Outpoll Weekly Recap: Crypto (January 12 – 18, 2026)

4 days ago7 min read

The crypto ecosystem this week felt like a DAO governance vote in action—decentralized, occasionally chaotic, but ultimately trending toward a clearer consensus. The headline act was Ethereum’s long-anticipated ‘Prague’ upgrade finally locking in a mainnet deployment date for late Q1, sending ETH prediction market odds for a post-upgrade price above $5,000 soaring to 68% on Outpoll.It’s more than just a tech update; it’s a reaffirmation of the network’s core ethos, enhancing scalability and reducing fees in a way that directly empowers the DeFi and NFT communities building on it. We saw this ripple out immediately, with blue-chip DeFi governance tokens like UNI and AAVE seeing a 15-20% weekly lift as traders bet on renewed protocol activity.Meanwhile, Bitcoin played its familiar role as the bedrock, quietly holding above $85,000 despite some macro jitters, with prediction markets still giving BTC a 55% chance of hitting $100k before the halving event—a testament to its narrative resilience. The altcoin scene was its usual vibrant self, with a notable surge in AI-agent-related tokens as a major protocol unveiled a marketplace for autonomous, token-gated AI workers, sparking a fascinating debate on whether the future of work is a smart contract.On the regulatory front, whispers of a more nuanced, non-custodial DeFi framework emerging from the EU had policy prediction markets shifting to ‘likely,’ a potential game-changer that could finally provide the clarity builders have craved. All told, it was a week where foundational progress on Ethereum set the tone, proving once again that in crypto, the most powerful moves aren’t always the loudest, but the ones that strengthen the infrastructure for everything to come.

#Weekly recap