GM,

 What the hell is going on with the markets this week?

 This is W3VE, your Web3 whisperer here to translate Web3 jargon into plain Jane simple English.

Table of Contents

• Company Highlight

• Fear & Greed Index

• Project power rankings of the week

• Market Updates and News

• Growth Marketing Tip of the Week

• Recently Funded Companies

• Meme’s of the Week

Company Highlight

Web3 Marketing is hard. Like really hard. Your community never grows, your engagement is nonexistent and you’re lost in a sea of AI content. 

We’ve personally seen W3VE come up in the space and take on giants like StakingCabin who are validators for projects like Sui, Aptos and Cosmos.

That’s why I’m confident in recommending it, because it feels like a 10 person in-house marketing team without any of the hassle.

• Book a call to explore your Web3 goals: W3VE Calendly

Fear & Greed Index

Project power rankings of the week

Market Updates and News

1) Prediction markets are still crushing it:

Prediction markets are hotter than a jalapeño in July. Last week, both Polymarket and Kalshi rolled up to the VC buffet and walked away stuffed. Polymarket pulled a jaw-dropping $2 billion investment from the Intercontinental Exchange (yes, that ICE — the one that owns the NYSE), ballooning its valuation to a spicy $9 billion. Meanwhile, Kalshi didn’t slouch either, bagging $300 million at a cool $5 billion valuation …. casual. The windfall even minted a new baby billionaire: Shayne Coplan, Polymarket’s founder, who’s now officially the youngest self-made billionaire at 27 years old… he’s like barely legal.

But the real action is in the trenches, or rather, the charts. September saw a prediction market frenzy, with the platforms clocking a combined $1.44 billion in trading volume. That’s not a typo. Kalshi hit an all-time high, snagging 60% market share and flipping the script on Polymarket, which had previously worn the prediction market crown. What changed? Kalshi partnered with Robinhood, making it possible for Robinhood users to place bets on Kalshi’s prediction markets — all without leaving the Robinhood app. This gave Kalshi access to millions of retail investors who already use Robinhood to trade stocks and crypto. And let’s be honest: when people can bet on NFL games and economic data like inflation or GDP in the same app, it's wild, but strangely efficient.

Under the hood, though, these two platforms couldn’t be more different. Kalshi keeps it traditional, with all its market data tucked behind APIs, the financial equivalent of grandma’s recipe box: reliable but opaque. Polymarket, on the other hand, is an open book where everything is onchain, all verifiable, all public. It’s blockchain transparency versus Wall Street elegance, it’s the finance version of Batman vs Superman. As these platforms jostle for dominance, one thing’s clear: prediction markets have officially outgrown the crypto basement and are crashing the mainstream trading party — glitter, chaos, and billion-dollar valuations in tow.

2) Friday’s $20 billion crypto market meltdown:

Crypto had a full-blown meltdown on Friday; the kind you don’t walk off with just a bottle of water and a nap. More than $20 billion vanished in what Bitwise’s Jonathan Man called “the worst liquidation event in crypto history.” The chaos hit hardest in perpetual futures, or “perps” — those endless, cash-settled contracts that let degens bet on prices without ever touching the underlying asset. When the market started freefalling, liquidity disappeared, leverage collapsed, and exchanges were forced to scramble just to keep things from snapping entirely. According to Man, Bitcoin nosedived 13% in an hour… yes W3VERS, 1 hour , and smaller tokens like ATOM briefly plunged to near-zero on some platforms before bouncing back from the abyss.

So, what actually broke? When prices swing violently, exchanges have to juggle massive losses and gains across a shared margin pool. If losers can't pay up, the whole system gets wobbly. To stop a full-on implosion, some platforms hit the emergency brakes. Auto-deleveraging (ADL) kicked in — that’s where winning trades get partially closed to cover unpaid losses on the other side. Meanwhile, specialized tools like liquidity vaults stepped in to catch falling knives. One called Hyperliquid’s HLP apparently had a great day, buying assets on the cheap and flipping them into price spikes like a turbocharged garage sale. Centralized exchanges (CEXs) bore the worst of it, especially in the thinly traded “long-tail” tokens that don’t have Bitcoin’s deep liquidity cushion.

In contrast, DeFi kept its cool… mostly. Lending protocols like Aave and Morpho were insulated because they deal mainly in high-quality collateral like BTC and ETH. They even went as far as hardcoding USDe's price at $1, preventing liquidation spirals even when it traded around $0.65 on CEXs due to extreme illiquidity. That clever move avoided a full-blown panic, but users who posted USDe as margin on centralized platforms still got wrecked. The takeaway? In crypto, it’s not just about what you trade,  it’s where and how you trade it that decides whether you’re the hunter, or the liquidation.

In short, be careful if you decide to use leverage or not because as Warren Buffet says, "Rule No. 1: Never lose money. Rule No. 2: Never forget Rule No. 1." 

3)  Farcaster - the Facebook of Web3:

Farcaster just slid into BNB Chain’s DMs — and it’s more than just a casual chat. The decentralized social media protocol announced it’s adding support for BNB Chain (formerly Binance Smart Chain), just as BNB overtook XRP (which has crashed significantly) to become the third-largest crypto asset by market cap. Clearly, someone’s having a moment. With BNB up nearly 80% in the past three months, thanks to surging network activity and all those juicy token burns, Farcaster is making a strategic move to cozy up to the chain everyone’s watching.

But BNB isn’t Farcaster’s first dance outside Ethereum. The protocol, founded by ex-Coinbase duo Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan, has been making the rounds across the multichain galaxy, and they do in fact kiss and tell. Earlier this year, it integrated Solana, and more recently, HyperEVM, a custom Layer 1 within the HyperLiquid ecosystem that lets users track balances across chains without bridging (yes, finally). Its already live across a who's-who of chains and Layer 2s: Arbitrum, Base, Polygon, Optimism, Zora, and even Unichain — because one chain clearly isn’t enough for a protocol with ambition.

So what’s the big picture? As Romero put it bluntly on X: "Every asset and every chain that matters. Instant swaps. No bridging. Near-zero fees."

The mission is clear: make social and financial interaction across chains as seamless as tweeting, except it’s decentralized, permissionless, and interoperable. With crypto's social layer heating up and more users demanding cross-chain everything, Farcaster is positioning itself as the go-to protocol for building apps that speak every blockchain language.

Growth Marketing Tip of the Week

The “Hi I’m Roy” bill board that broke the internet

A giant billboard in Times Square reads: “hi i’m roy im 21 / this was very expensive / pls buy my thing / cluely.com.”

Simple. Funny. Totally human.

Marketing analysis: 

This is anti-marketing that works as marketing. By stating the obvious and being self-aware, “Roy” cuts through the usual over-produced noise of billboards. It’s conversational, human, and meme-ready — exactly what spreads in 2025.

Why it works:

• Radical honesty builds instant trust

• Humor lowers audience defenses

• Simplicity makes it instantly readable in 2 seconds

• Relatability drives shares and online chatter

Recently Funded Companies

Meme’s of the Week

That’s it for this week.

Keep showing up, keep cheering each other on — and as always, head for the moon!