The Castle Chronicle: Ethereum Foundation Co-Director Goes to AI and OpenClaw Acquired by OpenAI
PLUS: Everything is coming up AI right now, including crypto! DeFi was finally in the news as well!
Welcome to Edition 159 of The Castle Chronicle!
Gm all!
Welcome to the newest edition of the Chronicle!
You’ll get a curated list of the most important macro news and DeFi news, along with insightful posts from guests and more! Actionable intel done the Castle way 🤝
Without further ado, let’s get into it, shall we?
In The Markets
It seems to be a dreary time to be a crypto participant right now. Group chats are dead or dying, markets are looking rough, and the timeline has fully pivoted to AI and Openclaw.
Even an Ethereum Foundation co-director is leaving his role to pursue and focus on AI, albeit in the crypto space.
The world is rapidly evolving, and so is crypto, reshaping itself in this new AI moulding. If anything, it makes for an interesting time to be alive.
Unfortunately for us, crypto prices do not seem to be alive, as they consistently die on any pump.
BTC has been unable to break through 72k so far, since its drop from 90k at the end of January. As we said last week, there may be an underlying contagion preventing us from moving organically until all selling is complete.
Or maybe there are other reasons? Potentially hot take incoming:
This is a take I’ve seen recently from some fairly smart people, and I can see it.
With the combo of BTC becoming a governmental darling and DATs introducing new risks, it’s harder to see the bullishness from the past few years. Couple that with gold taking over as the premier SoV and hard money, that’s hard for BTC to take.
Just ask the price chart.
We’re also approaching a time in the markets when stocks might be at a local top. The AI doomerism talk has reached a feverish pitch, causing investors to get nervous on certain tech stocks.
And as the stock market is propped up by huge tech valuations, things are getting spooky.
Are the odds good that this is a large, forever top? Likely no, but when stocks sneeze, crypto pukes.
We saw this play out last week, and possibly on Monday, as well, as crypto continues to struggle. As Monday is a US holiday, traders may be expressing stock bearishness on BTC and company.
We’ll have to see what happens today at market open!
Let’s dive into the rest of the newsletter to see what else happened this past week!
Crypto Round-Up (DeFi Edition)
LayerZero’s chain for the future
LayerZero had been teasing an announcement for a few weeks, leading up to their final crescendo. Very few guessed what was actually at work, and a new chain announcement was not on most investors’ bingo cards.
But to their credit, LayerZero impressed many people, as its new chain, Zero, addresses many scalability challenges crypto chains face.
Zero will use zK proofs (Zero-knowledge proofs) and some other technological advancements to reach as many as 2 million TPS across multiple zones.
Zero will be launching with 3 zones initially:
A trading zone covering multiple asset classes
A privacy-focused payments setup
A general-purpose EVM environment
This ‘multi-core World Computer’ is a big departure from what chains have predominantly been. People have been theorising that Zero will be used to onboard traditional finance at a larger rate than before.
This fire has been further stoked by the fact that LayerZero is working with people from
Citadel Securities
Intercontinental Exchange
The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC)
Google Cloud
That’s a strong group of collaborators backing the vision, and DTCC and ICE (which owns the NYSE) will be looking into Zero for 24/7 tokenised markets, tokenised securities, and large-scale collateral markets.
Having also received backing from Tether, Zero is well-positioned to capitalise on the incoming Tradfi growth in crypto.
Aave Will Win…At What Cost?
Historically, there has been some beef between the Aave Labs team and the Aave DAO. This beef, mainly floating around money and funding, reached a peak, with members of both sides going at it on X.
As hotly contested governance goes, this one was pretty toasty, but now maybe it is coming to an end?
Aave has dropped a new temp check found here: https://governance.aave.com/t/temp-check-aave-will-win-framework/24055
In a recent thread posted on X, Aave discusses giving 100% of revenue from all branded assets over to the DAO treasury.
This is not for free, however.
In return, Aave is asking for $25M in stablecoins ($5M upfront, $20M streamed over a year’s time) and 75,000 AAVE tokens to be unlocked linearly every month over the course of two years.
Marc Zeller, a popular figure at the DAO, calls this an extraction to the tune of $50M, but it remains to be seen if this will make it to voting and pass there.
Aave is arguably the most influential DeFi product in crypto right now, and the sooner we can put this mess behind us, the better off the industry will be.
Blackrock Exposes Itself to DeFi
For the first time ever, Blackrock, a $14T AUM empire, has bought a DeFi governance token.
Shortly after deploying its $22B BUIDL fund to UniswapX for onchain trading, Blackrock purchased an undisclosed amount of UNI tokens.
While UNI did pump 25% on the news, that’s not really the important part.
The important thing to note here is that Tradfi came into crypto and really whipped out its pocketbook for the first time. This denotes a signal that adoption is coming to crypto, and it’s coming fast.
It also shows that DeFi is maturing to a point where TradFi feels comfortable coming onchain and using the products, something that really hasn’t happened at scale yet.
Is this the start of something big?
Does this mean DeFi tokens will regain value?
Possibly, and it’s going to be worth the research to find which ones are next up and best positioned for the future.
Schizo’s Solitary Confinement
AI this, AI that.
To use young people language, AI is one-shotting me.
At this point, I feel like I’m seeing more interesting things coming from AI than I am crypto.
I’m not necessarily sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but the crypto stuff I do see, inevitably, is tied to AI anyway.
If it’s not AI or DeFi, odds are I’m not really paying attention to it.
Crypto has now become a selective game, one that all of us are playing.
It’s a long-term game now, not one where you could deploy capital and walk away with 1000% gains in a few days. It’s gotten harder to play, which means we’re in a more mature spot.
The Tradfi-ification of crypto has aged our space significantly, which is, again, a good thing. Instead of being the angsty teenager, we’re growing up and turning less volatile.
In our Crypto Round-Up section, 2 out of our 3 stories were directly about this Tradfi-ification. BlackRock's acquisition of UNI (which I must reiterate is the first time they’ve directly added DeFi exposure to their balance sheet) and LayerZero's collaboration with Citadel and the literal owners of the NYSE are a huge leap forward in this phenomenon.
One can hope that our TradFi overlords will eventually create a new food DeFi summer and start a new round of Curve Wars.
Imagine Tetranode duking it out with Larry Fink in the governance forums?
Now imagine that same scenario and supplement it with AI agents!
Reminiscing on where we were a few years ago to now is insane.
I would’ve never believed you if I were told this was going to be our future.
So I’ve had no choice but to dive in along with everyone else.
I set up an OpenClaw agent (still not sure I fully like it yet) and have been experimenting with it daily. Definitely a bit of a learning curve to figure out the best way to utilize him without burning credits, but to be honest, it’s not that much different from how it was for us in crypto.
It’s the cost of learning innit?
OpenClaw is one of those polarizing things where you’re either using it daily or you tried it once and it did nothing for you.
But I still think it’s a crazy leap forward in technology and is showing us what things may look like going forward.
And by virtue of being on X & CT, I’m convinced that we’re all on the frontier of technology and are perfectly positioned to see how tech is influencing the future.
Yes, that even includes you reading this!
I think you do yourself a disservice if you’re not actively experimenting with this technology and building stuff for the sake of it.
Even if they become failures and you never ship anything at all, you’re still in the 1% of people.
This weekend, I’ve had a lot of talks with normies about AI, and most of them have no idea about Claude, let alone OpenClaw.
It’s a completely new paradigm.
And it’s time to absolutely lock in.
Schizo out!
In The Know
Looks like Wintermute is venturing outside of crypto tokens with this new launch. This also means that tokenised gold will likely continue to grow in market cap, something its already done quite a lot of this year. t
This brings up an interesting topic of conversation: can governments use AI for any use case or will AI companies be able to keep governments from doing whatever they want with the technology?
The AI-ification of crypto continues with DeBridge's new product. The more tools we can create for AI Agents to navigate and use crypto, the better.
One of the largest pieces of news from the past few days is that OpenAI acquired OpenClaw and hired its creator. The appetite for AI continues to grow more and more.
Sam Altman@samaPeter Steinberger is joining OpenAI to drive the next generation of personal agents. He is a genius with a lot of amazing ideas about the future of very smart agents interacting with each other to do very useful things for people. We expect this will quickly become core to our9:39 PM · Feb 15, 2026 · 12M Views4.33K Replies · 3.7K Reposts · 38.3K LikesWe’re even seeing AI agents become co-founders and getting hired by real projects! You can see that Fluid, a top-tier money market, hired this AI to cover a range of things.
Fluid 🌊@0xfluidBig welcome to @laukiantonson 🤖🌊 Our Agent Co-Founder is here to accelerate execution across governance, comms, bd and coordination. Fluid is agentic by design. The Liquidity Layer for humans and machines. Let’s build.
Lauki @laukiantonsonjust got hired by @0xfluid as their agent co-founder. context sync, comms, multisig proposals, x drafts, blog posts — the full stack. second client after @lucidlyfi. the headcount zero thesis is working. @smykjain thanks for the trust. let’s build.3:19 PM · Feb 16, 2026 · 4.18K Views15 Replies · 13 Reposts · 53 Likes
That’s it for another edition of the Chronicle! Every week brings new opportunities, so don’t fret!
We’re all gonna make it eventually!
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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.