Emerging markets defied tariffs, trade wars and global turmoil to notch up stellar double-digit returns in 2025, and investors are hopeful of a repeat performance next year. More here

FINANCE: Palmer Luckey has raised $350M for Erebor, valuing the digital bank at ~$4.3B as it moves toward launch with FDIC approval, per Axios.

Venezuela collects 80% of oil sales revenue in USDT

IOG: Mithril PM Reza Baram says "we're finalizing certificates for block headers, full ledger state—the final pieces for true light clients, allowing apps such as those run on mobile, to securely prove anything about blockchain history or state. We're now in the delivery phase."

IOG: Mithril PM Reza Baram says Mithril is "unlocking new capabilities with ZK. We are building succinct proofs for efficient verification on-chain, a game-changer for interoperability, especially for the trustless bridges, such as the one being built by the Bitcoin DeFi team."

IOG: Mithril PM Reza Baram says "we're focused on full decentralization, new capabilities. We finalized a new Haskell node—the foundation for anyone to run an aggregator and to integrate Mithril signer directly into Cardano node for seamless SPO participation—boosting security."

IOG: Mithril PM Reza Baram says "this year our focus has been on ensuring Mithril keeps pace with #Cardano node, while we're making it production ready. We successfully delivered support for UTXO-HD, ensuring that any node flavor can now use Mithril for fast bootstrapping." $ADA

IOG: Mithril PM Reza Baram says Mithril "has been running smoothly on mainnet without interruption since its launch in 2023, and we have fantastic participation with around 240 SPOs representing about 20% of the total active stake." #Cardano $ADA

Layer 2 Tokens Are Outperforming But Can It Last?

IOG: Mithril PM Reza Baram says "Mithril enhances Cardano by allowing fast trustless verification of blockchain data: SPOs sign the data, the aggregator collects signatures and creates a certificate—used by clients to verify data in a trustless way without a centralized entity."