Greetings! I’m Juan Aranovich, managing editor of Unchained.

Hi everyone,

Welcome to the latest edition of Unchained. In today's issue, we cover the possibility of Coinbase listing a tokenized version of its stock on Base, Arbitrum's upcoming Gaming Catalyst Program, and Ethena's plans for 2025, including a new offering for traditional financial institutions.

Plus, we have the latest on crypto regulation in the U.S. Congress, upcoming token unlocks, Bitcoin miner MARA's lending activities, Phantom's statement on not launching a token, and more.

Let's get into it!

Base Creators Looking at Putting COIN on L2

A tokenized version of Coinbase’s stock, which trades on the Nasdaq under the ticker COIN, could soon be available on the crypto exchange’s layer 2 network, Base.

“It’s something we are looking into in the new year,” Jesse Pollak, head of Base and Coinbase Wallet, posted on X.

Pollak went on to clarify that “there are no concrete plans” as of now, and that the team was still in an exploratory phase of understanding how to bring COIN onchain in a way that would be compliant with U.S. regulations.

Currently, non-U.S. citizens can access tokenized real-world assets such as COIN on platforms like Backed Finance.

Arbitrum’s $190M Gaming Catalyst Program Ready to Go

More than six months after the Arbitrum DAO approved the use of 225 million ARB tokens – roughly $190 million at the time – to grow the network’s gaming ecosystem, its Gaming Catalyst Program is finally set to begin making investments and providing grants to gaming projects.

According to the program’s first transparency report, its contributors have not only created an initial entity structure to support investment mandates, but have also formed a corresponding structure enabling program staffing and compensation frameworks.

Ethena’s Token Jumps on Plans for TradFi, Telegram Expansion

Ethena, a fast-growing crypto project with a synthetic dollar token positioned as an alternative to stablecoins such as Tether’s USDT, saw its token jump on Friday after founder Guy Young detailed plans for a new offering geared toward traditional financial institutions.

There’s also a planned integration with messaging platform Telegram and an expected buildout of a dedicated Ethena network.

After Young shared a long-form blog post detailing the protocol’s 2025 roadmap, governance token ENA’s price jumped 16% to $1.23, giving the cryptocurrency a market cap of $3.6 billion, according to CoinGecko.

Crypto Might Get Reality Check from Friendly U.S. Congress

Following the opening of the 119th U.S. Congressional session last week, politicians have promised clarity on regulatory requirements for stablecoins, a framework for deciding whether crypto firms are mostly overseen by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission or the Securities and Exchange Commission, and even the establishment of a bitcoin national reserve.

But spiking cryptocurrency prices indicate that investors expect regulatory clarity faster than the government may be able to provide it.

Policy advocates are thinking in terms of what can be passed in the next two years. While Congress may lean pro-crypto, getting a bill to the president’s desk will take time.

“We should contextualize ‘quickly,’” said Marta Belcher, president and chair of the Filecoin Foundation, which facilitates governance for the eponymous decentralized storage network. “Quickly is quickly for Congress, which is not quickly for what anyone in the industry would think of.”

$759M of Token Unlocks Coming Up

Around $759 million of token unlocks are set to hit the market over the next seven days, according to data from tokenomics platform Tokenomist.

The biggest unlocks to come will be from Aptos’s native token, APT, valued at $114 million, and Movement’s token, MOVE, valued at $54 million.

In January, the crypto market will see a total of around $7.1 billion of token unlocks.

A token unlock is the process of releasing previously locked tokens into circulation, which typically results in a drop in token price. The process is usually governed by smart contracts that automatically release tokens based on predetermined conditions or timeframes.

They can take the form of “cliff unlocks” involving large, one-time releases of tokens, or “linear unlocks,” which are gradual, continuous distributions of tokens over time.

Bitcoin Miner MARA Lends 16% of BTC Reserves

Major Bitcoin mining firm MARA said in a recent production update that it had loaned out 7,377 BTC from its reserves to third parties as of Dec. 31, 2024.

The amount MARA has lent amounts to roughly 16% of its total bitcoin reserves and was worth around $730 million at the time