Today in Poland is All Saints’ Day. Whole families drive across the country to light candles on graves, and by evening the cemeteries glow. Yesterday Bitcoin’s whitepaper turned 18. One of the first people to run it was Hal Finney. In January 2009 he tweeted “Running bitcoin” and received the first transaction Satoshi ever sent. ALS took him in 2014. Tonight I’m lighting a candle for my own people, and one for the builders who didn’t get to see where this went.
Added some $FLR below $0.006. Not calling a bottom. The chart is ugly and the timeline is quiet. But last week a DAO moved 80% of its XRP treasury into Firelight on Flare. Cover went live on October 6. Builders are still shipping and capital is still arriving, even if price hasn’t noticed yet. I’d rather accumulate when nobody’s watching than chase green candles. Bookmarking this one for future me.
I turned the FIP Files into a guide. All sixteen Flare Improvement Proposals in nine pages: what each one changed, the five that matter most if you hold FLR or use FXRP, and what governance still hasn’t settled, like who ends up running FIRE. It’s free. Subscribe to The Flare Brief and it lands in your inbox straight away. After that, one short email a week with the numbers that moved on Flare. https://t.co/4nd15LmRft Which proposal do you think changed the most for holders?
Last week two Bulgarian banks announced crypto for 2027. Today German Sparkassen went live, and the headline sounds bigger than the product. A handful of savings banks start now, 30 to 40 more join each month. Keys sit in one DekaBank omnibus wallet, and you can only withdraw to approved crypto providers, so not to your own Ledger or Xaman. €0.99 per order plus spread. No advice, and the bank warns customers about total loss. Easy door, locked from the inside. First step toward self custody, or a replacement for it?
Went through the full Clearpool v4.0 whitepaper. Two big changes: CPOOL becomes $CLEAR at 1:1, and Clearpool is expanding to the XRP Ledger with Ripple and Cicada Partners. What's in it: - About $965M in loans originated since 2021. Past borrowers include Jane Street, Flow Traders and Wintermute - $10M in interest paid to lenders so far, $28M TVL - A curator model similar to Morpho. Curators underwrite borrowers off-chain and each vault is an isolated market - The XRPL credit fund lends RLUSD to fintech and payments companies. Cicada underwrites, Ripple is an LP, Hex Trust handles custody - Built on XLS-65 vaults and XLS-66 lending. XLS-66 separates impairment (a missed payment that can still be cured) from default (after a grace period), with optional first-loss capital ahead of depositors - 50% of protocol fees go to buying back and burning CLEAR Token: - Total supply 1,428,571,429 CLEAR - 70% existing holders, 15% treasury and partnerships, 10% ecosystem incentives, 5% contributors - 1.125B circulating at migration, full supply after 36 months - Plus 1-4% annual issuance for liquidity, staking and incentives What the paper leaves open: - 1:1 keeps your token count, not your share. CPOOL supply was 1B, CLEAR is ~1.43B, so existing holders go from 100% to 70% of supply over three years - The network list (Ethereum, Optimism, Base, Arbitrum, Mantle, Plume) doesn't mention @FlareNetworks , even though T-Pool, listed as a core product, runs on Flare with Hex Trust's USDX. Likely an omission, but worth clarifying - No hard cap. The 1-4% yearly issuance comes on top of the 1.43B, with no rule for who sets the rate - No fee rate, no revenue history, no figures on past buybacks. Without them the burn is hard to size - $965M originated against $10M interest and $28M TVL. Average loan size and duration would explain the gap - No credit history. Nothing on late payments, defaults or recoveries since 2021 - No size given for the first-loss buffer or the XRPL fund, and no number for Ripple's commitment - Yield is described as coming from real credit demand, not emissions, while 10% of supply plus yearly issuance funds yield incentives and TVL growth - One audit listed: MixBytes, 2023. Nothing on the migration contract, the bridge, T-Pool, X-Pool or the XRPL vaults - XRPL is at the "preparing for Devnet" stage and depends on the XLS-65/66 amendments. The roadmap has no dates - The 15% treasury allocation covers a "fundraise", with no terms, buyers or lockups - No detail on how much CLEAR gets bridged to XRPL or who runs the bridge - USDX, Dynamic pools and per-pool insurance accounts are in Clearpool's docs but not in the paper - No turnout figure for the Snapshot vote A lot of direction in this paper, not many numbers to check it against yet. Which of these would you want @ClearpoolFin to answer first?
FLR's four roles are not equally busy. Staking is the clear winner: about 21.5B FLR staked in early September, up from roughly 16B in July. Collateral is the odd one. FIP.16 itself says earlier FAssets upgrades made them safer but cut what FLR does inside them. FIRE, with its buyback and burn mandate, is the attempt to reconnect usage to the token. So when a builder says they build around FLR, which role do they feel first?
Credit where it's due: this is a lot of work. Going through repos, announcements and old papers to connect Ondo, Sentora, Veda, Firelight, FCC and Enosys takes real effort, and the narrative is genuinely interesting. The idea that the story isn't "who tokenizes most" but "who provides the services around tokenized assets" is a good one. I also appreciate that you separate documented facts from interpretation. But I'd push back on a few points: 1) Adjacency isn't a plan. Shared investors (Sentora, Borderless, etc.) and names appearing in one document don't show coordinated development. You say this yourself, yet the structure of the piece still leans on it. 2) The Mitchnick/Athey formula carries more weight than it can bear. A 2018 valuation framework doesn't tell us whether Firelight creates meaningful XRP demand. That depends on coverage actually purchased, fees and capital requirements, none of which we have numbers for. 3) The $100M hypothetical shows the pieces could fit together, not that anyone will pay for it. Compatibility is not demand. 4) Missing from the article: the AIC proposal itself says FCC isn't needed for the basic index licensing business, and that Post Fiat positions itself publicly against XRP. Both matter a lot for how central Flare and XRP really are here. 5) The lens is Flare/XRP from start to finish. A counter-case (what if this stack converges around Ethereum and others, with FCC as one optional provider?) would make the thesis stronger. Still a good read, and a useful map of who is building what. I just wouldn't treat it as evidence for an XRP thesis.
Not a dumb question. The complexity is real, but it should live underneath, where users never touch it. I expect the UX to move toward one click: you say what you want, the infrastructure picks the route. If that works, people won't think in terms of separate chains at all. Wallets or protocols, who gets there first?
Glassnode’s chart: realized cap is still climbing while new money from ETFs, stablecoins and treasuries fades. The rally is being carried by holders who were already in. That’s a fragile setup for anything that needs fresh capital to keep working. Tokens paying yield out of inflation are the first to feel it. Flare cut inflation from 10% to 3% in two votes (FIP.01, FIP.16). If inflows stay thin through Q4, whose yield actually holds up?
