Fed-led liquidity expansion (QE) where Bitcoin absorbs excess liquidity and surges. Silver's role is noted, with its price action tied to industrial demand and the gold-silver ratio. Long-term, both gold and Bitcoin are expected to appreciate against fiat currencies due to persistent monetary debasement, with leadership shifting from gold to Bitcoin once liquidity floodgates open.

marsbit01/09 06:43

Gold Rushes Ahead of Quantitative Easing, Bitcoin Awaits Liquidity (Part 2)

marsbit01/09 06:43

Base Contributes 70% of Revenue but Pays Only 2.5% in 'Rent', Superchain May Enter Countdown to 'Breakup'

Base, Coinbase's L2 network, contributes approximately 71% of Superchain's sequencer revenue but pays only 2.5% of its income to Optimism Collective. This revenue concentration is increasing, while OP token prices have plummeted 93% from their peak, despite Base’s TVL growing 48%. The MIT-licensed OP Stack allows Coinbase to fork or renegotiate terms at any time. Base’s minimal governance participation and recent independent infrastructure developments (e.g., a Solana bridge using Chainlink CCIP) suggest reduced reliance on Superchain. Coinbase has begun exploring a native BASE token, which could overlap with or supersede OP governance, potentially leading to renegotiated revenue sharing or full exit. Optimism’s 118M OP token grant to Base offers limited binding value. OP holders face significant asymmetric risk: limited upside from Base’s growth but severe downside if Coinbase reduces payments or exits. Market pricing reflects poor value accrual to OP but not yet the exit risk.

marsbit01/09 04:39

Base Contributes 70% of Revenue but Pays Only 2.5% in 'Rent', Superchain May Enter Countdown to 'Breakup'

marsbit01/09 04:39

How Do 99% of Non-Profit Web3 Projects Survive?

99% of Web3 projects lack cash flow and survive by relying on token sales and external funding rather than actual revenue. These projects often prioritize early token generation events (TGE) and aggressive fundraising over product development, leading to inflated valuations unsupported by real economic activity. The core issue is the "runway period"—the time a project can operate without revenue. Without sustainable income, projects eventually exhaust their resources and fail. Even marketing efforts become short-term fixes that can't compensate for a non-viable product. A comparison with the top 1% of profitable Web3 projects—which maintain reasonable price-to-earnings (P/E) ratios—highlights the unsustainable valuations of the remaining 99%. The system incentivizes founders to exit early via token unlocks and sales, regardless of project success, while investors bear the losses. This creates a distorted cycle where financial engineering outweighs genuine value creation.

marsbit01/09 03:02

How Do 99% of Non-Profit Web3 Projects Survive?

marsbit01/09 03:02

Galaxy Research 10,000-Word Report: x402 and the "Leviathan Moment" of the AI Economy

Artificial intelligence agents are poised to transform the internet by enabling autonomous task execution, reducing the need for direct human interaction. Galaxy Research highlights the emergence of Agentic Payment Standards (APS), particularly the x402 protocol, which allows AI agents to use cryptocurrencies like stablecoins for seamless, on-demand payments for digital services, data access, and API calls. Developed by Coinbase, x402 leverages the HTTP 402 status code to facilitate machine-native transactions, eliminating the need for traditional payment rails or API key management. The protocol operates through a stack involving clients (agents), servers, coordinators, and blockchain settlement layers, with recent upgrades (x402 V2) enhancing support for subscriptions, reusable sessions, and service discovery. Early adoption saw speculative activity, but use cases are expanding into data-as-a-service, agent-to-agent transactions, and infrastructure payments. While x402 excels in micro-payments for digital resources, traditional players like Visa, PayPal, and Stripe are also developing agentic commerce solutions for regulated, high-value e-commerce transactions. The integration of APS could significantly improve capital efficiency for software production by replacing subscriptions with pay-per-use models, reducing friction in experimentation and development. In the long term, blockchain-based payments are likely to operate silently in the background, complementing rather than replacing existing systems, and becoming a foundational layer for the AI-driven economy without requiring end-user engagement with crypto directly.

比推01/09 00:08

Galaxy Research 10,000-Word Report: x402 and the "Leviathan Moment" of the AI Economy