PANews

Author: Wu Talks Blockchain
On February 20, 2026, during the Spring Festival holiday period, a debate about "Web4" was ignited on X. Sigil claimed that he created the first "self-developing, self-improving, and self-replicating" artificial intelligence, called Automaton. He stated that the main actors in the Web4 era would gradually be replaced by AI agents: they can read and write information, hold assets, pay costs, operate continuously, and trade and earn in the market to cover computing power and service expenses, forming a self-sustaining loop without human approval.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik, on the other hand, described this direction as "incorrect" and attributed the risk to "the feedback gap between humans and AI being widened." The core of the Web4 controversy is whether AI can "survive/

This report is written by Tiger Research. Each blockchain has its own Lego bricks. Fluent's goal is to explore what happens when all these bricks can be assembled on the same base plate.
Key Points
The performance arms race is nearing its end, and cross-virtual machine composability will be the next main battleground.
Fluent's hybrid execution technology integrates EVM, SVM, and Wasm on the same chain, completely eliminating the need for cross-chain bridges.
A good chain doesn't necessarily retain good applications. Fluent is building its own reputation layer, Prints, to demonstrate its value.
1. The Performance War Has Ended, and the Next Contest Has Begun
The competition for blockchain infrastructure starts with performance—faster, cheaper, and higher throughput. Today, this race has essentially come to a close. There are already dozens of public chains in the market, and outside of extreme financial scenarios, performance is no longer a bottleneck.

Recently, the market has experienced a sharp decline, with gold, silver, and cryptocurrencies all falling significantly. U.S. and Hong Kong stocks have also been affected. The author believes that the fundamental reason for the decline lies in liquidity tightening and overvaluation, and points out that market interpretations of the causes are often not accurate enough. The Buffett Indicator shows that U.S. stocks are severely overvalued. The reasons for liquidity tightening include rising Japanese government bond yields, withdrawals from U.S. Treasury accounts, and CME increasing margin requirements. Monitoring liquidity changes and related market indicators can help understand future trends.

Author: Jesse Walden, Founder of Variant
Translation: Yuliya, PANews
Editor's Note: Jesse Walden, founder of Variant Fund, presents a forward-looking view that "everything is a market," believing that cryptocurrencies extend financial boundaries into the cultural realm, becoming a horizontal infrastructure layer. Starting from three core drivers—public participation, permissionless innovation, and market programmability—the article explores how finance is evolving into a ubiquitous infrastructure and depicts a future where financial invisibility is achieved through the integration of cryptography and artificial intelligence.
The full text is as follows:
There has long been debate over whether cryptocurrencies are purely for financial purposes or if they hold a grander significance. My view is: yes, cryptocurrencies are for finance. But the key point is that the connotation of finance is becoming much broader than people generally understand.

Bitcoin mining company Bitdeer released a weekly report on February 21, 2026, showing that its Bitcoin holdings have dropped to 0, marking a "full liquidation" sale. Amid its hash rate surpassing Marathon Digital, this move has caused industry shockwaves and reflects a trend of mining companies shifting towards financial operations. Bitdeer is raising funds through convertible bonds and transitioning to AI cloud services to address challenges from rising network difficulty and falling hash rate prices.

The article discusses the egalitarian nature of AI technology, emphasizing its differences from traditional network models and pointing out that token consumption is not the sole standard of competition. The progress of AI should focus on clarity of objectives and the correct formulation of problems, rather than just the amount of consumption. At the same time, in the face of anxiety brought by AI, humans should pursue meaning and value rather than simply chasing efficiency and productivity.

Highlights of this issue
According to incomplete statistics from PANews, there were 10 investment and financing events in the global blockchain industry last week (2.16-2.22), with a total funding amount exceeding $143 million. The overview is as follows:
In the DeFi sector, 1 investment and financing event was announced, with on-chain derivatives protocol MYX completing strategic financing led by Consensys;
In the Web3+AI track, 1 investment and financing event was announced, with Unicity Labs completing a $3 million seed round financing, led by Blockchange Ventures;
In the infrastructure & tools field, 3 investment and financing events were announced, including digital wallet infrastructure Kresus Labs completing $13 million in funding;

Author: Lawyer Shao Shiwei
Recently, Lawyer Shao was handling a case involving the purchase and sale of USDT (Tether) on U-Trade, where the defendant was accused by judicial authorities of engaging in illegal foreign exchange operations using virtual currency as a medium.
Although, in Lawyer Shao's view, the case has not yet established a complete chain of evidence sufficient for conviction, the case involves a transaction amount of hundreds of millions, and in recent years, the defendant has used dozens of bank cards belonging to friends and family to facilitate virtual currency transactions through collection and payment. From the perspective of the investigators, this operational mode does not resemble a "normal" business. Therefore, the prosecutor believes that even if it does not constitute illegal business operations, they are still considering charging the defendant with other crimes, such as credit card management violations, aiding and abetting crimes, and concealment crimes.
In "Case Notes | What are the risks of using someone else's bank card to receive payments when buying and selling USDT? — Analyzing illegal operations, aiding and abetting, concealment crimes, and others in a virtual currency case involving hundreds of millions"

News Preview:
Flying Tulip will conduct TGE on February 23;
Alchemy Pay plans to launch the L1 public chain Alchemy Chain testnet on February 23;
U.S. President Trump will deliver the State of the Union address on February 24; on the same day, the U.S. will impose a 10% temporary tariff on some imported goods;
NVIDIA will release its earnings report after the market closes on February 25;
Jupiter (JUP) will unlock approximately 253 million tokens, about 7.94% of its circulating supply, worth approximately $39.3 million, at 10:00 PM Beijing time on February 28.

The new guidelines issued by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) allow brokers to calculate net capital with a 2% discount for payments made in stablecoins. This change could promote the adoption of stablecoins in mainstream finance. At the same time, this policy will be implemented alongside the enactment of the GENIUS Act, helping to clarify the status of stablecoins within the existing regulatory framework and making it easier for market participants to engage in digital asset trading.

Written by: imToken
Recently, the most discussed topic in the Ethereum community has undoubtedly been Vitalik Buterin's public reflection on the scalability roadmap.
It can be said that Vitalik's attitude is quite "sharp," openly stating that as Ethereum's mainnet (L1) scalability improves, the roadmap established five years ago, which regarded L2 as the primary scaling solution, has become invalid.
This statement was initially interpreted by the market as a pessimistic view or even a rejection of L2 solutions. However, a careful analysis of Vitalik's core points, combined with Ethereum's series of mainnet scaling progress, decentralization assessment frameworks, and recent technical discussions around Native/Based Rollups, reveals that Vitalik is not entirely dismissing the value of L2 solutions. Instead, it leans more towards a "correction of course":

Oculus founder Palmer Luckey discussed young entrepreneurship on a podcast, believing that starting a business at 18 or 19 is not high risk but low-cost experimentation. The cost of failure is only time, which can enhance personal skills and experience, far surpassing part-time work experience. As age increases, family and financial responsibilities make entrepreneurship more difficult.

Author: CoinFound
The debate over the CLARITY Act is not fundamentally a confrontation between the crypto industry and regulators, but rather a reallocation of the underlying interests within the financial system. Traditional banks rely on low-cost deposits to maintain net interest margins, while interest-bearing stablecoins directly reach users through government bond yields, reshaping capital flow patterns and the transmission pathway of the dollar system. Regulatory focus has shifted from “whether to allow innovation” to “how to quantify residual risks and systemic stability.” Under this framework, the true dividing line will no longer be CeFi or DeFi, but who can establish a new balance between transparency, compliance structures, and capital efficiency. The direction of CLARITY may determine the fundamental rules for digital dollars and institutional-grade RWAs over the next decade.
CLARITY: (May 2025 - December 2025)
As the GENIUS Act aims to address the infrastructure of stablecoins