Linera Launches Babbage Testnet

On December 18, cryptocurrency analyst @alicharts shared a market note, noting Bitcoin is breaking out of a flag consolidation pattern and targeting $70,000.

**December 18: U.S. November CPI is set to be released tonight.** Data collection for this inflation print is significantly shortened and highly concentrated due to the prior government shutdown and holiday factors, making it hard to fully reflect underlying inflation trends. The market expects year-over-year November CPI to come in around 3.1% and core CPI around 3.0%. However, multiple institutions have flagged data reliability risks—tariff factors still pose potential upward pressure on commodity prices, so cautious interpretation is advised. **Also tonight, the Bank of England (BoE) is highly likely to deliver a 25bps rate cut, lowering its benchmark rate to 3.75%.** Recent rapid inflation declines, weakening economic activity, and softening employment conditions have sharply increased the odds of Governor Bailey shifting to a dovish stance. The market has priced in over 90% probability of this cut, but consensus is growing that the UK’s rate-cut cycle is nearing its end,

December 18th The U.S. Department of Labor will release three key economic indicators at 21:30 Beijing time: - November non-seasonally adjusted CPI year-over-year rate (forecast: 3.1%) - Initial jobless claims for the week ending December 13th (in thousands) - November non-seasonally adjusted core CPI year-over-year rate Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said in a December 11th speech that the labor market is gradually cooling, while inflation remains somewhat elevated with upside risks. He added labor demand has slowed significantly, vitality has weakened, and the sector shows noticeable softness. Goldman Sachs analyst Kay Haigh noted the Fed has reached the end of its "insurance rate cuts." "Next, labor market data must weaken further to justify additional recent easing policies," she stated.

On December 18, BitcoinForCorporations released a report noting that if the MSCI Capital International Index excludes cryptocurrency treasury companies, those firms could be forced to sell up to $15 billion in crypto assets. The group opposing MSCI’s proposal—BitcoinForCorporations—based its prediction on a preliminary verified list of 39 companies with a combined market capitalization of $113 billion, forecasting a potential outflow of $10 billion to $15 billion. Additionally, JPMorgan analysis finds that Michael Saylor’s MicroStrategy (which accounts for 74.5% of the total market cap of affected firms) could face a $2.8 billion outflow if removed from the MSCI index. Analysts estimate the total potential outflow across all affected companies could reach $11.6 billion. Such a large outflow would add significant selling pressure to the crypto market, which has trended downward for nearly three months. As of press time, BitcoinForCorporations’ petition has collected 1,268 signa

Recently, on December 18th, social tokenization platform Trends.Fun launched a tweet campaign on X (formerly Twitter): **summarize your 2025-Solana story in two words**. Solana’s official X account replied with “Capital Markets” — **signaling 2025 will be the year Solana breaks into traditional finance**. Trends.Fun founder Toly used the Chinese term for “cooking” (translated as “Cooking”); in Web3 slang, “Cook” refers to building a product or operating a token. Multicoin partner Kyle Samani’s keyword was “Outperforming Cefi” (outperforming centralized finance). The campaign is still ongoing: all participants are eligible to enter a raffle for a $12,000 SOLARLAMA token prize pool.

On December 18, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin stated that the Ethereum blockchain needs to better communicate its features to users to achieve true "trustlessness"—a common challenge for all blockchain protocols. Trustlessness means the protocol doesn’t require developer oversight; instead, it enforces rules automatically via code. But if the protocol is so complex that only a handful of people can participate in its operation, others will still end up trusting that group in practice. Ethereum already has trustless features: transactions and smart contracts run on open-source code and a decentralized validator network. However, in a Wednesday tweetstorm, Buterin noted the network still needs to boost users’ understanding. "One important but underrated form of trustlessness is growing the number of people who truly understand the entire protocol from top to bottom. Ethereum needs to do better here by simplifying the protocol." When asked about the feasibility of this v