Weekly Top Stories - 01/23/26

In this week’s newsletter, Zack Pokorny tracks how crypto’s profile has risen at the annual Davos confab of muckety-mucks; Alex Thorn breaks down the U.S. Senate Agriculture Committee’s version of market structure legislation; and Lucas Tcheyan explains the significance of the Solana phone getting its own token.

👔 Crypto at Davos: A Sideshow No More

The crypto industry has moved decisively into the center of global and financial policy discourse at Davos. The World Economic Forum’s annual meeting took place this week, with senior crypto executives, including Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong and Jeremy Allaire, appearing alongside TradFi heavyweights such as BlackRock’s Larry Fink. While crypto figures have spoken at Davos in prior years, this year’s discussions and tone reflected a clear evolution in how blockchain technology is understood by institutions and regulators. A look back makes the change obvious:

• 2024: This was the year of the meme-ified Jamie Dimon quote (which is featured in the intro of the Galaxy Brains podcast) mocking bitcoin’s finite supply and pseudonymous creator(s?), Satoshi Nakamoto. In his interview, the JPMorgan CEO referred to bitcoin as a “pet rock” and said

  "I think there's a good chance, when we get to that 20 million bitcoins...

  Satashi [sic] is going to come on there, laugh hysterically, go quiet, and all bitcoins [are] going to be erased. How the hell [do] you know it’s going to stop at 21?"

• 2025: Davos last year took place around the time of President Donald Trump’s inauguration. Optimism around crypto and blockchain at this point was soaring, but the crypto and TradFi industries and U.S. lawmakers had made little progress on implementation; the industry was still in the “figuring it out” stage, with the emphasis being on the need for “clear rules” and thoughtful evaluation from regulators.

• 2026: This year at Davos the tone and topics discussed were materially different. Since last year, we have seen the GENUIS Act pass, willingness from regulators for exemptive relief around crypto, and a market structure bill sitting with U.S. lawmakers. Notably, Larry Fink spoke on a panel with Citadel’s Ken Griffin outlining the BlackRock CEO’s vision of everything being tokenized on “one common blockchain.” Brian Armstrong also did an interview talking about prediction markets and Decision Markets, two more crypto-native topics that have been gaining traction.

The pivot around crypto sentiment happened fast. We went from Dimon mocking Satoshi to the CEO of Blackrock saying we need to tokenize everything and operate on a single, unified ledger in just 730 days.

OUR TAKE:

One shift at Davos this year was how crypto felt part of the discussion and not just a footnote to other topics and debates. The official agenda slated sessions like “Is Tokenization the Future?” and “Where Are We on Stablecoins?” which explicitly focused on where digital assets fit within existing financial infrastructure and not just on whether they should be allowed to exist.

Panels framed tokenization as gaining real operational traction, including commentary on reducing costs and settlement friction, and stablecoins emerging as a scaled use case, moving the conversation toward how blockchains are integrated into payments and settlement systems.

These discussions align with broader World Economic Forum narratives that blockchain and digital assets are transitioning “from experimentation to enterprise-grade deployment,” aided by clearer regulatory frameworks and growing institutional pilots.

The industry has essentially elbowed its way into institutional circles, where these subjects are now treated as foundational building blocks of internet finance, and not just niche curiosity and debate as it has been in the past. – Zack Pokorny

🚜 Senate Ag Releases Market Structure Discussion Draft

Republicans on the Senate Agriculture Committee posted draft language for the Digital Commodity Intermediaries Act (“DCIA”), which should eventually be combined with completed product from the Senate Banking Committee to form the totality of the “crypto market structure bill.”

Because the Senate Agriculture Committee oversees the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the draft language focuses on the digital commodity markets, particularly giving the CFTC exclusive jurisdiction to regulate and oversee spot crypto markets (i.e., crypto exchanges, dealers, and brokers).

The Committee plans to hold a markup hearing on Tuesday, Jan. 27, during which point members from both parties will likely offer amendments. Although the commodities side of the crypto market structure debate, including CFTC jurisdiction over spot market oversight, is generally viewed as less controversial than the securities side, this discussion draft is a partisan document. It has not been endorsed by the lead Democratic negotiators, even though it incorporates substantial provisions that were negotiated with Democrats.

OUR TAKE:

This Senate Agriculture language broadly does what is expected and not much more. It builds a CFTC-centric market structure framework for spot digital commodities. When compared to the issues being debated on the Senate Banking side, this product is narrower and less politically combustible.

For example, the draft includes a broad safe harbor for DeFi (nodes, oracles, wallets, etc.), with the only “pitfall” for DeFi being definitional. If a purported DeFi system is under centralized control or legal persons can materially alter functionality, then it likely would not qualify as “DeFi” and thus could be required to register and comply. The Senate Banking language took a similar approach – carving out “truly decentralized” applications and protocols. Given that Senate Ag’s version is a partisan draft, a battle over that fault line (what constitutes “centrally controlling” or the ability to “materially alter”?) could move the needle materially through bipartisan or Democrat-proposed amendments. Nonetheless, that functional definition of DeFi appears to be palatable to broad groups of stakeholders: It is becoming entrenched across a wide swath of crypto regulatory conversations – from Senate Banking and Agriculture crafting OFAC and AML/KYC requirements to market participants (even TradFi firms) discussing which types of DeFi entities might have to register with the SEC. Overall, even beyond the handling of DeFi, the discussion language does appear, at least at first look, to be less controversial than the debate last week around Senate Banking.

The big questions now are 1) when the Senate Banking Committee can find time on the calendar to reschedule the markup hearing they postponed last week following Coinbase’s withdrawal of support, and 2) whether the gridlocked negotiations over stablecoin rewards can advance in the interim to raise the odds that such a markup is a bipartisan success. Bloomberg reported Wednesday that the Senate Banking Committee was pivoting to work on housing legislation (the full committee name is “Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs”) and thus the next chance to hold a crypto markup is likely not until late February or early March.

As for progress on the stablecoin yield issue (which we wrote about last week, which appeared to be the dealbreaker), there aren’t yet any significant indications that the two sides have identified a compromise that can rejuvenate the bill’s prospects. But the additional 4-6 weeks until a second attempt at markup should give the parties more time to work on that.

For now, the Senate Agriculture Committee is poised to move forward on its portion of the bill next week. Whether Democrats and Republicans can come together in Senate Agriculture, and the extent to which acrimony emanating from last week’s rupture spills into bipartisan efforts there, should provide the market with important information at least about the temperature of negotiations, if not the bill’s overall prospects. – Alex Thorn

📱 What Solana Is Seeking with Seeker

Solana Labs this week launched the Seeker token (SKR), tied to its second-generation mobile device, Seeker, marking the latest milestone in the Solana ecosystem’s multi-year push into consumer hardware.

Unlike a traditional smartphone, Seeker is built from the ground up to be crypto-native. It integrates on-device key management via a secure enclave called Seed Vault, secure transaction signing at the operating system level, native wallet and payments support, and direct access to a Solana-first app store that bypasses Apple and Google’s distribution and fee structures.

Seeker follows the Saga phone, which launched in 2023 to limited interest before finding late-cycle demand during the memecoin boom, when Solana ecosystem airdrops briefly made buying the device a profitable trade (see Galaxy Research’s coverage here). Saga ultimately sold an estimated ~20,000 units before Solana Mobile (Labs’ hardware subsidiary) wound down support. Seeker has seen stronger early uptake, with over 150,000 devices activated across more than 50 countries.

SKR sits at the center of the platform’s design. As described in the whitepaper, the token is used to stake and elect “Guardians,” who verify device authenticity, curate applications for the Solana dApp Store, and enforce platform rules. Developers post SKR to submit apps, creating Sybil resistance and a mechanism to penalize malicious behavior, while users and stakers delegate SKR to Guardians in return for inflation rewards. Monetization is intentionally deferred; fee capture and discounts may come later, but only once the ecosystem matures.

OUR TAKE:

While crypto has made significant progress on the blockspace and infrastructure side, distribution and adoption remain persistent challenges. Launching applications is no longer the hard part (nor is launching tokens, thanks to Pump.fun and its ilk). Getting those applications in front of users consistently, repeatedly, and outside of speculative cycles remains tough. Most crypto adoption arrives in bursts driven by airdrops, hype, or short-lived narratives, then fades. What’s missing are channels that support recurring behavior rather than one-off engagement.

Mobile offers a way to change that dynamic. Not simply because it improves reach, but because it engrains crypto into daily human activities like payments, signing and authentication, social apps, and games. A crypto-native mobile stack has the potential to make onchain activity feel similarly routine. There is a useful parallel to the early days of mobile. Primitives like GPS, cameras, and secure hardware enabled new categories of applications. Crypto-native mobile hardware introduces its own primitives – biometric signing, device verification, and native payments – that are difficult to replicate on desktop and may unlock applications that don’t exist yet.

The challenge remains getting those phones in the hands of new users in the first place. Yes, 150k phones is impressive growth in adoption since the Saga launch. But it’s unclear how many of those users are net-new crypto users, and they represent only a fraction of active wallets on Solana. Part of the bet Solana is making is that if offered an affordable but functional phone, even non-crypto native users will take an interest. An airdrop only sweetens the deal.

Solana Mobile’s ambitions extend beyond Solana-branded hardware. The platform is designed to expand to other devices and manufacturers if the model proves viable. Seeker is best viewed as a proving ground, a way to test whether crypto-native UX, incentives, and governance can support a sustainable mobile ecosystem.

The risks are obvious. Hardware is an unforgiving business, incentives can attract short-term behavior, and revenue is postponed by design. But the tradeoff is intentional. Solana is prioritizing distribution and engagement over near-term monetization. If even a modest share of onchain activity begins flowing through a mobile interface, it could become a much-needed form of onboarding new users.

Solana founder Anatoly Yakovenko, who worked in mobile before founding the network, has framed success in similar terms. The goal isn’t to displace Apple or Google outright. A real win would be forcing incumbents to cut fees, loosen restrictions, or improve support for crypto-native experiences. If building credible alternatives sways platform behavior, that alone would help the broader ecosystem. – Lucas Tcheyan

Charts of the Week

On Jan. 16, daily Ethereum network transactions set an all-time high of about 2.8 million. The milestone had been foreshadowed by an earlier spike in daily new addresses, which topped out on Jan. 11. At first glance, you might attribute this wave of activity to the success of the Fusaka upgrade, which lowered transaction costs. But digging deeper, something much more nefarious appears to have happened. As reported by Andrey Sergennkov, the spikes in addresses and transactions were a result of a mass address poisoning attack.

Crypto scams have become all too common, as Galaxy Research reported on last year. The mass address poisoning attack, also known as a transaction history poisoning, works as follows.

1. The attacker picks a target and a likely recipient

   1. The attacker looks at accounts where a user often sends funds, or which addresses they recently interacted with.

2. They generate a lookalike address

   1. The attacker then creates addresses until they get one that visually resembles the real recipient, often matching the beginning and sometimes the end of the address, because many apps display only a short prefix or suffix. This step plausibly drove the surge in daily new addresses.

      1. Intended recipient: 0xd9A1b...

      2. Attacker lookalike: 0xd9A1c...

   2. They “seed” your wallet history

      1. After the attacker has identified a target and created an address that closely resembles the address of a recent transaction, they send your wallet a tiny transfer, so their lookalike address appears in your recent activity list. This step is the “poisoning” and may have resulted in the spike of transactions.

   3. You later copy the wrong address

      1. If the user copies an address from the recent transaction history (or taps an autocomplete suggestion) without checking the full address, they might send real funds to the attacker’s lookalike address.

This kind of attack typically has a very low success rate, around 0.01%, and most of the profit comes from a small number of victims. In the most recent wave, $509,000 was sent to the attacker’s wallets on Jan. 16. In a separate campaign last month, one victim lost roughly $50 million. The Fusaka upgrade is a double-edged sword: the cost of sending dust (tiny amounts of cryptocurrency) and paying gas has historically limited these attacks, but the roughly sixfold reduction in fees makes large-scale poisoning far more economical.

As address poisoning and similar social engineering attacks scale, more users are realizing that radical transparency cuts both ways, because it makes their behavior easy to map and target forever. The natural response is a move toward privacy by design, either through purpose-built privacy networks or through native privacy layers that minimize what gets revealed onchain.

As of writing, the attacker’s wallets are still active, so stay vigilant. Users should use frontends that support the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) to make addresses more human-readable. Users should also rely on frontends that alert them when they are interacting with addresses they have never used, and that highlight potential address spoofing by detecting similar prefixes or suffixes. Ideally, the frontend should also indicate whether a counterparty has been linked to prior malicious campaigns, giving users one last, high-signal check before they hit “send.”

Stay sharp. Dust is cheap, mistakes are expensive. — Christopher Rosa

Other News

🤝SEC and CFTC to hold joint crypto “harmonization” event next week

🔒Custodian BitGo raises $212.8m in IPO valued at $2.08b

🖥️Coinbase forms advisory board on quantum computing threat

💰Tokenization startup Superstate raises $82.5m

🙏F/m Investments asks SEC to let it tokenize T-bill ETF shares

🕙NYSE says it’s building a 24-7 tokenized trading platform