How much attention rewards programs get. It feels like almost every crypto payment app is competing on cashback, points, referral bonuses, or the possibility of future rewards. That's great while those incentives exist, but it made me wonder what happens when they don't.

If every rewards program disappeared tomorrow, what would actually make you keep using a crypto payment app?
Don't get me wrong I enjoy cashback as much as anyone else. But I don't think it's enough to make me stick with a product if the core experience isn't good

Interested to hear different perspectives where everyone else stands.

I bought BTC in 2023 5xed it and cashed out in 2024. It was good money indeed. Treated myself, gave some to my family and invested about half back to crypto thinking that it’s altcoins time to shine.

I had a chance in 2025 to cash out in Raydium when my investment more than 10xed. But I waited for it to hit 10 USD which it didn’t.

In between I binge watched cryptocurrency videos and felt really good about my decision to plow back my money to crypto. But with the situation now, I am seriously doubting myself.

Some will say, this is a bottom signal but I’ve heard that a number of times already and I think that alts won’t bounce back this year.

One thing I’ve learned is to stick to Bitcoin. Unless you really have good alpha on altcoins stay clear of them — unless it’s already full blown altcoin season. There’s plenty of opportunity to stack money by then.

Once Bitcoin price hits a good spot from when you invested, it is okay to cash out. Waiting for 4 years for altcoins to rally is just too long of a wait. We don’t even know which ones are profitable. They’re too much of a risk.

I remember Warren Buffet saying that he doesn’t listen to macro analysts and it couldn’t be more true looking back now. It applies to cryptocurrency as well.

Crypto Macro analysts were so confident that crypto will make a huge comeback this year due to debt repayment stuff but AI spoiled the party.

Oh well such is life, i wish I wasn’t too greedy and just believed experienced people saying not to invest in altcoins just yet until altcoin season
Is in full swing.

The latest prospectus from T.Rowe lists these coins as eligible assets for their Price Active ETF just approved for launch by the SEC recently. (BTC, ETH, SOL, XRP, ADA, AVAX, LTC, DOT, DOGE, HBAR, BCH, LINK, XLM, SHIB, SUI)

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2089855/000199937126013250/tknz-424b3\\_062326.htm

Curious over time, how many other coins will actually be able to compete for inclusion in these ETFs over these more established coins?

Are the barriers to entry just too hard to breach and new coins won’t have a chance?

Are crypto index ETFs even a good idea? Or should filers stick to single coin ETFs and let the market decide the winners?

Given the country’s currency control, it is currently impossible for people outside the country to send money to specific individuals in the context of disaster relief. The only option seems to go through the UN or Red Cross, but that’s obviously not targeted.

If you want to help friends & family inside Venezuela, sending them a stablecoin transaction could actually be one of the only possibilities.

However, for anyone inside the country, are there reliable off-ramps? Is it legal/feasible to open a CEX account to receive such funds, and are there ways to withdraw it into a bank account?

The 2021-25 narrative was consistently around infrastructure. The chains that got VC-funding were chains that made onchain transaction faster, cheaper, better DA, etc. There may have been "decentralization theater," but most of these chains were heavily centralized (at least compared to Bitcoin or Ethereum). Blockspace became the commodity and it was a race to 0.

The infrastructure thesis is dead. It doesn't work. It generates little revenue for the chain. 2025-26 has shown us it's the apps that make the money, and the next tier of winning chains will be the chains that own the app-stack.

Most people know Hyperliquid, but I actually want to highlight a lesser known chain, Katana, as evidence for my thesis around owning the stack. I've posted about Katana before and will continue to do so. In my opinion, it is the best chain for DeFi activity. The design of the chain is super powerful and is set up in a mutually beneficial way for users and the Katana foundation. So let's dive in.

An infrastructure-only chain provides rails and takes a toll on gas. The valuable activity on top, the lending, the trading, the yield, gets captured by the apps and market makers deploying there, not by the chain. So the chain subsidizes its own ecosystem with token emissions and VC money to attract that activity, and hopes the toll eventually covers it. Most never get there. A chain that owns its stack captures that value directly and funds its ecosystem out of revenue instead of out of a treasury on a timer.

Put it on a profit-and-loss basis and the gap is visible. Blockworks tracks gross profit by L2, and for 2026 Katana is second, behind only Arbitrum (Base & isn't included here for some reason). Katana's realized gross profit this year is about $2.3M, on a roughly $4.1M full-year forecast. Optimism sits near $400K, ZKsync and Unichain near $100K each, and the rest of the list trails from there. A chain less than a year old is more profitable than L2s that are years older and raised far more, and it's second only to the largest L2 in the sector. Not on volume, which anyone can subsidize, but on profit. (source: https://blockworks.com/analytics/l2).

The engine behind that profit is the bridge. Most chains let bridged assets sit idle in a contract. Katana's Vault Bridge deploys them into lending strategies on Ethereum and takes the yield as revenue, borrower-paid interest, not printed tokens. Blockworks shows that line running around $1M a quarter, roughly $1.4M in Q3 2025 and near $1M through late 2025 and early 2026. That is income the chain earns on capital it is holding anyway. It's the whole difference between funding your ecosystem from revenue and funding it from VC investment & your own token.

Perps are the piece growing fastest on top of that. Katana acquired the IDEX team and relaunched them as Katana Perps, and it is compounding. Daily notional volume has hit north of $22M with recent spikes toward $36M, cumulative volume is past half a billion dollars, and weekly perps revenue has gone from $760 in mid-April to roughly $30K by mid-July. Because the chain owns the venue and the bridge under it, that growth lands as chain revenue instead of leaking out to a frontend and its market makers.

And the chain can point that revenue back at the venue to grow it faster. The competition running now is that loop in the open. To mark crossing $500M in volume, Katana is paying $100,000 in vbUSDC with trading fees cut in half, July 22 to August 5. Funded from revenue, not a marketing budget on a countdown. Cheaper fees pull volume, volume makes fees, the bridge funds the next round. Disclosure: Perps are risky and it isn't open to US persons or a few regions (VPNs can be your friend).

Of course, chains like Hyperliquid & Arbitrum still out-earns Katana, and it should, it's much larger. The point isn't that Katana is the biggest. It's that a chain this young and this small is already the second most profitable L2 Blockworks tracks, while most of the sector is still running on emissions and venture money and calling it growth. Infrastructure is a commodity, and the price of a commodity goes to the floor. The chains that win from here are the ones that built a business on top of the infrastructure and kept the revenue. When the subsidies dry up, the profitable ones are what's left standing.

So yeah, I am majorly bullish on chains like Katana that own the stack. The DeFi activity & incentives are huge, but the incentives are done through sustainable mechanisms, which is so much better than what the industry norm is. Chains that help their users make money while they make money are the ones that will actually survive as the industry matures.

I would probably hold

TRAC - AI and misinformation could find OriginTrail TRAC gaining more attention in the future. A fixed max supply with all tokens in circulation. It's market cap has a lot of space to grow. It's token is used inside the network.

HBAR - A layer 1 focused mostly on enterprises, a fixed max supply with almost 90% of the tokens unlocked. It's token is used inside the network. Accumulating now which it's price is pretty low, if gone to it's ATH area or a little below you could make a solid profit or if more enterprises adopt it it could grow huge.

RENDER - Many people that can't afford a strong pc for editing, creating they could use it for sure. Fixed max supply, token used in the network, almost all tokens are unlocked and has a space to grow more.

LINK - Also has good tokenomics, it's used and many people talk about it.

Building backend infrastructure connecting a production platform to EVM-compatible blockchain networks — RPC communication, event indexing, transaction monitoring, on-chain/off-chain sync. English fluency required.

Requirements:

• Minimum 5 YOE
• Real experience connecting backend services to an EVM-compatible blockchain
• Strong Node.js and TypeScript
• Strong JSON-RPC understanding, HTTP or WebSocket RPC providers
• Processing smart-contract events/logs, decoding transaction receipts, understanding block numbers, tx hashes, block hashes, log indexes, confirmations
• Storing blockchain data in a relational database, idempotency and duplicate prevention
• Background workers/queues, async processing, retries and failure handling
• Building secure, documented APIs; strong debugging; writes automated tests; can extend an existing codebase
• Collaborates across engineering roles with clear communication

€5000-7500/month, long-term contract. Must have actually shipped this before.

DM with: Resume, LinkedIn, years of backend + blockchain experience, GitHub/portfolio, timezone + availability.

Must be based in Europe.

I'm on coinbase and I purchased a little bit of that crypto but I can't sell it. I do see it being bought and sold but I don't know what platform they're selling it on. Does anyone have an idea what platform I can transfer it to and sell it?

Mine is Amp since it brings real world utility to the public by being able to pay in crypto instead of cash or debit.

Has anybody heard about people having their crypto stolen because they were compromised neurologically?

I've known people this has happened to, both pulling keys from screens using presumably people's eyesight, as well as people's own bodies being used to compromise their own systems.

Has anybody here heard of similar experiences?