ChainFeeds pulls together five major crypto talking points in its Aug. 11 briefing
ChainFeeds’ Aug. 11 research briefing brought together five separate discussions spanning Bitcoin governance, social trading, Ethereum economics, and the early performance of Robinhood Chain. Rather than centering on one headline, the report grouped several debates that are unfolding at the same time across the market.
The briefing also listed that day’s headline items: Bitcoin’s BIP editor group removed Luke Dashjr’s editing privileges; Arthur Hayes said the yen could see volatility and that an expansion in the Federal Reserve balance sheet would be positive for Bitcoin; the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is set to review a customized issuance rule for certain crypto asset investment contracts on Aug. 14; Wang Chun said he opposed BIP-54 and would update his node if the proposal passed through the BIP-9 process; and Vitalik said privacy has become a top-tier priority in Ethereum’s updated technical roadmap.
BIP-110 triggered a Bitcoin chain split despite minimal signaling support
In a long post summarized by ChainFeeds, Bitcoin Orange wrote that the Bitcoin network split into two incompatible chains on Aug. 8. The unusual part was the level of support behind BIP-110 before the split happened. In the prior 2,016-block signaling window, the proposal received support from only 51 blocks, or 2.53%.
Even so, once block height 961632 was reached, nodes running BIP-110 began rejecting every block that did not include a bit 4 signal, following the proposal’s predefined rules. Most miners did not support the proposal and continued mining under the old rules. A smaller group of BIP-110 nodes and miners stayed on a separate branch.
As of 9:00 a.m. Beijing time on Aug. 9, the higher cumulative-work main chain had advanced to height 961654, while the BIP-110 execution chain was stuck at 961633, trailing by 21 blocks. In the first 23 blocks of the new period, the main chain did not produce a single signal in favor of the proposal.
The article said this was not a close hash power fight. The main chain kept moving normally, while the BIP-110 branch fell behind because its hash power was too limited to maintain a comparable block pace. BIP-110 was proposed by the pseudonymous developer Dathon Ohm, and Luke Dashjr contributed to early drafts and technical suggestions. Its reference implementation was built on Bitcoin Knots, which Luke maintains. It was not merged into Bitcoin Core, did not receive majority miner backing, and was never part of Bitcoin Core’s mainnet upgrade path. The practical push came from some Knots node operators and a small number of miners.
The report described the effort as a UASF attempt. In that framework, nodes tighten the rules for what they accept even if miners have not reached sufficient signaling support, forcing the network to choose.
The underlying dispute remains the long-running inscriptions debate. Ordinals, BRC-20, and Runes write images, text, and token data into Bitcoin blocks. Supporters of those uses argue that block space is a fee market and miners should be free to include whatever users are willing to pay for. BIP-110 supporters take a different view. They argue that Bitcoin should first serve as money and a payments network, and that large amounts of arbitrary data increase blockchain size and leave global full nodes carrying long-term storage, bandwidth, validation, and propagation costs. Publishers pay a fee once, but nodes everywhere bear the burden afterward.
BIP-110 tries to move that conflict out of relay policy and miner packaging preferences and into consensus rules. According to the summary, the proposal would run for about a year after activation. Most ordinary new output scripts would be limited to 34 bytes, OP_RETURN would be capped at 83 bytes, data pushes and some witness elements could not exceed 256 bytes, and several Taproot constructions that might carry data would be disabled. Old UTXOs would be exempt, and most conventional payment transactions would remain unaffected.
Opposition extends beyond whether inscriptions can still be published. The article said BIP-110 changes parts of the debate from a fee-market question into a valid-versus-invalid consensus judgment. That could affect Miniscript, BitVM, and future protocols that rely on Taproot. It also would not fully eliminate on-chain data publication, since users could still split data or alter encoding schemes, though at higher cost and with more complexity.
Why push ahead with support so low? The explanation given in the piece is that BIP-110 supporters do not treat miner signaling as the final vote. Under UASF logic, nodes decide which blocks are valid. If enough users, wallets, exchanges, and payment services enforce new rules, miners may eventually follow to avoid producing blocks that economic actors reject.
BIP-110 sets a 55% miner lock-in threshold, below the 95% commonly seen in traditional BIP9 deployments. The more aggressive part comes later: even if the threshold is not reached over time, the proposal still enters a mandatory signaling period from 961632 to 963647. BIP-110 nodes treat blocks without bit 4 as invalid, their branch would lock in after 963648, then after another 2,016-block period the data restrictions are scheduled to take effect at 965664.
For now, the article said, that bet has not paid off. Most miners continue to extend the original chain, while BIP-110 nodes wait for blocks on a low-hash-power branch. It also stressed that what has happened so far is only a signaling-rule fork. The 34-, 83-, and 256-byte restrictions are not active on Bitcoin mainnet, and the BIP-110 branch has not yet reached formal lock-in or enforcement.
Pump and FOMO are fighting over the social trading gateway
In another English-language long post cited by ChainFeeds, Rune framed the contest in simple terms: who controls discovery, amplification, distribution, and trading. In the author’s view, that is the more valuable half of the market now being contested.
Pumpfun has raised more than $1 billion and has laid out a clear ambition to become crypto’s social media layer, not just a token launch platform. FOMO has raised roughly one-tenth as much, according to the piece, but got the product to market first.
Pump entered from the livestream creator angle, combining live trading, personal branding, entertainment content, and trade execution. The theory is a social flywheel: creators attract users, users trade, and fee revenue helps fund more creators. The criticism in the article is that creators end up needing to issue tokens just to sustain the format. The author compared that problem to Jesse Pollak’s “coin everything” idea and to issues seen in the Zora ecosystem. Instead of a real social network, the result becomes a set of streamers optimizing around token fees.
FOMO took a different route. The article said it was founded in 2025 by former dYdX team members. It uses a non-custodial model, supports cross-chain trading, and removes the need for users to directly handle bridging. It offers a live trading feed where users can watch real trades and copy them. Over a year, the author wrote, it may have reached more than 100,000 traders, billions of dollars in volume, and millions of social interactions.
Pump has now moved directly into FOMO’s lane. On Aug. 8, it rolled out a social trading upgrade with alerting for “called” tokens to all followers, zero-fee trading, and cross-chain USDC. The article’s argument was blunt: this is essentially FOMO’s product thesis.
The recruitment strategy described in the post was equally direct. Pump has reportedly offered one-time signing bonuses and fixed monthly payments to top FOMO users on the condition that they move their capital and positions away from FOMO, bind their X accounts to Pump, publicly state that Pump is their only wallet, and permanently delete their FOMO accounts. In the author’s telling, joining is not enough; users are expected to burn the old house on the way out.
Still, the piece gave Pump clear strengths. Its advantage lies in infrastructure: strong execution, a fast backend, dependable routing, and a mature technical stack built over years of running the largest token launch platform in crypto. Both products use Relay for cross-chain functionality, so that part is roughly even, but Pump’s core trading stack is already established.
Pump also owns a distribution point that FOMO cannot reproduce. Every Solana meme coin is born on Pumpfun. If the social layer forms where the token is created, there is no need to persuade users to go looking for another app afterward.
FOMO’s moat, however, was described as social rather than functional. It comes from who users follow, whose portfolios they watch, whose trade judgment they trust, and which communities are coordinating. The article compared Pump adding social features to Meta launching Threads against X. Features can ship overnight. Relationships cannot. Threads reached 100 million users on day one and still did not kill X, because the culture remained where it had already formed.
The post did not claim those relationship networks are permanent. If Pump improves the app experience and fully uses its launchpad position, it could still shift the balance. But the author argued that this would not happen through sign-on deals in three months. It would take product execution over a year. The prevailing market view, according to the article, is not loyalty to one side. It is that competition helps, and traders care more about whether both products are moving faster than they were a month ago.
The closing framework divided the market into two phases. The first was issuance infrastructure, a phase Pump has already won. The second is attention and distribution: who controls discovery, amplification, distribution, and execution. That is the fight now underway.
A market note argued Bitcoin is setting up quietly while attention is elsewhere
Another English article in the roundup, written by Will, said the past year has been difficult for people focused on Bitcoin and the broader crypto market. Even though BTC’s drawdown from cycle highs has been milder than in earlier cycles, the author argued that this bear market has in many ways felt harder than 2022.
In 2022, the reasons for the downturn were clear: rising rates, leverage liquidations, fraud events, and the collapse of FTX. Investors could reasonably believe that if those forces changed and the market was near the point where things could not get much worse, BTC would likely become an attractive long-term opportunity again. This time, the article said, there has been no comparable repair narrative. Aside from digital asset treasury companies, or DATs, and quantum-computing risk, there had not been an obvious path to recovery.
The piece contrasted several data points. Bitcoin ETFs now hold about $50 billion in assets, and institutional lending products have started to emerge. Gold surged last year on central bank reserve demand and de-dollarization narratives, which should have opened a window for Bitcoin to perform. Yet nearly everyone who wants Bitcoin exposure can already get it, and that has made BTC’s weak performance more disappointing. Over the past year, Bitcoin ETFs saw about $5 billion in net outflows, while DRAM-related assets drew $10 billion in a single month.
When the author talks about Bitcoin fundamentals, the focus is not on conventional financial statements but on the state of the network itself. The argument starts from the continued value of decentralization in a world shaped by state-led economic systems, government influence over markets, and concentrated technological power in large companies.
Within Bitcoin, nodes and miners play different roles. Anyone can run a node, which enforces network rules and validates transactions. Miners provide security through energy-backed computation. There are large numbers of Bitcoin nodes globally, spread across nearly 200 countries. Hash rate becomes the practical way to gauge the energy committed to the network, since individual miners are much harder to track than nodes.
The article acknowledged that hash rate has declined. It linked the drop to squeezed miner margins after 2022, higher energy costs, and a shift by many mining companies toward AI and HPC. But it also argued there is a constructive interpretation: even after most listed mining companies pivoted, total hash rate has only fallen back to mid-last-year levels, which suggests that many miners with access to low-cost energy are still supporting the network. Alongside the broad node distribution, the piece said this points to a Bitcoin network that remains decentralized and healthy.
From a technical and on-chain valuation perspective, the note argued that Bitcoin is approaching the lower end of its historical valuation range. BTC is trading around the 2021 all-time high, sits below the 200-week moving average, and is showing a bullish divergence on weekly RSI. The article described that as the first oversold condition since the last bear-market bottom. Historically, the 200-week moving average has been an important reference for investors looking to start accumulating spot BTC.
Another indicator highlighted was MVRV, or market value to realized value. It compares current market price with the network’s aggregate cost basis. When the ratio is elevated, there are large unrealized profits in the market and holders are more likely to sell into strength. When it falls into low or even negative territory, the article said, history has often marked those periods as stronger accumulation zones.
It also pointed out that during the 2024 to 2025 run, MVRV never reached the extreme overheating levels seen at prior cycle tops. The interpretation was that Bitcoin is maturing and volatility is gradually moderating. With cycle highs trending lower and bear-market lows trending higher, the author suggested Bitcoin may not need to revisit deeply distressed loss territory to form a bottom. What matters more, in that reading, is that Bitcoin is already trading in the lower part of its historical valuation range while long-term holders are accumulating again after distribution in the second half of 2025.
The article laid out three possible approaches. The first is to keep dollar-cost averaging into spot Bitcoin over the next few months. The second is to wait for one final market leg lower before allocating. The third is to build a position now while hedging through the options market.
EIP-8363 reopened the debate over Ethereum’s reward model
Haotian’s contribution to the roundup centered on EIP-8363 and whether Ethereum should eventually rely on “real income” rather than ongoing issuance to support staking returns. In the version described in the article, once total network staking rises above 50%, consensus-layer issuance rewards would be fully burned away, leaving only execution-layer income such as MEV and tips to incentivize stakers.
The article argued that the proposal’s starting point is positive for ETH holders because it would reduce ongoing issuance and push the market toward sustaining network security through actual economic activity instead of relying on dilution-based subsidies.
Resistance in the short term, the author wrote, is inevitable because the proposal would affect incumbent interests and could upset the current DeFi balance. Liquid staking protocols such as Lido and etherFi would see their earning power hit because most of the rewards they currently pass on to stakers come from about 2.6% in consensus-layer issuance, while MEV and similar fees contribute only 0.2%. Under that framing, the proposal weakens a major source of future yield.
The same logic extends to established DeFi names such as AAVE, according to the article. Some lending and looping activity depends on that issuance-linked reward base. The piece also named institutional treasury participants represented by Fundstrat as another group that would face pressure if native staking yield were stripped away and the case for holding ETH became one of zero yield.
Even so, the article treated much of the immediate backlash as noise. First, the proposal is still in public discussion and the 50% staking threshold has not yet been reached. The proposal’s existence itself could discourage the market from leaning too heavily on staking rewards, which in turn could help prevent that threshold from being crossed too easily. Second, even if adopted, the implementation would include an 18-month transition period rather than an overnight removal of rewards, leaving time for the market to adjust.
The article’s bottom line was that shutting off what it described as the switch for unlimited ETH issuance subsidies would force Ethereum toward a model where genuine economic activity funds the network.
Robinhood Chain posted a strong debut, but meme trading drove most of it
In the final section, AJC argued that Robinhood’s crypto unit is hitting a growth ceiling even as the company’s broader business reaches record highs. In the second quarter of 2026, Robinhood’s crypto revenue fell 38% year over year to $100 million and accounted for only 8% of total company revenue. Retail crypto trading volume fell 36%, and crypto assets under custody as a share of total AUC dropped to a record low of 7%.
At the same time, Robinhood Chain’s launch produced one of the strongest openings seen recently among Layer 2 networks. In July, the network generated $3.6 million in real economic value, or REV. That amounted to 38% of all Layer 2 revenue tracked by growthepie and put Robinhood Chain ahead of Polygon at $2.7 million and Base at $2.1 million for the month.
Robinhood officially launched the Robinhood Chain mainnet on July 1, 2026 as a Layer 2 meant to support its on-chain ecosystem. At the current pace, the July REV figure annualizes to about $43.2 million. The article stressed that this is an impressive start for a new chain, but still not enough on its own to reverse the decline in Robinhood’s crypto revenue.
Early activity has also been concentrated in one area. Meme coins accounted for 51% of spot trading volume on Robinhood Chain in July. Total spot volume reached $6.93 billion, with meme coins contributing $3.55 billion. By comparison, RWA, one of the chain’s original strategic narratives, represented only $313.2 million, or about 5% of the total.
The article added that some RWA activity is also tied to meme coin liquidity pools. Certain tokenized stocks or ETF products are paired with meme assets, which means meme-related influence on the chain’s activity may be even larger than the headline figures suggest.
From there, the analysis shifted to value capture. The article argued that crypto is gradually moving from infrastructure-led monetization to application-layer monetization. Solana was cited as a case where mature ecosystems see applications capture growing revenue while the base chain captures a smaller share. If Robinhood wants Robinhood Chain to become another business line generating more than $100 million a year, it will need to participate directly in application-layer business models rather than relying mostly on network fees.
Robinhood has already started exploring that path through its stablecoin strategy. Unlike chains that primarily use USDC or USDT, Robinhood Chain uses USDG as its native stablecoin. That gives Robinhood access to interest income generated by the reserve assets behind the stablecoin. As of the end of July, USDG’s market capitalization on Robinhood Chain was $333.1 million. Using a 3.5% reserve yield and assuming Robinhood keeps 90% of the interest income, the article estimated annualized revenue at about $10.5 million.
The report also pointed to application-layer partnerships. Lighter has deployed a perpetual futures DEX on Robinhood Chain and shares trading fees with Robinhood, while Morpho is entering the main Robinhood app to provide stablecoin yield services to users.
The article’s final point was straightforward: Robinhood has an advantage that almost every other blockchain lacks, direct access to a large retail investor base. Whether Robinhood Chain can turn a strong first month into something durable depends on whether a meme-led burst of activity can last and whether application-layer monetization develops quickly enough behind it.
