ChainFeeds on July 18 published a research digest that bundled five pieces on Bitcoin market structure, Base’s builder strategy, meme tokens and creator economies, the incentives behind corporate-backed chains, and Changpeng Zhao’s long-range view of crypto.
Glassnode: Bitcoin shows “green shoots” as long-term holder pressure fades
Glassnode said in its weekly note that Bitcoin’s main source of pressure this quarter has been higher real rates rather than a broad flight to safety. U.S. 10-year real yields have climbed close to their 2026 highs at about 2.4%, while the dollar has stayed above its 200-day moving average since May.
At the same time, the report said wider risk markets have not shown comparable stress. Equities remain near record highs, credit spreads are still close to very tight levels, and volatility has stayed subdued. Against that backdrop, weak inflation data released on Tuesday prompted one of the strongest reactions among major assets: Bitcoin jumped quickly in the hour after the data and finished the week clearly ahead of U.S. and European equities.
Glassnode argued that this change in sensitivity matters. For roughly a month, Bitcoin had been stuck near local lows, but the market is again responding positively to supportive news. In the firm’s framing, a market that can rally sharply on a single inflation print usually signals that seller exhaustion is building and buyers are waiting for a fresh catalyst.
The cost-basis picture, it said, is unusually clear. Bitcoin is trading above Realized Price but still below the Short-Term Holder Cost Basis. Realized Price represents the average on-chain acquisition cost for the market as a whole and is often treated as a natural floor area in bear phases. The short-term holder cost basis, around $69,000, reflects the average cost of coins bought over the last five months.
That places the current rebound near a major break-even zone that also serves as an important overhead resistance area. Glassnode said a large amount of supply from underwater buyers is still waiting to be released there. The first test of that region could trigger a visible response: a clean break and hold would open room for further upside, while a rejection would suggest the market remains trapped in a range.
The report also pointed to a shift in who is selling. For most of this cycle, profit-taking by long-term holders dominated. Now, that pressure has nearly disappeared. Coins sold by long-term holders are now mostly being distributed at a loss. Loss-taking by both holder groups has become a major share of on-chain activity, which Glassnode described as typical of a late-stage bear market.
The more important change is that the share of long-term holder losses has stopped rising. Persistent sell pressure that had accompanied each rebound this year is starting to ease. Glassnode tracks that capitulation through Entity-Adjusted Long-Term Holder Realized Loss, a metric that removes the effect of internal transfers and measures the value long-term holders are actually surrendering each day.
That metric peaked two weeks ago, according to the report. Glassnode had already flagged a cooldown last week as a necessary condition for a more durable rebound. It now says the measure has started to decline. One downturn does not prove that the bottom is fully in place, and another shock could revive selling, but this is the first time in the current cycle that a core bottoming indicator has begun to move lower rather than keep rising. In the firm’s view, the selling force that drove the bear phase is weakening at the margin.
Base Build tells developers to help build a global on-chain financial system
In a message addressed to builders, Base Build said the Base ecosystem fund sees global finance as one of blockchain’s most decisive application areas. That covers payments, stablecoins, credit, trading, asset tokenization, derivatives, prediction markets and AI agents.
On tokenized assets, the piece said demand is growing for productive yield-bearing instruments as more real-world assets move on-chain. The opportunity spans short-duration operating capital such as stablecoin pre-financing, accounts receivable financing, trade finance and revenue-share financing, as well as longer-duration assets such as REITs, royalty income, licensing income and private credit funds.
Assets can reach the chain through wrapped off-chain funds, natively issued on-chain instruments, or stablecoin yield vaults that allocate capital into target exposures. But Base Build argued that strong teams will need more than token issuance. They will need vertical expertise in sourcing, risk assessment and asset management.
The payoff, it said, is broader than digitizing an existing product. A successful tokenization platform could offer users return streams with lower correlation to traditional markets, deeper portfolio diversification, greater liquidity and wider distribution. The larger opportunity is to redesign how assets are issued, traded and managed by using blockchain composability and open infrastructure.
Stablecoins and credit are another area of focus. Base Build pointed to emerging markets with weak financial infrastructure, including Argentina, Cambodia, Ecuador, Lebanon and Venezuela, where the U.S. dollar remains the main unit of account even though a large share of household wealth still sits in cash. That capital has limited access to yield and remains outside much of the modern financial system.
One opening, according to the piece, is to connect local cash networks with stablecoin infrastructure so that cash can move on-chain and into yield products or broader financial services. Stablecoins, it said, can help users bypass inefficient banking rails and gain faster, cheaper access to payments and finance.
The same logic extends to credit. Traditional systems rely on limited data and fixed scoring models, often shutting out borrowers who could otherwise qualify for reasonably priced loans. With tools such as zkTLS, Base Build said it becomes possible to verify salary data, bank account details and asset information while preserving privacy, then combine that with on-chain credit records to build a fuller underwriting model.
That future credit stack may include more than personal collateralized lending. The post said it could expand into multi-party structures such as family-backed credit support or lending based on remittance relationships. Using smart contracts, stablecoins and verifiable data, financial institutions could create a more open and efficient credit system that reaches more people.
Base Build also framed AI agents as a new class of economic actor. Today’s financial rails assume the transacting parties are people or companies, so they depend on identity checks, manual authorization and legally recognized principals. Once AI agents can execute tasks autonomously, the post argues, they will need their own identity, wallets, payment capability and transaction authority.
An AI agent might buy data, rent compute, pay service fees, manage capital and transact with other agents. To support that kind of machine economy, Base Build said the industry will need agent wallets, agent identity systems and agent commerce protocols.
Agent wallets would need autonomous payment capability together with risk limits, permission controls and automated audit mechanisms. Identity systems would need to establish what an agent is, on whose behalf it is acting and whether it has authority to act at all. Commerce protocols would need to let agents transact directly with one another. Base Build’s argument is that blockchain’s openness, programmability and transparent settlement make it a natural base layer for that economy. The challenge ahead is not only to make AI more capable, but to let it participate in economic activity through new payment, identity and trust rails.
Ansem argues for a tokenized creator network model
Ansem said memecoins have already shown that highly energized online communities can pull in large numbers of retail speculators, but they often struggle to maintain long-term activity after peak hype passes. By contrast, the creator economy has shown that creators can generate lasting revenue from loyal audiences, yet markets still lack a direct way to invest in creator influence itself.
He framed $ANSEM as an attempt to bring those two models into a single token and align holders around a shared network objective. The goal, he said, is to create one of the largest on-chain user onboarding events in crypto history while building a network of people focused on markets, personal financial sovereignty and contributions to the crypto ecosystem.
In his telling, tokenization offers a way to combine memecoin-style attention with creator-economy durability. Asset values are often shaped by both tangible and intangible inputs. The first category includes revenue, market position, product progress and innovation. The second includes attention, narrative strength and community influence. Memecoins and creator networks are, in his view, some of the clearest examples of pricing attention as an asset.
The core idea behind $ANSEM is to create what he called the first tokenized social network. He compared Instagram’s roughly 3 billion users with Meta’s roughly 30 million shareholders, arguing that most social media participants contribute time, content and attention every day without owning any stake in the value they help create. A memecoin, he said, can attract retail participation in ways traditional equities cannot. In that framing, $ANSEM is meant to bridge the gap between an asset like Dogecoin and long-term public equity ownership in firms such as Meta or Apple.
The project plans to build network effects through guerrilla marketing, phased airdrops and protocol-level incentive alignment. Ansem said price appreciation itself is the largest marketing funnel because rising prices draw attention and then more users. He also argued that $ANSEM had a fairer launch profile than many tokens that begin life with market capitalizations already in the hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars, since the token remained at a lower valuation stage before his involvement.
Its broader plan is to tie the token into the creator’s future crypto-related activity and use partnerships and ecosystem incentives to move more users into the on-chain economy. The long-term ambition, he said, is to become a representative project for a trillion-dollar crypto vertical: a tokenized creator economy where tokens serve as a more efficient tool for user growth and value distribution.
Ansem also reviewed earlier attempts to merge social identity, creators and tokens. Friend.tech let users buy Keys tied to individuals, showing that users were willing to pay for access to trusted figures and private communities. But he said the product eventually failed because of high transaction costs, growth limits created by the bonding curve design and a feature set that could not keep users engaged.
Time.fun tried a related structure with personal tokens, livestreaming and chat, but in his view it never captured enough attention and lacked a core narrative that could sustain ongoing trading. Creator coins launched through Pump.fun faced a similar problem: they could attract short-term attention but struggled to hold value because the underlying creators did not sustain broad influence and did not build an external ecosystem users could keep participating in over time.
His conclusion is that many of those projects failed because they only tokenized an individual without creating a larger story users wanted to identify with. $ANSEM aims to avoid that by centering not on a single person but on a meme and community culture with broader distribution potential. It also plans to expand through existing channels such as X, YouTube, TikTok and Instagram rather than relying on one platform. The intended result is an on-chain social network that combines memecoin attention with the longer-lived community value of the creator economy.
Jonah Burian: corporate chains sell distribution, but the dependency can become costly
Jonah Burian’s essay asked why developers choose to build on what he called “Corpo Chains.” His answer was simple: distribution. Some platforms provide direct incentives, but more often the pitch is user growth and built-in access to customers. In Base’s case, he wrote, the implied promise is that if a team builds on the chain, Coinbase may help surface the product through Coinbase Wallet or the main Coinbase app.
On paper, that can look like a mutually beneficial exchange. Developers get access to user channels that are hard to build from scratch, while the chain captures fee revenue from application activity and may extract additional value through promotion or discovery services. The tension is that platforms often run their own applications too.
That creates conflicts of interest. Coinbase has an incentive to push its own exchange and wallet. Robinhood has an incentive to prioritize its brokerage and wallet products. Stripe has an incentive to reinforce its own payments stack. Burian’s point is not that distribution is worthless, but that developers accept platform dependence in exchange for it, and that dependence can harden into a structural risk over time.
History offers plenty of examples. Amazon used third-party seller data to identify popular products and then launched private-label competitors. Those merchants helped prove demand, only to find that the platform with the best data and customer access could become the rival. Microsoft’s battle with Netscape showed the same logic in software distribution: Netscape relied on Windows for reach, and Microsoft undercut that position by bundling Internet Explorer into the operating system.
Burian said a similar pattern could emerge in ecosystems such as Base, Robinhood Chain and Tempo. If a platform controls the core infrastructure and the main user gateway, it enjoys stronger information and resource advantages than any independent developer. Once the platform sees a valuable application category, it may decide to enter directly rather than keep backing third parties.
That is where so-called neutral chains still matter. Burian argued that Ethereum and Solana offer an underappreciated advantage in credible neutrality. A base chain does not usually operate a large portfolio of apps, so developers do not have to worry that the chain itself will suddenly launch a competing product. Teams building on Ethereum, for instance, do not need to spend time asking whether Ethereum will start an app that takes their market.
He treated that neutrality as a long-term asset. It allows developers to build products and customer relationships without constantly recalculating whether the underlying platform will shift strategy. Corporate chains are not off limits, he wrote, but developers should reduce their reliance on any one platform. A better strategy is to use distribution from a corporate chain as an early growth tool while developing an independent brand and direct user channels.
Multi-chain deployment is another hedge. It preserves optionality and reduces the bargaining power of any single platform. Burian said the corporate-chain model is still early and platforms may yet find ways to manage these conflicts, but the central trade remains intact: distribution advantages often come bundled with platform risk, and long-term winners will still need their own user relationships, their own brand strength and their own independent path to growth.
CZ: don’t think about exiting crypto
In the interview section of the roundup, CZ said crypto was still a niche industry nine years ago. When Binance started, Bitcoin was around $2,000 to $3,000, the user base was small, and the users were highly committed early adopters who understood products in detail. He said they knew Binance protected them, so they followed both conviction and capital.
As the community expanded, he said, Binance kept protecting users through action rather than slogans. Many volunteers contributed to the Binance ecosystem; some were called Binance Angels, while others had no formal title at all. That, he said, is what “Built by You” means in practice. If a company treats its community well, the community stays with it.
CZ argued that centralized companies attract all kinds of attacks, from regulation and legal pressure to geopolitics. Communities, by contrast, are harder to attack because they are distributed. In Binance’s case, he said, the community is spread across the world, making a coordinated attack on it much harder. He added that communities can also fight back, often generating more volume on social platforms than mainstream media outlets.
He said every product category in the industry still has room for improvement. Fiat on- and off-ramps remain too expensive and too cumbersome, so the providers that lower cost, reduce friction and expand geographic coverage will have an edge. Stablecoins are another example. The most popular ones do not pay users interest, while the products that do offer yield are not always easy to trade. A stablecoin that combines attractive yield with free tradability would represent a clear product improvement, in his view.
On tokenized real-world assets, CZ said the sector is still very new. Only a small number of stocks have truly been tokenized, and the market remains centered on the United States. He raised the question of why other countries would not want to tokenize their own stock markets and open them to a global investor base. Measured by wealth, crypto penetration is still below 1%, he said, which means the industry remains at an early starting point.
His broader criticism is that many people still view crypto as a speculative instrument rather than an underlying technology. “You buy Bitcoin and then think about when to exit. You wouldn’t exit the internet, and you wouldn’t exit AI. Crypto is the same. It is a technology,” he said. He described blockchain and crypto as one of the three foundational technologies of his lifetime, alongside the internet and AI, and said projects should be judged on a long-term basis.
CZ also spent time on AI. He said he sees AI much like the internet: every company and every person should use it as much as possible, though not abuse it. AI is strong at writing code, spotting bugs and analyzing software, and it is also useful in design and video work. But he said not everything should be handed over to AI because the world people live in is still a human one and people still want a human touch. AI may be good at creativity, he added, but original creativity remains stronger in humans.
On security, he said AI will reshape the field because it is very good at finding vulnerabilities. Developers can use it to identify weak points in systems quickly. He specifically mentioned Anthropic’s Methuselah model as “extremely powerful” and said he hopes a developer-facing version will arrive soon to help harden systems. In his view, there may be some hacking incidents in the short term, but systems should become much safer over time.
He also said blockchain throughput is still insufficient and that the industry needs faster, higher-capacity chains to cut usage costs. AI, he said, will play an important role in accelerating that development. At a deeper level, he expects AI to push the world into a far more digital state than the internet did, by a factor of ten or even one hundred. The more digital the world becomes, the more it will need digital money. “The concept of paper currency is outdated. AI will push us past that tipping point,” he said.
The roundup also listed several headline items for the day, including an Ethereum researcher’s “Privacy Guardians 2.0” proposal for on-chain payments, Robinhood’s filing with the SEC for an employee broker-dealer exemption and a related employee investment fund, Bitcoin Japan’s plan to spend about $4.069 million on an initial Bitcoin purchase, Tom Lee’s comments on AI bottleneck assets and Ethereum, and remarks from a Bullish representative during a CLARITY Act hearing.
