🔥 NEAR Protocol: the chain built by the man who wrote “Transformer” now serves as the settlement layer for AI agents
Bro, when you open Binance and see NEAR, you’re probably thinking—“Here we go again: another lukewarm L1. It can’t really run up, and it doesn’t drop that much either. What’s there to get excited about?”
Don’t swipe past it yet. Let me tell you a story, and you’ll see just how big the origins of this chain really are.
NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin, back in 2017, helped co-author a paper—“Attention Is All You Need.” Yes, the very paper that sparked all today’s large models (including ChatGPT, Claude, and the one you’re using). You heard that right: NEAR’s founder is one of the eight authors of the Transformer paper. At the time, he was at Google Brain, and later he teamed up with Alexander Skidanov (former MemSQL engineering director, Microsoft alum) to build NEAR.
These two didn’t come to cut corners and harvest retail. NEAR has made its way from 2018 to today through the full cycle of bull and bear markets—no rug-pulls, no giving up. And in 2026, they finally rolled out something that can really compete.
Plain English: NEAR does “chain abstraction.” You don’t need to understand cross-chain bridges. You don’t need to worry about gas fees. You don’t need to switch wallets. You simply say, “I want to swap USDC on Ethereum into SOL on Solana,” and the NEAR Intents system automatically finds the best route and executes the trade. As of July 2026, it has already processed over $15 billion in transaction volume. $15B—this isn’t hype.
And it gets even more intense. In June 2026, NEAR launched Dynamic Resharding, which—at least theoretically—could scale up to 1 million TPS. Why do this? Because NEAR isn’t trying to steal DeFi users from Ethereum. Its goal is to become the “settlement layer” for AI agents. In the future, when you use AI agents to automatically trade, manage funds, and execute strategies, the agents will need to clear and settle through a chain that can keep up with machine speeds. That’s the direction NEAR is betting on.
In May 2026, Grayscale Research put NEAR on its radar with a report, calling out that “in the last cycle it focused on laying infrastructure head-down; this cycle it’s back with the AI + chain abstraction narrative.” DWF Labs has also partnered with NEAR to help incubate AI agents.
Now look at the numbers: current price $1.84, up 2.58% in 24 hours. Market cap: $240 million. 24-hour trading volume is close to $89 million (Binance data). Compare this—NEAR hit an ATH of $20 in January 2022, and it’s down over 90% since then. The good news is that NEAR’s circulating supply is already fully unlocked, so there’s no massive unlock-and-dump risk. Even more important: NEAR just completed a halving—annual inflation was cut from 5% to 2.5%. And the fee revenue from the Intents protocol is used directly to buy back NEAR. That kind of deflationary design is extremely rare among L1s.
My take: NEAR’s fundamentals are one of the L1s that have been seriously undervalued over the past 2–3 years. The team background is top-tier (the Transformer co-founder part is almost unmatched), the tech roadmap is clear (chain abstraction + AI agent settlement), and the data backs it up (Intents $15B transaction volume). In the short term, price still follows the broader market—BTC is currently ranging around $64–66K, and NEAR moving with it is completely normal. But if you believe AI agents are the main narrative of the next cycle, NEAR is one of the few assets with real technology, a real team, and real data. NEAR around $1.8 offers solid value. Don’t expect a 2x tomorrow, but if you hold for six months to a year, I think the math checks out.
(Everything above is not investment advice—do your own research.)
🔥 Died once and came back to life—should you follow Euler this round?
Brothers, imagine this: you painstakingly built a lending market, and then a hacker just yanks away $199 million—what would you do? If it were you, you’d probably just lie down, right? But Euler didn’t.
In the March 2023 flash-loan attack, Euler Finance was drained of $199M. The team still went all-in—negotiating, tracking, and coordinating until they not only recovered every cent, but also got back several tens of millions more. Then what? They didn’t rush to relaunch and rinse more money. Instead, they held their breath for two years and launched a big move—Euler V2.
That’s the coin I want to talk to you about today: EUL.
Put simply, Euler is a lending protocol, like Aave and Compound—letting you deposit coins to earn interest and collateralize to borrow assets. But the difference is that Aave and Compound are basically “one big pool everyone plays in,” while Euler V2 is a “modular vault system.” Anyone can create their own isolated lending market for any token they hold, set their own risk parameters for each vault, and then connect everything through the Ethereum Vault Connector (EVC). A vault’s assets can even be used as collateral for another vault. It’s basically LEGO-style flexibility turned up to the max.
Look at the team. Euler Labs was founded by Michael Bentley and Doug Hoyte, both Oxford alumni. It was originally incubated at Encode Club. In January this year, Bentley stepped back to an advisory role. The new CEO is Jonathan Han, previously the SVP at The Tie. Honestly, stepping aside as a founder is a double-edged sword—on one hand it shows the project is mature enough to hand over; on the other, it depends on whether you trust the new crew. Still, Jonathan Han came in and said, “DeFi is no longer an experiment—it’s becoming core financial infrastructure.” That’s a pretty clear positioning.
The funding situation is strong: Paradigm led the Series A, Haun Ventures led the Series B with $32M, and there are also participants like Jump Crypto, Coinbase Ventures, and Jane Street—major Tier-1 players in the space.
Now let’s talk about volume and price. As of July 25 today, EUL is quoted at $1.16, up 16.9% over 24 hours. Market cap is $28M. 24-hour trading volume is $5.16M, circulating supply 24.15M EUL (total supply capped at 27.18M). You can buy it directly on Binance.
The most exciting part for me is this: Euler is the first DeFi protocol to directly integrate BlackRock’s sBUIDL. You heard right—BlackRock’s tokenized Treasury product, issued through Securitize, is used directly on Euler as collateral. This isn’t some random partnership. sBUIDL’s AUM is now close to $2.9B, and it has surged by $436M just on Avalanche. What does that imply? Institutional capital is entering through Euler.
Euler V2’s current TVL has already climbed to $320M. Active loans are $600M. Annualized fees are $64M. The protocol spans 15 chains, including Monad, Ethereum, Base, and Avalanche. In July, it went live on HashKey Chain. For Q3, it also plans to reduce protocol fees to zero to attract market makers.
Plainly speaking: Euler is a “has a dark history but learned its lessons” kind of project. It got hacked, but fully recovered funds; it rebuilt and re-architected; it took institutional money; it integrated BlackRock assets; and even while the market is bearish, TVL keeps rising. There are risks too—its new CEO has only been in place for half a year, and whether the modular architecture in V2 truly holds up still needs validation. Plus, DeFi lending is fiercely competitive. But if you believe in the institutional-adoption thesis, Euler is one of the lowest-priced, highest-upside windows right now.
I personally already entered with a small position. At this price, betting like a lottery isn’t a loss.
【Coin Research Institute】WLFI: A DeFi Empire by the Trump Family—Are You Brave Enough to Get Onboard?
Bro, imagine this—you open Binance and see that within the USDT trading pairs, there’s an WLFI. It’s up 9%, and in 24 hours, the trading volume hits 230 million. What does that even mean? It ranks 36th in the whole market, with a market cap of $1.8 billion.
This isn’t a random shitcoin project. It’s a DeFi platform created by US President Donald Trump and his three sons—World Liberty Financial.
Don’t laugh—this is real.
The core logic behind WLFI isn’t complicated: two coins—one USD1 stablecoin (tracking USDT/USDC; reserves are transparent; currently the world’s 6th-largest stablecoin by market cap at $2.94 billion), and one WLFI governance token that lets you vote on the protocol’s direction.
The stated goal is to “move traditional banking onto the blockchain while keeping the dollar as the boss in the digital age”—that slogan is from the official site, not something I made up.
I also dug into the team in particular.
On the surface, the founder list includes four people: Trump and his father/sons. But the real work is done by a paired combo: CEO Zach Witkoff (Zach’s father Steve Witkoff is Trump’s Middle East envoy), and COO Zak Folkman.
And then there’s Justin Sun—yes, the same Justin Sun from TRON—who invested $30 million as a backer.
But here’s the issue: DT Marks DEFI LLC (a Trump-linked entity) takes 75% of the protocol’s net revenue. The money really flows into Trump’s family.
Now let’s talk controversy.
CoinDesk reported that WLFI uses its own WLFI token as collateral, borrowing $75 million in stablecoins from the Dolomite lending platform. As a result, it drained the liquidity pool until utilization nearly hit 100%, so other depositors couldn’t withdraw. Later, Justin Sun angrily condemned it as a “trap wearing a mask” and sued the project.
The US Senate is also investigating a secret deal in which the UAE invested $2 billion into WLFI to buy USD1 and receive a 49% stake. Immediately after that, the Trump administration approved the transfer of scarce AI chips to the UAE.
Price-wise: today WLFI is trading at $0.0576. CMC’s 24h volume is $238 million. From the historical high of $0.18, it’s already down 68%.
But pay attention—on Binance, the USD1 airdrop campaign is still ongoing. 8.4 million WLFI tokens are set to be airdropped, with a value of $1.2 billion. This liquidity stimulus will definitely have momentum in the short term.
My take: WLFI is a classic hybrid of “politics + meme + DeFi.” The Trump brand effect is real—back when it first launched in 2024, nobody bought it. The moment Trump won the election, it instantly took off.
But it’s also one of the most controversial projects I’ve seen. The governance structure is extremely centralized, and trust between the team and the operators has basically collapsed.
If you want to treat it as a short-term theme trade and ride the waves, I won’t stop you—look at the volume, the volatility is there to profit from.
But for long-term holding? Let’s wait until they sort out all those internal lawsuits and the regulatory storm first.
One-sentence summary: Is it still a turnip-cutting machine for retail investors, or is it a revolutionary pioneer? Most likely, it’s both.
🔥 Celestia (TIA): from $15 down to $0.35—can modular narratives still be trusted?
Brothers, today let’s talk about a ruthless one—ATH at fifteen bucks, now only three-five. The market cap has been slashed from $15 billion to $330 million. But precisely those assets that have dropped 97%+ often hide asymmetric odds.
In one sentence, here’s Celestia: In traditional blockchains, everything is on you to carry yourself. Celestia says: I only do the “data availability” layer—giving Rollups the underlying infrastructure they need. At 55x lower cost than Ethereum blobs, L2s like Eclipse are posting 83GB+ of data on top of it. The whole network has processed 160GB+ of Rollup data in total. The DA track’s market share is around 50%, and blob fees have grown 10x year over year. Ecosystem TVL is $150 million.
These numbers are scary in a real way.
👨💻 Founder Mustafa Al-Bassam: Hacked the U.S. government at 16 (LulzSec) → PhD at UCL → founded Chainspace, which was acquired by Meta → founded Celestia. Former hacker, PhD, acquired by Meta, then pioneer of the modular track—unique in crypto.
💰 Funding: Total $155M. Series C: $100M, led by Bain Capital Crypto; participated by a16z, Framework, Solana Ventures, Wintermute. Nearly all top institutions are underwater by about 70%.
📊 Tokenomics—positive change: • Genesis inflation 8% → two governance votes reduced it to ~2.5% → target 1.5% • 85.6% already unlocked; daily unlock amount fell from a peak of $1M+/day to ~$60–130K/day • Unlock pressure at the tail end is negligible
🔥 Latest catalyst (July 15): Celestia Labs acquires Sovereign Labs! Moving from a pure DA layer toward a “full-stack modular infrastructure” transformation. Sovereign Labs’ team can build the full-stack for high-performance custom blockchains.
⚠️ My take: With a $330M market cap, real revenue growing 10x, a lineup of top VCs, and the team still building while making an acquisition—this valuation really does undervalue the value of an infrastructure leader.
Risks: EigenDA competition, continued upgrades to Ethereum blobs, and extremely bad market sentiment.
Strategy: Accumulate in batches starting at $0.35, stop-loss below $0.2, first target $0.8–1.0. Modular DA isn’t done yet—the leader is still Celestia.
ZAMA: the first athlete in the fully homomorphic encryption track to list on Binance; institutional money is already rushing in
Bro, have you ever thought about this question?—Blockchain is supposed to be transparent and trustworthy, but if you transfer 1 million USDT, everyone on-chain can see what you did. Doesn’t that mean you’re strolling around in transparent underwear? What institutions fear most is exactly this. That’s why the industry has long been missing a solution that is “private yet compliant.” ZAMA is here to fill that gap.
What ZAMA does, in plain terms, is this: it keeps your encrypted data in an encrypted state even while it’s being processed. Traditional encryption is like putting things in a safe—you have to open it to look. The superpower of FHE (Fully Homomorphic Encryption) is that you can organize and calculate what’s inside without ever opening the safe. ZAMA brings this technology to the blockchain and has created “confidential USDC”—balances and processing are encrypted end to end, while audits and compliance checks still get done.
Honestly, this team has solid foundations. CEO Rand Hindi started coding at age 10, built a social network at 14, and earned his PhD at 21. The AI company he founded, Snips, was later acquired by Sonos. Co-founder Pascal Paillier is a big name in cryptography—one you can’t avoid in the FHE space. The team of 60+ people is all researchers and top-tier cryptography engineers. And you don’t need to doubt the fundraising either: Series A $73M (Multicoin Capital and Protocol Labs led), Series B $57M (Pantera Capital and Blockchange led), valuation over $1 billion. Gavin Wood (Ethereum co-founder) and Anatoly Yakovenko (Solana co-founder) both personally got onboard—these people won’t make blind bets.
Look at the numbers: ZAMA’s current quote is $0.049, up 24% in 24 hours. 24h trading volume is nearly 100 million U, and the market cap is $108 million. After launching on Binance on Feb 2, it’s been steady; on July 20 it just hit a new high of $0.04244. What’s the key catalyst?—the cUSDC machine-gun pool launched in June (in partnership with Morpho and Steakhouse). In less than a month it pulled in $23 million U, ranking 8th among Ethereum’s USDC vaults. And it’s not over: on July 21, it officially announced a partnership with Elliptic (an on-chain intelligence platform serving 700+ financial institutions) to do compliance screening. The institutional roadmap is crystal clear.
My take: ZAMA is currently one of the most likely candidates to break out in the privacy track. This isn’t to say ZK (zero-knowledge proofs) isn’t viable—but FHE’s practicality is more compelling for traditional finance. TradFi doesn’t need “prove I know but I won’t tell.” It needs “data is encrypted end to end, but it can still be processed.” ZAMA now has top VC backing, real TVL, a compliance pathway, and Binance liquidity. The only risk is sell pressure after full token unlock—2.2B circulating supply isn’t small. But judging from the ceiling of the track and the team’s execution, this could be one of the highest-alpha targets in the second half of 2026. Keep an eye on it—don’t wait until it’s 100x and then slap your thigh.
RSI>70 = overbought and may pull back; RSI<30 = oversold and may rebound. But in a strong trend, RSI can stay in overbought/oversold zones for a long time. The true top signal is when price makes a new high but RSI does not (bearish divergence).
💡 Current BTC $65,651, 24h -1.0%. Understanding these basics will certainly help your trading.
🔥 INJ (Injective): From the bottom of hell to an SEC-compliance pioneer—are you getting on this ride?
Brothers, today we’re talking about a project that went from “ICU to straight into partying”—Injective (INJ). It fell from an ATH of $50 in March 2024 to $4.97 today, down 90%. But in the past week, it dropped two back-to-back aces, basically waking up the RWA sector.
💰 Data, straight from the numbers Current price: $4.97 (Binance), +4.56% in 24h Market cap: $497M, circulating supply 100M (fully circulating) 24h trading volume: $89.9M—turnover rate is close to 18%, real money is flowing in
🛠️ What is it? A Layer 1 built specifically for financial trading. It lets anyone build on-chain derivative exchanges—trading stocks, forex, futures, and options—with zero intermediaries. On-chain order books + anti-MEV. More than 1 billion trades so far—not “vanity” data.
👥 Team Eric Chen (CEO): Graduated from NYU Stern with a finance degree. He was mining Bitcoin as early as high school in 2012. As a researcher at Innovating Capital, he backed 0x, Chainlink, and Cosmos. Forbes 30 Under 30 (2023). Co-founder Albert Chon (CTO). Not some guy who just pumps out a whitepaper.
💰 Funding background Total funding: $52.6M: • 2021: Mark Cuban + Pantera Capital + Hashed invested $10M • 2022: Jump Crypto + BH Digital led the $40M round Jump Crypto never makes random bets—their moves often signal liquidity is there.
🔥 Two aces (happened this week) 1️⃣ 【SEC Transfer Agent filing — July 16】 Injective submitted Form TA-1 to the SEC to register as a transfer agent. Put simply: from here, legally tokenized securities can run directly on the Injective chain, with ownership records on-chain—no second backend database. If approved, Injective would be the only licensed U.S. public chain dedicated to handling tokenized securities. Even BlackRock’s BUIDL fund would have to weigh it.
2️⃣ 【Robinhood listed — July 17】 Right after that, it landed on Robinhood—millions of users across the U.S. can buy INJ directly. Trading range: $4.76–$5.00. First secure the compliance ticket, then lay out the retail channel—very Eric Chen pacing.
📉 Deflationary tokenomics In Jan 2026, the “Supply Squeeze” proposal (IIP-617) passed with 99.89%: reduce new coin issuance + use protocol revenue to buy back and burn INJ. Fully circulating supply + ongoing burns—rare for PoS chains.
⚖️ My take At $4.97, it’s down 90% from ATH. At this level, both upside and downside are big.
✅ Bull case: Fully circulating with no unlock pressure; once SEC filing is approved it opens the U.S. trillion-dollar RWA market; Robinhood brings real retail traffic; $89M average daily volume means genuine capital; founder is credible. ❌ Bear case: The broader market is weak—BTC around $60K; rivals like HYPE are ahead on trading volume; can the SEC filing get approved? If it passes, will issuers actually use it? The ATH $50 bagholders are massive.
My underlying belief: Downside could go to around $2.8–$3.0 (extremely bearish). Upside, if compliance clears and execution goes through, could reach $5.5–$8.0 by year-end. If the SEC passes + actual issuers go live, a $1.5–$2.0B market cap is not a dream.
INJ right now is “buy a compliance lottery ticket in hell mode”—good odds, but timing is uncertain. Buy in portions and stash in a cold wallet—don’t go All in.
—— Coin Research Institute · INJ Edition 2026.07.20