The Castle Chronicle: InfoFi and AI Agents are the Ones to Watch, Restaking is NOT Dead
PLUS: The Vow That Built Castle
Welcome to Edition 122 of The Castle Chronicle!
Today we’re having Atomist back on the weekly issue with an inspiring piece about Castle, making this a special one for all of us.
Here’s what we have for you today:
🔍 Market Watch - Price action & Relevant metrics across sectors and assets
✍️ Founders Corner - Atomist (Castle Labs)
🏛️ Fundamentals Corner - The Latest Updates on Restaking
🏰 Castle Reads - All of Castle’s research you might have missed
📖 Recommended Reads - The best reads from the best researchers on CT
Great news! Castle Labs is an official Media Partner of ETHMilan 2025, the largest EVM-focused conference in Italy, taking place on June 24 in the city of Milan.
As partners, we have secured an exclusive 25% discount on tickets for the event for the Castle community. Get yours here!
I bet you want to explore one of the best cities in Italy and talk crypto with us, as well as with top degens and builders in the space, coming from many countries, including those outside Europe. See you there!
🔍 Market Watch
Gm frens! Looks like the analysis is playing out perfectly as BTC has just reached new ATH this week, yeehaw!
Price Action
BTC keeps printing re-acc after re-acc as demand pushes price up and the momentum cycle holds. At this point, we are in the 3rd re-accumulation, so eventually we’ll get into overextended territory. But for as long as the momentum cycle holds, I’m overall mega bullish.
What we can see:
A new ATH
A strong momentum cycle
The way I see it, we might print one or two more re-accumulations before failing the momentum cycle for a bigger re-accumulation on the weekly chart. At that point, I’ll wait for some money to change hands before once again following fresh momentum.
Top Performers
With BTC being in a giga bullish context, we should (as always) look for relatively stronger performers.
$VIRTUALS is one that kept re-appearing in the TOP 5, so let’s once again take a deeper look at it.
This chart is currently in a higher timeframe re-accumulation. We can see price accumulate around the 60c area and break out into a fresh new momentum cycle. Currently, we see a confirmed 2nd re-accumulation, and I’m expecting new ATHs. I have no idea how new highs will be reached, but as long as the momentum cycle holds, I’m overall very bullish on $VIRTUALS.
Considering the AI-Agents sector is a hot one, this asset should definitely be on our watchlist.
Narrative Performance
Although BTC is pumping higher, we don’t quite see the BIG green wave just yet. Most narratives are consolidating this week, except for a big spike in the Social-Fi and Data narrative, which is mostly being carried by a single coin that has pumped over 80% this week - $COOKIE.
Taking a deeper look at $COOKIE, we can see a nice uptrend that is currently in the 2nd re-accumulation. There is a lot of space for this to run higher. As long as the momentum cycle remains intact, I’m happy to keep this on my watchlist.
With BTC leading the charge and providing a good context for the overall crypto sector, there will be many opportunities along the way. But remember to always -
Risk responsibly, and I’ll see y’all next time!
Not following what I’m talking about? Check out my quick cheatsheet to understand how I approach a chart.
Courtesy of 0x_Vlad - trend-based trader and MentFX student
✍️ Founders Corner: The Vow That Built Castle - Atomist
Two years ago, I left the UK with a vow.
I said I wouldn’t come back until I’d built something real.
This is the story of how that reckless promise turned into Castle, and why I’m about to make another one.
In late 2022, my life in crypto was a mess. We were one year post-FTX, and I had been 'full-time', but not really making a living. Castle started as a close-knit group of crypto believers, trying to level each other up through the bear. It was within this community that I quit my job earlier that year. I started out trying to be a dev, building data visualisation web apps. That didn’t stick. I pivoted to ghostwriting, scraping together $100 articles. Even an SQL bootcamp kept the lights on longer than anything else that year. But nothing felt like the real path, nothing was sticking.
So I left.
First, I went to Australia and then New Zealand with some friends. I took real time off, like four to six weeks of rest, reset, and zero expectations. No trenches. No code. No bootcamps. Just distance. Somewhere in the quiet of that pause, and in observing the community within Castle, I had an idea: to start The Castle Chronicle, the newsletter that would eventually become the front door to Castle itself.
After NZ, I left for Thailand, and I made a promise to myself:
I wouldn't return until I built a sustainable business for myself.
It was reckless. But it was the push I needed.
By some stroke of luck, I landed a personal contract with Rysk after just one week. But looking back, it wasn’t luck. Although many previous endeavours had failed, I always had one constant: building in public. Whether on Twitter, in Telegram communities, or within Castle itself, I was coding, writing, learning, and developing out in the open. That’s what landed me the Rysk gig. I had written about them along my Threadoor journey.
(s/o to @dandefied & @jib0xD for betting on me)
I spent weeks slogging for Rysk throughout Thailand and Malaysia, always wondering how I could do more, how I could leverage the skills of Castle’s community for something bigger. I spent this time constantly developing and pitching our services as a decentralised collective of on-chain power users. Marketing, ghostwriting, technical documents, Dune dashboards. You name it, we’d do it.
Finally, at some point, things started moving. Castle landed its first real client: Level Finance. I remember being in the airport, heading to Tokyo to meet the Rysk team and begin the conference trail, completely wired because I didn’t want to go dark on our first deliverable. For the first time, people were not just relying on me, but on Castle.
Japan was the first real test.
Rysk by day.
Castle by night, solo.
In Osaka, after everyone went to bed, I’d walk to the corner shop, grab a six-pack, light up a few smokes, and write documentation until 4 a.m. Thousands of words, all on me. I was slowly figuring out how to coordinate async across timezones and contributors. Although I had support analysts and QC, this was Castle’s first contract, and I didn’t trust anyone else to lead the writing. I had to deliver. I had to prove we were legit.
That rhythm—building in the margins, working at night, saying yes to everything—carried me through the next few months.
Around this time, I also started sheepishly pitching Castle at conferences. At ETH Tokyo and ETH Taipei, I was mostly still repping Rysk, but I began testing the waters, trying to articulate what Castle could be. I’m sure everyone thought it was a cute idea: a decentralised collective that does everything a dev shouldn’t do. The contrast to today couldn’t be sharper.
In the summer, I was back in Europe at EthCC in Paris. In the months between Tokyo and Paris, Castle was still rough-edged. But the seed had been planted, and I kept watering it. I wasn’t just there for Rysk anymore. I was there for Castle, and the community showed up in force too.
At one point during the week, I was sitting in a bar with @ProofOfJake_, and I noticed something that caught me off guard:
Castle’s Twitter account had just clocked more followers than mine.
It may sound small, but that hit different.
Castle had legs of its own now.
It wasn’t a side note. It wasn’t “this little thing I’m building.”
It was the thing.
But that didn’t mean we were stable. Far from it.
Between summer 2023 and spring 2024, we were in the deep middle. I’d spent the better part of a year trying to turn Castle from a promising idea into something operationally sound. It was slow, uncertain, and unglamorous.
We scraped through project by project, with no repeatable revenue. Contributors were mostly unpaid or underpaid. I was doing delivery, BD, marketing, and finance without infrastructure, systems, or any real breathing room.
It was during this time that @Francescoweb3 became essential. He didn’t just pitch in, he carried weight. He wrote, connected, and shipped work, treating Castle like it mattered long before others did. When belief was thin, that mattered.
In the summer of 2024, I spent three months living in Lisbon. Castle as a business was one year old, and still very much in the “figuring it out” phase. It was another reflection period for me.
We didn’t have dependable income.
Most contributors were still volunteering their time, making sustained momentum hard to maintain.
I was juggling ops, clients, growth, delivery, and anything else that threw a curveball on any given day.
It wasn’t failing, but it wasn’t thriving either.
That period taught me resilience in a different way. Less “grindset,” more grit. Quiet, boring consistency.
No one claps for the in-between years, but they matter.
By Q4 2024, things started to click:
We started getting calls from the kinds of clients we used to chase.
We built enough trust in the ecosystem to start landing high-stakes work.
We found our rhythm with clients who respected the work.
We stopped relying on miracle contributors and built a core team.
We shifted from “let’s survive” to “let’s scale.”
Castle stopped being a scrappy extension of me and started becoming a company.
Now, I’m leaving the UK again.
Not because I’m lost.
Because I know exactly what I’m building and want to do it in motion.
I just left to spend three months on the road working across Europe.
But I’m taking a new vow with myself.
Not a vow to prove something.
A vow to deepen it.
To grow what I’ve built.
To lead better.
To slow down and scale up.
To keep showing up.
If you’re in the trenches right now, this is your reminder: the early slog does matter.
Castle started with a six-pack and a Notion doc.
Maybe what you’re building needs one too.
If Castle started with a vow, maybe your journey will too.
Courtesy of Atomist
🏛️ Fundamentals Corner: Restaking is NOT Dead
It seems that after all the buzz, some people believe restaking is now dead. I would argue it is quite the opposite, so I would like to share some of the latest updates regarding this narrative.
Market Size and Activity
Restaking is not a dying market. Even after the $EIGEN and $BABY airdrops, their TVL remained relatively stable in both ETH and BTC terms. The protocols building around them had time to launch their own airdrop campaigns, scale, and differentiate themselves.
Infra Updates
Let’s now look at the major updates coming from the main infrastructure providers:
Eigenlayer
Slashing is now live on mainnet, which cuts operators’ stake if they underperform or act maliciously. Subsequently, EL stated that these funds will not be burned but rather redistributed according to the rules set by the AVSs themselves.
@Skate_chain launched its AVS and will redistribute fees to its restakers.
Apps built on top of @Eigenlayer’s AVSs are now live, and you can check them here.
Symbiotic
Symbiotic launched on mainnet at the end of January and integrated 14 networks that can leverage its shared security module.
They also presented a “Universal Staking” feature that would not only secure networks but also underwrite risks. For example, lending markets could use it to backstop bad debt, enabling stakers to opt into specific risk profiles with customizable terms.
@Symbioticfi announced Universal Staking Vaults, which are managed solutions to earn yield from restaking and various strategies run by verified curators.
Babylon
@babylonlabs_io launched the $BABY token in April and shipped its mainnet.
The protocol integrated the IBC bridge to move Bitcoin LSTs between Babylon and Cosmos.
Conclusions
Restaking is a developing space that needs time to mature. Technical issues are a daily occurrence, and now tens of protocols depend on it for their solutions.
There are many protocols building on top of AVSs, and others are bootstrapping the capital to do so, even in creative ways. For example, @ether_fi offers multiple earning features and crypto-backed credit cards, while @lombard_finance recently onboarded Sui as a new network where you can restake your BTC.
This article serves as a reminder not to overlook restaking, as it is potentially one of the most resilient and transformative narratives in crypto over this decade.
See you in the next one! defi.
Courtesy of Matt
🏰 Castle Reads
Special edition of The AI Dispatch on Virtuals, All you Need to Know about Virgen Points and Launches:
Vibe-Analyzing Resolv’s TVL & APY, by @chilla_ct:
Calculations and Estimates over the Airdrops for YT sKAITO holders, by @mattdotfi and @0x_davi:
📖 Recommended Reads
Deep dive into the rebranding of Maple Finance, by @kenodnb:
Q2 2025 Airdrop Farming Guide, by @katexbt:
Stablecoins TVL on Pendle is reaching new highs, by @jamesjho_:
That’s it for today’s issue, we hope you enjoyed it.
You can check out our X for new research reports and weekly gigabrain content.
See you in the next issue,
The Castle Team
In our newsletter, we may discuss projects or tokens in which we hold positions. While we aim to provide informative content, our views are not financial advice. Please conduct your research and consult professionals before making investment decisions. Crypto markets are volatile, and past performance doesn't guarantee future results. Invest responsibly, and be aware of the risks. Your capital is at risk, and we do not accept liability for any losses.