OVERVIEW

Time’s Up, 2024—Pour One Out for the Market Predictions That Aged Like Milk 🥛 

Before we dive in, here’s today’s crypto market heatmap:

And here’s a look at crypto’s total and altcoin market cap YTD:

New In Three Sentences
Crypto News 📰

🔎 Chainlink SVR: Finally, Liquidation MEV Pays You Instead

Chainlink’s Smart Value Recapture (SVR) lets DeFi protocols reclaim some of that sweet MEV that used to flow straight into liquidators’ pockets. Working with Aave, Chainlink basically auctions off the right to pair the price update with the liquidation in one neat, front-runnable bundle—but the revenue goes back to the protocol and the oracle itself. That means a chunk of the liquidation gravy returns to your favorite lending dApp (and helps sustain oracles). Chainlink blog.

🔮 2025 Trends by Ava Labs: AI, No-Code Chains, and More

Ava Labs predicts that launching your own blockchain will soon be as easy as creating a Squarespace site, courtesy of AvaCloud. Meanwhile, consumer wallets will morph into catch-all super-apps, more institutions will experiment with DeFi behind the scenes, and sports leagues will come crawling back to blockchain—bigger than ever. And while stablecoins continue their unstoppable climb, AI + crypto is slated to explode (in the good sense). Avalanche blog.

📦 Hedera’s Block Streams: One Big Data Party

Hedera’s unifying its record streams, event logs, sidecars—you name it—into a single Protobuf-based feed that’s cryptographically verifiable. Every “block” comes signed by a majority of nodes, bundling state changes, events, and transactions in one shot. Hedera’s basically going “modular blockchain” with a robust new spin. Hedera blog.

🔑 IRS Finalizes “Unlawful” Rule That Demands KYC for DeFi

In its last throes of the year, the IRS took a sledgehammer to decentralized finance by finalizing a rule that would force DeFi front-ends to collect users’ personal data—and potentially withhold service if you don’t cough up your ID. President-elect Trump, who ironically has a DeFi project in the works (World Liberty Financial), might have a trick up his sleeve to overturn it, and DeFi bigwigs from Jake Chervinsky to Uniswap’s Hayden Adams are calling the move “unlawful” and “dead on arrival.” The Defiant.

TECHNICAL ANALYSIS
And This Is Where We’re At 👀 

Remember this weekly Total Crypto Market Cap chart back on December 9?

And here’s where we’re at this week:

The major gaps between the Tenkan-Sen and candlestick bodies are resolved. That’s one of the first signs a ‘bottom’ is developing and/or in. And there are some other pieces of technical data to support that.

There’s hidden bullish divergence developing between price and the Composite Index - a bullish continuation signal.

Shifting over to the daily chart, things get a little more sloppy - mostly because the daily is stuck inside the Cloud.

If the daily closes above the Tenkan-Sen and Senkou Span A, that’s another heads-up warning that bulls might take control. Confirmation of bullish continuation will likely occur when the Composite Index (red) crosses and closes above its slow average (yellow) and the DTO closes above the zero line. 🧠 

STOCKTWITS COMMUNITY INSIGHTS
Share Your Top Trade Ideas For 2025! 🤩 

We recently recapped an amazing 2024 on Stocktwits, but with the calendar now turning to 2025, we want to shift our focus to the future…and you can help!

We’re gathering the community’s top ideas for 2025 and giving out Stocktwits Edge to some of our favorites. Come share your highest conviction plays and see where the Stocktwits community is focusing on in the new year. 🤑