From Bitcoin dipping to $89,000 earlier this week to a quick resurgence in three days above $100,000, the crypto market has seen a whirlwind of emotions this week, and there is plenty of optimism for BTC in 2025, especially with the incoming Trump administration considered the first “pro-crypto” administration in USA history.

With Bitcoin sitting atop of this descending triangle, is it time it breaks out? Or will it continue to capitulate for another month, and then break out in February-March? One of our mentors, IncomeSharks, is expecting a bit more sideways action first. However, the next week post Trump-inauguration will tell which way Bitcoin and crypto moves.

XRP has been a major player in the spotlight this week. As I mentioned in my last newsletter, there’s a 70% chance of an XRP ETF being launched in 2025. Despite the SEC appealing the Ripple lawsuit only five days before Gary Gensler resigns as the head of the SEC, this news barely moved the price of XRP to the downside.

$XRP has now broken above $3, an achievement that hasn’t happened in over seven years. Bullish on all time frames, XRP is looking pretty hot at the moment. What will happen if the XRP ETF is submitted and approved in 2025? Let’s follow XRP closely and find out.

Side note: The XRP momentum is trickling into other “Dino” coins like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano, which are also experiencing notable gains. These older-generation blockchain projects are benefiting from renewed investor interest, possibly fueled by broader market optimism and institutional attention. All of this optimism could trickle into the rest of the cryptocurrencies, including Ethereum and lower market cap altcoins, if Bitcoin price sustains itself post-Trump inauguration.

This week, I interviewed the founder of XION Protocol, Burnt Banksy. Burnt Banksy became infamous for buying a Banksy painting, tokenizing it and burning it on the spot, leaving only the NFT version remaining.

XION has been around for over a year. I’ve been following them since the testnet launch and initial campaigns in the late 2023, and they have now had a successful launch. I was blessed to speak with them after they recently lauched their mainnet.

XION is reinventing Web3 because they do not have a wallet for their blockchain. They’re known as one of the first walletless blockchain protocols, lowering the barriers to entry for new people to get into crypto without having to understand how to set up a wallet. They also have one of the highest daily active user-to-market cap ratios, with many people testing out XION compared to other blockchains of similar size and infancy. See my interview with Burnt Banksy, who explains their approach to mainstream adoption and onboarding the next billion users into Web3 without needing a wallet, below.

I also spoke with Lingo, the world’s most rewarding token, which has built a large community across Web3 in the past few years. They launched their token and main staking platform in December and have continued growing since. Lingo uses community rewards from the actual return of real-world assets (RWA); they have invested in real estate, and those rewards go directly to the token holders and stakeholders of Lingo. I spoke with Vince Hoffman of Lingo about the continued growth of the platform, how they see real-world assets RWA and tokenization evolving, and what’s next for the Lingo DAO and community growth.

Lastly, I spoke with Panther Protocol, a compliant DeFi and privacy-preserving protocol aimed at increasing institutional adoption of decentralized finance. Currently, institutions have to trade on Ethereum blockchains that are completely public and transparent, potentially exposing their transactions and competitive advantages to other players in the industry. Panther has developed a technology that incorporates ZK (zero-knowledge) proofs to bring a compliant platform that can also shield transactions, creating a privacy layer that allows institutions to trade more closely to how they’re used to in traditional finance. I spoke with Anish Mohamed, co-founder of Panther Protocol, on how exactly ZK, privacy, and artificial intelligence technology play a role in shaping a platform designed to bring institutions into crypto.

Anish has been an early advocate of Bitcoin, an advisor of Ripple, and worked on cryptography and encryption in the 90s during the cypherpunk days. His insights into how crypto is shaping up into the mainstream and how regulation might pave the way for more institutions to get involved in DeFi, sheds light on how close more capital is to entering the industry.

Panther Protocol’s main platform has been in the works for many years, and their mainnet is finally around the corner. I have a feeling that privacy platforms like Panther Protocol ZKP and Partisia MPC will have a strong impact on the next wave of institutional adoption in DeFi.

While Bitcoin continues to drive attention in the mainstream news, certain narratives are forming for 2025. We’re seeing more AI agents, AI abstraction layers, and now AI in DeFi, coined as “DeFAI”, with decentralized finance and AI coming together to upgrade all parts of the Web3 industry.

While the AI agent narrative is strong and there’s potential for AI agents to take over a lot of workloads, there’s still much speculation and many crypto projects claiming to be the next AI superpower. However, the fundamentals are not there yet. I believe they will develop as AI continues to advance, with more processing power being dedicated to computing, AI, LLMs, and physical AI. That’s where DePIN (decentralized physical infrastructure networks) will also play a role in helping AI agents transact with each other—whether through humanoid robots, IoT devices, autonomous cars, or other devices. As AI grows, I also expect DePIN networks to grow, enabling AI to interact and transact seamlessly.

I’m still very interested in the peaq Network and its growth. It launched in December 2024 as one of the leading DePIN networks and already has hundreds of thousands of nodes on different dApps, like Silencio Networ, which allows mobile devices to become nodes, gather sound information, and transact through the DePIN network. Similarly, SkyX on peaq gathers weather data in real time, and Teneo, which also has hundreds of thousands of nodes, operates on the peaq Network.

Despite being early in this narrative, I expect millions of devices, nodes, and IoT devices to join DePIN throughout 2025. I’ll be keeping an eye on peaq Network’s growth. Additionally, IoTeX, another DePIN blockchain, deserves a mention. It’s been around longer than Peaq and initially focused on IoT devices transacting together. Over time, it has evolved into a full-fledged DePIN network. These are the two major networks in DePIN that I’ll be following moving forward.

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