The Castle Chronicle: Crypto's Income Arc
PLUS: GlueX Terminal, Market Watch, Arbitrum Corner
Welcome to Edition 151 of The Castle Chronicle!
Gm all! It’s almost the holiday season, and Castle is celebrating the only way we know how…keeping consistent articles going straight to your inbox! Curl up under a blanket with some hot cocoa and dive into some good reads!
This week:
🔍 Market Watch - Sideways price action that will determine future direction
GlueX Terminal: New Tool on the HyperEvm
The Arbitrum Corner
Crypto’s Income Arc
🔍 Market Watch
Gm frens! I’m here again to bore you out of your mind with the same stuff! Such is the life of a trader when it comes to charts lolz.
Price Action
Let’s take a look at the 1D BTC chart again. Just like last week, nothing has really changed. Price has found some kind of supply/demand equilibrium and is moving sideways here.
Given the HTF direction, the expectation is bullish continuation. So I’m overall learning towards this sideways price action becoming an accumulation schematic and breaking up higher.
This is the basic Wyckoff accumulation schematic. There’s a lot going on here, but we don’t need to understand it super in-depth (although it does help for conceptual understanding). The most important thing is:
It’s a sideways price action
Its purpose is to accumulate more of the underlying asset
ST(B)’s and springs are liquidity grabs
It’s the last point regarding ST(B)’s and springs that I want to discuss a bit. If this sideways price action breaks down, I’ll switch my bias to short. BUT it needs to be a convincing break, because we expect price to liquidate the extremes of the range while still remaining overall sideways.
Either way, right now there’s nothing to do but spectate from the sidelines. Crypto is in a very uncertain stage now (price-wise), so there’s no point risking our capital on it.
Risk responsibly, and I’ll see y’all next time!
Courtesy of 0x_Vlad - trend-based momentum trader
Not following what I’m talking about? Check out my quick cheatsheet to understand how I approach a chart.
GlueX Terminal: new tool on the HyperEvm
I recently saw my friend Jojo from Hyperliquid Malaysia posting about Gluex Terminal & it caught my attention quite quickly.
The same team as GlueX Protocol (a Dex Aggregator on a couple of EVM chains) basically built a new type of Terminal centric around HyperEvm & it can be leveraged in many ways.
First of all, there is a cool portfolio tracking section that lets you make an efficient follow-up of all your HyperEvm positions.
There is an INVEST section that helps you to track all the best yields in the Hyperliquid ecosystem. In the case below, you can have a clear visualisation of the best place to park your $USDH bag.
They intent to add much more section in the Terminal (the product being in closed BETA, only acessible via Access code), like BORROW (imajine easily tracking where you can Borrow $HYPE at the best rates), PERPS (manage all your Hyperliquid & builder code position directly on the Terminal), OPTIONS (Rysk coded) or even NFTs (RIP).
But the UI / Experience is really promising & the shilling that I have seen on Twitter really caught my attention tbh. The Bloomberg Terminal on HyperEvm type of narrative is good AF imo.
Anyway, let’s see if they can deliver the product very early. If you want access, check it out there:
Have a GUD week frens
From CL, with love
This newsletter is provided in partnership with Nado, the all-in-one CLOB DEX for spot & perps trading built on Ink (Kraken’s L2).
Nado provides
High-performance execution in 5-15ms
One click trading and unified margin
Collateralised Vault shares through NLP, Nado’s yield bearing liquidity vault tokens
Nado is currently in private alpha.
Castle readers can try the platform as an early user through this access code: https://app.nado.xyz?join=MDny5go
The Arbitrum Corner
Welcome to another Arbitrum Corner! Long time no see.
Arbitrum welcomes you back with open arms and a new look!
Check out the new website:
From now on, users can go to the Arbitrum Portal and immediately see an intuitive view of all the incentives available in the ecosystem, which has been repeatedly highlighted as an issue.
Let’s now dive into the main ecosystem updates.
Arbitrum Highlights
Robinhood just released their 2025 wrapped.
Undeniably, hosting Robinhood is one of, if not the main highlight, in Arbitrum's broader distribution to established platforms, with the giants tokenising a lot of stocks and more onchain.
To date, the total market cap of tokenised stocks onchain by Robinhood is over $13m.
For more details on Robinhood Crypto strategy, check out the Edge Podcast with Johann Kerbrat:
The total value of tokenised assets on Arbitrum is over $800m.
For the first time in a long time, we’ve also heard from Sanko, which is preparing to launch its own version of Runescape - boomers unite!
Here is a sneak peek of the game:
But that’s not the only update that we have for you gamers.
PawPals just launched on Arbitrum, allowing anyone to have their own pet and create a custom environment.
It also features a native currency, PAWS, and an active game acronomy with in-game purchases.
This week we’ve also published an article going deeper into the possibilities of Stylus and how they help protocols to bypass the limitations of the EVM environment.
In particula we focused on RedStone as a case study on how oracles can take advantage of the second WASM virtual machine within Stylus to create cheaper and more scalable implementations.
Talking about opportunities, epoch 8 from DRIP season 1 just started.
Not sure how to take advantage of the incentives?
Here are the top 10 opportunities in the ecosystem:
They are continually updated by Epoch and daily rewards and available for consultation on: https://arbitrumdrip.com/opportunities
Another protocol that has seen recent success is Lava Network, which provides decentralised infrastructure (e.g., RPCs, APIs, smart routers).
This week, they have been listed on both Binance and Kraken. You can learn more about their roadmap in this recent space they hosted with Arbitrum.
As we draw conclusions for the year-end, one thing is evident: in 2025, Arbitrum made big bets that are beginning to pay off and differentiate it from other networks.
That’s it for this week - see you in the next Arbitrum corner in 2026.
Crypto’s Income Arc
In almost every investing book, you’ll find the author talking about some way to increase your ability to either buy more assets or live a more comfortable life.
More often than not, they’re referring to cash flow. Put simply, you need to find ways to increase your income, whether that’s by getting a job, owning real estate, or using various means to earn from investments.
For us in crypto, the meme is applying for a job at McDonald’s to help make it all back, but we have a few options available to help us up our cash flow, like liquidity provision, bribes on veTokens, and options.
No, adding options at the end of that sentence wasn’t a typo. I’m including it because there is a protocol pivoting to everlasting call options to generate income.
Flat Money was originally a protocol designed to create a delta-neutral flatcoin that outpaces inflation. Users would deposit collateral (ETH or BTC), mint UNIT, and earn fees on trading, liquidation, and borrowing.
But now they’ve moved on to generating income via covered calls.
Everlasting options are a novel class of financial derivatives, based on Bitmex’s Perpetual Swaps product. Funnily enough, everlasting options were first theorised by the one and only, Sam Bankman-Fried.
No one can say that SBF wasn’t a smart cookie, and credit to him (and Dave White, the other researcher who helped in this creation), everlasting options are pretty cool. They share characteristics with standard options, but they never expire.
This means that traders don’t have to roll their options after expiry continually, and can keep permanent exposure to the option. TradFi has something similar called Perpetual American Options, but they are very difficult to price correctly and can be expensive.
Everlasting options solve this problem by instituting a periodic funding fee (like perps markets), thus replacing time decay and constantly moving the price towards its theoretical value, making it easier to price.
So, how does Flat Money use this to create everlasting income?
While there isn’t any in-depth information about the protocol yet, we can glean some insights from what they have said. Flat Money says this cash flow comes from providing Bitcoin-as-a-service to their everlasting covered calls.
Likely, this means users would provide liquidity to these call options and earn revenue from funding and option premiums. This enables a way for LPs to earn an income on their BTC, without having to micromanage options expiries or rebuild positions every week.
Any new DeFi product that finds a way to produce an income for the user is a win in my book, and I’m fairly interested in seeing how this plays out. The dream is being able to completely automate income production via DeFi, and this feels like it could be another good option (heh) for people to try out.
We’ll be able to judge Flat Money more once all the information comes out about their pivot, but this should whet the appetite in the meantime!
Schizo out!
In our newsletter, we may discuss projects or tokens in which we hold positions. While we aim to provide informative content, our views are not financial advice. Please conduct your research and consult professionals before making investment decisions. Crypto markets are volatile, and past performance doesn't guarantee future results. Invest responsibly, and be aware of the risks. Your capital is at risk, and we do not accept liability for any losses.