Mavik_Leo

This week’s violent move in the precious metals market was a reminder of something investors tend to forget during long periods of calm. Silver collapsed in a matter of hours, erasing months of gains, while gold followed with a sharp double-digit drawdown. What was framed as a “safe haven” suddenly behaved like a leveraged trade unwinding under stress.
The usual explanations arrived quickly. Profit-taking after an extended rally. A strengthening dollar. Shifting expectations around future monetary policy. But beneath those surface reasons sits a more uncomfortable truth. Even assets we treat as anchors are, in practice, tightly bound to narratives shaped by policy signals, institutional positioning, and collective belief. When those narratives fracture, the anchor drags.
That is the lens through which I find myself thinking about digital assets today. Not in terms of speed, hype cycles, or recycled ideas of “digital gold,” but in terms of where genuine certainty might come from in a system designed to operate without central discretion. If traditional markets show us how fragile narrative-driven value can be, the question becomes whether blockchains can offer something structurally different rather than cosmetically new.

This is where my attention turns to Vanar Chain. Not as a price story, but as a design response to a long-standing weakness in Web3. Vanar’s origin matters here. The team did not emerge from speculative infrastructure theory. They came out of real digital product constraints through Virtua, a collectibles platform that confronted a painful reality early on: if the data that defines an asset lives elsewhere, ownership is always provisional. A broken link, a lost server, or a deprecated storage layer can quietly erase meaning itself.
That experience shaped Vanar’s direction. Rather than treating storage as an external dependency, the chain is built around the idea that data must be native, permanent, and directly usable by the protocol. The key shift is not performance, but ontology: data is no longer a reference, it is the object.
At the center of this design is what Vanar calls its stack, particularly the Neutron and Kayon layers. Neutron functions as a semantic memory layer. Through multi-stage, AI-assisted compression, large unstructured files—contracts, images, documents—are reduced into compact representations that are written directly on-chain. There is no IPFS pointer and no external cloud assumption. The data and the asset remain inseparable.
Kayon sits above this as an inference layer. Instead of relying on external oracles to interpret off-chain information, smart contracts can reason directly over standardized, on-chain data. Logic is no longer blind. It can evaluate conditions, verify states, and execute outcomes based on information that the chain itself understands. This is a subtle shift, but a foundational one. It turns smart contracts from reactive scripts into systems capable of internal judgment.
Once viewed through this lens, the implications become concrete. Real-world assets can exist on-chain without fragile trust bridges. Documents representing ownership or receivables can be stored, queried, and conditionally acted upon with full auditability. AI agents can persist memory across interactions, allowing learning systems to evolve instead of resetting with each execution. Payment logic can become contextual and compliant, bridging on-chain intelligence with real financial rails through integrations such as Worldpay.
What stands out to me is how grounded Vanar’s ecosystem strategy appears. Compliance-focused middleware like Nexera lowers friction for regulated use cases. Infrastructure support from validators such as Google Cloud and NVIDIA adds operational credibility. Consumer-facing partnerships in gaming bring actual users rather than abstract throughput metrics. Since mainnet launch, the network has quietly processed millions of transactions and attracted a broad base of unique addresses, suggesting real activity rather than staged performance.
In markets where external narratives can reverse overnight, internal structure becomes the real stabilizer. Gold’s sell-off and Vanar’s technical direction highlight opposite approaches to certainty. One relies on collective belief reinforced by institutions. The other attempts to encode permanence, verifiability, and logic directly into the substrate.
Vanar’s valuation may still be forming, and its vision will take time to be tested in production. This is not a short-term race. It is a long effort to answer a more difficult question: how do you build digital systems whose value does not evaporate when the story changes?

In the end, every investment reflects a belief about where certainty comes from. Some place it in policy continuity. Others place it in technological inevitability. Vanar is clearly aligned with the latter, attempting to construct an environment where data, assets, and intelligent agents can exist with durability rather than dependence. Whether the market recognizes this immediately is secondary. Foundations are rarely loud, but they are what everything else eventually stands on.
$VANRY
🔔 PS: This reflects only my personal perspective and is not investment advice. Some information is sourced from public materials; corrections are welcome if needed.
@Vanarchain #Vanar $VANRY

Plasma joins over 25 blockchains in NEAR Intents' chain-abstracted liquidity pool with native token XPL and USDT0 stablecoin.The integration leverages Plasma's high-performance infrastructure backed by Framework Ventures, Bitfinex, and Peter Thiel from a $24M funding round.NEAR Intents processes significant USDT volume with 39% of cross-chain transactions involving Tether in the last 24 hours.
Plasma a purpose-built layer-one (L1) blockchain for stablecoins has integrated NEAR Intents for large-volume stablecoin cross-chain settlements and swaps, joining a list of more than 25 other networks. Plasma got popular mostly due to Tether and Peter Thiel, a PayPal co-founder, backing, having a strong focus on efficient USDT operations.

The integration was announced on Jan. 23 with social media activity from both Plasma and the NEAR Protocol. With that, Plasma’s native token, XPL, and the USDT0 stablecoin have joined a chain-abstracted liquidity pool of more than 125 other digital assets running in over 25 blockchains.

Plasma is now live on NEAR Intents.

Users can seamlessly swap 125+ assets across 25+ major chains to and from Plasma’s native token XPL.

USDT0 deposits and withdrawals on @Plasma are also now supported via the NEAR Intents app.

NEAR Intents onchain data as of Jan. 23, 2026 | Source: Dune Analytics Dashboard

By integrating—and being integrated by—NEAR Intents, Plasma leverages its high-performance infrastructure, backed by industry leaders, connecting it with the broader crypto ecosystem and other leading blockchain networks and communities of builders and users.

“Plasma builders can now integrate NEAR Intents directly into their products using the 1Click Swap API, giving users frictionless access to assets and unified liquidity across 25+ blockchain ecosystems,” NEAR Protocol account on X wrote earlier on Jan. 23.In early 2025 Plasma raised $24 million in a private funding round led by Framework Ventures, with contributions from Bitfinex, Peter Thiel, and Paolo Ardoino. Thiel was also named one of the project’s advisors, leveraging his expertise co-founding PayPal.

Related article: Binance Exchange Lists Ripple's RLUSD Stablecoin
Since then, the high-performance, purpose-built L1 has made significant movements in the crypto industry, as Coinspeaker covered. In September 2025, they unveiled Plasma One, a stablecoin-native neobank and card system offering 10%+ yields and 4% cashback across 150 countries. Later in October, the project integrated Chainlink after reaching a milestone of $6 billion in stablecoins running onchain.

What NEAR Intents Unlocks for Plasma
NEAR Intents is a cross-chain protocol developed by the NEAR-based Aurora team, running an MPC network of market makers called “solvers,” who read and solve users’ intents across different systems and chains. It has reportedly been the fastest-growing cross-chain protocol in 2025 and received relevant industry-level recognition, with honorable mentions and awards, as Coinspeaker reported when the protocol surpassed $10 billion in total volume.

Data from Dune Analytics’ NEAR Intents dashboard shows that 39% of the cross-chain volume in the last 24 hours belongs to transactions involving Tether’s USDT, Plasma’s main focus. Moreover, the protocol had more than half a million unique addresses in the last 30 days

NEAR Intents onchain data as of Jan. 23, 2026 | Source: Dune Analytics Dashboard

By integrating—and being integrated by—NEAR Intents, Plasma leverages its high-performance infrastructure, backed by industry leaders, connecting it with the broader crypto ecosystem and other leading blockchain networks and communities of builders and users.

“Plasma builders can now integrate NEAR Intents directly into their products using the 1Click Swap API, giving users frictionless access to assets and unified liquidity across 25+ blockchain ecosystems.
@Plasma
#plasma
$XPL

Decentralized storage protocol Walrus aims to offer a cheaper, more secure and “tamper-proof” live archive of the crypto trade publication's content.
Decrypt Media Articles and Videos to Be Stored on Sui Protocol Walrus
Decentralized storage protocol Walrus aims to offer a cheaper, more secure and “tamper-proof” live archive of the crypto trade publication's content.

Decrypt news articles, videos and photos will be stored on Sui decentralized storage solution Walrus, creating an unalterable archive of the crypto media company’s content.

The Web3 trade publication’s reporting will be stored as data files called “blobs” on Walrus, a protocol built upon layer-1 network Sui, the companies’ representatives said Tuesday at the Token 2049 conference in Singapore. The aim is to create a secure, “tamper-proof” record of Decrypt’s content to foster trust among the publication’s readership.

“Ultimately the press serves the public interest and ensuring the integrity and availability of news stories is a public good” George Danezis, Chief Scientist and Co-Founder at Mysten Labs, the blockchain infrastructure firm behind layer-1 network Sui, told Decrypt.

In the past decade, the disappearance of news content across the internet has surged due to link rot, or the breaking down of hyperlinks that makes web addresses that point to digital content such as news articles or videos no longer accessible to internet users.

This “digital decay” occurs when a web page is deleted from its host server, or when the host server itself no longer exists, according to non-profit research firm Pew Research.

More than a third of online content vanished from the internet between 2013 and 2023, a Pew Research report shows. Meanwhile, 23% of news articles featured at least one dead link, the same data shows.

But storing articles on decentralized storage protocols could help content publishers sidestep that problem.

“Decentralized storage infrastructures require coordination between vast numbers of storage nodes, in relation to who is participating in the system,” Danezis said. “Walrus leverages Sui for all these functions.
Link rot occurs when a web page is deleted from its host server, or when the host server itself no longer exists.

But by leveraging decentralized protocols such as Walrus, that isn't an issue — the network and the data it stores aren't centralized, meaning they can't be deleted by any one person.

Walrus also plans to support Decrypt’s efforts to monetize its content through Web3 integrations, promoting interoperability between Decrypt’s website and decentralized apps, NFTs and other blockchain-based assets.

More broadly, the protocol also aims to leverage distributed-ledger technology to roll out competitively priced storage solutions for media companies, offering cheaper alternatives to centralized cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services.@Walrus 🦭/acc
#Walrus
$WAL

The ability to ensure quick purchase and sale of assets at the expected price without sharp slippage is a key parameter that directly affects the income and reputation of the crypto exchange.

At the same time, high liquidity can be achieved through custom crypto exchange architecture that prioritizes matching engine configurations, microservices, and high-throughput aggregation.

Below we will talk in detail about the key parameters of CEX that should be taken into account during development.

Why is liquidity a key indicator for a successful crypto exchange?

It is the criterion of liquidity that market makers, arbitrageurs and algorithmic traders pay attention to. Why is it important to attract a target audience:

● It is they who often generate up to 50-70% of the volume of all transactions and form the largest income of the crypto exchange (more large transactions, the higher the total profit from commissions).

● Price stabilization occurs due to the formation of a “glass” with a dense price grid, as professional traders regularly create new buy/sell orders. What is the advantage of the exchange: the possibility of manipulating the “glass” decreases, which means that reputational risks also decrease.

● The “depth of the glass” increases (traders have the opportunity to conduct large transactions without slipping). This attracts institutional clients and increases the status and trust of the stock exchange.

In turn, a good reputation and large trading volumes attract even more new clients, and liquidity will increase even more.

At the same time, exchanges with low liquidity are considered unstable and less competitive.

Failure tolerance and liquidity: how are they related?

Resilience is the ability of a crypto exchange to continue to work correctly in the event of failures, peak loads, network problems, updates or local problems of individual servers.

How does this correlate with liquidity:

● The unstable operation of the exchange (downtime/delays in the execution of orders) forces users to switch to alternative platforms, which reduces liquidity.

● Reliable and fast processing of orders builds the confidence of traders, stimulates large transactions, reduces spreads, increases exchange income due to commissions and increases liquidity.

● Errors due to low fault tolerance (loss/partial execution of orders, duplication of transactions, balance failures) lead to reputational and financial losses (due to complaints and compensations), customer outflow and drop in liquidity.

High liquidity is achieved only by exchanges that show their reliability, withstand peak loads and continue to function correctly even with local failures

Matching engine: why it is important and how to increase fault tolerance

Matching engine (ME) is the key software of a crypto exchange that receives, matches, implements and fixes orders for the purchase/sale of crypto-assets.

Additional functions;

● updates the order book;

● manages liquidity;

● controls shoulders, limits;

● implements rollback of the operation in case of failure.

The greater the volume of trades, the variety of order types (limit, stop, etc.), the types of trade (spot, futures), the greater the required performance and the lower the latency (the time between the order’s sending and realization).

For example, on large exchanges such as Binance, Bybit, OKX matching engine must process millions of operations per second with a delay of milliseconds.

But at the same time, the fault tolerance parameter also plays a key role: the Matching engine must work correctly even with network problems, server failures, and updates/failures of dependent servers.

Important: The larger the exchange and the larger the load (which is especially relevant in peak periods with high market volatility), the higher the risk of failure.

How is the increased fault tolerance of the matching engine implemented from a technical point of view

Hot cues

This is the creation of 2 or more instances of ME that work in parallel.

There are two models: Active-Passive (one works, the second is in reserve, but is constantly synchronized with the first; in case of failure, it switches to the second) and Active-Active (both work simultaneously and are synchronized, in case of failure of the second, it will continue to work without delay).

Active-Active is 2-10 times more expensive to implement (depending on the complexity of the synchronization mechanism, tests, infrastructure capacity + DevOps rates, which require more complex work). It makes sense if the exchange has a very high load and is focused on institutional clients (funds and market makers). Since the main plus is the complete absence of delay for users. For startups with average trading volumes, AP is often enough.

WAL (Write-Ahead Logging)

With this approach, each operation is recorded in a special log before implementation through ME.

If WAL is not implemented, if the matching engine fails, the loss of a part of the orders, desynchronization of the book, duplication/only partial execution of transactions may occur – these are financial losses for the exchange + a decrease in trust.

When developing/choosing ME characteristics for a crypto exchange, it is also important to pay attention to its internal properties, such as atomicity and idempotency.

● Atomicity is a guarantee that the order will either be fully executed or not executed at all. There will be no situations when the order is written off, but not added to the order book and vice versa.

● Idempotency is a part of the “order processing logic” that excludes the duplication of the same order. For example, a trader created an order, a failure occurred, he sent it again, but ME will not create a duplicate, but will record that it is already in the process of implementation.

In practice, what is important to specify when ordering ME: are the transactions atomic and is the logic implemented that duplicates are not created when an order is submitted with the same UUID.

This is usually written in the ME/API documentation. This can also be checked by looking at the crash tests.

Without idempotency, the order book can “break”, errors will appear in client balances and, as a consequence, complaints and loss of trust (and sometimes compensation payments).

Without atomicity, there will be desynchronization, the risk of financial errors and stock exchange losses will increase + customer dissatisfaction will increase

Microservice architecture: how does it increase fault tolerance?

There are two types of crypto exchange architecture: monolithic (all functions are combined in one application/ME; all processes work in a single memory space/database) and microservice.

With a microservice architecture, the system is divided into separate independent services that “communicate” through an API. Each of them has its own function, for example:

● Service of wallets and deposits;

● Service for ETH-USD pair;

● Service for reporting and so on.

Such an architecture increases fault tolerance, as a failure in one service does not affect the work of others.

Additional advantages: it is easier and cheaper to restart, change, scale 1 separate service than the entire monolith; it is easier to localize failures; the load is distributed better.

An example of a mechanism for increasing fault tolerance within the microservice architecture is sharding for the order book.

The book is divided into separate shards, each of which is processed by a separate service.

What this gives: if 1 shard falls, the failure will be local, all other shards and the exchange will continue to work in normal mode + so the ME load is better distributed and it can process more transactions at the same time (this is a plus for traders and improves the reputation of the exchange).

General principles and patterns of microservice architecture, which are fundamentally important for the owner of a crypto exchange:

● Asynchronous queues. Between services not direct synchronization, but messaging. If 1 of the services fails, the message remains in the queue and does not disappear, while other services continue to work. It is especially relevant during times of high volatility. Why is this important for the owner of the exchange: orders and transactions will not be lost, downtime will be minimized and, as a result, income will be even in case of single failures + the confidence of traders increases.

● Horizontal scaling. If necessary, only 1 service is added to handle the increased load, while the others will continue to function. This approach makes it possible to scale the project with lower costs, increase productivity and, as a result, show a lower % of errors and delays.

● Localization of failures. An error in 1 service does not affect others, it can be quickly restarted, while the exchange will continue to function fully at this time. In this way, the probability of downtime is reduced (that is, a stable income will be preserved) + total financial losses in the event of failures are reduced.

When a microservice architecture is critically important: with a large volume of trades + a growing number of users + if scaling and the introduction of new functions are planned in the future.

A monolithic structure is cheaper, as it is easier to develop, but it is justified only if the exchange is small or at the very first stages with a limited budget.

Additional elements: what else increases fault tolerance?

Database replication is also useful for reducing the risk of data loss + reducing financial errors, and load balancing is used to prevent overloading.

The Monitoring & Alerting system will allow you to quickly track failures, react and minimize downtime.

There should also be an emergency recovery plan
$ETH $SUI

When I look at DUSK, I don’t see a project chasing attention or trying to redefine what crypto should be. I see a network that has stayed focused on a specific problem that the industry still hasn’t fully solved: how to use privacy in finance without breaking trust, oversight, or compliance. That framing explains much of the recent discussion around Dusk Network and why interest tends to return even after periods of volatility.

Market activity around DUSK has been uneven but active. Price movements have shown sharp advances followed by pullbacks, yet trading volume has remained present throughout. This kind of behavior usually points to rotation and repositioning rather than disinterest. Traders come and go, but the asset continues to be watched. In crypto, that alone is a signal worth noting.
What keeps DUSK relevant is not short-term price performance but the role it plays in the privacy conversation. Most privacy-focused systems lean toward full anonymity, which works well for some use cases but creates friction when real financial products are involved. Dusk takes a different approach by emphasizing selective disclosure. Transactions can remain private while still allowing verification when required. This makes the network easier to discuss in the context of compliant DeFi, tokenized securities, and regulated financial infrastructure.
This positioning has mattered as attention across the market has shifted away from purely experimental protocols toward systems that could realistically be used by institutions. Coverage around DUSK has largely reflected this angle, focusing on how privacy and auditability can coexist rather than treating privacy as an all-or-nothing feature. That distinction places DUSK in a smaller, more specialized category, but one that aligns with how financial systems actually operate.

Volatility in the token has also been influenced by broader movement within the privacy sector. When capital rotates into niche areas, smaller assets often move faster than established names, both upward and downward. DUSK’s price action fits this pattern. Strong momentum phases tend to attract attention quickly, followed by corrections as traders lock in gains. None of this appears unusual for an asset positioned at the intersection of infrastructure and narrative shifts.
From a development perspective, the project has remained consistent. There have been no sudden pivots or exaggerated claims. Communication continues to emphasize infrastructure, real financial use cases, and gradual ecosystem development. This slower, less theatrical approach does not always capture headlines, but it reduces the risk of expectation mismatches that often hurt projects later.

Overall, DUSK sits in a space that is still being defined by the industry. Privacy in finance is no longer a fringe topic, but it is also not a solved problem. As long as that tension exists, projects that attempt to balance confidentiality with accountability will continue to be examined closely. DUSK’s presence in that discussion explains why it remains part of ongoing market conversations, even during quieter periods.
@Dusk #Dusk $DUSK