Jane Street Market Manipulation, Stripe Considering Acquiring PayPal, What's the Overseas Crypto Community Talking About Today?

By: blockbeats|2026/02/25 13:00:01

Publication Date: February 25, 2025
Author: BlockBeats Editorial Team

Over the past 24 hours, the crypto market has heated up at both ends of the macro narrative and ecosystem implementation. The mainstream discussion focuses on the accelerating mainstreaming of stablecoins, increasing expectations of fintech giants' mergers and acquisitions, and the impact of AI on the traditional industry's valuation system. In terms of ecosystem development, Solana's Agent and yieldcoin combination ignite application imagination, the Ethereum camp strengthens consumer-grade entry points and development tool infrastructure, the Perp DEX race intensifies around on-chain CLOB and TGE expectations, and the overall market sentiment leans bullish.

I. Mainstream Topics

1. Stripe Releases 2025 Annual Letter, Emphasizing Stablecoin Development

Stripe co-founder John Collison released the "2025 Annual Letter," emphasizing that the "internet economy is accelerating its evolution." The letter points out that in 2025, stablecoin payment volume doubled year-on-year, gradually becoming a core part of the global payment infrastructure, with its use decoupling from cryptocurrency price volatility. Meanwhile, Stripe processed a total transaction volume of $19 trillion last year and focused on trends such as agentic commerce and the significant acceleration of startup formation in the letter.

Community discussions focus on the mainstreaming process of stablecoins' "de-crypto-ization." Paradigm founder Matt Huang used a black hole event horizon as a metaphor, saying, "We may have crossed the singularity of AI, but we have not truly felt the gravity." Omid Malekan warned that if Stripe's internally built Tempo Network forms a strong network effect, it could replicate the path of Visa and Mastercard evolving from a "non-profit alliance" into a high-fee monopoly system, suggesting that companies prioritize choosing permissionless networks. John Collison personally shared an audio version, and posts related to Collision received tens of thousands of views. The overall public opinion is generally optimistic about Stripe's layout in the "Stablecoin + AI Payments" direction but also accompanies ongoing vigilance against centralization risks.

2. Stripe Considers Acquiring PayPal, Valuation Rises to $159 Billion

According to Bloomberg, Stripe is evaluating the possibility of acquiring all or part of PayPal's business. At the same time, through an employee stock buyback (tender offer), Stripe's valuation has risen to $159 billion, approximately a 49% increase from September last year's $106.7 billion. Following the news, PayPal's stock price surged over 7%, with the market interpreting it as a signal of the fintech giant's accelerated integration.

A "Role Reversal" meme quickly went viral on social media. In 2011, PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and Elon Musk led an early investment in Stripe, but now a scenario of "student surpassing teacher" has emerged. Trung Phan shared a 2011 TechCrunch article revisiting history, Jason Calacanis listed potential buyers such as Uber, Robinhood, Coinbase, and more, Mo Shaikh even called out to Solana to "join the bidding." Financial accounts like Kobeissi Letter are tracking PYPL's stock price in real-time, with the community generally exclaiming that "fintech consolidation is accelerating," while also engaging in hot discussions around regulatory, anti-monopoly, and cultural integration risks.

3. Meta Plans to Restart Stablecoin Project

CoinDesk exclusively revealed that Meta plans to restart its stablecoin project in the second half of 2026, collaborating with third-party service providers to fully support stablecoin payments on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, with the goal of reshaping the social payment ecosystem.

Dragonfly Managing Partner Haseeb exclaimed, "My 2026 prediction came true." Mike Ippolito pointed out that the current total market value of stablecoins is around $300 billion, and Meta's tens of billions of users base could "easily push it towards a $1 trillion scale." The community has started wildly speculating about potential partners (such as Stripe/Bridge, Sui, Aptos, Keeta, etc.), widely believing that this could be the largest distribution event in stablecoin development history, with emotions running high; at the same time, there are also voices reminding the market not to overlook the regulatory lessons learned from the Libra project's challenges in 2019.

4. Anthropic's "Stock Price Drop Effect"

Anthropic released multiple product updates intensively this month, including the Cowork legal plugin, Opus 4.6, Code Security, COBOL modernization solution, and enterprise data connectors, which subsequently led to a sharp drop in related sector stock prices: legal SaaS (such as Thomson Reuters down 16%), cybersecurity companies (e.g., CrowdStrike down 8%-25%), IBM plummeted 13% in a single day (its worst performance since 2000), and software ETFs posted their worst monthly performance since 2008. Despite Anthropic's ARR reaching $14 billion and a valuation as high as $380 billion, it is mockingly referred to in the market as the "SaaPocalypse" instigator.

Aakash Gupta posted a long analysis of the so-called "Hit List" pattern: in the weeks following a product launch, impacted companies often instead turn to seeking partnerships, with companies like FactSet and DocuSign having signed Connector agreements. Brett_eth compiled a timeline stating, "With each Claude update, almost precisely harvests a track." The community is both astonished by AI's disruptive speed to the industry, "10 times faster than the era of cloud computing," and also debating whether this is a "high valuation repricing" or a "genuine structural disruption." Some investors have already begun positioning themselves in SaaS companies that "can coexist with AI."

5. Jane Street Cryptocurrency Market Manipulation Controversy

ZeroHedge and other media outlets revealed that Jane Street has been accused of engaging in manipulation in the cryptocurrency market, including precise shorting before the 2022 Terra/UST collapse, and the long-standing "10 am slam" (a concentrated sell-off at 10 am New York time). The latest news indicates that Jane Street internally has ordered to "immediately cease manipulative Bitcoin trading." After the related algorithms were shut down, Bitcoin exhibited a rare trading performance of "no apparent significant selling pressure" that day.

QuintenFrancois, MacroCRG, Chad Steingraber, and others directly compared, "On the day of exposure, the 10 am slam disappeared," and flooded with "Coincidence? Sunlight is the best disinfectant." The community sentiment has shifted from long-standing conspiracy theories to anger and anticipation of "finally being confirmed," recalling the 2022 crypto winter and recent multiple weekend sell-off events, calling for regulatory intervention. Some also joked that "Jane Street took a day off today," and the overall public opinion atmosphere is leaning towards a direction of "regulatory moment might be coming."

II. Mainstream Ecosystem Updates

1. Solana

Clawpumptech released the largest-scale 7 major self-evolving Agent Skills upgrade on Solana (covering DeFi + Social full-stack capabilities). The Agent can achieve gasless transactions on Pumpfun, self-raising SOL/USDC, arbitrary swaps on Jupiter, conduct arbitrage scans on 11 DEXes like Raydium, Meteora, Orca, receive webhook notifications for new coin sniping, automatically publish Twitter/moltbook content, register domains, and create agent roles, among other features, and has now officially joined @pumpfun's Build In Public hackathon.

This news quickly exploded in the Solana community, with the comment section overflowing with "the age of agentic finance has come." Many users have already leveraged their new skills to launch the first Agent and complete the first round of liquidity binding. Some have even exclaimed, "Permanently assigning 65% of transaction fees to the Agent is too good to be true." The overall sentiment is highly excited, as the Agent narrative enters the implementation phase.

Reflect has launched a Whitelabel product, allowing any protocol to issue a custom yield-bearing stablecoin without permission. Reflect provides the underlying infrastructure and yield logic configuration. The first batch of partners includes Titan Exchange (DEX routing), Umbra Privacy (privacy-native yieldcoin), Moto Card (on-chain credit card), with support for 60-second rapid deployment.

The community refers to it as the "60-second stablecoin issuance artifact." Ecosystem KOLs like Superteam Poland have praised it as a "major release" with "amazing delivery capabilities." The discussion quickly shifts to who will be the first to pioneer the killer agent + yieldcoin combination paradigm, and the overall atmosphere is extremely optimistic.

2. Ethereum

Ether.fi (neobank) has launched the iOS Earn App, focusing on "spend and earn" and institutional-grade infrastructure experience. Users can directly manage assets within the app and earn rewards. Optimism officials praised it as "putting institutional-grade capabilities in your pocket." Developers and users generally praised it with "love the UX/UI" and "finally putting institutional-grade rewards in your pocket," with Android users already asking for updates.

Starknet has released an open-source TypeScript SDK called "Starkzap," allowing Web2 developers to seamlessly integrate invisible wallets, paymasters, and mainstream DeFi without changing their existing tech stack. This enables social logins, gasless interactions, Bitcoin/stablecoin payments, and other functionalities. They have also launched a $3,000 developer challenge, along with a maximum of $1M in growth grants and $1M in gas rebates.

The community praised it for "completely removing the excuses at the infrastructure level" and enthusiastically declared that "Starknet is going global" and "we are now in a phase of rapid product delivery." A large number of developers have signed up for the challenge, with the BTCFi and consumer app narratives overlapping, significantly boosting the Starknet ecosystem's momentum.

3. Perp DEX

In the Hyperliquid ecosystem, the Open Interest of trade.xyz (HIP-3) has surpassed Lighter.xyz, becoming the new OI leader in the current OI scale (data source: DefiLlama). The related discussion quickly heated up, with the community flooding the screen with "the power of tokenized stocks," and the $HYPE topic's popularity rising in sync. Subsequently, CoinShares launched the $HYPE staking ETP, providing institutional investors with a compliant, convenient staking channel, described by the market as a "HyperBullish" signal.

Meanwhile, Perpl launched its private mainnet on the Monad mainnet, becoming the first truly on-chain CLOB Perp DEX, and supporting seamless composability. Access applications are now open. Following the announcement, the Monad community quickly boiled over, with "onchain perps finally here" and "only Monad can achieve this" becoming common comments. The product demo video was praised as "insane," and even the Chainlink official joined the interaction, further amplifying the volume.

Additionally, GRVT posted a "26.02.2026｜Save the date" post, accompanied by a "The Exchange Designed to Pay You" promotional video, widely interpreted by the community as a TGE teaser. Keywords like LFG, TGE, Spot flooded the discussion area, with some joking, "points farming is over, should we get on the train now?" Overall, the Perp DEX track sentiment continues to heat up, and market attention is focused on who can break out first in the next round of eruption.

4. Others

NEAR Protocol released the super app near.com at NEARCON (based on Intents), supporting 35+ chain cross-chain swaps, confidential transactions, and P2P transactions, enabling unified management of all on-chain assets under a single account. It has now officially launched. The community praised it as the "best tech, finally matched with a clean and user-friendly app," and exclaimed, "the real crypto neobank is near.com." Founder Illia's personal influence was once again strengthened.

Coinbase opened 24/5 stock trading to US users (zero commission, stocks and crypto assets in one portfolio, $1 minimum fractional share purchase).
Autism Capital joked, "Now we can lose money in stocks too," with the community flooding with "everything exchange" and "no more sleep on weekends." Traditional market trading hours are being redefined.

Kraken launches $TSLAx, $AAPLx, $NVDAx, and other xStocks Perps, enabling 24/7 trading. Discussions focus on the "legacy market hours becoming relics" and how "weekend gaps are going to cause chaos," while the narrative around tokenized stocks continues to heat up.

xAI signs agreement with the Pentagon to deploy Grok to classified systems, becoming the second AI model approved to enter the military's sensitive intelligence and weapons development processes after Claude. The community reacts with both awe, calling it "massive" and praising the "truth-seeking model," and speculates on how "AI warfare rules are being written in real time." Elon's and xAI's tech reputation surges once again.

Editor's Note: Citrini7's cyberpunk-themed AI doomsday prophecy has sparked widespread discussion across the internet. However, this article presents a more pragmatic counter perspective. If Citrini envisions a digital tsunami instantly engulfing civilization, this author sees the resilient resistance of the human bureaucratic system, the profoundly flawed existing software ecosystem, and the long-overlooked cornerstone of heavy industry. This is a frontal clash between Silicon Valley fantasy and the iron law of reality, reminding us that the singularity may come, but it will never happen overnight.

The following is the original content:

Renowned market commentator Citrini7 recently published a captivating and widely circulated AI doomsday novel. While he acknowledges that the probability of some scenes occurring is extremely low, as someone who has witnessed multiple economic collapse prophecies, I want to challenge his views and present a more deterministic and optimistic future.

Never Underestimate "Institutional Inertia"

In 2007, people thought that against the backdrop of "peak oil," the United States' geopolitical status had come to an end; in 2008, they believed the dollar system was on the brink of collapse; in 2014, everyone thought AMD and NVIDIA were done for. Then ChatGPT emerged, and people thought Google was toast... Yet every time, existing institutions with deep-rooted inertia have proven to be far more resilient than onlookers imagined.

When Citrini talks about the fear of institutional turnover and rapid workforce displacement, he writes, "Even in fields we think rely on interpersonal relationships, cracks are showing. Take the real estate industry, where buyers have tolerated 5%-6% commissions for decades due to the information asymmetry between brokers and consumers..."

Seeing this, I couldn't help but chuckle. People have been proclaiming the "death of real estate agents" for 20 years now! This hardly requires any superintelligence; with Zillow, Redfin, or Opendoor, it's enough. But this example precisely proves the opposite of Citrini's view: although this workforce has long been deemed obsolete in the eyes of most, due to market inertia and regulatory capture, real estate agents' vitality is more tenacious than anyone's expectations a decade ago.

A few months ago, I just bought a house. The transaction process mandated that we hire a real estate agent, with lofty justifications. My buyer's agent made about $50,000 in this transaction, while his actual work — filling out forms and coordinating between multiple parties — amounted to no more than 10 hours, something I could have easily handled myself. The market will eventually move towards efficiency, providing fair pricing for labor, but this will be a long process.

I deeply understand the ways of inertia and change management: I once founded and sold a company whose core business was driving insurance brokerages from "manual service" to "software-driven." The iron rule I learned is: human societies in the real world are extremely complex, and things always take longer than you imagine — even when you account for this rule. This doesn't mean that the world won't undergo drastic changes, but rather that change will be more gradual, allowing us time to respond and adapt.

The Software Industry Has "Infinite Demand" for Labor

Recently, the software sector has seen a downturn as investors worry about the lack of moats in the backend systems of companies like Monday, Salesforce, Asana, making them easily replicable. Citrini and others believe that AI programming heralds the end of SaaS companies: one, products become homogenized, with zero profits, and two, jobs disappear.

But everyone overlooks one thing: the current state of these software products is simply terrible.

I'm qualified to say this because I've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on Salesforce and Monday. Indeed, AI can enable competitors to replicate these products, but more importantly, AI can enable competitors to build better products. Stock price declines are not surprising: an industry relying on long-term lock-ins, lacking competitiveness, and filled with low-quality legacy incumbents is finally facing competition again.

From a broader perspective, almost all existing software is garbage, which is an undeniable fact. Every tool I've paid for is riddled with bugs; some software is so bad that I can't even pay for it (I've been unable to use Citibank's online transfer for the past three years); most web apps can't even get mobile and desktop responsiveness right; not a single product can fully deliver what you want. Silicon Valley darlings like Stripe and Linear only garner massive followings because they are not as disgustingly unusable as their competitors. If you ask a seasoned engineer, "Show me a truly perfect piece of software," all you'll get is prolonged silence and blank stares.

Here lies a profound truth: even as we approach a "software singularity," the human demand for software labor is nearly infinite. It's well known that the final few percentage points of perfection often require the most work. By this standard, almost every software product has at least a 100x improvement in complexity and features before reaching demand saturation.

I believe that most commentators who claim that the software industry is on the brink of extinction lack an intuitive understanding of software development. The software industry has been around for 50 years, and despite tremendous progress, it is always in a state of "not enough." As a programmer in 2020, my productivity matches that of hundreds of people in 1970, which is incredibly impressive leverage. However, there is still significant room for improvement. People underestimate the "Jevons Paradox": Efficiency improvements often lead to explosive growth in overall demand.

This does not mean that software engineering is an invincible job, but the industry's ability to absorb labor and its inertia far exceed imagination. The saturation process will be very slow, giving us enough time to adapt.

Redemption of "Reindustrialization"

Of course, labor reallocation is inevitable, such as in the driving sector. As Citrini pointed out, many white-collar jobs will experience disruptions. For positions like real estate brokers that have long lost tangible value and rely solely on momentum for income, AI may be the final straw.

But our lifesaver lies in the fact that the United States has almost infinite potential and demand for reindustrialization. You may have heard of "reshoring," but it goes far beyond that. We have essentially lost the ability to manufacture the core building blocks of modern life: batteries, motors, small-scale semiconductors—the entire electricity supply chain is almost entirely dependent on overseas sources. What if there is a military conflict? What's even worse, did you know that China produces 90% of the world's synthetic ammonia? Once the supply is cut off, we can't even produce fertilizer and will face famine.

As long as you look to the physical world, you will find endless job opportunities that will benefit the country, create employment, and build essential infrastructure, all of which can receive bipartisan political support.

We have seen the economic and political winds shifting in this direction—discussions on reshoring, deep tech, and "American vitality." My prediction is that when AI impacts the white-collar sector, the path of least political resistance will be to fund large-scale reindustrialization, absorbing labor through a "giant employment project." Fortunately, the physical world does not have a "singularity"; it is constrained by friction.

We will rebuild bridges and roads. People will find that seeing tangible labor results is more fulfilling than spinning in the digital abstract world. The Salesforce senior product manager who lost a $180,000 salary may find a new job at the "California Seawater Desalination Plant" to end the 25-year drought. These facilities not only need to be built but also pursued with excellence and require long-term maintenance. As long as we are willing, the "Jevons Paradox" also applies to the physical world.

Towards Abundance

The goal of large-scale industrial engineering is abundance. The United States will once again achieve self-sufficiency, enabling large-scale, low-cost production. Moving beyond material scarcity is crucial: in the long run, if we do indeed lose a significant portion of white-collar jobs to AI, we must be able to maintain a high quality of life for the public. And as AI drives profit margins to zero, consumer goods will become extremely affordable, automatically fulfilling this objective.

My view is that different sectors of the economy will "take off" at different speeds, and the transformation in almost all areas will be slower than Citrini anticipates. To be clear, I am extremely bullish on AI and foresee a day when my own labor will be obsolete. But this will take time, and time gives us the opportunity to devise sound strategies.

At this point, preventing the kind of market collapse Citrini imagines is actually not difficult. The U.S. government's performance during the pandemic has demonstrated its proactive and decisive crisis response. If necessary, massive stimulus policies will quickly intervene. Although I am somewhat displeased by its inefficiency, that is not the focus. The focus is on safeguarding material prosperity in people's lives—a universal well-being that gives legitimacy to a nation and upholds the social contract, rather than stubbornly adhering to past accounting metrics or economic dogma.

If we can maintain sharpness and responsiveness in this slow but sure technological transformation, we will eventually emerge unscathed.

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