Coinbase Earnings Call, Latest Developments in Aave Tokenomics Debate, What's Trending in the Global Crypto Community Today?

Publication Date: February 13, 2025
Author: BlockBeats Editorial Team

Over the past 24 hours, the crypto market has seen significant developments on multiple fronts. The mainstream discussion has focused on regulatory signals and platform governance disputes. On one hand, leading public blockchains and crypto companies are accelerating their integration into regulatory frameworks. On the other hand, the ongoing discussion about equity distribution between project teams and token holders continues. In terms of ecosystem development, Solana is advancing product implementation around payments and creator incentives, the Ethereum ecosystem is focusing on sovereign stablecoins and privacy infrastructure, and the Perp DEX track is undergoing comprehensive upgrades in performance, account structure, and asset types, intensifying the competition.

I. Mainstream Topics

1. Coinbase Releases 2025 Q4 Financial Report, Experiences System Outage

Coinbase has released its financial report for the fourth quarter of 2025 and the full year. The data shows that the annual trading volume has grown by 156% year-on-year, the platform's share of the crypto trading market has doubled, assets under custody have grown approximately threefold over the past three years, with 12 products now having an annualized revenue of over $1 billion, and both USDC and Coinbase One have reached historic highs.

However, despite the strong overall performance, the data for the fourth quarter came under pressure: quarterly revenue decreased by 22% compared to the previous quarter, consumer trading revenue declined by 45%, earnings per share were at a loss of $2.49 (analysts had previously expected a profit of $0.96), and the net loss reached $667 million. Meanwhile, Coinbase experienced a system outage, temporarily preventing users from buying, selling, or transferring crypto assets, leading to widespread discontent.

In terms of business expansion, the company announced the acquisition of Deribit, further solidifying its position in the crypto derivatives space, while simultaneously launching prediction markets and stock trading services, continuing its transformation into a diversified financial platform.

Market reactions have been clearly divided. Some users criticized CEO Brian Armstrong for selling over $500 million worth of company stock before and after the financial report release, questioning the company's governance and strategic execution. They believe that despite having structural advantages such as ETF custody, Coinbase has failed to establish overwhelming profitability and has instead fallen behind emerging competitors like Hyperliquid.

On the other hand, some believe that the financial report reflects Coinbase's gradual transformation into a crypto financial infrastructure company, with subscription and service revenue reaching $2.8 billion, approximately 5.5 times higher than the previous bull market peak, indicating promising long-term institutional adoption prospects. In addition, the Echo acquisition of Cobie Services and the $152 million valuation case have also become points of reference widely discussed in the community.

2. New Developments in Aave's "CoinGecko Dispute"

Aave Labs has put forward a new governance proposal, intending to redirect 100% of protocol fees to the DAO, transfer Aave's brand-related intellectual property to a newly established foundation, and request annual budget support from the DAO (including 75,000 AAVE tokens) for core activities such as user growth, engineering and development, and marketing.

The proposal aims to address previous controversies surrounding "value leakage," align with a technical roadmap adjustment, and plan to complete the migration from V3 to V4 within 8–12 months. The dispute originated from ACI founder Marc Zeller's strong criticism of Labs' original proposal, describing it as an "archetypical value extraction" attempt, accusing Labs of trying to access about a quarter of the DAO treasury funds and a third of the AAVE reserves.

Sentiment overall leans towards cautious optimism. Supporters believe this version reflects a significant concession by Labs, helping clarify AAVE holders' value ownership and positioning Labs as an incentive-aligned service provider.

However, there are still lingering doubts, including the actual control of the new foundation, transparency of key voting addresses, and the systemic risks of a hasty V3 exit. Some investors believe that as governance uncertainty dissipates, AAVE may undergo a revaluation, while others continue to criticize Labs' motives as overly aggressive, calling for a more detailed and verifiable budget structure disclosure.

3. Vitalik Discusses the Boundaries of "User Incentives"

Vitalik Buterin responded to a community discussion, systematically distinguishing between "good incentives" and "bad incentives." He pointed out that reasonable incentives should be used to compensate for the real costs of new projects in their early and immature stages, such as using DeFi liquidity rewards to mitigate smart contract risks; whereas "bad incentives" often attract users with no long-term retention intention, such as exchanging paid tweets for short-term exposure, ultimately leading to the creation of low-quality content and false prosperity.

Vitalik further suggested that by returning user fees in protocol tokens, users can be transformed into stakeholders, emphasizing that the industry's core focus should be on building genuinely useful applications rather than relying on speculation-driven short-term bubbles.

This view has garnered widespread agreement. Many participants believe that in the current environment, organic users themselves are extremely scarce, and the role of incentive mechanisms is not to "go big" but to filter and consolidate high-quality community members.

During the discussion, specific cases were also mentioned. Some recommended tool-based projects such as Fileverse that emphasize practical use cases. Others suggested increasing application fees in exchange for potential token rewards (e.g., a 1% fee in the Base ecosystem in exchange for an airdrop expectation). The topic further expanded to the market psychology level, with many voices reflecting on founder greed, a narrative of overvaluation spinning out of control, and calling for a recalibration between innovation speed and sustainability.

4. CFTC Innovation Advisory Committee List Revealed

The full list of members of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Innovation Advisory Committee was announced by CFTC Chairman Mike Selig. The list includes representatives from both the crypto industry and institutions from traditional finance and the gambling industry. The committee is positioned to provide recommendations for regulatory frameworks related to financial innovation.

Some members publicly expressed their honor to participate, emphasizing their commitment to fostering a positive interaction between the crypto industry and the regulatory system. However, there are also critical voices. Some believe that some selected members have not been truly involved in Web3 infrastructure but are trying to gain institutional advantages in the regulatory process.

Some also raised concerns about the representativeness of specific assets (such as XRP, BTC) in the committee. Overall, the market tends to view the committee as a signal of the gradual convergence of regulation and innovation, but remains cautious about its actual impact.

II. Mainstream Ecosystem Updates

1. Solana

Solana Labs CEO Anatoly Yakovenko has officially joined the CFTC Innovation Advisory Committee. The committee aims to provide policy advice for regulatory issues related to financial innovation and includes crypto industry representatives such as Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov and Robinhood Crypto GM Johann Kerbrat. This appointment is seen as an important signal of Solana further integrating into mainstream regulatory frameworks. The community widely interprets Anatoly's joining as a key step for Solana towards institutionalization and compliance. Some market participants are optimistic that this move will strengthen the institutional adoption narrative and even link it to the imagined impact of SOL reaching $200. However, there are also voices questioning the composition of the committee members, believing that some selected individuals have not been truly involved in foundational infrastructure development.

On the product side, Pump.fun has launched a GitHub creator fee-sharing feature, allowing users to allocate token transaction fees to any GitHub account through a mobile app, aiming to establish a more direct incentive alignment mechanism between the token community and open-source creators. The official release of operational guidelines and legal disclaimers aims to reduce potential compliance risks. The feature's overall feedback has been positive, seen as a new attempt in token incentive design, but the community also cautions against forming implicit commitments and calls for long-term transparency in fee allocation rules.

In addition, Crossmint has partnered with Visa to launch Lobster.cash, an open payment standard under the OpenClaw proxy system. This solution, based on Visa Intelligent Commerce, enables a secure tokenized transaction process. It combines Solana, Circle, and Stytch to build a "human-controlled" proxy payment architecture that supports credit card and stablecoin payments. A future release will introduce an OpenClaw plugin to further enhance the composability of the proxy ecosystem. Lobster.cash is seen as a significant breakthrough in the proxy payment space. The community is optimistic about its security and scalability potential but also highlights the need for more thorough testing to mitigate potential risks like input injection attacks.

2. Ethereum

The UAE Dirham stablecoin DDSC has officially launched on the ADI Chain, the first institutional RWA L2 network in the MENA region. DDSC, initiated by the International Holding Company and First Abu Dhabi Bank, has received approval from the UAE Central Bank. It follows a 1:1 peg to the Dirham reserve issuance model and primarily targets high-value payments and cross-border trade scenarios. The project is seen as the first step in a sovereign stablecoin network framework and plans to collaborate with traditional financial institutions like Mastercard and BlackRock in the future. The launch of DDSC is widely regarded as a significant milestone in the development of digital finance in the Middle East. Some users are optimistic about its application potential in institutional payments and sovereign-grade financial infrastructure. However, some question its close ties to the traditional financial system, which may limit its expansion within the crypto-native ecosystem.

Meanwhile, the privacy-focused Ethereum L2 project Aztec has introduced the $AZTEC token. The project has raised a total of $157 million, with a current market capitalization of around $59 million and a fully diluted valuation of approximately $215 million. The public sale phase saw an FDV as high as $480 million. Aztec focuses on a decentralized sequencer architecture (around 3600 nodes) and privacy transaction capabilities, offering up to a 16% APR staking incentive. The market performance of $AZTEC has sparked considerable controversy. Critics view it as a typical case of VC overpricing, noting an approximately 50% retracement in the secondary market. Supporters, on the other hand, emphasize the long-term value of the privacy track, believing that short-term price fluctuations do not accurately reflect its technical potential.

At the infrastructure level, Succinct has announced a partnership with Optimism to introduce ZK proofs into the Superchain ecosystem. OP Succinct has become the official preferred ZK proof solution of OP Stack, covering around 90% of the rollup market. With the OP mainnet (around $20 billion TVL) set to complete integration soon, the demand for ZK proofs is expected to increase significantly. This partnership has been widely praised by the community as a crucial step for Superchain to embrace ZK technology. Users are looking forward to further enhancements in rollup security and TVL (around $5.5 billion) and are calling for more OP Stack chains (such as Base) to join soon.

3. Perp DEX

As the first network extension to go live on Solana, Bullet supports up to 30,000 transactions per second with sub-1ms latency. The current initial deposit cap is 1000 USDC, and it adopts a phased rollout mechanism to ensure system security while providing incentive points to early users. Bullet's mainnet launch is seen as a significant upgrade to Solana's perpetual trading architecture, with the community highly anticipating its performance but also calling for expanded access and prompt introduction of deeper liquidity support.

Extended launched the first batch of six stock perpetual futures contracts (including TSLA, AAPL, etc.), aiming to replicate the experience of traditional stock derivatives trading in a decentralized environment. The current focus remains on building liquidity and plans to continue expanding contract categories in future releases. The community views this as a crucial attempt to expand the boundaries of perpetual trading, while also looking forward to the introduction of more hedging tools to alleviate liquidity bottlenecks.

Hibachi announced the development of a next-generation foreign exchange platform on Circle's Arc network, leveraging Arc's sub-second finality and optional privacy features to provide an institutional-grade FX trading experience and support stablecoin-native gas. The project has received funding from the Arc Builders Fund. The collaboration between Hibachi and Arc has sparked optimism, seen as an important step for stablecoins entering the mainstream forex market, but users are also concerned about striking a balance between its privacy design and regulatory compliance.

Additionally, Aster Chain announced that its mainnet will launch in March, emphasizing "privacy-first" as a core selling point; Lighter introduced a new trading account type, achieving unified collateral for spot and perpetual trading, and plans to advance LLP tokenization to improve capital efficiency; Hyperliquid's HIP-3 unified margin account solution is also set to go live, aiming to address the liquidity constraints brought by the isolated margin mechanism.

The community generally welcomes the account upgrades from Lighter and Hyperliquid, believing they are likely to attract more large-volume LPs, but also emphasizing the need to simultaneously expand trading market depth and product richness. Aster's privacy narrative has also sparked discussions, with some users suggesting that it may raise the DEX's privacy standards, while also being wary of potential centralization risks.

4. Others

Tether introduced Scudo as a new gold denomination, with 1 Scudo equal to 1/1000 XAU₮ (gold ounce), aiming to lower the barrier for small-scale gold transactions and accounting. Some users acknowledge its improvements in accessibility and fine measurement but also question its functional overlap with existing small-scale XAU₮ products and whether it supports physical delivery.

The Bubblemaps investigation revealed that Trove Markets quietly refunded a portion of KOLs after the token's collapse (totaling over $250,000), while presale participants suffered a full loss. The project had previously raised around $11.5 million and later pivoted to the Solana ecosystem, coinciding with an external LP dumping around $20 million worth of $HYPE, sparking market controversy. The event has triggered strong community discontent, with users widely accusing the project of unfair treatment towards different participants and questioning whether their actions constitute fraud, calling for further investigation and regulatory intervention.

In addition, Polymarket launched a 5-minute cycle crypto price prediction market, hinting at future 1-minute markets and the $POLY token. These developments have fueled speculative enthusiasm, with users anticipating potential airdrops and higher-frequency trading opportunities, but also expressing concerns about Polygon network congestion and further liquidity fragmentation.