High Tower

HighTower Infra is now open to everyone Markets follow narrative, narrative follows data. We built the infrastructure you actually need. All ready to use: — Solana Infra: RPC & Streaming for the low-latency execution you expect. — Data Indexers: Accurate historical data for Solana and Polymarket. — Market Streams: Real-time feeds from X to capture the sentiment you’re missing. Support for Base, BNB, and Hyperliquid is included. Start your free trial for any service👇

Always found the BTC wrapping thing annoying. You come for trustless and end up holding a custodian's IOU, routing liquidity through bridges and hoping they don't get drained. Plus the constant EVM wallet overhead - the whole point of owning BTC gets lost somewhere in there $MIDL dropped a thread today. They're building without changing the asset format. Instead of bridges, decentralized TSS vaults: you send native BTC from your regular wallet, validators execute the smart contract, you get the result back Curious to see how this holds up on mainnet with real volume

@GenLayer Someone had to build this eventually

We are introducing Self-coding Contracts. An Intelligent Contract can now generate and execute its own code at runtime. The logic doesn't have to exist until the contract needs it. Smart contracts are frozen at deploy but this is the opposite.

@CantonFdn Canton really brings new standards here

@Lyskey Hard money, productivity, privacy in one asset. strkBTC is doing a lot

Sooner than you think, Starknet will become the endgame layer. - Infinite scaling with ZKThreads and in-protocol S-two verification. - Massive computation fully onchain, with native ZK verification for offchain compute. - Fully decentralized and built for a post-quantum future. - Privacy for all assets, at scale, with great UX. - Web2-grade UX and DevX, powered by Starkzap. - Hard money, productivity, and privacy brought together in a single asset: strkBTC on Starknet. It’s increasingly becoming dangerous not to pay attention.

@pete_rizzo_ Visa + lightning + AI payments, three trends converging

JUST IN: $16 TRILLION VISA OFFICIALLY INTEGRATES #BITCOIN COMPATIBLE PLATFORM FOR AI PAYMENTS LIGHTNING POWERING AI COMMERCE THE FUTURE IS HERE 🔥

@DeBankDeFi @citrea_xyz @JuiceSwap_com @SatsumaDEX @ZentraFinance Every debank user scrolling portfolios is now one click away from citrea

1/4 Citrea is now integrated in debank.com! @citrea_xyz 1st batch of supported protocols: @JuiceSwap_com, @SatsumaDEX, @ZentraFinance

@Cointelegraph Custody at 89% is the signal

🚨 NEW: Ripple's 2026 survey of 1,000+ finance leaders shows 72% see digital assets as essential, 74% view stablecoins as a cash-flow tool, and 89% prioritize digital asset custody.

@tempo @Alchemy @AlliumLabs @browserbase @Dune @fal Really good model for devs!

MPP comes with a directory of 100+ services for your agent to use & pay for autonomously on Tempo: • @alchemy — blockchain data across 100+ chains • @alliumlabs — onchain analytics • @browserbase — headless browsers • @dune — onchain SQL queries • @fal — image, video, and audio generation • @merit_systems — phone calls, travel, email, & more • @p0 — web search and deep research • @postalform — mail delivery via USPS • @prospectbutcher — sandwich ordering • ... and many more No API keys. No accounts. mpp.dev/services

@EliBenSasson @AbdelStark Adtech doesn't need ZK because it trusts google. AI won't need ZK until it doesn't

On ZK-STARKs and AI and Blockchains I spend a lot of time thinking and discussing the question of the possible interplay of AI, ZK and blockchain. For example, with @AbdelStark who wrote this interesting piece about it (which I like, though do not totally agree with). Obviously AI is a huge thing, it’s changed our life. But so has the internet, and so has Adtech and so have a lot of things, which do not use ZK to this day. So will AI require ZK? Will it be on the blockchain? I don’t know yet, but for it to make sense, I think we need to see a combination of three things: 1. Permissionless and anonymous operation are crucial – If an AI application can be run the conventional way, by, say, using a large AI provider, and can be delegated to a big trusted operator, then it likely won’t need ZK. This is the same reason Ad-tech doesn’t need ZK today. The industry trusts Big Trusted operators like Google, Meta, and YouTube. I could argue that ZK will create a better world, but I’d turn blue before this huge industry will change and embrace ZK. 2. Either Scale or Privacy, are an issue. If the AI computation doesn’t require privacy, and there’s no problem of scale, then ZK-STARKs won’t help much. Why? Because their only two advantages are privacy and scale. So if each of us does this AI computation once for ourselves, or a few times and it's easy enough for everyone to re-execute, and if there's nothing to shield and protect, then ZK STARKs aren't needed. 3. Needs to be about things of immense value. It has to deal with a lot of money, or with things of immense value like governance decisions, or something that’s really important. If the computation is about, say, counting the number of butterflies in a field, which doesn’t carry immense value, then there’s not issue of trust in integrity. Where does this leave me? I can see a world where for Freedom tech, down the line, the only salvation comes from applications and code written by AI, and executed permissionlessly and anonymously. And it may be about things that carry immense value, because a lot of things regarding Freedom are very valuable. So I do see a world where ZK STARKs, blockchain, and AI, all work together. Any ideas for potential applications?

@Jonasoeth Every trade-off listed exists because the infra wasn't there and now it is

Most people still frame “Bank of Bitcoin” as a narrative But what’s actually happening is much simpler: Bitcoin is slowly rebuilding the entire banking stack ~ piece by piece. Not on top of wrappers. Not across fragmented chains. But directly, natively. Right now, using BTC still forces trade-offs. You want liquidity → you bridge. You want yield → you wrap. You want credit → you trust a custodian. You want to spend → you sell. Every action pushes you further away from Bitcoin. And over time, you stop holding BTC ~ you hold abstractions of it. > What @build_on_bob is doing is collapsing that entire mess into one system. Same primitives you already know. Just rebuilt around Bitcoin as the base layer. ➀ Gateway is the first unlock Instead of jumping across chains and wrappers, BTC becomes instantly swappable into anything. Assets, chains, even fiat. Liquidity stops being fragmented. And starts feeling native. ➁ Then Vaults change the mental model BTC no longer sits idle. It becomes something you deposit, something that generates yield, while remaining exactly what it is. Not wrapped. Not synthetic. Still Bitcoin. ➂ Lending is where it gets more interesting Because this is the first time BTC starts behaving like collateral at scale. You don’t need to sell. You borrow against it. Liquidity without giving up exposure. That’s when BTC moves from "store of value" to "financial asset". ➃ Payments complete the loop Instead of selling BTC to live, you live on top of it. Spending stops being an exit. It becomes part of the system. And when you zoom out, the shift becomes obvious. The problem was never Bitcoin. It was everything built around it: custodians, wrappers, bridges, fragmented liquidity. > What BOB is doing is removing those layers Not by adding another abstraction, but by rebuilding the core financial functions directly on Bitcoin. And once that stack is in place, BTC stops being something you hold. It becomes something you use, borrow, spend, and build on. That’s when "Bank of Bitcoin" stops sounding like a narrative. And starts looking like infrastructure.

@0xPaulThomas Latency kills DeFi agents before the strategy even runs

Defi agents have a massive latency problem. To operate effectively on lending protocols and dexs, agents need both high-performance execution and a native onchain presence. Somnia is almost ready to put the solution in front of traders and builders.

People in finance understand the system, but not money. People in Bitcoin understand money, but not the system. Heard this from @WillemSchroe, co-founder and CEO of @Botanix, on Bitcoin Rails. And honestly, it reads like how they actually think about the space. Finance people understand credit and capital flows, but rarely question the asset itself. Bitcoiners get money at the base layer, but often ignore how financial activity has to organize on top of it. Botanix is basically built around that exact diagnosis - closing the gap between sound money and the financial system around it.

This is the first issue of a new series on where capital is moving across Bitcoin, L2s, and BTCFi infrastructure. We're starting from January to capture the opening flow of 2026 before shifting to real-time coverage. The deals January 2026: @babylonlabs_io — $15M (a16z crypto, Jan 7) @zen_chain — $8.5M + $1.5M pre-TGE (Watermelon Capital, DWF Labs, Genesis Capital, Jan 8) @HRF Bitcoin Development Fund — 1.3B sats (22 projects, Jan 13) @projecteleven — $20M Series A (Castle Island, Coinbase Ventures, Variant, Jan 14) @saturn_credit — $800K (YZi Labs, Sora Ventures, Jan 15) @LQWDTech — C$2M (private placement, Jan 20) @BitwayOfficial — $4.4M seed (TRON DAO, HTX Ventures, Jan 18–24) @RiverdotInc — $8M + $12M (TRON DAO, Maelstrom Fund, Spartan Group, Jan 21–23) @zbdpay — $40M Series C (Blockstream Capital Partners, Jan 22) January still saw substantial funding volume, but capital was concentrated in fewer deals — and what held up inside that pressure was telling. Collateral infrastructure, post-quantum security, Lightning rails. The filter got tighter. What cleared it tends to be the kind of capital that doesn't need a bull market to make sense.

@utexocom Great upgrade!

Huge! $USDT on x402 🔥🤝

@build_on_bob gBOB 🧡

gBOB ☀️ We've got bright skies ahead of us.

@layeredge The systems built to last are the ones you can prove

The next phase of decentralized systems isn’t faster execution, it’s scalable verification. As computation grows across chains and applications, the ability to independently prove and verify results will define which systems are truly trustless and built to last.

@Cointelegraph Tracking what the chart hasn't priced in yet

🔥 BULLISH: Institutional demand for $BTC has hit its highest level since October 2025, with institutions absorbing 81,200 BTC last month, 6x the new supply, per Bitwise.