📚 0xResearch recommends…

Random EOY shower musings on the state of the stablecoin economy and its participants

Stepan Simkin from Squads published an article reflecting on stablecoin growth and the size of the opportunity ahead, arguing that stablecoins are no longer a “crypto story” but a new form of money infrastructure reshaping financial primitives. He contends that self-custodial stablecoin accounts offer cleaner, more transparent trust assumptions compared to opaque bank/fintech stacks, using the Synapse bankruptcy as a cautionary example. He contrasts global, internet-native rails with jurisdiction-bound fintech. In his view, “stablecoin L1s” like Tempo and Arc can only beat Ethereum and Solana if their advantages are big enough to compensate for the trust gap of a new network. Simkin also warns of an impending security and privacy reckoning, concluding that most teams are still replaying the 2015 fintech playbook on new rails instead of fully exploiting programmable money and internet capital markets.

Why the DeFi lending moat is bigger than you think

Silvio Busonero from Blockworks Advisory published an article arguing that DeFi lending protocols have a much deeper moat than most observers assume. He shows that across Aave and SparkLend, the interest paid by vaults to lending protocols actually exceeds the fees those vaults and even many asset issuers earn themselves. By mapping the onchain credit stack (users, lenders, issuers, lending protocols, chain) he demonstrates that lending protocols consistently capture more value per unit of TVL than downstream vaults and, in aggregate, more than upstream issuers like Lido or EtherFi, thus contradicting the idea that “distribution is king” in lending. The piece concludes that while DeFi lending looks low-margin compared to banks when viewed only on deposit NIM, within the onchain credit stack it is the highest value-capturing layer, underpinning a durable economic moat for money markets.

Why this proposal matters, and what gets lost in the noise

Marc Zeller from ACI published an article arguing Aave is now overwhelmingly run and grown by the DAO’s service providers, while key brand and distribution assets (domains, frontends, trademarks, major integrations) remain under unilateral control of Avara. This misaligns with governance, and the groups who actually maintain the “engine.” He details how independent teams (Chaos Labs, BGD, TokenLogic, ACI, etc.) have driven risk management, upgrades, integrations and revenue growth for relatively modest, token-aligned compensation, and warns that if value is structurally siphoned to a private company while the DAO lacks ownership of IP and storefront, top talent will leave. The piece calls for DAO-controlled ownership of strategic brand assets, with management delegated back to Avara under clear, enforceable mandates so both the company and the DAO can thrive without undermining the golden-egg-laying “goose” that is Aave. 

Deep Dive: Alpenglow

Toghrul Maharramov published a technical deep dive on Alpenglow, Solana’s upcoming consensus mechanism, arguing it preserves Solana’s pipelined, high-throughput design while massively cutting decision latency. Today, TowerBFT is non-responsive, hard to reason about formally, and only gives deterministic finality after ~33 blocks (~13s). Alpenglow introduces Votor (a certificate-based BFT consensus with concurrent fast/slow paths) and Rotor (a simpler, single-hop, erasure-coded dissemination layer) to deliver deterministic finality in roughly 100-150ms. The author is explicitly skeptical of the argument that “real” PoS systems will never approach 1/3 Byzantine stake. He notes that because stake is concentrated, compromising ~9-20 top validators could already breach the 1/5-1/3 thresholds, so Alpenglow’s security trade-off vs. classical 1/3 BFT should be viewed as a deliberate latency-for-safety swap rather than “free” performance.

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