Weekly Highlights | Clawdbot Goes Viral, Gold, Silver, and Copper Retreat After Reaching New Highs, Crypto Market Experiences Huge Volatility

This weekly roundup from PANews covers major developments in crypto, AI, and commodities, highlighting significant volatility and key trends.

Macro & Crypto Landscape

  • Binance's Challenges: The exchange faces a triple dilemma tied to its market dominance, with calls for it to foster more on-chain innovation and positive industry externalities.
  • Retail Exodus from DeFi: Despite lower fees, retail investors are leaving due to an unfriendly ecosystem plagued by issues like low-gas traps and skewed risk-reward.
  • Market Moves: Crypto experienced high volatility. Binance announced converting $1B in its SAFU fund to Bitcoin, while the SEC Chair suggested readiness for crypto in 401(k) plans.

AI & Tech Focus

  • Clawdbot Goes Viral: This open-source AI assistant, dubbed a "24/7 AI employee," gained legendary status, even affecting Mac mini sales. Its founder is a billionaire who previously cashed out €100 million.
  • Vibe Coding Trend: The "Clawdbot" phenomenon spurred interest in "Vibe Coding," where users describe requirements for AI to write code, tested by even non-technical users.
  • ERC-8004 Launched: This new Ethereum standard aims to create a decentralized "AI Yellow Pages" for agent identity and reputation, bridging AI agents with DeFi.

Precious Metals Surge & Correction

  • Record Highs & Pullback: Gold, silver, and copper hit 45-year highs, driven by structural factors. However, prices later retreated sharply, with gold nearly falling below $5,100 and silver dropping ~9% intraday.
  • Tether's Gold Hoard: The stablecoin giant has accumulated ~140 tons of gold (worth ~$23B), ranking among the world's top 30 holders, with plans to build a major gold trading platform.
  • Digital vs. Traditional Gold: The contrast between Tether's rise and the collapse of firm Jereh underscores a shift towards transparent, on-chain gold investment.

Key Web3 Developments

  • Agent Economy & Gaming: The launch of ERC-8004 supports the AI agent economy. An analysis argues that while gold farming sustained games like WoW, it could harm Web3 games if they focus only on free asset trading.
  • Whale Influence & Vitalik's View: The coin-hoarding strategies of firms like MicroStrategy and Bitmine are influencing markets. Vitalik Buterin warned the crypto industry's biggest risk is a loss of direction at the application level.

Other Notable Events

  • Regulatory & Macro: Kevin Warsh is reportedly finalized as the next Fed Chair; he views Bitcoin as an important asset. The US seized over $400M linked to the Helix mixing service.
  • Market Volatility: A so-called "1011 Insider Whale" lost ~$53M in 2 hours. Major options expiry approached for BTC and ETH. Meme coin (BP) on Solana surged 608% in 24 hours.
Summary

PANews Editor's Note: PANews has selected the best content of the week to help you catch up on anything you might have missed over the weekend. Click on the title to read.

Macro perspective

Kevin Warsh: Inflation is a “choice,” and I view Bitcoin as an important asset.

What are the policy proposals of Kevin Warsh, the most promising candidate for Federal Reserve Chair? What is his view on Bitcoin?

Power of discourse, internalization, and positive externalities: Understanding Binance's triple dilemma and "original sin".

Binance, as a giant in the cryptocurrency industry, is facing a triple dilemma stemming from its market position and business strategy. Binance's predicament is not simply a matter of market skepticism, but rather a lack of industry responsibility from a giant that has reaped enormous benefits. The solution lies in Binance moving beyond a focus on mere traffic, returning the narrative to the community, directing liquidity towards genuine on-chain innovation, and creating large-scale positive externalities for the industry.

The Playground of Whales: Why Retail Investors Are Fleeing DeFi

The DeFi era, which once championed financial equality, has ended. Despite significantly reduced transaction costs, retail investors are withdrawing en masse. The core reason lies in the current DeFi ecosystem's extreme unfriendliness towards retail investors, manifested in four major problems: low-gas traps, arbitrary rule changes, lock-up traps, and a severe imbalance between risk and return.

Tesla + xAI + SpaceX: The Trillion-Dollar Ultimate AI Flywheel

Independent analyst @farzyness (a former Tesla team member) provided an in-depth analysis of the synergistic ecosystem comprised of Elon Musk's Tesla, xAI, and SpaceX, believing it to be forming an unparalleled "trillion-dollar ultimate AI flywheel."

About Vibe Coding

Clawdbot achieves legendary status: a 24/7 AI assistant that caused Mac mini sales to sell out.

An open-source AI assistant called Clawdbot has recently become a sensation in Silicon Valley and the geek community, hailed by users as a "24/7 full-time AI employee" or a "real-life Jarvis."

The creator of Clawdbot, which went viral online, is actually a billionaire who felt "empty" after cashing out 800 million.

Peter Steinberger, the founder of Clawdbot, is an Austrian billionaire who created the document processing tool PSPDFKit in 2011 and cashed out in 2021 for approximately €100 million (about RMB 830 million).

After Clawdbot became a hit, I couldn't resist: A liberal arts student with zero experience practicing Vibe Coding.

A liberal arts student with zero coding experience personally experienced "Vibe Coding" (a new paradigm of "just make your requirements and let AI write the code") after AI agent tools such as Clawdbot became popular, and reviewed the practical process and core skills of three mainstream tools.

Focus on precious metals

Both involve gold plus "certificates," so why did Jereh collapse while Tether continued to profit immensely?

The same round of gold price increases tests the robustness of the underlying structure. The collapse of JWG reflects the risks of accumulated gray areas in traditional finance, while the rise of Tether Gold demonstrates the evolution of gold investment in the digital age towards transparency, verifiability, and censorship resistance.

Gold: The risk of a major pullback after the surge is looming.

Gold's technical indicators show it is most overbought in 55 years, with a historical similarity to the 1979 US-Iran crisis. The current tensions between the US and Iran may push up gold prices, but caution is advised regarding the risk of a pullback after the conflict subsides. Chasing the rally should be done with caution.

The remarkable resurgence of "gold for the poor": A review of noteworthy tokenized silver.

Silver prices hit a record high, outperforming Bitcoin and gold. Besides purchasing silver funds or physical silver through traditional brokerages or brick-and-mortar stores, tokenized silver may also be an option.

In-depth analysis of the intergenerational asset migration behind Tether's increase of 27 tons of gold holdings

Tether added another 27 tons of gold in the fourth quarter, bringing the circulating supply of USDT to over 187 billion. Meanwhile, Hong Kong announced plans to build a 2,000-ton gold storage facility. Behind this series of "gold hoarding frenzy" lies the depletion of physical asset liquidity and the explosion of on-chain finance. This article analyzes, through the latest data, why Tether's gold purchases are a "game-changer" and why Bitcoin is the only Noah's Ark in 2026.

Why is the hottest market since 1979 occurring in gold, silver, and copper?

Gold, silver, and copper are experiencing their hottest rally since 1979, with all three hitting 45-year highs. This is not a cyclical rebound, but a fundamental shift in the global valuation logic of hard assets, driven by multiple structural factors.

The Hidden Players Behind the Gold Price Surge: This Cryptocurrency Firm Earning Billions of Dollars Annually Has Hoarded 140 Tons of Gold

Stablecoin giant Tether has quietly amassed approximately 140 tons of physical gold, worth about $23 billion, ranking among the world's top 30 gold holders, with holdings exceeding those of several countries. Tether plans to capture arbitrage opportunities through active trading of its gold reserves and to build a top-tier gold trading floor, aiming to compete with traditional giants such as JPMorgan Chase and HSBC.

Seize the opportunity

Foresight for 2026: A Look Ahead at Quantitative Trading and How to Allocate Alternative Assets

In 2025, the quantitative finance industry will exhibit both "high growth" and "high volatility." The scale of public quantitative funds will grow rapidly, surpassing some private funds. The market's leading players will be disrupted, with firms like Boda and Guojin emerging as leaders thanks to high turnover rates and agile strategies, demonstrating that extreme flexibility is key to breaking through in a highly competitive market.

While CEXs were still undergoing trial periods, Hyperliquid was already trading precious metals and forex.

Perliquid is shifting from a “user-friendly DEX” to an “on-chain Nasdaq” narrative, expanding to trading of all categories of synthetic assets such as crude oil, foreign exchange, and precious metals through the HIP-3 protocol, thus escaping the fierce competition in the original Perp DEX track.

Web3 Matters

When an agent possesses an "on-chain business card," how does ERC-8004 become a decentralized "AI Yellow Pages"?

Ethereum's ERC-8004 standard has been launched on the mainnet, providing decentralized identity, reputation, and verification mechanisms for AI agents through an on-chain registry, breaking down centralized "walled gardens" and promoting the deep integration of autonomous agent economy and DeFi.

Why did gold farming studios sustain World of Warcraft but "kill" all Web3 games?

Once an activity can be scaled up, it inevitably becomes industrialized. Gold farming studios exploit this characteristic. If Web3 games solely pursue free asset trading, they may fundamentally deviate from the essence of gaming.

How are the two major cryptocurrency whales, MSTR and BMNR, influencing the crypto market?

Against the backdrop of the crypto market correction in early 2026, enterprise-level coin hoarding strategies became a key narrative in the market. This article provides an in-depth analysis of the coin hoarding behavior, strategic differences, and multidimensional impact on the market of two representative companies: MicroStrategy (MSTR) and Bitmine Immersion Technologies (BMNR).

A Second Visit to Vitalik: Rejecting the Doomsday Script, Searching for Crypto's Lost Soul

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin recently gave an interview in Chiang Mai, sharing his profound thoughts on the current state and future of the crypto industry. He believes the biggest risk facing the industry today is not technology, but a loss of direction at the application level.

Key Information

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Author: 一周精选

This article represents the views of PANews columnist and does not represent PANews' position or legal liability.

The article and opinions do not constitute investment advice

Image source: 一周精选. Please contact the author for removal if there is infringement.

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