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Just don’t look. That was the advice of Lisa Simpson and Paul Anka, which amazingly stopped evil 50-foot billboards from destroying Springfield three decades ago.

Now, it’s relevant yet again. Don’t check crypto prices right now. 

(This is not financial advice — more of a mental health suggestion. Unless your bags are really heavy. Then I’d probably sneak a peek.)

Meanwhile:

• The number of new AI agents on Virtuals has fallen from over 200 at the start of January to 135 on Sunday, per Blockworks Research data.

• Usual’s stablecoin USD0 has now bled almost $350 million amid recent drama. It still has over $1.5 billion circulating.

• Over $2.1 billion crypto has flowed out of Binance in the past month, while $1.7 billion and $1.5 billion has flowed into Bitget and Gate.io, respectively.

🧈 Bread and butter

Binance has barely skipped a beat since CZ stepped down.

And it’s not like the odds aren’t stacked against it — even to the point that much of the world outside crypto has been outright hostile to it.

The past few years have seen rolling bans and other jurisdictional roadblocks across parts of Europe, Asia and Africa. That includes a grueling eight-month ordeal in Nigerian jail for Tigran Gambaryan, Binance’s head of financial crime compliance who’d been arrested on spurious money laundering charges.

Then there’s increasing competition within the crypto space. Rival offshore crypto exchanges including Bybit, Bitget and Gate.io have all grown their footprints to fill parts of the sizable gap left by FTX.

Still, Binance persists as the number one venue by trade volume. CoinGecko points to $9 billion in normalized daily volume on Binance right now. Bybit is a distant second with $3 billion, followed by Coinbase with $2.6 billion.

Binance’s ability to serve memecoin traders what they want seems to be its key to success — at least at this part of the cycle.

In fact, Binance has effectively cornered the memecoin game: Kaiko in December calculated that the exchange was controlling 44% of memecoin volume on CEXs.

Empire’s Jason Yanowitz brought some of this up with new(ish) CEO Richard Teng on today’s podcast episode:

“I thought you guys would have to stop doing a lot of the things [Binance did] to get to the place it got to: Listing things early, getting out to new markets early,” Yanowitz said.

“But you guys are still listing a lot of memecoins. You’re still very early to listings. You have new Launchpool projects in the last couple of months — Binance has given users a lot more trading opportunities. It kind of goes against what I thought would happen.”

One dashboard tracking new tokens listed on Binance in 2024 lists 37 coins, nine of which are memes including HMSTR, BABYDOGE, TURBO and DOGS. The platform also recently added perps for AI coins — next-gen memecoins — AI16Z, ZEREBRO and GRIFFAIN with up to 75x leverage.

Teng responded by stating that Binance lists fewer coins compared to many of its competitors, itself a function of the listing processes that protect the interest of its users.

“If you look at the number of coins that we list, it’s around 600. We are very, very stringent with the coin selection process on that front. We have published the listing criteria and we ringfence the listing team so much that we give them the time and space to do their independent due diligence.”

Co-host Santiago Santos then probed for an answer on listing fees — one of the last great lucrative aspects of crypto exchanges still opaque to outsiders.

“[Binance’s] distribution is unparalleled — when you think about the overall fees [for Launchpad listings], is it like a dollar amount or a notional amount — is it a token supply amount, and if so, I’m curious how that has evolved over time,” Santos said.

Teng declined to comment by saying that those details were very specific. Better luck next time, I guess.

— David

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Unichain is launching soon!

Designed to be the home for DeFi and liquidity across chains, Unichain is an L2 that will launch with up to 95% lower transaction fees than Ethereum L1. Shortly after mainnet launch, the chain will introduce 250 millisecond block times for near instant transactions. Plus, as part of the Superchain, Unichain is optimized for seamless cross-chain transactions.

Stay in the loop — visit Unichain.org and follow @Unichain on X for updates!

• Like any healthy relationship, crypto’s election honeymoon phase is finally over, and we’re now back to being more linked to macroeconomic events. Woohoo.

• Alt-ernatively (see what we did there?) you could pay attention to the altcoin markets, which could have a volatile week thanks to the $3 billion unlock schedule.

• Mango Markets, after surviving the infamous $110 million exploit and facing charges from the SEC, is winding down.

🐦‍🔥 A phoenix rises

The crypto credit market hasn’t quite recovered since 2022, when we saw the downfall of most of the major players.

Honestly, perhaps that’s been for the best given how much damage was done.

But it’s not an area of crypto that we can expect to stay dormant, especially if crypto’s truly set for another golden year (or even four). 

Clearly, a lot of changes will have to take place. And there’ll have to be far more transparency. 

Data platform Accountable, which operates in the undercollaterized crypto credit space, is taking steps to perhaps be one of the first successful lending firms post-2022. 

The “main value capture is being able to prove, without any API key sharing, any wallet sharing, what's happening in the centralized venue — such as banks, brokerage accounts, exchanges, custodians — that the lenders or any other user can basically prove I'm financially healthy, I'm operating as intended,” Accountable CEO Wojtek Pawlowski told me. 

“The goal of Accountable one day is to become the new Celsius,” Pawlowski said. Without all of the fraud and bad actors, of course. Pawlowski hopes to grow his company to be a “digital finance platform” that could open up yield-bearing opportunities for users.

I’ll admit that, in my conversation with Pawlowski, I expressed skepticism about retail being willing to come back to lenders after being burned.

Pawlowski thinks that, like any other cycle, we’ll see the appetite return as transparency challenges are mitigated. They’re already working with firms like Galaxy and Amber Group.

He also noted that the human brain moves past financial losses after two or three years. If that’s true, perhaps now’s indeed the time to strike while the iron is hot.

— Katherine

This March, hear from Michael Saylor, Brad Garlinghouse and other top leaders driving the evolution of global finance. From navigating macroeconomic dynamics to exploring the rise of onchain economies, DAS NYC brings together institutional investors, allocators, and fund managers for meaningful insights and actionable ideas.

📅 March 18-20, 2025
📍 NYC | Javits Center North

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On our minds: The importance of memecoins