The NFT Royalty Debate Has Reached a Quiet Standoff, and Creators Are Adapting

About TheWeal

TheWeal is an independent cryptocurrency publication that tracks live prices, market data and sentiment across the digital-asset market, and publishes original analysis and educational content for people who want to understand crypto rather than just trade it. We combine server-rendered live data with human-written editorial: every coin page serves real-time prices, market capitalisation, volume, a technical analysis gauge and a deterministic bear-base-bull price scenario, while our articles section covers the news and ideas that move markets.

We are funded entirely by display advertising and do not accept payment from crypto projects, exchanges or issuers in exchange for rankings, coverage or editorial positioning. No token has ever paid to appear on a TheWeal list. No company has ever paid to improve its standing in our analysis. Our editorial guidelines set out what that means in practice.

Our data comes entirely from free, keyless sources: CoinGecko for prices and market-cap data, CoinPaprika as a fallback, Binance for historical price charts, and Alternative.me for the Crypto Fear & Greed Index. Where a data point is unavailable, we leave the field blank rather than substitute a placeholder. This is a deliberate choice: it is more useful to know that a figure is missing than to see a number that might be wrong.

TheWeal is built for three audiences. First, people who are new to crypto and want to understand what they are reading before they make any decision. Second, people who follow markets closely and want reliable real-time data with no noise or hype. Third, people who want to think critically about crypto, including its risks and its limits, not just its upside. We write for all three.

What We Cover

Our coverage spans ten editorial categories, each with its own feed of original articles, news analysis and market commentary.

Bitcoin

The bitcoin category covers the original cryptocurrency in depth: the mechanics of proof-of-work mining, the halving cycle, custody options, the on-chain metrics that matter and the regulatory and macro forces that affect its price. We explain what changes with each halving and what does not, why hash rate is a better measure of network health than price, and how to verify a bitcoin transaction yourself without trusting a third party.

Ethereum

The ethereum category covers the largest smart-contract platform: the transition from proof of work to proof of stake in the September 2022 Merge, what gas fees tell you about network demand, layer-2 scaling networks, staking mechanics, and the governance processes that shape protocol upgrades. We cover both the technical foundations and the economic dynamics of the world's second-largest blockchain.

Altcoins

The altcoins category covers every significant cryptocurrency that is neither bitcoin nor Ethereum. That includes layer-1 competitors such as Solana, Avalanche and Cardano; utility tokens; and emerging networks. We examine competing technical claims and developer-activity numbers rather than price alone, and we cover both why alternative chains have attracted capital and where their trade-offs are real.

DeFi

The DeFi category covers decentralised finance protocols: lending platforms such as Aave, decentralised exchanges such as Uniswap, stablecoin issuance systems, yield farming and the total-value-locked metric that attempts to measure the scale of activity. We explain how automated market makers work, what impermanent loss actually costs, and what the risks are for users of on-chain financial protocols.

NFTs

The NFT category covers non-fungible tokens: what they are on-chain, what ownership actually means, the economics of digital scarcity, where the market has been and where it is heading. We write about NFTs without the hype of 2021 and without the cynicism of 2023: ownership of a unique digital token is a genuine technical innovation with genuine limitations, and we cover both.

Regulation

The regulation category covers how governments, central banks and financial regulators around the world are approaching cryptocurrency. That includes securities law, stablecoin legislation, exchange licensing, anti-money-laundering requirements and how regulatory developments in the US, EU, UK and Asia affect the broader market. Our Editor-in-Chief, James Okafor, has particular focus on African regulatory developments and Bitcoin's role as a monetary tool in emerging economies.

Exchanges

The exchanges category examines the infrastructure layer of crypto: how centralised exchanges hold user funds, what proof of reserves does and does not prove, how decentralised exchanges differ structurally, and what exchange failures have revealed about the risks of custodial platforms. We do not rank exchanges for commission; we analyse their structures and their disclosures.

Memecoins

The memecoins category covers the segment of the crypto market driven primarily by community, speculation and social dynamics rather than technical utility. We cover why memecoins keep returning in each market cycle, how rug pulls and scams work mechanically, and what distinguishes a memecoin with lasting community interest from a pump-and-dump scheme. We do not recommend memecoins; we explain how to read them.

Stablecoins

The stablecoins category covers the pegged assets that now carry a large fraction of on-chain transaction volume. We explain the three main types, fiat-backed, crypto-backed and algorithmic, and their different risk profiles. We cover what happens when a peg breaks, the mechanics of the USDC bank-run episode, and the legislative frameworks emerging in the US and EU to govern stablecoin issuance.

Analysis

The analysis category is where our editorial team publishes longer-form market commentary, data-driven pieces and opinion. That includes how to interpret the Fear & Greed Index, what volatility actually measures and why it is not the same as risk, how to read on-chain data without being misled, and how TheWeal's own prediction model works. This is where we step back from the daily price movement and try to put it in context.

How Our Predictions Work

Every coin page on TheWeal includes a price-scenario module that shows three labelled outcomes: bear, base and bull. These are not analyst price targets, they are not community polls, and they are not machine-learning forecasts. They are deterministic calculations produced by a model we have documented in full at theweal.com/methodology/.

Bear, base and bull

The bear scenario models a continuation of the most significant recent downtrend, widened by a multiple of the coin's historical volatility. The base scenario projects the current trend forward at the most probable continuation rate given recent momentum. The bull scenario models a continuation of the most significant recent uptrend, also widened by a volatility multiple. All three scenarios apply the same inputs and the same logic; they differ in the directional assumption they start from.

The eight horizons

Each scenario is calculated across eight time horizons: 24 hours, 7 days, 30 days, 90 days, 1 year, 2027, 2028 and 2030. Shorter horizons use tighter volatility multipliers because uncertainty is lower over a shorter window. Longer horizons use wider multipliers because small errors in the starting assumptions compound. This is why the gap between bear and bull widens dramatically as the horizon extends: the model is being honest about how much it does not know about the future.

What the model does not do

The model does not incorporate news, regulation, technology roadmaps, macroeconomic forecasts, management quality, competitive dynamics or any qualitative factor. It uses only what the price data shows. This is a deliberate choice: it makes the model transparent and reproducible, but it also means you should not treat any scenario as a complete picture of what might happen to a coin. A regulatory ban, a protocol hack, or a macro credit event can move any coin far outside any model's scenario range. Read our guide to reading a prediction before acting on any figure.

Every prediction surface on TheWeal carries this notice: "Model-based scenarios. Not financial advice." That is not legal boilerplate; it is a description of exactly what the numbers are. The methodology page at theweal.com/methodology/ gives the full technical specification, including the exact inputs, the formula for each scenario and the volatility-multiplier table by horizon.

Bitcoin

Bitcoin is the first and largest cryptocurrency, launched in January 2009 by a pseudonymous creator or group known as Satoshi Nakamoto. It operates on a public blockchain maintained by tens of thousands of independent nodes worldwide, with no company, central bank or single operator in control. The protocol enforces a fixed maximum supply of 21 million coins, a cap written into the code and enforced by every participating node. This supply constraint is the core of Bitcoin's value proposition as a store of value: unlike fiat currencies, more cannot be created on demand.

New bitcoins enter circulation as rewards to miners, who compete to process transactions and add new blocks to the chain by solving a cryptographic puzzle. That reward is cut in half roughly every four years in an event called the halving. Each halving slows the rate at which new bitcoin enters circulation, following a predictable schedule that will see the last bitcoin mined around 2140. The current block reward, after the fourth halving in 2024, is 3.125 BTC per block.

Bitcoin's main use cases are as a store of value and as a medium of exchange for large settlements. For small everyday payments, its block space is limited and fees can rise sharply when the network is busy, pushing most retail activity to second-layer networks such as the Lightning Network. The live Bitcoin price, market cap and 24-hour volume on our Bitcoin page come from CoinGecko (CoinPaprika fallback) and the chart is built from Binance daily closes. Our forward scenarios for Bitcoin are in our bitcoin section.

Ethereum

Ethereum is the largest smart-contract platform in the world and the second-biggest cryptocurrency by market capitalisation. Launched in 2015 by Vitalik Buterin and a team of co-founders, it extended the blockchain idea from simple value transfer to programmable applications: developers deploy self-executing code, called smart contracts, that power decentralised finance, stablecoins, NFTs and much of the broader crypto economy. Ethereum's native asset, ether (ETH), is used to pay the transaction fees called gas and to secure the network through staking.

In September 2022, Ethereum completed the Merge, transitioning from proof-of-work mining to proof-of-stake validation. This reduced the network's energy consumption by more than 99%. Under proof of stake, validators lock up ETH as collateral to earn the right to propose and attest to blocks, earning rewards in return. A portion of every transaction fee is burned, which means ETH can be net deflationary when the network is sufficiently busy. Unlike Bitcoin, ETH has no fixed maximum supply; the balance between new issuance to validators and fee burning determines whether supply grows or shrinks in any period.

Ethereum's main structural challenge is congestion: when demand is high, gas fees rise, pricing out smaller transactions and pushing activity onto layer-2 networks such as Arbitrum, Optimism and Base. These rollups process transactions off the main Ethereum chain and post compressed proofs back to it, reducing fees while inheriting Ethereum's security. Visit our Ethereum page for live data, and read our ethereum coverage for analysis of how these dynamics play out in practice.

Altcoins and DeFi

Every cryptocurrency other than Bitcoin is typically classified as an altcoin, though the term covers a huge range. Layer-1 networks such as Solana, Avalanche, Cardano, Polkadot and Cosmos are purpose-built blockchains competing with Ethereum for developer activity and user adoption. Layer-2 networks such as Arbitrum and Optimism are built on top of Ethereum to extend its capacity. Utility tokens give holders rights within specific protocols. Governance tokens confer voting power over protocol parameters. Each of these categories has different risk profiles and different drivers of value.

Decentralised finance, or DeFi, is the set of financial applications built on public blockchains. Lending and borrowing protocols such as Aave allow users to earn interest on deposits or borrow against collateral, with rates set algorithmically by supply and demand. Decentralised exchanges such as Uniswap use automated market-maker formulas instead of traditional order books, allowing anyone to trade tokens without a counterparty. Yield farming strategies move capital between these protocols to chase the highest available returns. Total value locked (TVL) is the most commonly cited measure of DeFi activity, though it has well-known limitations as a metric.

You can browse all covered coins, including altcoins and DeFi assets, at theweal.com/coins/. Our altcoins and DeFi categories carry the corresponding editorial coverage, and our DeFi guide explains the mechanics in plain language.

Stablecoins and Regulation

Stablecoins are cryptocurrencies designed to maintain a fixed value against a reference asset, most commonly the US dollar. They now carry a significant fraction of all on-chain transaction volume and are central to how DeFi protocols function. The three main types each maintain their peg through a different mechanism. Fiat-backed stablecoins such as USDT (Tether) and USDC hold cash and cash-equivalent assets in reserve and redeem tokens at par. Crypto-backed stablecoins such as DAI use over-collateralisation with on-chain assets to maintain their peg. Algorithmic stablecoins attempt to hold their peg through supply-expansion and contraction mechanisms without full backing, a design that has failed catastrophically in several prominent cases, including TerraUSD in 2022.

A peg is a target, not a guarantee. Every type of stablecoin carries risk: fiat-backed stablecoins are exposed to the creditworthiness of their issuers and custodians; crypto-backed stablecoins can be under-collateralised if collateral values fall fast enough; algorithmic stablecoins can enter death spirals when confidence breaks. Holding a stablecoin is not the same as holding cash, even if the price is currently $1.00.

Regulatory attention on stablecoins is intensifying in most major jurisdictions. The EU's MiCA regulation established a framework for electronic money tokens and asset-referenced tokens; the United States has debated several competing bills; the UK and Singapore have their own licensing regimes. Our stablecoins and regulation categories track these developments, and our stablecoins guide explains the mechanics of each type without advocacy for any particular asset.

Memecoins

Memecoins are a recurring feature of every crypto market cycle. They differ from other cryptocurrencies in that their value is driven primarily by community sentiment, social media activity and speculation rather than by technical utility or cash flows from protocol activity. Dogecoin, launched in 2013 as a joke, was the original memecoin; it survived multiple cycles and now has significant market capitalisation by any measure. Shiba Inu, PEPE and dozens of others followed a similar playbook with varying degrees of longevity.

The memecoin segment also concentrates the highest density of outright fraud in crypto. Rug pulls, where a project's developers drain liquidity after pumping the token price, are disproportionately common among low-market-cap memecoins. Honeypot contracts prevent buyers from selling. Coordinated wash trading inflates volume metrics to attract unsuspecting buyers. Our memecoins section covers these dynamics honestly, including the anatomy of a rug pull and how to read a meme token's on-chain metrics, not to promote speculation but to explain what is happening.

We do not publish price predictions for memecoins whose value is driven entirely by speculative sentiment rather than fundamentals the model can read. Where we do show scenarios for a memecoin, they carry an especially prominent disclaimer that model-based scenarios are even less predictive for assets where price is decoupled from any fundamental anchor. If you are considering a memecoin, read our guide on crypto security basics first.

Live Data

TheWeal's live data stack is keyless, meaning we rely on free API tiers rather than paid subscriptions. This is a deliberate constraint that keeps our operating costs low and our data sourcing fully transparent. Every data source we use is publicly documented, and every page marks data with a timestamp so you can see when it was last updated.

Prices and market data

Cryptocurrency prices, market capitalisation and circulating-supply figures come from CoinGecko's free API. When CoinGecko is unavailable, we fall back to CoinPaprika. Both are established, widely-used market data providers. We do not manufacture price data, interpolate missing values or blend different providers' prices for the same coin: the displayed price is exactly what we received from the primary provider at the last fetch.

Charts

Price charts on individual coin pages are built from Binance daily close prices, giving a clean daily-close candlestick series for most major pairs. Sparklines on market overview pages use the same source. For coins not listed on Binance, chart data may be unavailable; we display a notice rather than a blank that could be mistaken for a flat price line.

Fear and Greed Index

The Crypto Fear & Greed Index, published daily by Alternative.me, aggregates volatility, market momentum, social media volume, surveys, Bitcoin dominance and Google Trends data into a single 0-100 score. We show it on the homepage, on the dedicated sentiment page, and as a context marker on coin pages. We explain how to interpret it in our reading the Fear & Greed Index guide.

Caching and freshness

We cache API responses server-side, typically for 60 to 90 seconds for prices and a few minutes for market tables. Caching serves two purposes: it keeps the site fast under traffic spikes, and it prevents us from hitting rate limits on free APIs. Every data block shows a "last updated" timestamp. If the live feed fails, we serve the most recent cached value and label it as such; we never substitute a stale value without flagging it. The full caching policy and TTL table are in our methodology.

Free Tools

The tools section provides seven free calculators for crypto investors. All run in the browser, require no sign-up and collect no personal data or trading activity.

How to use the tools

The profit calculator requires an entry price, an exit price and an amount. It then shows absolute profit or loss, percentage return, and the tax-basis cost in your currency of choice. The DCA calculator models what a fixed regular investment would have produced over a chosen period at Bitcoin's or another coin's historical price. The position-size calculator asks for your account size, the percentage you are willing to risk per trade, and your stop-loss distance, then outputs the maximum number of coins or contracts you should hold. All inputs are entered and processed locally; nothing is sent to a server.

Learn

The Learn section is where we publish the educational content that makes the live data on the rest of the site readable. It has two components: guides and a glossary.

Guides

Guides are longer explanatory articles rated by difficulty level: Beginner, Intermediate or Advanced. Each guide includes a sticky table of contents for navigation, a "Key concepts" box linking the most important glossary terms, and a "Next" link to a logical next step. The four cornerstone guides cover the essentials before you interact with any of our data:

• Bitcoin 101: What It Is and How It Works — supply, mining, halvings, custody and volatility for complete beginners.
• Price Chart Basics: Candlesticks, Volume and Ranges — how to read the OHLC charts shown on every coin page.
• Crypto Wallets Explained: Hot, Cold and Custody — how wallets work, how to protect your keys, and the custody trade-off.
• Reading a Price Prediction (Without Fooling Yourself) — what our bear, base and bull scenarios mean, and what they do not.

Additional guides cover DeFi, stablecoins, NFTs, dollar-cost averaging, position sizing, staking, crypto security basics, layer-2 networks, market capitalisation, the Fear & Greed Index and volatility. Each guide links to the relevant glossary terms and coin pages so you can move from concept to live data in one click.

Glossary

The glossary covers more than 100 terms that appear in crypto coverage and trading interfaces, from "airdrop" through to "zk-rollup". Each entry includes a plain-English definition, a concrete example, links to related terms and a note on which guide to read next if you want to go deeper. The glossary is designed to be the first stop when you encounter an unfamiliar term in a news article or on a coin page.

Editorial Independence

TheWeal's editorial independence rests on a single financial rule: we accept no payment, direct or indirect, from any cryptocurrency project, exchange, fund, protocol or token issuer in exchange for coverage, rankings, prediction outputs or editorial opinion. Advertising on the site is sold by category and placement; advertisers have no influence over which coins are covered, how they are ranked or what our editorial team writes.

Our EEAT commitments

Expertise: every editorial piece carries a named byline from one of our five staff writers, each with specific domain coverage. No article is published under an anonymous byline or a fictitious persona. Market-data pages are assembled programmatically from our documented sources; they are reviewed for accuracy before they go live.

Authoritativeness: we source factual claims from primary sources, including protocol documentation, on-chain data, regulatory filings and audited financial reports where available. We link to sources in every article. When a claim cannot be sourced to a primary document, we say so.

Trustworthiness: we correct errors promptly and transparently, logging every correction on our corrections page with a description of what changed. We do not delete articles containing errors; we update them with a clearly marked correction notice. We disclose our data sources, our prediction methodology and our advertising practices.

Read the full policies at: Editorial guidelines, Ethics policy, Methodology, Corrections and About.

Newsroom

The TheWeal newsroom consists of five staff writers with distinct coverage beats. You can read full profiles and see each writer's article archive on the team page.

Each writer's author page lists their full disclosure of any crypto holdings, their professional background and their contact information. TheWeal has an ethics policy that governs conflicts of interest: staff writers disclose any personal holding in an asset they cover, and editors review all coverage of assets where a writer has a disclosed position. We do not prohibit staff from holding crypto assets, but we require full disclosure and editorial oversight.

Subscribe

Our free newsletter delivers a weekly digest of the most important developments in crypto markets, regulation and technology, curated by the TheWeal editorial team. Subscribers receive a summary of the week's biggest price moves and what drove them, links to the week's most important analysis pieces, a brief on the most significant regulatory or macro news, and one educational concept explained plainly for those still building their understanding of the market.

We do not sell subscriber data and we do not send promotional content on behalf of crypto projects. The only emails you will receive from TheWeal are the weekly digest and, occasionally, a notification when we publish a major piece of analysis. You can unsubscribe at any time from any email we send.

The subscription form is in the footer of this page. You can also follow our latest coverage on X at @theweal.

Frequently Asked Questions

Model-based scenarios. Not financial advice. Crypto can lose value rapidly. All content is for information and education only.

Risk Disclaimer

Cryptocurrency markets are highly volatile. The value of any cryptocurrency can decrease significantly or go to zero at any time. Past price performance is not an indicator of future results. Price scenarios published on TheWeal are model-based outputs, not investment advice, and they are explicitly not predictions of future prices.

TheWeal does not hold, buy or sell cryptocurrencies on behalf of users. We are a publisher of information, analysis and educational content, not a broker, dealer, financial adviser or investment manager. Nothing on this site constitutes personalised financial advice within the meaning of any applicable law.

Before investing in any cryptocurrency, you should consider whether it is appropriate for your personal financial situation, investment objectives and risk tolerance. You should consider consulting a licensed financial adviser, particularly if you are new to crypto markets. Regulatory protections that apply to traditional investments may not apply to cryptocurrencies in your jurisdiction.

We make no representation that the information on this site is complete, accurate or up to date. Market data is sourced from third-party providers and may contain errors or delays. We accept no liability for any financial loss arising from reliance on any information or data published on TheWeal. The full terms of use govern your access to and use of this site.

TheWeal is an independent crypto publication. No content on this site is financial advice. Cryptocurrency markets are highly volatile and unregulated in many jurisdictions. The value of digital assets can go to zero. Always do your own research. © TheWeal. Founded 2002.