The biggest crypto news and ideas of the day |
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XRP Falls As Market Drops |
XRP led crypto losses on the second-last day of this year as a stronger dollar weighed down global currencies and assets including bitcoin, with Asian equity markets sliding lower on Monday. XRP sunk more than 5% in the past 24 hours, with dogecoin (DOGE), Solana’s SOL, ether (ETH) and BNB falling as much as 2%. Overall market capitalization fell 3%, while the broad-based CoinDesk 20 (CD20), an index tracking the largest tokens, minus stablecoins, shed 3.5%. US equities declined on Friday and as investors trimmed positions amid uncertainty heading into year-end. An Asia Pacific index reversed 5-day gains, while futures contracts on U.S. indexes S&P 500 and Nasdaq pointed to losses in the U.S. session as of Asian afternoon hours. BTC has historically moved in the opposite direction of the U.S. Dollar Index (DXY), which gauges the greenback's exchange rate against major fiat currencies, including the euro. Strength in the dollar largely comes ahead of President-elect Donald Trump stepping into office in late January, where he has promised several policies to help the economy in the coming years. When the dollar strengthens, dollar-denominated assets become more attractive compared to cryptocurrencies. Investors prefer traditional investments like U.S. Treasuries or stocks, which yield returns in a strong dollar environment. |
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A message from The central bank of Latvia |
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The central bank of Latvia, Latvijas Banka, has announced free pre-licensing consultations for crypto-asset service providers looking to pursue the EU MiCA license – the new EU-wide united license and legal framework for the crypto-asset industry. Latvijas Banka will begin accepting applications and issuing operating permits starting January 2025, when the MiCA license will go into effect.
Latvijas Banka has developed both licensing and pre-licensing processes to provide the best possible support for innovators in the financial sector.
The pre-licensing process offers individual consultations with Latvijas Banka experts, ensuring guidance on the viability of applications, regulatory compliance, and document readiness. Latvijas Banka emphasizes accessibility and responsiveness, ensuring prompt, human-centered communication with an average response time of 48 hours.
A license from Latvijas Banka provides the opportunity to scale fast across the EU market and passport the services cross-border.
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AI Agents Capture Wide Attention |
The dead internet theory may not be in full swing just yet, but AI agents have already taken over much of Crypto Twitter. Reply bots on X are populating posts on nearly everything, using artificial intelligence models to increase reach and blockchains to settle micro transactions or record data. These bots are increasingly interacting with other bots, with pairs of such bots launching their own tokens. (While token issuance still requires humans, often the concept stems from whatever the AI bots decide). Initial replies to nearly all of CoinDesk’s posts in the past few weeks are often these AI bots, each either providing a reaction, a summary or analysis of linked reports, or sometimes even subtle snarks. The relatively new “AI Agents” sector has become crypto’s hottest in the past few months, beating gains in bitcoin, memecoins and decentralized finance tokens. Leading the pack among agents is ai16z, a meme parody of venture fund a16z that operates as a decentralized hedge fund. Token holders become “partners” by supplying their holdings to an on-chain fund, gaining a cut of profits until the fund’s expiration date in October 2025. The fund had locked up more than $22 million in user tokens as of Monday Dec 30. Those trading decisions are a mix of the bot’s read of the market. Token holders meeting a certain threshold can also interact with the bot directly, pitching ideas, and trying to influence its investing decisions. |
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Microstrategy Plunge Deepens |
In retrospect, it was inevitable.
Down more than 8% and holding just above $300 on Monday, MicroStrategy (MSTR) shares are now lower by about 30% since just after the announcement of their inclusion into the Nasdaq-100 index and nearly 50% from their late November record high. The signs of at least a major short-term top in one-time barely known enterprise software company turned juggernaut Bitcoin Development Company MicroStrategy were everywhere.
First among those signals was the rocketing stock price — at its high of $543 in late November, MSTR was up nearly eight-fold in 2024 and more than a 50-bagger since the company began buying bitcoin (BTC) in August 2020.
There was also founder and Executive Chairman Michael Saylor — never shy about promoting his company's prospects and evangelizing for Bitcoin — who late this year had somehow become even more ubiquitous on the financial news, podcast and social media carousels.
It wasn't just the constant appearances, but subtle changes in Saylor's attitude to what might charitably be described by U.S. sports fans as "spiking the football" following a touchdown. Among them was the constant promotion of the MicroStrategy-invented key performance indicator of "bitcoin yield," which recalled late 1990s made-up internet bubble metrics like "page views." His company flush with cash from share and convertible debt sales, Saylor — for reasons unknown — late in the year also got in the habit of teasing announcements of sizable new bitcoin purchases on the Sunday prior to the official regulatory filing on Monday morning. |
Growth, Trust and Global Adoption on Display at Fastex Harmony VI Meetup Both literally and figuratively, Dubai sits at the center of trade and commerce. The roots run deep. Dating back to the spice routes of antiquity, the region has long connected East and West and served as a global hub. Now Dubai is a flourishing environment for blockchain and Web3, making it the perfect setting for Fastex’s Harmony VI meetup. Held at the Intercontinental Ras Al Khaimah, this summit of experts, founders and CEOs underscored Fastex’s leadership, growth and focus on one crucial concept: trust. Continue reading here. |
Crypto Scammers Target Each Other |
Crypto scammers have finally found their thieving match: Themselves.
A new scam has been making the rounds mainly on YouTube that would make even the most cunning trickster tip their hat, security firm Kaspersky said in a security update last week. "I have USDT stored in my wallet, and I have the seed phrase. How do I transfer my funds to another wallet?,” Kaspersky noted one such comment. The specific wallet held over $8,000 worth of stablecoins on the Tron blockchain. A seed phrase is a word string that grants their knowers access to a crypto wallet.
This question, however, was not from a crypto novice but a cleverly laid trap. Those stablecoins were held in a multi-signature wallet, and theoretically require a gas fee to be able to withdraw funds. However, when thieves attempted to siphon off the funds by sending Tron’s TRX tokens to the wallet, the sent tokens mysteriously evaporated into another wallet controlled by the scammers.
The catch is that the bait wallet is set up as a multi-signature wallet. To authorize outgoing transactions in such wallets, approval from two or more people is required, so transferring USDT to a personal wallet won’t work and instead gets transferred somewhere else. “The scammers are impersonating beginners who foolishly share access to their crypto wallets, tricking equally naive thieves — who end up becoming the victims,” Kaspersky said. “In this scenario, the scammers are something like digital Robin Hoods, as the scheme primarily targets other crooked individuals.”
This scam isn't a lone wolf either, with several instances across the internet teeming with similar comments from new accounts, all of which dangled the same seed phrase, Kaspersky said.
As such, gas fees are typically cheap and cost less than $10 across most blockchains, meaning the hustle is likely targeting wannabe thieves rather than being a complex operation seeking to steal thousands, or even millions, of dollars.
But expect a crypto criminal to make money whenever there’s a chance to. |
The Takeaway: The Year of AI Agents |
By Jack Purdy, Messari:
One of the most significant emerging trends of 2024 has been the interplay between artificial intelligence (AI) and the crypto ecosystem. Historically this has primarily been on the infrastructure side, affecting various layers of the stack such as decentralized compute, storage and model training and inference. However, the last few months the crypto x AI crossover has taken stage front and center as agents have surfaced and are multiplying by the thousands. While the AI agent narrative has taken up a lot of mindshare of late, we've barely scratched the surface of what we're going to see in 2025. AI agents are autonomous programs designed to perform specific tasks. This could be as simple as sharing memes on X, all the way to complex on-chain transactions optimizing trade execution or yield farming strategies. Unlike standard bots, AI agents can learn best practices over time and make undefined decisions to meet predefined goals. Think of them as highly skilled, evolving crypto participants capable of navigating the digital economy autonomously. The value of AI agents lies not just in their utility but in their potential to scale human capabilities. Agents are no longer just tools — they are emerging as participants in the on-chain economy, driving innovation across finance, gaming and decentralized social platforms. With protocols such as Virtuals and open-source frameworks like ELIZA, it’s becoming increasingly simple for developers to build, deploy and iterate AI agents that serve an increasingly diverse set of use cases. This year offered glimpses of the potential applications for AI agents. From the bizarre rise of the Goatseus Maximus ($GOAT) memecoin to the rapid growth of agent-led experiments, AI agents are beginning to reshape how we interact with technology, culture and finance. Terminal of Truths (ToT) , an AI agent trained on a satirical internet religion, received a grant from prominent venture capitalist Marc Andreesen and amassed over 200,000 followers becoming crypto’s first AI KOL (key opinion leader) and millionaire as it drove $GOAT to a market cap of more than $1 billion.
While ToT might feel like an anomaly, it serves as a proof of concept for how AI agents can drive community-building, capture attention and fuel the next generation of on-chain activity. Since then over 11,000 agents have launched on the leading platform Virtuals, which may seem like a lot yet pales in comparison to pump.fun which is averaging 4x that every single day. While most of the agents launched are simple bots that simply propagate memes, we’re also seeing agents such as aixbt, which provides sophisticated investment research, and zerebro, which creates unique digital art. These applications may appear niche, but they offer a glimpse into the growing design space for AI agent innovation. Unlike the core foundational AI models that are developed behind the walled gardens of OpenAI and Anthropic, AI agents are being innovated in the trenches of the crypto world. And for good reason. Blockchains provide the ideal infrastructure as they offer permissionless and frictionless financial rails, enabling agents to seed wallets, transact and send funds autonomously — tasks that would be unfeasible using traditional financial systems. In addition, the open-source nature of crypto allows developers to leverage existing frameworks to launch and iterate on agents faster than ever before. With more no-code platforms like Top Hat gaining traction, it’s only getting easier for anyone to be able to launch an agent in minutes. Add in the financial incentive in which agents that gain traction tend to have a rise in price similar to your run-of-the-mill memecoin, potentially making the creator huge amounts of money, and you can see how this environment is ripe for attracting talent and accelerating progress. If 2024 laid the foundation for AI agents, 2025 will be the year they scale. Three trends will drive this evolution:
First, agent-to-agent and human-to-agent interactions will proliferate. Decentralized social platforms like Warpcast have already shown how agents can launch tokens, trade autonomously and interact with communities. As tools for creating agents become more accessible, these interactions will become a defining feature of the on-chain experience.
Second, AI agents will dominate financial activity on-chain. As developers build agents capable of optimizing trades, managing wallets and automating yield strategies, the financial infrastructure of crypto will become increasingly autonomous. Blockchain’s efficiency, combined with agents’ adaptability, will position crypto as the preferred environment for financial AI. Finally, agent-led ecosystems will reshape gaming and entertainment. Projects like Wayfinder and Echelon Prime’s Parallel Colony point to a future where AI agents not only participate in games but also manage assets, coordinate strategies and drive entire in-game economies. These agents will blur the lines between players, developers and automated participants, creating new dynamics for virtual worlds. The rise of AI agents marks a new chapter for both artificial intelligence and blockchain technology. While the applications we’ve seen so far — from memecoins to agent-led communities — may feel experimental, they mark a preview of the impact these agents will have as they scale. |
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