Base releases new roadmap, Solana integrates private swap feature, what are the updates in the mainstream ecosystem?

Publication Date: January 15, 2025
Author: BlockBeats Editorial Team

Over the past 24 hours, the crypto market has exhibited complex developments in multiple dimensions. The mainstream discussion focuses on the industry divide triggered by regulatory proposals and the game of "good bill/bad bill"; in terms of ecosystem development, Solana has introduced enhanced privacy exchange capabilities, Ethereum has reaffirmed its decentralized sovereignty vision and strengthened the narrative of staking rewards, and the Perp DEX track continues to heat up amid high trading volume and controversy over protocol adjustments.

1. Mainstream Discussion

1. Coinbase CEO and Crypto Institutions such as a16z Publicly Differ on the Senate Banking Committee Draft

The U.S. Senate Banking Committee is set to review the "CLARITY Act" draft, aiming to establish a unified regulatory framework for the cryptocurrency market, involving key issues such as stablecoin incentives, DeFi privacy protection, tokenized stocks, and the division of authority between the CFTC and SEC.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong publicly stated his inability to support the current version, citing "significant flaws" in the draft. He specifically criticized four points: the potential for a de facto ban on tokenized stocks; regulatory provisions on DeFi equivalent to a "de facto ban," such as allowing unrestricted government access to financial records, infringing on user privacy; weakening CFTC authority, further subordinating it to the SEC; banning stablecoin incentives, which could result in a "bank exclusion competition" protection. Armstrong emphasized that he "would rather have no bill than a bad bill" but remains optimistic about revisions in future versions.

In contrast, a16z partner Chris Dixon publicly supports advancing the bill, believing that even if imperfect, it can provide developers with clearer rules and protect decentralized innovation. Meanwhile, institutions such as Circle, Kraken, Ripple, Coin Center, and others have also expressed their support for advancement. Reporter Eleanor Terrett reported that Coinbase's opposition could lead to a delay in the Senate's markup meeting, amplifying internal industry divisions.

The community response has also been quite intense. Some users appreciate Coinbase's tough stance, seeing it as "holding the line" for privacy and innovation, praising Armstrong for "showing them some color." However, others have mocked Coinbase for its past advocacy for regulation and now opposing the draft bill, highlighting its position swing.

One side supporting the bill emphasizes that it is the result of a five-year bipartisan effort, crucial for the United States to maintain its leadership in the crypto field, believing that "now is the time to advance the CLARITY Act." Opponents, on the other hand, are more concerned that the bill is essentially a product of banking lobbying, ultimately leading to regulatory capture. Some community members have sarcastically thanked the Senate for protecting consumers from the "danger of earning profits."

Overall, the core of the controversy revolves around one question: Is this bill truly opening up space for innovation, or is it reinforcing the moat of traditional finance with a "compliance framework"?

2. Noise Secures $7.1 Million in Seed Funding, Announces Launch on Base

Emerging trading platform Noise has announced the completion of a $7.1 million seed funding round led by Paradigm, with participation from Figment Capital, Anagram, GSR, JPEG Trading, and Kaito AI, among others. Noise's product focuses on trading the prices of "trends, brands, and ideas," attempting to integrate social data with trading behavior to create a signal system that captures cultural heat.

The project was initially incubated by MegaETH but has ultimately chosen to launch on Base. Similarly, another MegaETH-related project, GTE, also left after funding to focus on building its own L1 application chain. This trend of "moving out of MegaETH" has sparked considerable discussion, with some interpreting it as a pattern of projects shifting direction post-Paradigm investment, suggesting deeper strategic or even political considerations.

The community's overall reaction to the funding has been mostly positive, seeing it as a validation of the project's phase progress and reflecting the market's interest in the "social signal + trading" narrative. However, the project's decision to leave MegaETH and pivot to a Base launch post-funding quickly sparked controversy, with users bluntly stating, "If the first three apps are all going elsewhere, what's left in Mega?"

Supporters argue that Base has more practical advantages in user distribution, asset coverage, and ecosystem synergy, making it suitable for rapidly scaling products focused on "cultural/trend trading." Critics, however, point out that this migration equates to actively giving up MegaETH's ultra-low latency and native community benefits, prompting a reassessment of MegaETH's attractiveness and ecosystem retention capabilities.

Furthermore, the discussion has extended to the influence of investment institutions: in crucial chain selection and roadmap adjustments, whether top-tier capital firms like Paradigm are merely "riding the wave" or to some extent shaping the project's strategic direction. Overall, this debate ultimately boils down to two trade-offs: Base's distribution capability and asset coverage vs. MegaETH's speed and local ecosystem, and just how much influence Paradigm has in project selection.

3. Morpho Project Closes Discord: Shifting from "Community Hall" to "Customer Support System"

The DeFi protocol Morpho has announced the closure of its public Discord channel, moving to service support tools such as Intercom, providing features like real-time translation, help center, AI support bots, and ticket management to enhance user experience and security.

Founder @MerlinEgalite stated that Discord has been heavily polluted with scam information, and even with the team's strict monitoring and quick bans, users are still being phished via private messages. Similarly, DefiLlama has also shifted to real-time chat support and email ticketing mechanisms, emphasizing that Discord's product nature itself makes it challenging to effectively protect users.

0xngmi shared his experience, saying, "Discord makes it almost impossible to protect users from scams; even if you ban quickly, they can still scam via DMs." However, he also proposed a compromise: keeping Discord as an entry point, guiding users to open tickets through a gateway page, and using a verification code system to filter out bots, in order to retain a channel for genuine user feedback.

The community as a whole understands this decision, seeing it as the "best decision, as Discord is a time sink, especially in crypto." Some also view this as a sign of industry maturation, predicting that "the next step may lean towards Web2 standards, such as Intercom, real-time chat, or even phone support." A few critics believe this is not an operational issue but a "fundamental flaw" of Discord, with some users bluntly stating, "This is a Discord feature, not a bug."

The overall sentiment leans more towards "security first," but some lament that this shift signifies that the "community feel" is being weakened, feeling that "DeFi mainstreaming is a bit bittersweet."

4. Solana Official Twitter Account Mocks Starknet User Data, Sparking Inter-Chain Banter

The Solana official account tweeted mocking remarks about Starknet's extremely low activity: only 8 daily active users and 10 daily transactions, despite having a $10 billion market cap and $150 billion FDV, challenging them to a "direct reset." Starknet founder @EliBenSasson quickly fired back, sarcastically mentioning Solana's "8 bald marketing interns, 10 daily tweets, yet having 10 billion followers and a $1.5 trillion FDV."

Subsequently, the Starknet official account responded with a video, to which Solana replied with a "true" statement, and both sides engaged in meme-filled banter. Projects like MegaETH and Injective joined the mockery, quickly turning it into a public "inter-chain narrative battle."

The community's overall response is mainly humorous, considering it "interesting" and saying, "Brother... at least use a burner account." Some also think that publicly mocking competitors with the main account is not very dignified, stating, "If the main account starts belittling others, it may indicate that they are a bit desperate." Overall, this seems more like a typical marketing battle: using opponent data as material and using mockery to gain attention.

5.Base Releases New Roadmap: Transaction Priority, Redoing "On-Chain Economy Gateway"

Base founder @jessepollak released a new roadmap, with the core direction being to refocus the Base App on "transaction priority" and become the best application gateway to the on-chain economy, driving asset demand and distribution.

Pollak explained that the feedback the team received was very clear: the original roadmap was too focused on socialization, resembling more of a Web2 product with limited user assistance that also could not cover broader asset demands. Therefore, the new roadmap emphasizes: a transaction-priority product experience and interaction design; introducing more high-quality assets, including protocols, applications, stocks, predictions, memes, and creator assets; more financially oriented feature designs, such as copy trading, information flow trading, leaderboards, etc.

The community's overall response has been positive, but some have raised more pointed questions: Who is Base's direct competitor? Is it a trading terminal, FOMO-type product, or an "on-chain version of the Coinbase App"? Some critics have been more straightforward, stating, "No one wants to mint tweets," implying that the previous social route deviated from the demand. However, the overall sentiment is more optimistic: many believe this means Base is trying to turn its self-custodial wallet into a "global asset trading gateway" rather than just staying in on-chain social narratives.

II. Mainstream Ecosystem Updates

1.Solana

Solana's privacy transfer protocol, Privacy Cash, has launched a new feature called Private Swaps, enabling users to exchange various tokens in private mode, such as SOL with USDC/USDT/ORE, etc. Privacy Cash emphasizes that its underlying privacy protocol has processed over $173M+ in private transfers and has undergone 14 audits.

The core of this upgrade is that users can perform "coin swaps" without exposing their main wallet address on the chain.

The working mechanism can be summarized in three steps:
1) Input tokens from the privacy pool are unshielded and enter the client-side temporary wallet;
2) Complete the swap via Jupiter;
3) Output tokens are shielded again and returned to the main wallet.

Meanwhile, the protocol also introduces a "Selective Disclosure" mechanism to obfuscate amount analysis, reduce observers' ability to trace fund flows and amounts. On the user interface, users can directly see their private balance and exchange options, such as through an operation entry displaying "Swap 3.79 SOL to -555 USDC." The project team also emphasizes its "No CA (No Contract Address)" feature, aiming to strengthen the privacy and anti-surveillance narrative.

The community's overall sentiment is notably excited, with many users considering this as a "hard upgrade" to Solana's privacy capabilities. The founder also stressed the strategic choice of "never diluting privacy" during interactions. Simultaneously, some have compared it to other privacy swap projects (such as Liberty Swap's ETH Private Exchange), focusing on whether this "usable privacy trading experience" will become a key competitive advantage for Solana in the privacy narrative.

2. Ethereum

Ethereum's founder, Vitalik Buterin, recently made consecutive posts on X, once again steering the discussion back to Ethereum's original vision of a "decentralized sovereign network" – not merely scalability, performance, or financial narratives but a three-layer architecture of a complete, replaceable Web2 infrastructure.

He reiterated that Ethereum's core idea proposed in 2014 is fundamentally a decentralized internet stack:

Blockchain Layer: Ethereum as the "world computer" responsible for the account system and verifiable state changes;

Messaging Layer: Whisper (later evolved into Waku) handles decentralized data communication and messaging;

Storage Layer: Swarm is responsible for decentralized storage and content distribution.

Vitalik believes that this vision has long been obscured by various "meta-narratives," but now the technical conditions are coming together: Ethereum has completed the PoS transition, the scaling path significantly reduces costs through mechanisms such as ZK-EVM, PeerDAS, L2 further provides throughput and experience gains on this foundation; meanwhile, Waku has been implemented in multiple applications, and the decentralized storage ecosystem (such as IPFS) has also shown strong performance, though many engineering details still need to be refined.

To make this vision more tangible, he used Fileverse as an example to describe a truly "decentralized sustainable" application form: using Ethereum for account and permission management, with a decentralized messaging network and storage system carrying data and content, thereby achieving the so-called "walk-away test" – even if the project team disappears and the platform shuts down, users can still access their data and continue to use the product. This "user-exit, data-not-hostage" capability is seen by him as a key differentiator between sovereign tools and traditional internet products.

In the critique section, Vitalik directly criticizes Web2's "corposlop," a product form that gradually loses its soul under corporate metric optimization: algorithm-driven social media, endless data collection, walled-garden platform lock-in, ultimately turning users into passive objects of attention and behavior. He calls on developers to refocus on "sovereigntable tools," such as privacy- and locally-first applications, user-controlled content platforms, low-risk financial infrastructure, open-source AI, and DAOs.

The community has responded enthusiastically to this set of posts. The discussion revolves around the opposition between "sovereign networks vs. corposlop," with widespread recognition of Vitalik's assessment of Web2's structural issues. On the other hand, more realistic implementation demands have been raised, such as the need for a more seamless gateway experience that allows ordinary users to access complete decentralized capabilities without understanding complex components. The overall sentiment tends toward consensus: privacy tools, exit mechanisms, and user control are transitioning from idealistic slogans to new product benchmarks.

Meanwhile, the financial narrative of Ethereum's "productive assets" is being further strengthened. Publicly traded company SharpLink announced that it earned 500 ETH in staking rewards last week, bringing their total staking rewards to 11,157 ETH, emphasizing that the rewards are continuously compounding. The significance of such data lies not only in the returns themselves but also in making the market more intuitively see that ETH is gradually evolving from a "price asset" into an on-chain capital tool that can be operated and generate cash flow.

Additionally, Base, in collaboration with AWS Cloud and Superscrypt, released the "2026 AI × Blockchain Integration Report," which will discuss advancing from "AI on-chain" to more specific execution layers: how AI agents transact on-chain, perform computation coordination, and participate in operation and settlement. The report particularly emphasizes the progress in Asia on agent-native payments, decentralized GPU networks, on-chain identity systems, citing cases from multiple industry participants as support, making it more like a practical industry roadmap rather than a mere conceptual output.

Finally, MegaETH also sent a strong signal at the infrastructure level: open-sourcing its stateless verifier code, the third open-source contribution following the open-source SALT database and MegaEVM implementation. This verifier allows lightweight clients to validate blocks through witness data without storing the full history, and can even verify sequencer behavior on consumer-grade hardware. This move not only received public recognition from Vitalik but also further reinforces a trend—the "open-source progress" is becoming a key metric in the competition for developer trust and ecosystem collaboration in the new generation of scalability race.

3. Perp DEX

Perp DEX Track recently experienced frequent developments, demonstrating a dual characteristic of "rising trading activity + more aggressive mechanism design."

First, the Hipperliquid-related HIP-3 hit an intraday high: trading volume of 7.57 billion; open interest of 4.21 billion, data seen as a reflection of high liquidity and market activity.

The community generally interprets this as a signal of the resurgence of perpetual DEX track liquidity and genuine trading demand: without relying on subsidy-driven "wash trading," trading volume and fees can still form a positive cycle, reflecting a more market-oriented growth structure.

Second, the Lighter protocol announced: accessing the LLP (Liquidity Providing Pool) requires pledging LIT, effective immediately, with the rule: for every 1 LIT pledged, 10 USDC can be deposited.

However, shortly after Lighter introduced the threshold of "accessing LLP requires pledging LIT," it immediately sparked strong backlash. Opponents believe that such restrictions will directly raise participation costs, leading to liquidity outflow, TVL contraction, decreased transaction execution efficiency, and even causing the protocol to fall into a self-contradiction of "sacrificing scale for alignment of incentives." Some have attempted to endorse it with the logic of traditional top-tier funds, but it was quickly questioned, as the analogy was deemed invalid.

More pragmatic concerns are focused on changes in risk structure: once the new threshold forces LP behavior to change, increased hedging demand could suppress APR, while making LPs passively bear higher directional risk, ultimately weakening the attractiveness of the liquidity pool. Although the goal is to enhance the alignment of interests between LIT and LLP and improve the risk-adjusted return structure, the controversy lies in the fact that such restrictions may directly compress TVL and reduce liquidity depth, thereby affecting user trading experience.

The third event comes from Ink Chain: after an on-chain outage, the Ink-based DEX Nado suspended deposits/withdrawals, while trading continued normally. The team stated that user funds were secure and provided continuous updates during the recovery process. Nado's product positioning emphasizes a unified margin experience of "spot + perpetual + money market," so infrastructure failures are particularly prone to sparking user panic.

The community sentiment has shifted to "urging-style tension." Most users recognize the team's continued synchronization and emphasis on fund security through transparent communication, but they are highly sensitive to the progress of recovery, intensely questioning issues such as undeposited funds and repair times, reflecting the vulnerability of trust in transactional products under infrastructure fluctuations.

Overall, the core contradiction of this round of perp DEX discussion is: track growth is still ongoing, but each mechanism adjustment triggers a new game between liquidity and user experience.

4. Other

The Sui Network experienced a several-hour outage on January 14, during which the mainnet suffered network congestion. This led to the unavailability of some dApps (such as Slush) and browsers (such as SuiScan), as well as slow or failed transaction processing.

The Sui core team responded swiftly to the incident and announced the network's recovery and the resumption of normal transactions approximately 6 hours later. The team advised those still experiencing issues to refresh their applications or browsers and committed to releasing a comprehensive incident retrospective report in the coming days. They also pledged to provide ongoing updates through the Sui Status page.

This incident once again exposed the "stability stress test" issue for high-performance L1 networks: while performance is crucial, what truly impacts user confidence is the availability and recovery speed during downtimes.

Community discussions quickly shifted from the "downtime itself" to a typical inter-chain taunting and rivalry. The voices from competing chain camps were notably more vocal, often using a mocking tone: on one hand, emphasizing their own network's stability and performance advantages, and on the other, seizing the opportunity to magnify the downtime cost of Sui, portraying it as a "counterexample of high-performance narrative" and even extending it to questioning and mocking the PoS mechanism.

Concurrently, the responses from Sui supporters primarily focused on two points: firstly, the team's quick response pace and relatively transparent recovery process; secondly, they viewed the controversy generated by the downtime as a sign of attention and even interpreted it as a "heat index" of sorts. Following the network's recovery, some opinions underwent a noticeable emotional reversal, shifting from criticism to acknowledging the team's response capability and repositioning it within the narrative framework of the "next Solana-style growth curve."

Overall, the discussions eventually converged on three focal points:

1) Whether high-performance public blockchains can truly withstand scrutiny in real pressure situations;

2) The age-old debate of PoS vs. PoW was reignited, becoming an outlet for emotional expression and stance polarization;

3) The downtime event itself is no longer just a technical mishap but has rapidly been repurposed into a material library for inter-chain narrative competition.