Gateway to Learning

Gate Research: Between 2025 and 2026, PayFi is evolving from a crypto payment tool into a next-generation payment and financial engine, with stablecoins achieving scale in high-frequency and cross-border payments and demonstrating clear efficiency and cost advantages over traditional systems. As Web2 and Web3 continue to converge, institutions such as Visa, PayPal, and emerging neobanks are becoming key gateways to mainstream adoption, while the combination of stablecoins, real-world assets (RWA), and AI is shaping PayFi’s foundational architecture by enabling automated, always-on settlement, asset mobility, and risk management. Looking ahead to 2026, regulatory clarity, scalable asset tokenization, and the maturity of AI-driven financial systems will be the primary determinants of PayFi’s competitive landscape and long-term barriers.

Gate Research: Against a backdrop in which the industry has broadly scaled back the supply of ETF leveraged tokens and accelerated the removal of complex structured products, Gate has continued to advance the scaled provision of ETF leveraged tokens through transparent mechanisms and a unified fee framework, becoming one of the few platforms able to offer this category of trading on a stable, long-term basis. By clearly disclosing rebalancing schedules and trigger ranges, a unified daily management fee of 0.1%, and the costs covered by this fee, including derivatives hedging, funding rates, and trading expenses, Gate makes the core rules and cost sources of highly structured leveraged tokens explicit, thereby lowering both the barrier to use and the cost of understanding. On this basis, Gate formed meaningful ETF scale effects in 2025, covering 244 products, approximately 200k trading users, and average daily trading volumes at the scale of several hundred million dollars, while establishing clear structural

Gate Research Weekly Report: BTC broke below $73,000 as deleveraging continued, with total liquidations reaching $2.56 billion over recent days; ETH pulled back to the key $2,000 support level, while a deeply negative premium index signals weakening institutional demand. Stablecoin market capitalization edged lower, and Ethereum gas fees remained subdued. Amid a structurally weak market, select assets moved counter-trend, including the BNB Chain Chinese meme coin “我踏马来了,” WMTX driven by the DePIN narrative, and SYN supported by adoption within the Filecoin ecosystem. On the event front, Ripple Prime integrated Hyperliquid, introducing a prime-brokerage model to on-chain derivatives, while Bitnomial launched regulated XTZ futures. On-chain data show a renewed convergence between profitable and unprofitable BTC supply, a historical “bottom signal” that may point BTC toward the $60,000 range, with key support at the 2021 peak near $69,000. Vitalik Buterin reassessed the L2 roadmap, emphasizing differentiated val