Arena Blog

OneCoin, Bitconnect, PlusToken, Celsius, FTX: billions gone, millions of victims. In 9 of the 15 biggest cases, the warning sign was in the offer itself, before anyone paid in: a fixed return, money for recruiting, a source of profit nobody could check. What the biggest scams had in common, how little victims got back, why the fraud of today looks different, and five questions to ask before you deposit.

If a strategy is almost always wrong, doing the opposite sounds like a winning strategy. Tested on the three weakest daily strategies on the platform and ten large coins since 2017: the flipped version beats buy and hold in 5 of 30 cases. A bad strategy rarely has a wrong signal. It usually has an arbitrary one, plus fees, and flipping keeps the fees. Two numbers tell you beforehand whether flipping can work at all.

The Smarter Web Company, a UK web agency, holds 2,830 bitcoin and is traded as a bitcoin stock. Checked against its own filings: you pay about 30 % more than the bitcoin that belongs to shareholders is worth, the bitcoin per share has fallen since April, a 12 % preferred dividend now costs more than the agency earns, and in July the company sold bitcoin at a 39 % loss to repay a loan. When the share makes sense, and when an ETF or your own coins do the same job for less.

Derive handles almost nine in ten dollars of option premium paid on blockchains, and its token DRV has risen ninefold in 2026. But on-chain options are a small slice of the market: Deribit alone trades about 14 times as much as all on-chain venues together, the liquidity costs up to twice what Derive earns in fees, and bought-back DRV goes into a treasury rather than being burned. What Derive does, who uses it, what was announced and what can be checked, and how DRV has done against bitcoin.

Measured by drawdown, the 2026 bear market was the mildest of bitcoin's big cycles: −53 % against −77 % to −93 % before. Measured in time, it was the worst: the low matched a price from five and a quarter years earlier, further back than any low since 2010. And against its own history, bitcoin was not cheap at any low since 2017. Three numbers for every bear market, and what each tells you before you call bitcoin a bargain.

Ichimoku is usually traded with 9, 26 and 52 and with the rule "only buy above the cloud". Both were tested on crypto from 2018 to October 2026. The cloud rule lowered the result on all ten of today's largest coins, and on bitcoin and ether the traditional numbers did no better than randomly drawn ones. What that means for your settings.

Hyperliquid calls itself decentralised. When markets got tight, a market was closed by vote, winning positions were force-closed and a bridge was paused. Who holds the stake behind those decisions, and what it means for traders and HYPE holders.

Solana is gaining ground where the future is supposed to be: its share of tokenized securities has more than doubled since early 2025, and BlackRock keeps 43 percent of its BUIDL fund there. But in the third quarter of 2026, 65.7 percent of the revenue of apps on Solana came from memecoin trading, and 1.2 percent from all the long-term fields together. What Solana does, where it really grows, who buys and sells SOL, and how the price has done against bitcoin.

Kaspa delivered: ten blocks per second since May 2025, smart contracts since June 2026. Yet users pay the network about 94 dollars in fees a day, less than Dogecoin, while new coins worth 71,500 dollars go to miners daily. What Kaspa does, who uses it, how its supply works, and why every upgrade so far was followed by a lag against bitcoin.

Staking ALGO pays roughly 5 percent a year. The network takes in about $142 a day in fees, around 170 times less than it pays out. The rest comes from the Algorand Foundation, committed for about 24 months from January 2025. What Algorand does, who really uses it, who holds and sells ALGO, and how the price has done against bitcoin.

A popular framework says: cut a strategy's position in half when its 90-day Sharpe drops below the backtest's 5th percentile, pause it at 1.5x the backtest drawdown. Simulated, those rules cut eight in ten healthy strategies to half size within three years and leave four in five strategies without any edge running through their first year. What to check instead.

Zcash can hide what Bitcoin and Lightning cannot: the amount. Private use grew as fast as the price last year. But per private transaction the market pays ten times what it pays for Monero, and the few who carry that price have stopped buying.