The Castle Chronicle: How Kaito is improving its InfoFi Leaderboards, is Stripe launching its own Blockchain?
PLUS: Zooming out on $BTC and $ETH charts
Welcome to Edition 133 of The Castle Chronicle!
The sun is shining, birds are chirping, and the Chronicle is back with some cool updates from the past week!
Here’s what we have for you today:
🔍 Market Watch - Zooming out on Bitcoin and Ethereum charts
🔮 Is Stripe about to Launch its own Chain?
📢 Are Kaito Leaderboards really going to improve from now on?
🏰 Castle Reads - All of Castle’s research you might have missed
📖 Recommended Reads - The best reads from the best researchers on CT
🔍 Market Watch
Gm frens! Since our newsletter is released weekly, I usually focus on weekly changes. However, every now and then, it's a good idea to zoom out and look at the monthly charts. So, let's do exactly that!
Price Action
Taking a look at the monthly $BTC chart, we can see a clear uptrend. The EMA 50 has been rising for a long time, and every pullback has resulted in re-accumulation. The expectation is for this type of price action to continue until it doesn't. We’re bullish, fam.
With rising talks about alt-season, I also want to take a quick look at $ETH.
$ETH has been underperforming for a long time against $BTC. Even now, it is still moving sideways within a range. To become giga-bullish on $ETH and an alt-season along with it, I need to see it break out from this range with convincing strength.
Until that happens, I’ll expect this resistance to hold and, therefore, expect $ETH’s upside to be capped.
Top Performers
Sorting by 30d%, we can see the biggest winners of the past month. The top 5 have all gained over 50%, with $CFX leading the charge with an impressive 122% increase.
With crypto in such a strong bullish context, I expect similar numbers to continue appearing.
Narrative Performance
Taking a look at the past 30 days, the strongest narratives have been Launchpads, NFTs, and Social-Fi, all increasing by more than +100%. On the other hand, the weakest-performing narratives have been DeFAI, ICM, and AI Agents, all decreasing by around -20%.
In summary, this past month has been very bullish for crypto overall. $BTC continues to rise to new ATHs, and we have no idea how high it can go. Along with it, many other cryptos are following its path. If $ETH can break out of its range with serious strength, we could be in for a whole lot of fun!
But until that happens, risk responsibly, and I’ll see y’all next time!
Courtesy of 0x_Vlad - trend-based trader and MentFX student
Not following what I’m talking about? Check out my quick cheatsheet to understand how I approach a chart.
🔮 Is Stripe about to Launch its own Chain?
Do you remember in October 2024 when Stripe acquired Bridge, a fully integrated stablecoin platform that enabled businesses to easily receive, store, convert, issue, and spend stablecoins? Back then, it was by far the biggest crypto acquisition.
Stripe did it again in June 2025 when they acquired Privy, a wallet infrastructure provider that gained fame during the Friendtech era in 2023 by enabling easy wallet creation for any Friendtech user simply via a Twitter account.
Recently, another very interesting news came out: Stripe and Paradigm will be working together to ship a new EVM-compatible Layer 1.
The information about the new TEMPO chain recently leaked from a job offer, now deleted, on the Paradigm website for a Product Marketing Lead.
Another interesting info is that Matt Huang, Cofounder and Managing Partner at Paradigm, recently joined the Stripe’s Boards of Directior.
Other than that, there isn't much official information on the new TEMPO blockchain. However, based on Stripe's past acquisition and its partnership with Paradigm, we can make a few educated guesses:
Given that Stripe spent close to 1.1 billion USD on Bridge, we can expect this new chain to integrate a lot of native functionality to enhance businesses' ability to leverage stablecoin technology.
The recent acquisition of Privy by Stripe makes me believe that TEMPO will feature new and interesting capabilities related to account abstraction.
Considering Paradigm's past experience with Blast L2 and their focus on yield, we can expect a strong emphasis on treasury and stablecoin yield.
With the Genius Act, there is a strong focus on everything related to stablecoins. Therefore, I believe that Stripe and Paradigm are building a purely stablecoin-focused Layer 1.
Cheers.
From CL with LOVE
📢 Are Kaito Leaderboards really going to improve from now on?
Last week, KaitoAI released a new upgrade to its algorithm to eliminate AI slops and improve the overall quality of engagement needed to climb the leaderboards.
But how are these efforts progressing? Will this actually make a difference?
Let’s find out.
Some Context
There are currently 94 leaderboards on Kaito, including 44 for Pre-TGE projects and 47 Yap Campaigns on Kaito Earn, from which Yappers can earn decent airdrops by posting about them on X.
Kaito has already distributed around $106M through past campaigns in 2025, excluding its own airdrop. This is a significant amount and highlights how strong the InfoFi meta has been in 2025.
However, things have worsened since bots and engagement farms started using multiple accounts or coordinated schemes to extract as much value as possible. They did this by posting AI slops (effortless replies/tweets) and farming engagement across groups of multiple medium-sized accounts.
The community, ranging from smaller to larger creators, didn’t appreciate this. The space became an echo chamber of AI slops and Yap farming addicts, all doing whatever it takes to reach the leaderboards and pocket any new airdrop.
The Upgrade
Kaito’s team has definitely been observing and taking notes on all of this, so they pushed out an upgrade to their leaderboards, which consists of:
Higher reputation thresholds to be included in each leaderboard, also rewarding early-stage support and engagement.
Stronger Anti-Spamming and Anti-Farming Filters, which exclude replies and reply-guy farming circles from acquiring leaderboard mindshare, as well as cutting out newly spun-up accounts, people buying followers, or people paying for engagement.
As they explained, this is just the first step to improve their algorithms, with new updates coming regarding:
The gKaito mechanism (Yaps + Capital Launchpad).
AI slop content detection.
Better categorization for projects and creators.
Onchain activity and holdings integration.
How’s this playing out?
Some creators, like myself, have been pushed out of many leaderboards after this change.
This might be because they adjusted the type of engagement to focus on value rather than general yapping.
At the same time, I found it interesting that I've been seeing fewer AI slops in replies, especially after posting some content that received decent engagement overall. This is definitely something I was waiting for because everyone is tired of it.
I also noticed less echo-chamber behavior around new leaderboards on my feed, meaning that those consistently posting about these projects are seeing themselves less rewarded by Kaito in terms of mindshare and are now pivoting to other types of content.
I also saw relatively new accounts getting yaps, so I think this upgrade is not penalizing them at the moment.
Other major creators view this upgrade as good news, so the Kaito team is definitely heading in the right direction.
Conclusions
I still have to assess whether the upgrade has been effective overall, as it has only been a few days since its rollout. However, judging by their approach, we can confidently say that Kaito is improving its product and working for the long term.
As a creator with over 160 Smart Followers and 900+ Yaps, I feel that this move could really encourage me to dive into Kaito Earn projects again because I’m confident in the quality of the work I put out.
My advice is to dive deep into the projects you believe are valuable (coff coff Arbitrum coff coff), find your edge, and be vocal about it in your content and replies. Reply-guying is still highly valuable for cementing your presence in the TL and improving your social metrics.
See you on the next one.
milady
Courtesy of Matt
🏰 Castle Reads
Understanding Boros, the platform built by Pendle to trade funding rates:
User Retention Analysis for Incentive Programs (A Compound Finance Case Study):
Full guide about how Boros works and how to leverage its full potential, by @mattdotfi:
📖 Recommended Reads
Thoughts on speculation, short-termism and Internet Capital Markets, by @0xkyle__:
Deep dive into the Pendle playbook for success, by @reisnertobias:
New approaches to credit risk in DeFi, by @moomsxxx:
That’s it for today’s issue, we hope you enjoyed it.
You can check out our X for new research reports and weekly gigabrain content.
See you in the next issue,
The Castle Team
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.