ChainFeeds on Aug. 7 published a research roundup spanning five topics: Japan’s regulatory and stablecoin push, Ethereum’s anti-censorship design debate, Bitcoin demand signals, the concentration risk inside Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 ecosystem, and a broader reset in how the crypto market values projects.
Japan is moving from policy talk to implementation
In its WebX 2026 note, ChainFeeds cited Four Pillars as saying Japan has entered the implementation stage of financial regulatory reform. One line came up repeatedly during the event: “the law will pass this week.” According to the report, that was largely borne out by events. The amendment to the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act, or FIEA, had already passed the House of Representatives before the conference and was approved by a Senate committee on the second day of the event.
Ken Kawai, a partner at Anderson Mori & Tomotsune, said the new framework will be formally implemented within one year after the law is promulgated, with enforcement expected in the summer of 2027. Policy changes tied to tax reform also point to a shift from the current top aggregate tax rate of 55% to a separate 20.315% rate around January 2028. Crypto ETFs could follow in 2028 after that tax reform is completed.
Bitbank founder and CEO Noriyuki Hirosue said Japan’s industry had failed for years to push through tax reform because regulators believed there were “too many scam projects” to justify preferential treatment. In his account, consensus only started to form two years ago, when the industry became willing to accept securities-level regulation, disclosure rules, the sector’s first insider-trading regime and higher compliance costs in exchange for long-term legalization and institutional access.
Stablecoins were one of the most discussed subjects at WebX. Japan now has two regulated yen stablecoins, JPYC and JPYSC, but their combined issuance is only about 13 billion yen. Global dollar stablecoins, by comparison, are close to 50 trillion yen.
Tomohiko Kondo, president of SBI VC Trade, said 100 billion yen is still “too small.” The real target, he said, is 1 trillion yen within a year. By the next WebX, he expects roughly 30% of attendees to be using stablecoins.
JPYC CEO Noritaka Okabe said Japanese stablecoin issuers could become long-term buyers of Japanese government bonds, or JGBs, because reserves are naturally allocated to government debt. If JPYC reaches the trillion-yen level, he said, it effectively becomes a balance sheet that keeps buying JGBs.
NETSTARS, described as Japan’s largest QR-code payments platform, has opened StablecoinPay to 700,000 merchants. The service supports payments in USDC, USDT and JPYC while settling in yen, with fees of about 0.98%, below the roughly 3% charged by traditional bank cards.
The pairing of AI agents and stablecoins was framed as one of the event’s most forward-looking themes. Okabe said 99.3% of global stablecoin payment volume is no longer initiated by humans and is instead completed automatically between programs, with true human offline payments accounting for only a very small share. He expects machine-to-machine transactions to outnumber human-to-human transactions by roughly 10,000 times by 2035 as the agent economy matures.
Animoca Brands co-founder Yat Siu said the number of AI agents on the internet could eventually reach 50 billion to 100 billion, far above the global population. Those agents cannot open bank accounts, in his view, which makes stablecoins their natural payment rail. Sungmo Park, head of Asia Pacific at a16z, said blockchain’s poor wallet experience may not be designed for humans but could be naturally suited to software. Franklin Bi, a partner at Pantera Capital, added that AI agents will become major participants in financial markets and that tokenized assets are the infrastructure that allows institutional assets to be understood and traded by AI.
FOCIL would shift Ethereum inclusion power away from a single proposer
In a separate piece, imToken Labs examined the proposal known as FOCIL, short for Fork-Choice Enforced Inclusion Lists. The article starts with a basic point: when a user signs and sends a transaction from a wallet, it usually goes first to Ethereum’s public transaction pool, the mempool. But getting into the mempool does not mean the transaction is on-chain. Someone still has to select it, order it, put it into a block and submit that block to the network.
That is where the problem appears. After Ethereum moved to proof-of-stake, the network adopted proposer-builder separation, or PBS, to reduce the chance that large staking pools could use maximal extractable value, or MEV, to build an economic monopoly. Under PBS, builders collect transactions, order them, search for arbitrage and liquidation opportunities, and assemble the most profitable block they can. Proposers then choose from candidate blocks submitted by builders and forward one to the network.
imToken Labs said this division of labor has a practical purpose. MEV strategies have become increasingly complex. If every ordinary validator had to optimize ordering and block construction on its own, larger nodes with more capital, data and technical capability would gain an edge. By shifting complex construction work to specialized builders, ordinary validators can still take part in block proposal and earn rewards even without advanced arbitrage systems, easing the pressure MEV places on staking decentralization.
FOCIL changes the question of who gets to decide whether a transaction must be included. Instead of leaving that power to one proposer, it moves the decision to a validator committee. For each slot, the network randomly selects a temporary committee. Each member watches the mempool independently and submits a local inclusion list.
The effect is straightforward. Even if 99% of builders and proposers across the network want to censor a transaction, that transaction can still fall under protocol protection if one honest committee member includes it on a list. A censor would no longer need to sway one person; it would need to get around several independent participants.
Lists alone are not enough, though. If a builder simply ignores the list, the mechanism would amount to a suggestion. FOCIL therefore adds a second layer: the fork-choice rule. Voting validators would check whether a submitted block complies with the committee-aggregated inclusion list. If a builder violates that obligation, the network would refuse to vote for the block. The block would fail as invalid under protocol rules, leaving the builder to absorb the cost of a failed proposal.
For ordinary users sending transfers, swaps or DeFi transactions, imToken Labs said the interface would not need to change. Users would still enter an amount, confirm gas, sign and wait. The difference sits under the surface, in the logic that governs whether a transaction can make it into a block.
What FOCIL improves is certainty around inclusion. A valid transaction would no longer depend entirely on the preference of one builder. Even if a builder does not want to process it, other validators could create a protocol-level inclusion requirement through the list. Over time, the power to include a transaction and the power to order transactions may separate further. Builders would still compete on ordering, arbitrage and liquidations, but their ability to decide who gets into the market in the first place would be restricted.
The article argues that Ethereum’s credible neutrality could gradually move from a claim based on participant conduct to a set of rules enforced by clients. Users would not need to know which builder assembled a block, or trust builders individually to stay neutral. Validators would apply the same checks, making it harder for non-compliant blocks to win network acceptance. Wallets and block explorers could eventually expose more detailed states too, showing whether a transaction has entered an inclusion list, whether a later block owes it inclusion, and whether a delay comes from low gas, transaction expiry or abnormal block construction.
Bitcoin’s rebound has not yet been confirmed by demand
On Bitcoin, Axel Adler Jr said the latest price rebound still lacks confirmation from capital inflows. Two indicators have improved from July lows but remain negative: the apparent demand-to-issuance ratio and net age flow.
His core point is that supply continues to age and leave circulation, which supports price, but fresh demand has not returned. Bitcoin’s 30-day apparent demand-to-issuance ratio remains below zero, the number of young coins held for less than one year keeps shrinking, and demand has not expanded.
The metric compares the change in the amount of BTC held for less than one year over the past 30 days with new issuance over the same period. It currently stands at -5.43. Over the last 30 days, the decline in young BTC supply was far larger than the amount newly issued. The indicator has been negative for about five straight months. It has recovered from around -16 in July, which suggests stress has eased, but Adler said the market structure itself has not materially changed. As long as the reading stays below zero, apparent demand has not validated the durability of the rally. A move back above zero would be the first sign of demand improvement. If it stays above 1, that would mark a new phase in which young supply is growing faster than issuance and demand is genuinely pushing the market.
The 30-day net age flow is also still negative, which means Bitcoin supply continues to age and liquid circulating supply is still falling. This measure tracks net BTC movement across different holding-age bands over the last 30 days. A negative reading means more BTC has moved into the over-one-year long-term holder cohort rather than back into younger supply. A positive reading would mean more long-held BTC has re-entered circulation.
The current value is -85,500 BTC. Over the past month, 85,500 BTC on net moved into the over-one-year holder group instead of returning to younger supply. The indicator has remained negative for seven consecutive months. It has improved from roughly -220,000 BTC in July, but it is still clearly below zero.
Adler said this shows supply continues to age and the amount of BTC available to trade keeps shrinking. That pattern reflects continued accumulation and a decline in sellable supply. From a positioning standpoint, he described it as medium- to long-term price support rather than a direct driver of immediate upside.
In his reading, the two charts describe the same market structure from different angles. Price is rebounding because supply is aging and the market is still accumulating, but new money is not coming in. Net age flow shows where the support is coming from. The apparent demand-to-issuance ratio shows what is missing: independent demand growth. Supply contraction can support price, but it is not enough on its own to create sustained upside momentum. The market may be forming a bottom, yet better entry conditions still require confirmation.
Why say the rally is unconfirmed if both indicators are improving? Because they have only bounced from extreme lows and remain negative. Young coins are still declining, and net age flow is still shifting BTC into long-term hands. In other words, the rebound is being driven mainly by reduced supply rather than expanded demand. Adler said the first sign of a new market phase would be both indicators moving back above zero. If the demand-to-issuance ratio remains above 1 and net age flow turns back toward active supply, that would offer a much stronger signal of a market turn. Until new capital arrives, the current rebound may still lose momentum over time.
HYPE’s value capture debate is increasingly tied to trade.xyz
ChainCatcher’s contribution focused on growing skepticism around HYPE. It said the market’s bearish concerns have centered on three issues: expected supply pressure from ongoing team token unlocks, direct selling pressure tied to institutional unstaking and ETF outflows, and Hyperliquid’s heavy dependence on a single deployer.
Those concerns converge on one question. HYPE’s current value support depends heavily on continued activity in the HIP-3 ecosystem, and HIP-3 trading is itself highly concentrated in trade.xyz. Team tokens are unlocking and the assistance fund needs buybacks to soften supply pressure. That fund is largely financed by protocol fees, and a key source of those fees is HIP-3 trading volume. At present, most of that volume comes from trade.xyz.
The result is a sharper market focus on what happens if trade.xyz slows down or if its economic relationship with Hyperliquid changes in the future. Could HYPE’s value-capture logic weaken with it?
The article said HYPE peaked around mid-June at close to $77 and has since moved lower in a volatile decline to about $56, a drop of roughly 25%. Funding pressure has become more visible as well. On June 4, on-chain monitoring showed Arthur Hayes sold about 247,000 HYPE for around $18.02 million, nearly exiting his position. That came only days after he had publicly said he expected HYPE to outperform the top 10 crypto assets by market capitalization by year-end.
Hyperliquid has become a major venue for on-chain perpetual trading. DeFiLlama data cited in the piece put its 30-day perpetual volume at about $200.7 billion, open interest at about $10.7 billion and annualized protocol fees at about $1.82 billion. A significant share of that trading comes from HIP-3. Dune data shows HIP-3 has processed more than $480 billion in cumulative volume since its launch in October 2025.
According to a Q2 report from Hyperliquid Research Collective, HIP-3’s share of platform trading volume rose from 1.8% last year to 20.7% in the first quarter of this year, then to 32.2% in the second quarter. Data from hl.eco shows that share has recently climbed to about 64.6%. In other words, more and more of Hyperliquid’s activity is now coming from the open deployment framework rather than official native markets.
Concentration is even more visible within HIP-3 itself. As of August 2026, TradeXYZ had deployed 103 markets, 88 of which remained actively traded. Those markets cover commodities, foreign exchange, U.S. stocks, Asian equity indices and pre-IPO assets, including Cerebras, SpaceX and ChangXin Memory Technologies.
HIP-3 is, in design, a permissionless framework. Any team can deploy its own perpetual market so long as it stakes enough HYPE. In practice, the article said, the system has produced a winner-take-most structure.
The first reason is the barrier to entry. Deploying one HIP-3 market requires staking 500,000 HYPE. At current prices, that amounts to tens of millions of dollars, which puts the market beyond the reach of most teams and leaves participation to a small number of well-capitalized players. The second reason is the overlap between auction mechanics and first-mover advantage. Each deployer gets only the first three markets for free. After that, it must compete in a shared Dutch auction starting at 500 HYPE per market, and those tokens are burned. New entrants face both higher upfront costs and the liquidity pull already built by established markets.
Payback is difficult too. Blockworks Research analyst Shaunda Devens estimated that, outside of trade.xyz, most HIP-3 deployers earn annualized returns on staked HYPE close to or below 1%. Of 136 paid listing markets in the sample, only 44 had earned back their auction cost. For non-trade.xyz markets, the median payback period was four years.
A similar pattern is appearing in HIP-4. On July 20, Hyperliquid said HIP-4 would open permissionless deployment for prediction-market direction. HIP-4 adds validator voting and caps the number of markets validators can deploy directly each year, but the high staking threshold remains. Arrakis’ early tracking found liquidity concentration there as well. One frontend, Outcome.xyz, routed more than 10 times the volume of the second-ranked competitor. Algorithmic wallets made up only about 6% of total wallets but accounted for nearly half of trading volume, while retail wallets were the majority by count and contributed less than one-third. The article’s conclusion was narrow but clear: open mechanisms do not by themselves prevent concentration when capital, liquidity and first-mover advantages matter this much.
Crypto’s old valuation model is breaking down
The final section, from Blockchain Knight, argued that the real shift in crypto is not only about prices. It is about the operating logic of the industry itself. For more than a decade, the market expanded quickly on the back of liquidity and narrative. A popular concept could support a striking valuation on its own. As liquidity becomes more rational and institutional capital takes a larger role, that framework is unraveling. The market is returning to a simpler question: what value does a project actually create?
The article said the current cycle is not eliminating the industry. It is eliminating an older model built on liquidity, storytelling and fundraising-led growth. Rather than looking like a standard bear market such as 2018 or 2022, it more closely resembles the period after the dot-com bubble burst in 2000.
At that time, the Nasdaq fell sharply, many internet companies failed and venture capital cooled fast. Many concluded the internet had been little more than a concept inflated by capital. Two decades later, the picture looks different. What disappeared were not the foundations of the internet, but companies without viable business models or durable competitiveness. Survivors such as Amazon and Google moved through the cycle and became core infrastructure of the internet era.
Blockchain Knight said crypto is now going through a similar process. Abundant liquidity drove rapid expansion across DeFi, NFTs, layer-2 networks and AI agents. Each new theme drew in capital, and even projects not yet validated by the market could win billion-dollar valuations.
The number of crypto projects surged over recent years. Every new hot sector quickly produced a wave of similar projects, and the threshold for issuing tokens kept falling. For a while, that made it easy to assume more projects meant faster industry development. The article pushed back on that idea. No industry can expand without limits. Projects can multiply quickly, but users and capital remain finite. When supply runs far ahead of demand, the market eventually corrects itself.
The projects now being eliminated, it said, tend to share the same weaknesses: no real users, no stable revenue and no hard-to-copy competitive moat. They achieved short-term growth through market sentiment but failed to build lasting value. Once liquidity tightened, the model lost support quickly. Seen from that angle, the washout is less about industry decline than about supply clearing in a maturing sector.
One notable change over the past two years is that more investors are paying attention to protocol revenue and active users instead of focusing only on fundraising pedigree, community heat or category labels. Even revenue alone is not enough in crypto, however. In traditional companies, created value ultimately flows into shareholder equity. In crypto, a protocol can succeed operationally without making its token more valuable.
If a protocol generates substantial revenue but cannot return that value to token holders, protocol value and token value begin to drift apart. That is why value capture matters as much as revenue, according to the article. The growing discussion around fee switches and buybacks over the past two years is really about the same issue: how to route the value created by a protocol back to the token itself.
Only when a token can share in the benefits of protocol growth does it gain a basis for long-term support, rather than functioning merely as a governance tool or a trading instrument. In that sense, the market is moving from narrative economics toward value-based pricing. Investors are no longer just looking for the next popular concept. They are looking for protocols that can keep generating revenue and build a closed loop of value.
The piece also tied that shift to a changing investor base after the approval of spot Bitcoin ETFs. Crypto-native participants were often willing to pay a premium for new stories and high growth. Wall Street applies a different set of standards, asking whether a project has stable revenue, real users and defensible moats. The implication is that crypto is gradually adopting the valuation logic of more mature capital markets. Competition in the next phase will not favor every project equally. Capital in a future bull market may be more concentrated, with the best chances going to infrastructure that has a workable business model and a credible value-capture mechanism.