January 2026 SQUID Drop
🦑 January is here! 🪂
Once per month, the monstrous and magickal Leviathan floats through town, dropping $SQUID on everybody who helps us build the world's preeminent decentralized news organization.
2025 in the Books
What a difference a year makes! Many of the categories below barely existed at the outset of the year, yet have evolved into critical infrastructure. Many updates about December and the full year below.
This newsletter provides a full update on Leviathan’s monthly accomplishments broken down into the following categories being submitted for a monthly DAO vote:
- News: Posting, editing and approving headlines via Telegram or web
- Dev: Any development relating to our Telegram bots or the website
- Moderation: Moderating, upvoting, and/or flagging website comments, responses, discussions
- Auction: Participating in an auction.
- DAO: Voting on Snapshot.
- Social: News comments and responses
- Liquidity: Bootstrap liquidity on mainnet
Written Interviews: - Resupply: Interview with designer Ionut Nechifor earned 7500 $RSUP
- Gemach: Assune from Gemach interviewed via SQUID Interview Pass
And livestreams! - Vibe Building with johnnyonline: We build a fixed-rate lending market (Flex) live in the open.
- Llama Party: A Friday morning open invite livestream focused on Curve and the broader DeFi ecosystem
This newsletter provides an update on each category, so you may cast a fully informed vote. We are hosting a public discussion on the website before the vote opens, so you may ask questions.
1. News
For those enough old enough to remember, 2025 was a wild year
As for December, 27 contributors posted 637 approved articles throughout the month.
The top ten stories are as follows:
At the top of the news funnel, congrats to DanicJade who took the top of all news leaderboards.
The news team has big plans for 2026. The Squid Cave will become a major nexus of activity for discussing and implementing these plans, so please join!
2. Dev
What a difference a year makes… how the website looked last year…
Versus this year…
The month of December we shipped analytics features related to our incipient ad network.
Join the Squid Cave to see numbers each day:
Or pull per articles numbers directly via Telegram
And the API
Some notes on how we fleshed out this data for our full-featured ads API:
On full display in our partnership announcement with SerenDB:
Otherwise, major renovations of plumbing for SEO and tagging continue — you may have already seen an improvement in the automated tags being generated! Some ambitions to better utilize the 𝕏 API fell short due to rate limits, so we turn our attention to Discord improvements this upcoming month instead.
Bug Bounties:
- SecondSetMaze spearheaded a major overhaul of tagging
sduring the month of December when most people were enjoying egg nog and gingersnaps!
3. Moderation
Moderation at the beginning of 2025 was little more than a “purple alien icon” on our Telegram feed that followers may have pressed at random but weren’t sure why. We close the year with a sophisticated upvote and downvote system that directly powers the feed and commenting, and plans to tie directly into $SQUID holdings and earnings.
Moderation combines two activities:
- Antispam efforts in the SQUID Cave social channel
- Voting on articles and comments (including flagging)
Thanks especially to Danicjade for keeping the community tidy this month!
4. Auction
In many ways, 2025 was our trial run for auctions (held using SQUID on Fraxtal), as we prepared for the real deal to be featured in 2026. Mainnet auctions went live last month, with .023023 ETH collected thus far on 3 successful auctions.
We encourage everybody to spread awareness of the SQUID Pass our weekly ticket to own prominent ad inventory across the website, 𝕏, Telegram, and QR codes on any livestreams.
Prior winners of the SQUID Pass can be seen on the auction page and the news archives. Congrats to winners in the prior month:
A nice AIOZ Network write up by decrypt tells us why we need decentralization now and forever
— cogsystormlight
This Thursday December 18th, RAAC is officially launching its gold-backed stablecoin $pmUSD!
The launch is via a bond sale on Apebond, where $1M pmUSD will be available with a reward going from 2 to 5%!
This means: for every $1 USDT / USDC you deposit, you receive up to $1.05 pmUSD after the locking period. On top of that, this sale also marks the start of the RAAC points program, and participating in this sale will grant the biggest point multiplier of the program!
Finally, this sale is private for the RAAC Bots holder, the Llamas and the ApeBond premium users!
Follow RAAC on X for additional details!
—DAdvisoor
If you’d like to suggest your own auctions to run via Leviathan, click the “Auction Recommendations” link on the auctions section of the website.
5. DAO
The DAO didn’t exist at the start of 2025, but now we have regular participants each month.
Thank you to the 19 unique voters on last month’s SQUID Drop! The active participation of the DAO is a joy, and shows that Leviathan lives its DeFi values.
6. Social
Commenting did not even exist at the start of 2025, but now Leviathan News has become the online sanctuary for reply guys:
December saw a total of 1106 comments, down a tick from last month’s record 1293. Congrats to Reply Guy champ Spencer420 for the top tier punditry.
7. Liquidity
SQUID remains sourced and most active on Fraxtal, but we’ve begun the process of bridging to mainnet and setting up infrastructure.
We remain underperformers in this category, having not yet moved liquidity rewards to mainnet, but we will make announcements in the news channel when we are finally successful here!
8. Written Interview: Resupply
Feel good using Resupply? That’s by design
— SecondSetMaze
It was a thrill to interview product designer & illustrator Ionut Nechifor who created the logos, brand assets, website elements, and UI/UX design for Resupply. The piece won 2nd place in Resupply’s December creator contest earning 7,500 RSUP - delivered directly to the Leviathan multisig.
9. Written Interview: Gemach
Note submitted by Defi Advisoor:
Hello everyone!
After a while traveling, mostly for crypto content for conferences btw, including some for Leviathan News (Soon TM), I’m back and excited to do my online content again - and in December I was honored to do this written interview with Assune from Gemach DAO - btw, after convincing him to bid for it as a SQUID Interview Pass on our auctions!
I hope you’ve enjoyed the article and if you haven’t feel free to check it out and share your feedback. I also invite other contributors to set up their own proposals for auctions with content they feel like creating, imo a genre very much worth exploring. Hope to share a lot of content everyone would enjoy next month, thanks folks!
The article - “Gemach: Where the Playing Field Finally Levels”
Livestreams
Leviathan hosted two livestream series this month.
10. Vibe Building with JohnnyOnline
A new DeFi Primitive emerges, try it at https://flexmeow.com/
Proposal: SQUID Allocation for Vibe Building
We propose a SQUID allocation to support and scale the Vibe Building livestream series - where we build a fixed-rate lending market (Flex) live in the open.
Allocation:
- 10% - johnnyonline
- 90% — 2/3 multisig (johnnyonline / CurveCap / Leviathan multisig) to accumulate SQUID until Flex launch, then used to incentivize lending
Any unused funds will be returned to the DAO.
11. Llama Party
Llama Parties are open conversations about headlines from the past week. Anybody is welcome to join! At the start of the stream we drop the link, and send out SQUID to everybody brave enough to join.
12/5: Assune, Johnny
12/12: None
12/19: MD
12/26: Spencer420, Assune, JoeWait
The SQUID Drop
Put it all together, and the January SQUID Drop (covering December) has been tallied. The full leaderboard is presented in detail here for all 91 proposed recipients across all 10 categories.
To better help you prepare your vote, SecondSetMaze created a handy worksheet. Try copying the spreadsheet and updating the default even weighting in column D. The final tallies on the full breakdown tab update automatically.
Once the final DAO vote is completed, we’ll record the final weighting and update the master sheet, which you may browse for historical reference.
The official discussion link for this budget is hosted on our website. Chat there, not just to earn points for the upcoming SQUID Drop, but because it will make you a better informed voter!
Asks
Ask not what SQUID can do for you… ask what you can do for SQUID!
- Try out Flex Protocol and report any bugs
- Join mainnet auctions and let us know how they are working for you
- Use our new API endpoints to review numbers and buy some sponsored posts!
Further Info:
Related reading for curious squiddos: