Web3 Weekly Roundup: This Week's Hot Takes and Industry Bombshells

01 The Silence of friend.tech

"friend.tech Soft Rug? Where Does Web3 Social Media Go From Here?"
02 Bitcoin Staking Roundup

"The New Promised Land — Can Bitcoin Staking Lead the Next Liquidity Unlocking Wave?"
03 Words From Web3ers

"Interview with VALR's CMO: How Marketing Values and Strategy Can Cross Geographic Boundaries"
"Cyber Capital Founder: Most L2s Will Stay Centralized Forever"
"Adam Cochran: Based Rollups Reshape Staking Dynamics"
04 Industry Deep Dives

"Opinion: Destroy the 'Four-Year Cycle' Theory — Crypto Can Actually Cross the Bridge"
"Where Does the Ethereum L2 War Stand Now?"
"Do You Need Product-Market Fit Before Launching a Token?"
"Bitwise: Why Can't the Crypto Market Escape the 'September Effect'?"
"Back to Bonding Curves — Have We Been Using Them Right?"
"Is the Four-Year Cycle Driven by BTC Halving Still Valid?"
05 Project Watch

"The Wall Street Journal: Tether, a Parallel Economic System Beyond the Reach of U.S. Law Enforcement"
"Hop On: A 3-Minute Overview of the CAT Protocol"
"A Quick Look at the Velo Labs Ecosystem — Bridging Traditional Finance and Web3"
"Telegram's Hot Tap-to-Earn Game Catizen: 800,000 Paying Users in Six Months"
"Revisiting the Penpie Protocol Mechanism — The Exploit Impact Shouldn't Be Overstated"

01 The Silence of friend.tech

On September 8, Beijing time, friend.tech's official Twitter account posted a cryptic announcement, setting its governance and ownership parameters to 0x000...000 — ostensibly to prevent any future changes to its fees or functionality, but in practice, a complete relinquishment of smart contract control. Some community members interpreted this as a stagnation and the end of the project's development. The rise and fall of friend.tech, like a mirror, reflects how Web3 social platforms — while chasing rapid growth — must also guard against the risk of becoming a bubble. Recommended reading:

"friend.tech Soft Rug? Where Does Web3 Social Media Go From Here?"
DefiLlama data shows that, as of the time of writing, friend.tech has generated $63.38 million in fees, with revenue reaching $31.66 million. As shown in the chart below, friend.tech once generated over $1 million in fees per day at its peak last October, but since launching V2, its fee growth has essentially stalled — with daily fees dropping to just a few hundred dollars over the past month.

02 Bitcoin Staking Roundup

Who could be the next WBTC? This piece examines the latest trends and development outlook for Bitcoin restaking, analyzes the financial logic behind it, and discusses potential future directions and market opportunities. Recommended reading:

"The New Promised Land — Can Bitcoin Staking Lead the Next Liquidity Unlocking Wave?"
Bitcoin, as a Proof-of-Work (PoW) network, relies on miners contributing computational power to maintain network consensus. However, with the rapid growth of DeFi, Bitcoin's use cases are also expanding. Liquid staking is a new mechanism designed to boost Bitcoin's capital efficiency and liquidity. It allows users to lock Bitcoin in staking contracts to participate in consensus and earn rewards while still maintaining asset liquidity. One key advantage of liquid staking is its broad applicability within DeFi. Because Bitcoin is regarded as an asset with high economic security, a growing number of financial applications and blockchain projects are leveraging Bitcoin's economic security to strengthen their own security and credibility. Liquidity tokens generated by staking Bitcoin can be used across a wide range of financial applications — such as decentralized money markets, stablecoins, and insurance — delivering higher capital efficiency for those applications.

03 Words From Web3ers

VALR has been making frequent moves across Asia lately — who's behind it, and what are their values and growth strategy? Foresight News was pleased to invite Ben Caselin, CMO of VALR.com, to share his story and VALR's direction. Recommended reading:

"Interview with VALR's CMO: How Marketing Values and Strategy Can Cross Geographic Boundaries"
Ben: While VALR is known as a dominant player in South Africa, our largest customers are actually in Asia. Over the next few months, we'll continue hosting meetups, attending conferences, and building partnerships — and we'll soon be launching a Chinese-language version of the app. In the meantime, we're meeting more people, expanding the community, and rolling out some great incentive programs to drive growth and trading volume. Every month, we offer a reward pool of up to 5 million USDT for futures traders with the highest trading volumes. We're also wrapping up our "Solana Summer" event, distributing over 300 SOL rewards to traders at every level. For both existing customers and new participants, we're also launching a Global Treasure Hunt where users can earn USDT and USDC rewards by completing simple tasks like finishing KYC, trading, referring friends, or staking. In October, we'll also be running a trading competition based on profit and loss as well as return on investment, to help people benchmark their trading performance.

Justin Bons, founder of Cyber Capital, believes that "If you truly believe in Ethereum and Bitcoin, you have to be willing to let go of them for the sake of their original vision." Recommended reading:

"Cyber Capital Founder: Most L2s Will Stay Centralized Forever"
Most L2s will remain centralized because their incentive structures are fundamentally broken. The current "solutions" to these problems are overly optimistic — L2s, as for-profit companies, will not voluntarily give up their revenue. Ultimately, Ethereum has drifted from its original purpose and is gradually becoming a platform for centralized services. Competing L1s and L2s are eating into Ethereum's user base, while its own leaders are promoting and celebrating Ethereum's decline. This situation is deeply troubling, as it runs counter to Ethereum's original purpose. They are pushing centralized solutions, handing more power to companies that are compelled to comply with government censorship. This goes against the cypherpunk movement's tradition of emphasizing privacy — and Ethereum is funneling most of its users toward L2s that can monitor, freeze, seize, and censor user funds. Ethereum is following the same self-destructive path as Bitcoin, abandoning on-chain scaling in favor of supporting L2s. History is repeating itself.

Cinneamhain Ventures partner Adam Cochran believes that "We are going to fundamentally change Ethereum's economic model through Based Rollups." Recommended reading:

"Adam Cochran: Based Rollups Reshape Staking Dynamics"
When we combine this with Ethereum's deflationary mechanism, we see a very interesting situation emerge. Ethereum's minimum issuance rate could reach 0%, while the yield from staking ETH as a validator could still be 4%–8% — driven by Based Rollups and MEV-extracted value. If the new issuance rate is 0%, but you're still earning more than U.S. Treasuries by staking ETH, what do you think Ultrasound Money will look like?

04 Industry Deep Dives

The author argues that real narratives aren't born on Twitter — they're forged through innovation. The concept of a "four-year cycle" for crypto needs to be completely dismantled; only then can crypto truly cross the bridge and become something entirely new. Recommended reading:

"Opinion: Destroy the 'Four-Year Cycle' Theory — Crypto Can Actually Cross the Bridge"
A CT representative once wrote: "It's very hard to tell the difference between the signs of a bubble and widespread adoption." The problem with widespread adoption is that you lose those early-mover opportunities. Crypto has adopted its own culture — a culture defined by destiny. Whether you're a Bitcoin maximalist, an ETH maxi, or a SOL maxi, you believe in the four-year cycle legend. Most people believe crypto will inevitably grow, with a massive bull market erupting every four years to lead us to the promised land of wealth. But as the industry matures, imitation and borrowing become more valuable than innovation. The crypto industry now relies on the four-year cycle narrative to sustain the "early bird gets the worm" mentality. That could change — participation alone may no longer be enough. The consequences of complacency will eventually arrive.

Ethereum has weathered many crises, and you can see that a large portion of the Ethereum community has shifted its attention toward how to scale L1, rather than channeling value to rollups. Recommended reading:

"Where Does the Ethereum L2 War Stand Now?"
We return to the earlier question: why are people once again trying to scale L1 and increase L1 fees? Is this actually the right move? Felipe from Theia believes that if we evaluate L1 tokens purely on MEV and fees, they'll go to zero — so the only thing that can justify their value is becoming a "reserve asset for emerging markets," i.e., becoming money. I support this view.

According to American entrepreneur Eric Ries, product-market fit (PMF) is the moment when a startup finally finds a broad customer base that genuinely resonates with its product. This raises the question: should PMF be achieved before launching a token? Recommended reading:

"Do You Need Product-Market Fit Before Launching a Token?"
For crypto products that don't depend on a token to function, PMF should be pursued before launching a token — because the decentralized nature of these projects makes it extremely difficult to course-correct after launch. For example, while governance tokens may be essential to a project's ecosystem, they are not the core of the product. Introducing a token too early can obstruct the PMF process by distorting incentives, influencing user behavior, and locking in specific product elements. Furthermore, it is often very difficult to adjust a token's economic model after launch, even when those adjustments are necessary to achieve PMF. And while token incentives may attract early users, they cannot guarantee long-term retention or resolve fundamental product issues that need to be addressed before launch.

September is the cruelest month. Since its debut in 2010, Bitcoin has averaged a 4.5% decline in September. September is by far Bitcoin's worst-performing month and one of only two months with a negative average return. Recommended reading:

"Bitwise: Why Can't the Crypto Market Escape the 'September Effect'?"
Bitcoin isn't the only asset affected by the back-to-school season. Since 1929, September is the only month in which the stock market has declined more often than it has risen. The phenomenon is especially pronounced in the Nasdaq 100. Economists have tried to attribute it to various factors — such as a surge in volatility following the summer economic slowdown and mutual fund losses at the end of the fiscal year. But no one has pinpointed the exact reason. Whatever the cause, the phenomenon has struck again: as of Friday, September 6, the Nasdaq 100 had fallen nearly 6% that month.

A Bonding Curve is the art of colliding growth curves with token economics — yet it seems we've been skipping the fundamentals and chasing surface-level gains. Recommended reading:

"Back to Bonding Curves — Have We Been Using Them Right?"
Looking at how project narratives map onto token economic models, we can see that a project needs a stable flow in its early stages to ensure the dataset can build an initial level of consensus during governance — and then add a threshold for latecomers in terms of access to that dataset, increasing subsequent participation costs while avoiding over-concentration of consensus around a single dataset. As a result, its Bonding Curve model is shown below. After 500 "drops," the overall minting cost shows linear growth. Simply put: if a user discovers the value of a particular dataset early, they can buy it through the Bonding Curve and profit in the future, thereby enacting governance behavior. However, this curve is still relatively crude for the governance process — buying and selling these tokens lags behind when the dataset is actually used by AI, there's no guarantee that these datasets remain available, and other mechanisms still need further refinement.

The halving is still more than 500 days away relative to both BTC's bottom and top, and it has played out in five prior cycles. Will the pattern break next time? Recommended reading:

"Is the Four-Year Cycle Driven by BTC Halving Still Valid?"
Bitcoin halving still dominates the crypto cycle, and external factors tend to orbit internal ones. When external factors temporarily deviate from the trend, internal factors will always pull BTC back on track. After each BTC halving, the time it takes to break the previous cycle's all-time high keeps getting longer. Under a normal timeline, BTC shouldn't have reached the previous cycle's peak of $68,000 until late 2024. But due to the event-driven impact of the U.S. Bitcoin ETF, BTC broke through $68K ahead of schedule. Wall Street institutions took advantage of the halving's impact — and in January, ahead of the April halving, they pushed through the ETF, front-loading the lower inflation and higher BTC price benefits that typically follow a halving. There's a common misconception: that the ETF was the primary reason BTC rallied in the first half of the year. The accurate statement is: the U.S. Bitcoin ETF, combined with the halving law, was the primary reason BTC staged a significant rally in the first half of the year. Nevertheless, BTC underperformed in the four months following the halving — which is precisely the internal factor (halving) at work. External factors (ETF) orbit internal factors (halving), and when external factors temporarily cause a deviation (overvaluation), internal factors will always pull BTC back to where it belongs.

05 Project Watch

In several countries outside the U.S., USDT has become a lifeline for local populations. Recommended reading:

"The Wall Street Journal: Tether, a Parallel Economic System Beyond the Reach of U.S. Law Enforcement"
An unregulated currency is undermining U.S. efforts to crack down on arms dealers, sanction saboteurs, and combat fraud. Last year, the volume of money flowing through its network was nearly on par with Visa; even more strikingly, its recent profits have surpassed those of asset management giant BlackRock — while employing only a fraction of BlackRock's workforce. That's Tether (USDT), the cryptocurrency that has become a significant part of the global financial system, with daily trading volume reaching $190 billion. In essence, USDT is a digital dollar — but it's controlled by a private company in the British Virgin Islands, whose operations are largely unknown to governments. USDT is pegged 1:1 to the dollar, which is why it's called a stablecoin. In its early days, USDT was only popular within the crypto world; but it has since penetrated the financial underground, powering a parallel economy beyond the reach of U.S. law enforcement. In countries where the U.S. government has restricted access to the dollar-based financial system (Iran, Venezuela, Russia), USDT has thrived as an anonymous dollar for cross-border transfers. Russian oligarchs and arms dealers use USDT to purchase foreign assets and pay for sanctioned goods. Venezuela's sanctioned state oil company uses USDT to pay for commodities. Drug cartels, fraud syndicates, and terrorist groups like Hamas use USDT for money laundering. In Argentina and Turkey, where economies are battered by hyperinflation, USDT has also become a lifeline for ordinary people, who use it for everyday payments and to protect their savings. USDT is widely considered the first genuinely successful real-world product of the crypto revolution that began over a decade ago. It has made the company behind it enormously wealthy. Tether holds $120 billion in assets — primarily risk-free U.S. Treasuries, along with Bitcoin and gold positions. Last year, Tether earned $6.2 billion in profit, surpassing BlackRock — the world's largest asset manager — by $700 million.

Gobbling up gas, fees spiking as high as 600 sat/vb, FB prices on the secondary market surging fast. Is the CAT Protocol a replay of the inscription boom, a new opportunity for segmented Bitcoin, or a protocol ahead of its time, doomed to fail? Market heat has been stoked quickly, and FOMO sentiment is spreading rapidly. This piece will walk you through the CAT Protocol in 3 minutes. Recommended reading:

"Hop On: A 3-Minute Overview of the CAT Protocol"
According to the official introduction from the ProtocolCAT project team, the CAT Protocol is a new Bitcoin token protocol based on UTXO that they have proposed, called the Covenant Attested Token (CAT). The protocol is verified by miners and uses smart contracts to govern token minting and transfers. It has the following features:

No indexer required: Token rules are enforced by Bitcoin consensus. Its data and logic all live on-chain and don't depend on any off-chain third party (such as an indexer) to run. It inherits the native Proof-of-Work security of Bitcoin.
Modular: CAT tokens can be used within other smart contracts to build more complex decentralized applications (such as AMMs, lending, staking, etc.). It provides a powerful and flexible new building block for expanding Bitcoin's application scope.
Programmable minting: Token minting rules are enforced by smart contracts. Transactions that attempt to mint beyond the allowed amount are directly rejected by the network.
Cross-chain interoperability: The CAT Protocol enables trustless asset bridging between different blockchains, allowing applications to run across multiple chains.
SPV compatibility: CAT tokens support Simplified Payment Verification (SPV). Light clients can independently verify token authenticity without trusting a central server. The CAT Protocol supports both fungible tokens (called the CAT20 standard) and non-fungible tokens (called the CAT721 standard). CAT721 has not yet been released.
Could integrating BlackRock's BUIDL into USDV allow VELO to replicate ONDO's growth trajectory? Recommended reading:

"A Quick Look at the Velo Labs Ecosystem — Bridging Traditional Finance and Web3"
Velo Labs is committed to bridging and filling the gap between traditional banking infrastructure and Web3, leading the charge on mass blockchain adoption. Its Web3-based payment network and licensed liquidity partner Lightnet have global reach. The specific product matrix is as follows: -Quantum: A one-stop remittance network that enhances traditional financial networks with blockchain-powered money transfers. -Universe: A multi-chain DEX for trading global assets at low cost on a high-performance decentralized exchange. -Nova Chain: A general-purpose, EVM-compatible blockchain with reasonable costs. -Orbit: A crypto super-app designed for individuals, merchants, companies, and enterprises worldwide, committed to enhancing global financial connectivity and expanding global accessibility. -Warp: A cross-chain, multi-network bridge that allows users to freely move assets between blockchains. Velo Labs launched its VELO utility token in September 2020; it is listed on major exchanges including OKX, Bybit, Bitget, and Crypto.com, and is deployed on the Stellar Network and BNB Smart Chain.

Catizen, a Telegram mini app, is a tap-to-earn and play-to-airdrop gaming platform. On September 7, Catizen announced that it had surpassed 34 million total users in its first six months since launch. Recommended reading:

"Telegram's Hot Tap-to-Earn Game Catizen: 800,000 Paying Users in Six Months"
In a post on X, Catizen called itself the highest-grossing app on Telegram, with over 800,000 paying users spending an average of $33 each. According to earlier reports, Pluto Studio — Catizen's publisher — recently received an undisclosed investment from The Open Platform, the largest development organization on the TON network.