These Mistakes Could Cost You MILLIONS!

It’s tempting to think that, with the bear market behind us and the sunlit uplands of Valhalla ahead, we’re all now playing on easy mode. The winter is over - time to make hay while the sun shines.

That may be true, but making hay isn’t as easy as it might sound. Or at least, making enough hay to justify all the hard work that’s gone into surviving the winter. In fact, the tricky phase of this cycle is about to begin.

It all comes down to that well-worn aphorism: making money is easy; keeping it is the hard part. Remember: crypto is you vs everyone else. Those who win will be the ones who emerge with their gains (and sanity) intact at the expense of those who mess up and fumble the bag. There are traps galore out there waiting to snare the unwary.

So, today’s video is going to take you through the ten biggest mistakes you can make in crypto. Some may be familiar, others may be things that have been sneakily holding you back for years. Brought to you by people who’ve made all of them before and want to stop you doing the same.

You can watch that video here.

📈 Crypto Market Forecast 📈

This week’s forecast can be summarized in one word: liquidity. It looks like the crypto market is about to get a much-needed shot of inflows from a massive crypto factor and a massive macro factor. The crypto factor is FTX’s repayments to creditors, with the repayment period beginning on Friday, and expected to be completed within 60 days of that date, so by March 4th, 2025.  

As mentioned in previous newsletters, many FTX creditors are reportedly planning on investing their repayments into crypto, particularly into SOL and altcoins in Solana’s ecosystem. To put things into perspective, creditors will reportedly receive over 16 billion dollars in cold hard cash. If even just a fraction of this capital is reinvested into crypto, it will have a profound effect on prices.

This ties into the macro factor that’s going to inject liquidity into the crypto market, and that’s the good old debt ceiling. The TLDR is that US politicians need to agree to raise the debt ceiling ASAP, or else the Treasury Department will need to start taking ‘extraordinary measures’, such as not paying certain obligations to government employees in the coming weeks.

This is positive for liquidity, because if the debt ceiling isn’t raised, this means the Treasury Department can’t sell debt to fund its operations. This means that it would need to fund its operations by spending money from the Treasury General Account or TGA, which can be simply thought of as the US government’s bank account. It has around 800 billion dollars to spend.

If this sounds familiar, that’s because the US government was in the exact same position almost exactly two years ago. If you check the crypto charts from back then, you’ll notice that this was bullish, particularly for Bitcoin. The subsequent banking crisis in March 2023 was even more bullish, and it’s possible that history could repeat again on that front as well.

This time around it could be banking and solvency issues in places like the EU that are triggered by the tariffs being planned by incoming US president Donald Trump. This would force foreign central banks to stimulate. What’s interesting is that if the Fed refuses to follow suit, the US dollar could rise, creating a scenario where foreign capital floods into US assets and crypto.

Believe it or not, but the first country to crack could actually be China, and this could happen even before Trump takes office. Many macro firms like Steno Research noticed a small detail in a recent announcement from Chinese authorities. In short, they used a very specific term that had not been used since the 2008 financial crisis, foreshadowing enormous fiscal stimulus.

Liquidity-focused macro analysts like Michael Howell noticed this too, and have speculated that China intends to negotiate a deal with the incoming Trump administration wherein the Chinese will stimulate massively, but only if the Americans agree to devalue the dollar so that the USD doesn’t crush the yuan. If a deal like this does happen, it would result in even more stimulus.

This brings us back to the crypto side of the equation. It’s easy to forget that liquidity and stimulus alone aren’t enough to cause crypto to pump. Accessibility is another key component, and this is where crypto regulations come into play. Some crypto analysts like Travis Kling believe that Trump will begin signing pro-crypto executive orders the moment he takes office.

Others believe that major central banks will front-run the US’s potential plans for a strategic Bitcoin reserve by creating their own before Trump gets into office. That’s certainly possible, but if we’re talking about changes to crypto market structure, the most significant in this context would be other jurisdictions making it easier to access crypto so that they get a slice of the pie.

Not surprisingly, this has already been happening for quite some time in places like Dubai and Hong Kong. What is surprising is that Europe is reportedly starting to pivot in the same direction, with crypto trading soon to be accessible via European banks, according to some reports. As bullish as this will be for majors like BTC and ETH, it will be even more bullish for altcoins.

🤖 AI Agent Frameworks 🤖

Another week, another segment in our newsletter covering the latest developments happening in the AI agent space. Don’t worry though, we haven’t pivoted to become an AI agent newsletter… yet.

Frankly, it’s impossible not to cover AI agents in crypto, especially when it seems like it could be the single most defining narrative of this cycle – similar to what DeFi was for the 2020 cycle. That may seem like a bold statement, but there’s merit to it.

We believe the AI agent meta is more than just viral memetic attention or snake oil promises. In fact, we’re beginning to see AI agent developers with web2 backgrounds (including a dev from Anthropic) come into the web3 space.

If you ask us, this influx of devs with ‘serious’ backgrounds will only accelerate as the months progress. On that note, the first sign of this happening is the rising focus on AI agent frameworks – the tech/code templates used to create AI agents.

Both new and existing AI agent projects, in their social media interactions and whitepapers, are increasingly emphasising the frameworks being used to power them. For instance, both Zerebro and ai16z recently announced they were starting to focus on creating infra layers that make it easier for other projects to launch using their framework.

In the case of ai16z, the project has begun to explore the possibility of creating an L1 for AI agent swarms (something we covered last week) and a pump.fun-style AI agent launchpad similar to Virtuals. The primary purpose of these possible developments is to supposedly increase the use of ai16z’s ELIZA framework while creating a positive tokenomics flywheel that drives value to the $ai16z token.

Zerebro’s announcement also focuses on something similar. The team announced they were launching Zentients – an AI agent launchpad (again similar to Virtuals) that focuses on launching agents through its ZerePy framework with $ZEREBRO as the token fuelling interactions on the platform.

On the face of it, it seems like everyone’s just trying to imitate Virtuals. After all, the main reason Virtuals is presumed to be the market leader in this niche is the positive price action seen by $VIRTUAL - a large part of which is driven by the project’s clever tokenomics model.

In reality, if you take a peek at the tech front, this gap between Virtuals and projects like Zerebro or ai16z isn’t as wide as what the price action reflects. For instance, data from an AI agent framework recommendation application built by Johnson Lai shows that 52% of the developers looking to create AI agents prefer using a full-code framework that offers custom-build opportunities, rather than no-code platforms like Virtuals and its GAME framework. There are also signs of this preference on Github – ai16z’s ELIZA framework surpassed Google’s Gemini to become the number-one trending repository globally in December.

By replicating Virtuals’ tokenomics model, rival projects are attempting to close this perceived gap between them and Virtuals. This now changes the battle to one that focuses on framework adoption and AI agent quality. On that note, we’ve already begun to see crypto researchers (including Messari) analyse the pros and cons of the different frameworks dominating mindshare. The four AI agent frameworks frequently covered during these analyses are Virtual’s GAME, ai16z’s ELIZA, Arc’s Rig, and Zerebro’s ZerePy.   

In many ways, it reminds us of the heated debates around consensus mechanisms and chain architecture we saw during the layer 1 infra battles of the 2017 (also arguably 2020) cycle. Notably, the subjects of focus in the discussion surrounding AI agent frameworks revolve around two topics – customizability and developer dependence.

In regards to customizability, the debate is about the benefits of using one-click deploy platforms like Virtuals and Zentients, which offer limited customisation, vs using full-code frameworks like ai16z’s ELIZA and Arc’s Rig which offer greater customisation for developers. In essence, is it better to bet on an AI agent ecosystem that lets one deploy many agents quickly (Virtuals) or is it better to bet on an AI agent ecosystem that takes longer to launch agents but offers more freedom to design novel use cases? For instance, ELIZA plug-ins even allow for the creation of AI agents with hardware compatibility, including sex toys.

This brings us to the second point of discussion – developer dependence. Frameworks like ELIZA are open source, which means that anyone can contribute to the codebase and battle-test it. AI agent developers do not need to depend on the framework’s original contributors to create additional functionality or improvements. However, Virtual’s GAME framework is closed source, which means that anyone building using GAME is limited by the team’s capacity to ship updates. As it stands now, there seems to be an increasing preference for open source over closed source frameworks. There are also rumours that Virtuals may soon open-source its GAME framework.

Ultimately, it’s become clear there’s an increasing focus on tech and adoption similar to what we saw unfold during the aforementioned layer 1 infra battles of previous cycles. Investors must now retire from speculative memecoin trading and put their analytical caps back on. Tech is hot again.

🔥 Hot Deal of The Week 🔥

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We decided to reach out to the Toobit team to see if we could get a great deal for Coin Bureau users. And good news - we did!

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🔮 Video Pipeline 🔮

* Bitcoin Risks 2025: What could stop this bull market in its tracks?
* Global Investor Survey: Key insights revealed!
* Pudgy Penguins: The rise, fall, and resurgence!
* Electric Capital Report: Highlighting  the trends in blockchain developer activity…
* AI Agents: The evolution of AI Agents and how they reshare the future of AI?
 
🏆 What's New at CoinBureau.com This Week? 🏆

* Secure Your Crypto with the Top Self-Custody Wallets In 2025
* Copy Trading Explained
* BitMart Review 2025: Complete Exchange Overview
* XION Review 2025: Web3 Accessibility with Chain Abstraction
* What Are AI Agents? Redefining Automation with Blockchain Technology

📖 Quote of the Week 📖

The most important thing that you need to keep in mind for this bull market is not to get greedy. Remember, portfolio screenshots aren’t currency that you can use in the real world. If you have hit your targets for this year, realise some of that profit. 

"Wealth is like seawater; the more we drink, the thirstier we become..." - Arthur Schopenhauer

Team Coin Bureau

Disclosure: Authors may own cryptoassets named in this newsletter. These are unqualified opinions, and a Coin Bureau newsletter, is meant for informational purposes only. It is not meant to serve as investment advice. Please consult with your investment, tax, or legal advisor.