Now the valuations are really too cheap to touch, which is completely different from before. In the past, you could really find treasures, but now if you bend down, all you find is crap. Those independent developers with a mental obsession for purity and technical perfection, who didn't want to take VC money and only wanted to build communities, are no longer around. Now, the projects that want to sell to you cheaply are very likely truly worthless.

The zama auction is about to start, and the pre-market valuation is estimated to be around 600 million to 700 million USD. The probability of opening above 600 million USD after the market opens is about 50%. From the trend of the market and implied probabilities, market expectations are weakening. If it goes any lower, I think it will be cheap enough. Zama is logically different from traditional privacy projects. If we compare it to zec and torn, zec can be understood as a Layer 1 with privacy features, while torn is a privacy transfer tool. The most direct difference with zama is that it adds "privacy capabilities" to existing applications on public chains while retaining composability, such as transfer, balance, settlement conditions, strategy parameters, etc., allowing for selective privacy (of course, there are certain capability boundaries here). It also does not require transferring to a new chain for a single privacy transaction; its long-term narrative is about upgrading the underlying capabilities of the entire public chain system.

Active Loans are one of the best indicators to measure a lending protocol, rather than TVL. At this level, Aave is still far ahead, accounting for over 60% of the entire network. The upcoming lending protocol WLFI Markets is about to launch, and it will be very interesting to observe whether it can pose a challenge to Aave in terms of scale. If it cannot change the existing lending market landscape, it will further reinforce Aave's competitive moat. I believe that WLFI Markets still has an advantage in the institutional demand market. Aave clearly pointed out the current market situation when it set its 2026 strategic roadmap, stating that the existing capital on DeFi chains is already very fixed and saturated. Therefore, Aave's growth will also rely on RWA/institutional demand, and in this area, WLFI Markets seems to have certain channel advantages. It depends on how the project team thinks; competing for the on-chain market may not be a wise choice.