A Legend Tells a Story About Another Legend.

In 1989, I received a phone call from Warren Buffett. My daughter picked up the phone and said, “Dad, Mr. Buffett is calling.”

I picked up and heard: “This is Warren Buffett calling from Omaha, Nebraska. I really love your book One Up On Wall Street. I’d like to use one sentence from it in my year-end report. May I have your permission?”

(You know how fast he talks.)

I replied, “Of course. Which line?”

Warren said: “Selling your winners and holding your losers is like cutting the flowers and watering the weeds.”

Ironically, that single line he picked from my entire book turned out to be my biggest mistake.

Peter Lynch
Forbes India, Collector’s Edition - November 2017

A story so good, so deep, that it almost needs no further commentary.

#MARKET | TL;DR

CRYPTO: BTC tested the $90K level three times this week. However, price action remains trapped in a range that has persisted for five consecutive weeks. Market sentiment has improved, but caution remains extremely high with every move.
STOCK: U.S. equities moved sideways as technology Stock paused, mirroring the cautious tone seen in crypto. Still, the long-term uptrend remains intact, supported by corporate earnings expectations and AI.
MACRO: The Fed has begun expanding its balance sheet again as year-end short-term liquidity tightens. The US–Japan yield spread has narrowed sharply as Japanese yields rise rapidly, reflecting growing concern over global debt costs and fiscal risk.
COMMODITY: Meanwhile, commodities (gold, silver, oil) continue to experience strong volatility, signaling a tug-of-war between expectations of monetary easing and unresolved macro pressure.

#STORY_OF_THE_WEEK

You Can Be Right About the Future, But…

During the Lunar New Year break, while revisiting history and studying past waves of “new technologies” that triggered speculation and bubbles to better understand the market’s rhyme, I came across a comment from Warren Buffett in 1999, right in the middle of the Dotcom bubble. It couldn’t be more relevant today.

Buffett pointed out a paradox: “Technologies that truly change the world often end up causing enormous losses for investors who correctly foresee their future.”

If you go back to the early days of automobiles, it was easy to imagine how profoundly the auto industry would reshape America. You would have said: “This is where I must invest.” But reality was very different.

Out of roughly 2,000 automobile companies that once existed, only a handful survived. The auto industry transformed America for the better, but it was a disaster for most investors.

The aviation industry was no exception. If you stood at Kitty Hawk and could see the future of aviation, you would think it was the perfect investment opportunity. But almost no investment in the airline industry delivered meaningful returns in the Stock market.

Buffett later summarized this lesson to shareholders: You can be absolutely right that the internet will change everything, and still be wrong to think that investors will necessarily make money from it.

Eight months later, the Dotcom bubble collapsed.

Looking back at the chaos of that period, very few projects survived, and even fewer became truly successful over the long term.

If you reflect on the two most recent technology manias Blockchain and AI, you may notice a similar pattern:

New technology emerges → Speculative bubble forms → Industry development accelerates → Society benefits → But the majority of investors lose money.

Years ago, everyone knew crypto would eventually reach mass adoption, but almost no one could accurately predict which projects would win that adoption.

In my view, crypto already has one foot inside mass adoption. 2025 has been a year of cleansing. From a positive perspective, this cleansing has been far less painful than a Dotcom-style collapse or perhaps that collapse simply hasn’t happened yet.

Either way, you cannot continue using old investment frameworks in a market that has fundamentally changed. So what will crypto look like in 2026?

That’s the question I’m asking myself. And during this holiday break, I’ve been organizing my observations to share with you.

#ALPHA

CUT THROUGH THE NOISE

(1) Ownership, Again

This week once again gives me a reason to revisit the keyword Ownership in our weekly reading.

Flash Trade, a Perp DEX on Solana, decided to transition into an Ownership-based structure via MetaDAO.
Ranger Finance is the next project to launch its ICO through MetaDAO, explicitly embracing an Ownership-first token design.

What caught the market’s attention is its Elon Musk style commitment:

A large portion of tokens is unlocked for the market.
Team and investor have zero tokens to sell at TGE.
Team rewards unlock only if price milestones are achieved.

This structure directly aligns incentives and puts real skin in the game.

(2) RWA / Equity Perp on Hyperliquid

The RWA / Equity segment currently ranks third in Perp Trading demand on Hyperliquid, accounting for nearly 8% of total trading volume.

While it’s still small to compare to 47% demand for BTC trading and 38.62% demand for other L1 but it already exceeds demand perp trading for: $HYPE, Other project token, Memecoin.

That’s a meaningful signal.

(3) What to Expect from RWA in 2026?

2025 was likely the year where RWA truly matured. From government bonds and private credit to index products and even equity, real capital has moved on-chain with clear legal structures, real compliance and global distribution.

Tokenization is no longer about “replacing TradFi.” It’s about modernizing issuance, settlement, and ownership.

Key takeaways from a Centrifuge piece on RWA in 2026:

Utility > Speculation: RWA matter because they are used (collateral, yield, settlement), not just traded.
Distribution > Issuance: Issuing on-chain is no longer the bottleneck. Secondary liquidity and capital access are.
Index products & equity move on-chain seriously: Not for speculation, but for real ownership and enforcement.
Standardization & infrastructure consolidation: Institutions don’t want ten fragmented systems.
Critical mass: Tokenization becomes inevitable not because it’s new, but because not tokenizing means falling behind.

2026 will be the phase where winners emerge.

(4) Looking Back at DeFi in 2025 with DefiLlama

Whether we like it or not, 2025 was not a DeFi boom year, but it was far from stagnant.

Key observations:

DeFi is no longer a “market,” but a financial system: Stablecoin act as the monetary base. Trading, lending, Perp, issuance, and prediction market now form a closed loop.
Execution beats narrative: Capital flows to platforms with better matching, lower fees, and less slippage
Lending shifts away from retail toward institution-friendly credit structures.
Solana evolves from a general-purpose chain into a trading-optimized chain: Fewer users but Higher-quality flow, More sustainable revenue.