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His argument, though simple, is as sharp as a guillotine: crypto is maturing into infrastructure. The era of memes, leverage, and quick riches is yielding to one where regulation, institutional tools, and serious capital determine who rises and who falls 🤷‍♂️.

It was a year when bitcoin bravely transitioned from a wild, risk-on maverick screeching through the markets like a parked jet engine to a steady, corporate-friendly stalwart. Prices soared to a jaw-dropping $126,000-enough to make even the most hardened hodler gasp-before settling into a more modest neighborhood of $80,000 to $90,000. Ah, stability-like a toddler on roller skates, but slightly less dangerous.

In this theater of greed and fear, analysts, those modern-day soothsayers, whisper of a short squeeze-a cataclysmic reckoning for the bears. But is it fate, or merely the delusions of a fevered mind? 🤔

According to the ever-enthusiastic ECC CEO Josh Swihart, things have taken a turn for the worse with Bootstrap deciding to dance to a completely different tune – one that’s out of sync with Zcash’s grand mission. He claims they’ve made it impossible for the team to work “effectively and with integrity.” What a pickle! 🥒

With a flourish of his quill, he proclaims that the network must abandon its quixotic quest for latency’s holy grail. Nay, he insists, the true treasure lies in the expansion of bandwidth, a realm where Ethereum may reign supreme, unshackled by the chains of time itself. ⏳

Key takeaways (because no one reads proper paragraphs anymore)

The sentiment recovered along with the price from late December, followed by renewed ETF inflows in the first two days of 2026. However, the ETFs’ daily net flows turned negative on the 6th and 7th of January, resulting in a total of $729 million in outflows. A most unbecoming display, if you ask me. 🐾

In a missive on the digital altar of X, Merrick painted a portrait of XRP as the bridge between the staid world of finance and the wild frontier of digital markets. 🌉 A role, one might add, as essential as a monocle at a Victorian soiree. XRP, he declares, is not merely a cryptocurrency but a patron saint of stablecoins, Real-World Assets (RWAs), and institutional payment flows. How quaint! 🧾